> Randomly throwing elements into software from the ground up rarely works well; everyone knows that early design is important for the software to be easy to use. In fact, intelligent design saves people from thinking about the software creation process at all, since the intelligent designer keeps the underlying processes of the software hidden from the user.
RAM: "You believe in the user?"
Crom: "Sure I do! If I didn't have a User, than who wrote me?"
RAM: "That's what you're doing down here. Master Control Program's been snapping up all us programs who believe..."
> Since the odds of survival for a human child with two parents is (or at least was) much higher than the odds of a single-parent child, it shouldn't be surprising that humans have a strong drive to forge lasting relationships. Natural selection in action, and all that.
...and it should be even less surprising that romantic love - the obsessive attraction to the beloved - fades in both males and females after about two years. Just long enough to meet, mate, spawn, and wean the offspring.
people who were spending 80 percent of their waking
hours not being able to think of anybody else.
And...
"Would you die for your partner?" She said she
was shocked by the answers to that query: All of the subjects
said they would.
I've eaten some pretty fucking good chocolate cake in my day. Ain't never wanted to die for the shit.
There are people who'd say things like that about their preferred batch of ingredients. We call them junkies, the chemical they use is called by many names -- not the least of which is junk. When a junkie is deprived of junk, they go through withdrawal. They experience physical pain, depression, and often behave irrationally or self-destructively in order to get their fix.
I (like most of you) have used
oxytocin. Like heroin users, when deprived of their fix (or even when threatened with their supply of the drug being cut off), oxytocin users feel depressed, lethargic, some feel physical pain - right in the chest/gut area, and are also prone to self-destructive and irrational acts.
From TFA:
"You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it's wonderful,' she said. 'In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion.'"
You can know every ingredient in heroin, and you
can still sit down and - oh, wait. Once you know what heroin
does to human neurochemistry, you can choose not to take the shit, and if you're a junkie, you still have the choice to stop.
Just because my former drug of choice happened to be secreted by my own endocrine system didn't make me any less a junkie.
Mercifully, the 2-3 year pair-bonding mechanism built into your brainstem puts a limit on the withdrawal: if you stay clean, that's about as long as you're physiologically capable of feeling oxytocin withdrawal symptoms. Once you're through that phase, the cravings disappear, and they stay disappeared unless you do something stupid.
> Having your identity card stolen != having your identity stolen.
Neither is having your driver's license, credit card, bank statement, passport, or social security number stolen. Any one of the above would make for a pretty fucking good starting point for an identity thief, though.
Kindly explain to me how putting all of the above onto the same card makes it harder, instead of easier, for an identity thief to do his work.
> "I think we've won the argument on it. People have this idea that there's a problem in civil liberties with people having an identity card and an identity registered today when across all walks of our life this is happening.
> >
"And with the real problems people have today with identity fraud, which is a major, major issue; illegal immigration; organised crime: it's just the sensible thing to do."
Because having an identity card - that you have to carry with you at all times - is the sensible solution to the problem of identity theft. Because we all know that nothing you carry with you 24/7/365 can ever be stolen.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed.
The US Government will lead the American people - and the West
in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
> The system lets content providers, such as music studios,
embed a watermark in their downloadable MP3 files.
[... ]
Even the best-trained human eyes and ears, according to Kip, can't detect the change.
In other words, "Nothing to see/hear. Please move along?"
More seriously - although it could be stripped out (relatively) easily, you could
embed watermarking data in the metadata segments of downloadable MP3s.
I'd accept this as a tradeoff for music studios offering downloadable
MP3 files: If some_hit_song_i_downloaded.mp3 shows up on a P2P network
and contains metadata whose MD5 could only be generated by, say, hashing
my credit card number with some_riaa_private_key, that'd be pretty
reasonable grounds for RIAA to believe that I'm the schmuck who (a) paid for the right to download it from a RIAA-authorized source, and (b) uploaded it to a non-RIAA-authorized filesharing network.
Make it impractical for Joe Sixpack (who will be unaware of this type of watermarking, and who probably will be unaware of the existence of tools to strip it) to upload his files without risking
fines/prosecution, and you can offer DRM-free MP3s to Joe Sixpack.
> > Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., is drafting a bill that would force Internet companies including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to keep vital computer servers out of China and other nations the State Department deems repressive to human rights.'"
> >Seems almost ironic doesn't it?
See the earlier thread on politicians making themselves exempt from the CAN-SPAM law while they were drafting it. The logic boils down to "it's not spam when we do it!".
Likewise, it's not repression when we do it. The conjugation of the verb "repress" is as follows:
We protect. Our allies monitor. Our adversaries repress.
>... and the fact that american politicians have created a loophole just for them is almost normal from that sad scene...
I find your presence of faith disturbing.
What's this "almost" of which you speak?
Re:I heard something about this long ago
on
Polite Cell Phones
·
· Score: 1
> "Taking away my rights" is what happens when I throw their phone in the nearest trashcan, "Invasion of privacy" happens after that, when they feel the sudden impact of my foot in their groin.
Solution obvious: In parallel to the little off-centered cam/motor arrangement used for "vibrate" mode, add a solenoid with a coil and plunger that run the length of the phone.
When you walk into a restaurant or movie theater, your phone obeys a store-owner-generated signal to switch to "cockpunch" mode and broadcast its relative position to nearby phones.
Hey, if someone's showing off how many friends they have by letting their phone ring ("Look at me! People want to talk to me all the time!") I see no reason why we can't all give him a ring.
> OK, I have to go with Communism being more evil than spamming (mainly due to that little "one hundred million people killed by it" problem). On the other hand, Spam has certainly inflicted more personal harm on me than communism in the last ten years...
Why not use one as a bludgeon against the other?
550 - Thank you for using our steganographic payment system.
550 - Your continued support of Falun Dafa / Falun Gong in the face of continued oppression from the butchers of Beijing is appreciated.
550 - The following token is your receipt for payment and a public key with which you may encrypt and sign your messages to your allies in the fight for freedom and democracy.
550 - KEYBLOCK 6x5 R87IZ FAUG3 ZOL5X CI0P3 F7JX2 E9MOX
Silly me, leaving a crontab script running to randomly re-generate the last line of my 550 message to a different series of random characters every 30 seconds instead of every 30 days.
Besides, someday I might need a spare kidney or cornea, and I want to be sure there'll be plenty available for me! Just think of a million such servers as the invisible hand of the free market...
Precious is gone. No precious. Stolen from us! Wicked tricksy headhunters, alwaysss after our precious! Stealing them with offerses of cafffeteriasses full of ruined fisshes! We ought to wring their filthy little necks! Throw chairses at them them! Fucking kill them all!
> Last year, Microsoft was involved with Google in a dispute over Google hiring away Dr. Kai-Fu Lee the vice president of Microsoft's Natural Interactive Services division, and appointing him as the head of Google's research and development center in China'
In other news, images.google.com just added a new feature: object recognition. In the beta version, pictures of tanks (and irregular patches of colors ranging from #FF0000 through #CC3333) can be automatically recognized by software. In the production version just released last month, server-side digital reconstruction is employed to restore the areas of photographs that had formerly been obscured by such objects.
> In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate."
In exchange for paying AOL/Yahoo, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered by AOL/Yahoo, and will bear a seal marked BAYES_90,HTML_AOL_SEAL,HTML_YAHOO_SEAL.
(The mailserver said she'd borne a seal. I said filter the damn spam and leave my wife's private life out of it, OK, pal?)
> What if claim that I am a African American, but I am actually white. Can they quantify and measure my race, will they sent to a local eugenics clinic to measure the size of my head or take my DNA to identify my race?
Go for it.
Teresa Heinz-Kerry, of Mozambique, is an African-American.
Nelson Mandela, of South Africa, is not an African-American.
If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you. Any company that would circular-file an application when you remind them of those two facts, isn't a company you want to work for.
> 4. Place phone in pan.
5. Crack an egg on the phone.
#5 might be closer to a solution than you guess.
I, like others, RTFA, and along with everyone else who'd like their 30 seconds of "WTF" back, here's a way that might actually work.
1) Remove batteries from phones.
2) You've got between 1 and 2 amp-hours of 12 volts to work with.
3) You need to get the yolk to around 63C for soft-boiling, and from 20C room temperature, that'll take you around 15-20kJ of energy. Yeah, I've skipped a bit.
4)...but it's within the right order of magnitude to cook an egg, particularly because the low internal resistance of such batteries allows for very high current.
Crack one egg onto one phone - you'll cook something as you short the entire battery out through a pile of egg. If you used the battery as a swizzle stick, constantly stirring the egg mess, and constantly scraping the battery terminals free of solidified gunk, you'll generate a decent amount of heat in the gunk. (You'll also probably electrolyze some of the stuff in the egg, so I wouldn't recommend trying this at home - FSM-only-knows what kind of stuff will show up at the battery terminals beyond hydrogen and oxygen.)
At worst, you'll end up with a partially-toxic, soupy, warmed-over mess with a few chunks of scrambled egg in it.
6) If you've got enough surplus energy (like, say, 100kJ to work with), break up the battery packs, use them to power a small hot plate or peltier unit, (preferably with 12V, but if you've got even more surplus energy in the battery packs to waste on conversions, you could use a converter to turn 12VDC into 120VAC), and power your heater with that.
Crack the egg onto the hot plate, and you'll end up with a light fluffy omelette.
Either way, you're way ahead of the author of the original link.
Firefox:A tripartite golden braid
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'.
Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian::
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.
> While it may seem ok because they are truly a heterosexual couple
in real life, in game they are two females.
As opposed to human females performing unspeakable acts with male
gnomes, which is just fine. Date outside your species, just get the sex right.
Reminds me of the old "Finding Nemo" joke.
"Why are the fundies so mad about Finding Nemo?"
"Because Ellen Degeneres is in it!"
"She's a talking blue fish!"
"Yeah, but she's a lesbian talking blue fish!"
Slashdot Mirror
On a Japanese Atari 2600, everything looks like pubic hair.
"In Communist China, Web Journalist Censored, Beaten"
(Someone had to say it.)
Apples are red,
Windows are blue,
OS X codebase,
Aren't belong to you!
s/have to shoot/get to shoot/g
> (sarcasm doesn't always transmit well via text...)
What makes you think either of us is being sarcastic?
RAM: "You believe in the user?"
Crom: "Sure I do! If I didn't have a User, than who wrote me?"
RAM: "That's what you're doing down here. Master Control Program's been snapping up all us programs who believe..."
Even if you win, you're still a scumbag.
Congrats.
Oh, great. You had to bring the NORML folks into it...
And...
I've eaten some pretty fucking good chocolate cake in my day. Ain't never wanted to die for the shit.
There are people who'd say things like that about their preferred batch of ingredients. We call them junkies, the chemical they use is called by many names -- not the least of which is junk. When a junkie is deprived of junk, they go through withdrawal. They experience physical pain, depression, and often behave irrationally or self-destructively in order to get their fix.
I (like most of you) have used oxytocin. Like heroin users, when deprived of their fix (or even when threatened with their supply of the drug being cut off), oxytocin users feel depressed, lethargic, some feel physical pain - right in the chest/gut area, and are also prone to self-destructive and irrational acts.
From TFA:
You can know every ingredient in heroin, and you can still sit down and - oh, wait. Once you know what heroin does to human neurochemistry, you can choose not to take the shit, and if you're a junkie, you still have the choice to stop.
Just because my former drug of choice happened to be secreted by my own endocrine system didn't make me any less a junkie.
Mercifully, the 2-3 year pair-bonding mechanism built into your brainstem puts a limit on the withdrawal: if you stay clean, that's about as long as you're physiologically capable of feeling oxytocin withdrawal symptoms. Once you're through that phase, the cravings disappear, and they stay disappeared unless you do something stupid.
I met my wife on a Counter-Strike server in 2000.
Brings whole new meaning to yelling "Boom! Headshot!", don't it?
Neither is having your driver's license, credit card, bank statement, passport, or social security number stolen. Any one of the above would make for a pretty fucking good starting point for an identity thief, though.
Kindly explain to me how putting all of the above onto the same card makes it harder, instead of easier, for an identity thief to do his work.
>
> "And with the real problems people have today with identity fraud, which is a major, major issue; illegal immigration; organised crime: it's just the sensible thing to do."
Because having an identity card - that you have to carry with you at all times - is the sensible solution to the problem of identity theft. Because we all know that nothing you carry with you 24/7/365 can ever be stolen.
In other words, "Nothing to see/hear. Please move along?"
More seriously - although it could be stripped out (relatively) easily, you could embed watermarking data in the metadata segments of downloadable MP3s. I'd accept this as a tradeoff for music studios offering downloadable MP3 files: If some_hit_song_i_downloaded.mp3 shows up on a P2P network and contains metadata whose MD5 could only be generated by, say, hashing my credit card number with some_riaa_private_key, that'd be pretty reasonable grounds for RIAA to believe that I'm the schmuck who (a) paid for the right to download it from a RIAA-authorized source, and (b) uploaded it to a non-RIAA-authorized filesharing network.
Make it impractical for Joe Sixpack (who will be unaware of this type of watermarking, and who probably will be unaware of the existence of tools to strip it) to upload his files without risking fines/prosecution, and you can offer DRM-free MP3s to Joe Sixpack.
>
>Seems almost ironic doesn't it?
See the earlier thread on politicians making themselves exempt from the CAN-SPAM law while they were drafting it. The logic boils down to "it's not spam when we do it!".
Likewise, it's not repression when we do it. The conjugation of the verb "repress" is as follows:
We protect.
Our allies monitor.
Our adversaries repress.
I find your presence of faith disturbing.
What's this "almost" of which you speak?
Solution obvious: In parallel to the little off-centered cam/motor arrangement used for "vibrate" mode, add a solenoid with a coil and plunger that run the length of the phone.
When you walk into a restaurant or movie theater, your phone obeys a store-owner-generated signal to switch to "cockpunch" mode and broadcast its relative position to nearby phones.
Hey, if someone's showing off how many friends they have by letting their phone ring ("Look at me! People want to talk to me all the time!") I see no reason why we can't all give him a ring.
Why not use one as a bludgeon against the other?
550 - Thank you for using our steganographic payment system.
550 - Your continued support of Falun Dafa / Falun Gong in the face of continued oppression from the butchers of Beijing is appreciated.
550 - The following token is your receipt for payment and a public key with which you may encrypt and sign your messages to your allies in the fight for freedom and democracy.
550 - KEYBLOCK 6x5 R87IZ FAUG3 ZOL5X CI0P3 F7JX2 E9MOX
Silly me, leaving a crontab script running to randomly re-generate the last line of my 550 message to a different series of random characters every 30 seconds instead of every 30 days.
Besides, someday I might need a spare kidney or cornea, and I want to be sure there'll be plenty available for me! Just think of a million such servers as the invisible hand of the free market...
Precious is gone. No precious. Stolen from us! Wicked tricksy headhunters, alwaysss after our precious! Stealing them with offerses of cafffeteriasses full of ruined fisshes! We ought to wring their filthy little necks! Throw chairses at them them! Fucking kill them all!
In other news, images.google.com just added a new feature: object recognition. In the beta version, pictures of tanks (and irregular patches of colors ranging from #FF0000 through #CC3333) can be automatically recognized by software. In the production version just released last month, server-side digital reconstruction is employed to restore the areas of photographs that had formerly been obscured by such objects.
"Whoa. We know Kai-Fu."
Because as we all know, AI isn't about theory, it's about implementation.
For my next trick, I'll write a book that shows professional .NET developers how to incorporate sorting technology into their daily programming.
Chapter 1: The Bubble Sort
... .NET Still Ain't Making It Any Faster Or Better
Chapter 2: The Insertion Sort
Chapter nlog(n): Why Coding It In
Unfortunately, nobody with two accounts and mod points is particularly interested in my left nut. Not even my squirrel's left nut.
In exchange for paying AOL/Yahoo, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered by AOL/Yahoo, and will bear a seal marked BAYES_90,HTML_AOL_SEAL,HTML_YAHOO_SEAL.
(The mailserver said she'd borne a seal. I said filter the damn spam and leave my wife's private life out of it, OK, pal?)
Go for it.
Teresa Heinz-Kerry, of Mozambique, is an African-American.
Nelson Mandela, of South Africa, is not an African-American.
If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you. Any company that would circular-file an application when you remind them of those two facts, isn't a company you want to work for.
5. Crack an egg on the phone.
#5 might be closer to a solution than you guess.
I, like others, RTFA, and along with everyone else who'd like their 30 seconds of "WTF" back, here's a way that might actually work.
1) Remove batteries from phones. ...but it's within the right order of magnitude to cook an egg, particularly because the low internal resistance of such batteries allows for very high current.
2) You've got between 1 and 2 amp-hours of 12 volts to work with.
3) You need to get the yolk to around 63C for soft-boiling, and from 20C room temperature, that'll take you around 15-20kJ of energy. Yeah, I've skipped a bit.
4)
Crack one egg onto one phone - you'll cook something as you short the entire battery out through a pile of egg. If you used the battery as a swizzle stick, constantly stirring the egg mess, and constantly scraping the battery terminals free of solidified gunk, you'll generate a decent amount of heat in the gunk. (You'll also probably electrolyze some of the stuff in the egg, so I wouldn't recommend trying this at home - FSM-only-knows what kind of stuff will show up at the battery terminals beyond hydrogen and oxygen.)
At worst, you'll end up with a partially-toxic, soupy, warmed-over mess with a few chunks of scrambled egg in it.
6) If you've got enough surplus energy (like, say, 100kJ to work with), break up the battery packs, use them to power a small hot plate or peltier unit, (preferably with 12V, but if you've got even more surplus energy in the battery packs to waste on conversions, you could use a converter to turn 12VDC into 120VAC), and power your heater with that.
Crack the egg onto the hot plate, and you'll end up with a light fluffy omelette.
Either way, you're way ahead of the author of the original link.
Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke :: ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.
As opposed to human females performing unspeakable acts with male gnomes, which is just fine. Date outside your species, just get the sex right.
Reminds me of the old "Finding Nemo" joke.
"Why are the fundies so mad about Finding Nemo?"
"Because Ellen Degeneres is in it!"
"She's a talking blue fish!"
"Yeah, but she's a lesbian talking blue fish!"