I Google Minused because they said they were pretty sure my boss wasn't smart enough to elude circle security, so I should probably associate everything I post and say with my legal and professional name and after all what could go wrong why not?
Also, because I was afeared that some of the stories about people outed for being nicknamed and ended up with lock-outs to their entire suite of Googlies were slightly true. If using my nick on Google+ meant jeopardising access to my control dealies for my Blog*spot public skirt-twisting or AdSense pimping, even temporarily while I argued with a Googlebot, I would be left helplessly rending my garments and shaking my fist at the cloud.
Handicapping, Ridiculous, Anti-Progress
on
3D Hurts Your Eyes
·
· Score: 5, Funny
First of all, there's no way to know if two things are separated by a volume of space unless you have a headache. That's how evolution works: the cerebral nerves were caused to evolve specifically by Darwin in order to function as a kind of animal cruelty version of Pavlov's dog in which mapping three-dimensional space actuates the occipital squinting reflex, causing us to narrow our eyes meaningfully at expansive vistas while also wishing for acetylsalicylic acid and a glass of water.
Scientists consider this sort of thing basically self-evident, like the existence of atoms or Jenny McCarthy.
Furthermore, the so-called Disney Cortex is capable of parsing dimensionality exclusively through parallax; in effect, the neck pain caused by this subtle lateral shifting of the head is conveyed via the uvula directly into the cranial brain-case, tapping into the same area of sensitivity exploited by the spatial depth pain discussed above.
Elementary biochemisphology tells us that the only way stereoscopy can function effectively in the real world of fake entertainment is by pulling out all the stop and going holographic, so that the images can be processed and hurt us in as natural a way as possible. This is God's way of telling us that the Holodeck was cool.
Fad researchers have understood this for centuries, since the time the Illuminati first started actively repressing news of the stereoscopic newspaper in 1743.
Novelists can't be trusted. It's always a story with those guys.
Like Al Gore and his triffids, or Michael Crichton's genetic engineering alarmism -- nothing to see here. Pure fabrication.
I'm pretty sure if we want to know the truth about piracy we have to dig really deep into the back part of the Bible...somewhere between Muhammed and the passages about Neo.
My Kids Use a Specially Tarded Up White MacBook
on
Computer For a Child?
·
· Score: 1
My kids, 6 and 3, use a hand-me-down white MacBook. The machine has been tarded up appropriately to stop them from breaking things (Simple Finder, Parental Control locks on Safari for whitelisted sites only, no IM, admin password unknown to children required to change any setting).
They are not allowed to eat or drink while at the computer, and the computer is not to be moved from its desk.
Within these constraints, they have a ball. The machine is loaded up with all their favourite movies (one click on pictographic icon launches VLC in fullscreen mode), and the sites where they play games (TVOntario Kids, BBC Kids, etc.) are bookmarked.
My 6 year old can videoconference with GTalk with my wife and I elsewhere in the house, but cannot initiate chats outside of the LAN. My 3 year old hasn't quite got the hang of negotiating the necessary dialogue boxes yet, but he'll pick it up soon.
We haven't bought much in the way of educational software, since the process of separating the wheat from the chaff is too labour intensive (most of it sucks the proverbial wang). We make do with web sites (like I Love Bacteria) and educational Flash games.
Many systems that have grown in an organic or semi-organic fashion are non-optimal (like, for example, most people you know and every decision ever rendered by a committee).
With something as complex and "live" as the Internet, process is more important than paradigm: the real question is how to optimize from the current live state, rather than mumbling pointlessly about how it should've had better roots.
Shoulda but didna. So, let's move on.
Also, I tried to send this guy a tweet but all I got was a message saying, "I'm sorry, a problem has occured; please reload the page."
I think that even in a pay-as-you-go type solution, a certain base threshold of traffic would have to be free, and the customer would pay on top of that. Otherwise, the user is penalized for visiting a site that rams heavy multimedia ads down their throats or for downloading spam to be filtered.
Another idea may be a price ramp: if I usually only use 5% of my connection, the cost for a spike in my usage should be low. Similarly, if I'm a heavy user than my spikes (higher, more frequent) would carry a heftier price tag. In other words, occasional spikes should be discounted while habitually heavy users would have to pay more to accommodate their persistent digital lifestyles.
Finally, I would only consider such a scheme if my account were discounted for every second of downtime during each billing cycle, whether it affected me directly or not. If have to pay for what I use, they have to pay for what they don't deliver.
A voting apparatus without a clear path for auditing of every system and sub-system is an invitation to corruption. Comparable mechanisms in governance have checks and balances to ensure fidelity.
Why do these shifty porkchops think they ought to be exempt? Because it may make their investors nervous?
This is definitely a situation where the bottom line should be drawn by logic, not by dollars.
That's why I always carry an Apple laptop in the event of belligent extra-terrestrials, and why I get off on belittling Bill Murray's accomplishments as an explorer.
Spielberg be my shepherd I heard if there first: "Life will find a way..."
Granted, this e-hissy from Anonymous is unlikely to take down the cult or even deal it serious damage, but it does serve to highlight how the traditional big media outlets have been legally hogtied.
Our usual media sources can't report on allegations of abuse because they've been very effectively muzzled by CSI hyper-litigation. They try to keep this fact close to the vest, but Anonymous' efforts are making it plain for all to see. This is a valuable service.
Also, any organization that exploits copyright law in order to silence critics should get a kick in the shins, even if that's all it amounts to. It's still a potent message: "We don't condone gag orders, and we'll fight back however we can, even if it is a David versus Goliath situation."
Glib as it may sound, raising awareness is key here. And an end unto itself.
What is this, Digg? The content of that blogspam is obvious. Good programmers, the revelation goes, are interested and excited by their fields, and intelligent self-starters.
Garsh!
Is there a field where these qualities wouldn't indicate a superior performer? Obviously you want to hire someone engaged by the subject matter on a personal level, obviously it would help if they had some brains to back up their passion, and obviously a demonstrated knack for going above-and-beyond is a good sign.
I'm fairly sure still would apply to engineers, pilots, designers, editors, choreographers equally as well.
This is a particularly satisfying story to me. When I was writing my pulp scifi novella The Bikes of New York (in which the poor pedal generator bicycles for spare change) I was told by many snotty self-proclaimed debunkers that human beings could never generate a meaningful amount of power using their bodies, and some of them had all sorts of intimidating mathematics to prove their points.
This story seems to show that their rigour was limp, and their points pointless.
Hooray for a legitimate basis for my surreal vision! Nerd on, MIT.
...even the simplest computer took up six city blocks, and was over ten storeys tall if you included the intercooler arrays.
My sixteen brothers and sisters had to walk forty-six kilometers through the blistering snow to even reach the keyboard, and then even when you did each key required over nine pounds per inch of pressure to depress them. And, since this was before Dvorak composed his famous New World symphony, the keys were always arranged in a completely random order.
Next we would chop wood and heft it into the boiler to keep the computer going, pausing only to replace vaccuum tubes or to put in a few hours at a Dickensian sweat-shop in order to afford that previous penny to buy us a sasperilly to share between us.
We all had tuberculosis, of course, which was the style at the time.
But did we complain? No, we didn't. We performed floating point calculations by tying little knots in the tatters from our pants, and rendered sums for the differential equations the war effort needed to bomb out the Nazis. How much RAM did we have, you ask? We had 1 bit. Today my grandson complains when his WoW refresh rates are too low, but back then we made out just fine with 1 bit of RAM and a box of Cracker Jacks.
Monochrome? We could only dream. Our display was semichrome. And our printer? His name was Guttenberg.
The eyes are a mechanical part of the apparatus, yes, but the actual imaging goes on in the brain. A pair of eyes without neuronal processing of the inputs is about as useful for vision as a pair of fuzzy tennis balls.
I think this is a good idea -- harnessing already honed human perceptions and using them to relieve some of the bandwidth hogging our visual senses are subjected to. It could be quite intuitive, and save valuable screen real estate.
On the other hand, I guess it means we can't take our mobile phones on airplanes anymore, can we?
Homeland Security Agent: "How much liquid is in that phone?"
You: "None. It's virtual liquid."
Homeland Security Agent: "It sounds like at least a few ounces."
You: "Virtual liquids have neither volume nor weight."
Homeland Security Agent: "Do I look stupid to you?"
You: "Can I take the fifth on that?"
Homeland Security Agent: "That's Mistake Number Two, bub. Quoting from documents concerning the governance or liberties of American citizens is suspicious activity Level Blue. Ever heard of Ron Paul?"
It's pretty well known that malware authors have historically targetted the most common platforms to exploit. For the past decade or so this has been Windows-based PCs, which remain the world's most popular platform. The platform is common.
Dells are renowned in the tech community as often technically poor machines stripped down to bargain components in order to keep the sticker price low. They do not have a reputation for having a high resale value or superior performance, but they have a significant chunk of marketshare among bottom-feeder users with humble needs. They dominate the low end of the market, or in more colourful terms, the gutter.
So, when I'm using a high-end machine on a platform only rarely thus far targetted by malware, it makes sense to be more surprised than if one were using a highly targetted machine.
Do you follow along now, my gutter-computer using reactionary friend?
I ran into one of these buggers while surfing news sites. Since I had many tabs open I'm not sure which one featured the poisoned ads, but I was fairly surprised when my Firefox 2 running under Leopard started coughing up fake, Vista-style dialogue boxes and floating window ads, as if I were using a common gutter computer like a Dell.
Slashdot Mirror
I Google Minused because they said they were pretty sure my boss wasn't smart enough to elude circle security, so I should probably associate everything I post and say with my legal and professional name and after all what could go wrong why not?
Also, because I was afeared that some of the stories about people outed for being nicknamed and ended up with lock-outs to their entire suite of Googlies were slightly true. If using my nick on Google+ meant jeopardising access to my control dealies for my Blog*spot public skirt-twisting or AdSense pimping, even temporarily while I argued with a Googlebot, I would be left helplessly rending my garments and shaking my fist at the cloud.
So I took my toys and went home.
Not without your time-machine, bitch.
First of all, there's no way to know if two things are separated by a volume of space unless you have a headache. That's how evolution works: the cerebral nerves were caused to evolve specifically by Darwin in order to function as a kind of animal cruelty version of Pavlov's dog in which mapping three-dimensional space actuates the occipital squinting reflex, causing us to narrow our eyes meaningfully at expansive vistas while also wishing for acetylsalicylic acid and a glass of water.
Scientists consider this sort of thing basically self-evident, like the existence of atoms or Jenny McCarthy.
Furthermore, the so-called Disney Cortex is capable of parsing dimensionality exclusively through parallax; in effect, the neck pain caused by this subtle lateral shifting of the head is conveyed via the uvula directly into the cranial brain-case, tapping into the same area of sensitivity exploited by the spatial depth pain discussed above.
Elementary biochemisphology tells us that the only way stereoscopy can function effectively in the real world of fake entertainment is by pulling out all the stop and going holographic, so that the images can be processed and hurt us in as natural a way as possible. This is God's way of telling us that the Holodeck was cool.
Fad researchers have understood this for centuries, since the time the Illuminati first started actively repressing news of the stereoscopic newspaper in 1743.
Your friend in science,
Cheeseburger Brown
I'm sure that if anyone were falsely accused of being a leaker, they would no doubt have swift access to just recourse. This is the West, after all.
If someone ends up in a such a situation and reports the contrary, their testimony is likely tainted because they are a dirty rotten leaker.
Ultimately, we are all safer somehow.
Novelists can't be trusted. It's always a story with those guys. Like Al Gore and his triffids, or Michael Crichton's genetic engineering alarmism -- nothing to see here. Pure fabrication. I'm pretty sure if we want to know the truth about piracy we have to dig really deep into the back part of the Bible...somewhere between Muhammed and the passages about Neo.
My kids, 6 and 3, use a hand-me-down white MacBook. The machine has been tarded up appropriately to stop them from breaking things (Simple Finder, Parental Control locks on Safari for whitelisted sites only, no IM, admin password unknown to children required to change any setting).
They are not allowed to eat or drink while at the computer, and the computer is not to be moved from its desk.
Within these constraints, they have a ball. The machine is loaded up with all their favourite movies (one click on pictographic icon launches VLC in fullscreen mode), and the sites where they play games (TVOntario Kids, BBC Kids, etc.) are bookmarked.
My 6 year old can videoconference with GTalk with my wife and I elsewhere in the house, but cannot initiate chats outside of the LAN. My 3 year old hasn't quite got the hang of negotiating the necessary dialogue boxes yet, but he'll pick it up soon.
We haven't bought much in the way of educational software, since the process of separating the wheat from the chaff is too labour intensive (most of it sucks the proverbial wang). We make do with web sites (like I Love Bacteria) and educational Flash games.
Hope this helps!
Many systems that have grown in an organic or semi-organic fashion are non-optimal (like, for example, most people you know and every decision ever rendered by a committee).
With something as complex and "live" as the Internet, process is more important than paradigm: the real question is how to optimize from the current live state, rather than mumbling pointlessly about how it should've had better roots.
Shoulda but didna. So, let's move on.
Also, I tried to send this guy a tweet but all I got was a message saying, "I'm sorry, a problem has occured; please reload the page."
Wanker.
If it isn't a pizza company, I say we abandon domain names and go back to numeric addressing.
I think that even in a pay-as-you-go type solution, a certain base threshold of traffic would have to be free, and the customer would pay on top of that. Otherwise, the user is penalized for visiting a site that rams heavy multimedia ads down their throats or for downloading spam to be filtered.
Another idea may be a price ramp: if I usually only use 5% of my connection, the cost for a spike in my usage should be low. Similarly, if I'm a heavy user than my spikes (higher, more frequent) would carry a heftier price tag. In other words, occasional spikes should be discounted while habitually heavy users would have to pay more to accommodate their persistent digital lifestyles.
Finally, I would only consider such a scheme if my account were discounted for every second of downtime during each billing cycle, whether it affected me directly or not. If have to pay for what I use, they have to pay for what they don't deliver.
A voting apparatus without a clear path for auditing of every system and sub-system is an invitation to corruption. Comparable mechanisms in governance have checks and balances to ensure fidelity.
Why do these shifty porkchops think they ought to be exempt? Because it may make their investors nervous?
This is definitely a situation where the bottom line should be drawn by logic, not by dollars.
Oh...wait.
Nevermind.
Good luck, lads.
That's why I always carry an Apple laptop in the event of belligent extra-terrestrials, and why I get off on belittling Bill Murray's accomplishments as an explorer.
Spielberg be my shepherd I heard if there first: "Life will find a way..."
Granted, this e-hissy from Anonymous is unlikely to take down the cult or even deal it serious damage, but it does serve to highlight how the traditional big media outlets have been legally hogtied.
Our usual media sources can't report on allegations of abuse because they've been very effectively muzzled by CSI hyper-litigation. They try to keep this fact close to the vest, but Anonymous' efforts are making it plain for all to see. This is a valuable service.
Also, any organization that exploits copyright law in order to silence critics should get a kick in the shins, even if that's all it amounts to. It's still a potent message: "We don't condone gag orders, and we'll fight back however we can, even if it is a David versus Goliath situation."
Glib as it may sound, raising awareness is key here. And an end unto itself.
Yours,
Cheeseburger Brown
Suppressive and Proud
What is this, Digg? The content of that blogspam is obvious. Good programmers, the revelation goes, are interested and excited by their fields, and intelligent self-starters.
Garsh!
Is there a field where these qualities wouldn't indicate a superior performer? Obviously you want to hire someone engaged by the subject matter on a personal level, obviously it would help if they had some brains to back up their passion, and obviously a demonstrated knack for going above-and-beyond is a good sign.
I'm fairly sure still would apply to engineers, pilots, designers, editors, choreographers equally as well.
This is a particularly satisfying story to me. When I was writing my pulp scifi novella The Bikes of New York (in which the poor pedal generator bicycles for spare change) I was told by many snotty self-proclaimed debunkers that human beings could never generate a meaningful amount of power using their bodies, and some of them had all sorts of intimidating mathematics to prove their points.
This story seems to show that their rigour was limp, and their points pointless.
Hooray for a legitimate basis for my surreal vision! Nerd on, MIT.
Similarly, bugs become "personal challenges" and murderous malfunctions become "quirks."
ED 209: "You have four seconds to comply."
...even the simplest computer took up six city blocks, and was over ten storeys tall if you included the intercooler arrays.
My sixteen brothers and sisters had to walk forty-six kilometers through the blistering snow to even reach the keyboard, and then even when you did each key required over nine pounds per inch of pressure to depress them. And, since this was before Dvorak composed his famous New World symphony, the keys were always arranged in a completely random order.
Next we would chop wood and heft it into the boiler to keep the computer going, pausing only to replace vaccuum tubes or to put in a few hours at a Dickensian sweat-shop in order to afford that previous penny to buy us a sasperilly to share between us.
We all had tuberculosis, of course, which was the style at the time.
But did we complain? No, we didn't. We performed floating point calculations by tying little knots in the tatters from our pants, and rendered sums for the differential equations the war effort needed to bomb out the Nazis. How much RAM did we have, you ask? We had 1 bit. Today my grandson complains when his WoW refresh rates are too low, but back then we made out just fine with 1 bit of RAM and a box of Cracker Jacks.
Monochrome? We could only dream. Our display was semichrome. And our printer? His name was Guttenberg.
Man, those were the days.
"Now this move will end that pesky arms race once and for all!"
Richard Dawkins chuckles, then turns back to his computer and downloads a screener of Bender's Big Score.
As described in Geist's post, the bill would outlaw VCRs.
I don't think that is actually likely, and Geist's track record for inflating hysterical claims makes me even more dubious.
To be fair, though, I'm at work and pretty busy so I haven't yet browsed the actual text of the proposal.
Geist is an alarmist nutter, and an attention-whore. His "interpretation" of the provisions in this bill should be taken with a grain of salt.
The eyes are a mechanical part of the apparatus, yes, but the actual imaging goes on in the brain. A pair of eyes without neuronal processing of the inputs is about as useful for vision as a pair of fuzzy tennis balls.
I think this is a good idea -- harnessing already honed human perceptions and using them to relieve some of the bandwidth hogging our visual senses are subjected to. It could be quite intuitive, and save valuable screen real estate.
On the other hand, I guess it means we can't take our mobile phones on airplanes anymore, can we?
Homeland Security Agent: "How much liquid is in that phone?"
You: "None. It's virtual liquid."
Homeland Security Agent: "It sounds like at least a few ounces."
You: "Virtual liquids have neither volume nor weight."
Homeland Security Agent: "Do I look stupid to you?"
You: "Can I take the fifth on that?"
Homeland Security Agent: "That's Mistake Number Two, bub. Quoting from documents concerning the governance or liberties of American citizens is suspicious activity Level Blue. Ever heard of Ron Paul?"
You: "Uh, sure."
Homeland Security Agent: "You're under arrest."
Defensive much?
It's pretty well known that malware authors have historically targetted the most common platforms to exploit. For the past decade or so this has been Windows-based PCs, which remain the world's most popular platform. The platform is common.
Dells are renowned in the tech community as often technically poor machines stripped down to bargain components in order to keep the sticker price low. They do not have a reputation for having a high resale value or superior performance, but they have a significant chunk of marketshare among bottom-feeder users with humble needs. They dominate the low end of the market, or in more colourful terms, the gutter.
So, when I'm using a high-end machine on a platform only rarely thus far targetted by malware, it makes sense to be more surprised than if one were using a highly targetted machine.
Do you follow along now, my gutter-computer using reactionary friend?
I ran into one of these buggers while surfing news sites. Since I had many tabs open I'm not sure which one featured the poisoned ads, but I was fairly surprised when my Firefox 2 running under Leopard started coughing up fake, Vista-style dialogue boxes and floating window ads, as if I were using a common gutter computer like a Dell.
What can I say? Feckless whining irks me.