Also, there's the whole "vaporware" issue. The scale of this programming task is staggering; it's not only image recognition, but image *searching*. Just look at how poor OCR does with handwriting (and sometimes even pre-printed text). Generalized image recognition is orders of magnitude harder than recognizing a small set of print characters lined up in nice rows and clustered into words, and image searching is beyond that.
Yeah, but this doesn't have to be any more accurate that say.....Google. And the computer doesn't actually have to "comprehend" the image like a human, it just has to recognize something close to it.
Personally I think it'd make a great reseach topic for a grad student studying DSP.
Here's how I would do it:
First, you downsample any ridiculously large images. (This can cut your processing and bandwidth costs signifcantly.)
Then, you convert the color space to HSV. (Brightness and shape information is probably more important than colors.)
Next, you might choose to normalize some or all the channels. (You want a bright picture of something to show up when you submit a dark picture, a picture taken with a diffent camera, etc.) You probably also want to reduce the color depth to something easy.
So you've got this image in a reasonable shape, now you need to extract something to search with (as well as create a database key for the image you were just given). The thing I'd try here would be various mathematical transforms (Fourier, etc). I bet you could have some luck with using wavelets.
Now you've got a 3 dimensional matrix of coefficients. Thing is, you probably don't want all of them so you can throw out all but the most important ones. So you keep only the first N coeffiecients from each channel.
Take all those coeffients and apply a weighting/importance to them. Use them in chunks, so your seach can be handled with a tree.
There are some tricks you'd want to develop, like being able to find an image that of something that's been offset, or finding close ups from wide shots, etc but I think it's worth a shot.
No, that is still a nonsequitor. I am a feminist. Dunno wtf you mean by "the Gloria Steinem sense of the word"
I mean that by saying the word feminist, you're actually referring to the set of ideals held by the feminist movement rather than some aribtrary subset of less extreme viewpoints. If you don't know much about her viewpoints, you might care to research them more before claiming to agree with them.
If you objected to some videogame saying that it was somehow anti-semitic, and I refuted you and said that the lead designer was a Jew, that would also be a nonsequitor. Women can be anti-feminist. Jews can be anti-semitic.
Sure it's POSSIBLE, but that does not automatically make it irrelevant. The interesting thing about saying that this person is a woman, is that it makes even more clear the point that you haven't made a very strong argument. Here someone is, a woman, saying these games are bad. Here is another woman, who doesn't seem to think so. Where's the objective evidence?
Think about what you're saying!
Based on that twisted logic I can say that just about ANYTHING is anti-somegroup, and you'll automatically dismiss an entire side of the argument from those within that group.
is completely irrelevant, whether you are a feminist or not. If you are suggesting otherwise, you're dumb.
I would say that suggesting that a person's viewpoint and the vital statistics which influence that are definately NOT irrelevant and that ad hominem attacks are dumb.
It comes down to this: A black man has a good idea what's keeping the black man down. He has EXPERIENCE being a black man.
Saying that his viewpoint or his race is IRRELEVANT, because he might be anti-black is really foolish and silly. To really point out the silliness of this viewpoint:
How do you know that the FIRST person isn't anti-somegroup, rather than the second?
Suddenly it's now irrelevant that the woman this article is about is in fact a woman, and this is because it's possible that she may be anti-woman.
Sure it is....to someone with a rational viewpoint of the world.
To "feminists" (used in the correct Gloria Steinhem sense of the word) it is very much relevant.
A good Steinhem quote the illustrate this would be:
"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."
Of course, this viewpoint shows an unbelieveably messed-up view of the world but many people have it. Here is one of the more interesting views on the subject:
I have read this thread people. I'll tell you, the CENSORS are active.
I am a young gay man and a depiction of a female body does not in any way affect me on a sexual level. Most of the time a depiction of male nudity doesn't even have that effect. Hot-Babe to me isn't even interesting software, but....
After reading the "Womens Rights" posts, I am certainly going to install Hot-Babe out of principle.
So it is forbidden to depict nudity, because it objectifies people?
Well it would only objectify people if many generations were raised with the idea that their bodies are not something natural and should not be depicted, lest they "lose" their pent-up, prude, bourgeoise, narrowminded mentality.
So it is "not done" to depict female nudity because it does not respect Women? Well, sorry, respect is something earned and personal, not something out of entitlement just because one was born with a penis or a vagina.
The notion "I am female, I have a vagina, I am entitled to respect, so others shouldn't dare to depict female nudity, because I find it offensive to my vaginally bestowed respect entitlement" is absolutely ludicrous.
Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing
Doesn't it?
It think there are a great many reasonable people out there who believe that blind, dogmatic belief in the supernatural is a fundamentally bad idea.
When you base your moral and social values on a bunch of fiction, it makes them very easy to manipulate.
IMO, this has a LOT to do so many people being killed in the name of religion (the worst offender being Christianity). If the moral values of those holy warriors were based on philosphy rather than religion, honest intellectual thought might come into play, giving them a chance to realize that they were being manipulated.
Without a belief in the supernatural, it's possible to sit down and evaluate the consequences of your actions. Putting mythology before reality is antithetical to rational behavior.
Oh, and of course the other obvious alternative this guy could choose is to burn the songs he purchases to CD and then get any bloody portable CD player he wants to play his songs (even those purchase through the iTMS).
That's like saying:
"I don't have a monopoly, because even though I own every bus in the country, you can always buy a car or ride a bike."
Obviously there are alternatives in ANY situation, but they are simply not equivalent.
The alternative you're suggesting is simply not equivalent. Do you have ANY idea how many CD's you have to walk around with to equal the number of minutes of compressed audio you can hold on an ipod?
You're talking about walking around with a frickin backpack full of CDs.
If you want to make an actually *valid* point about the avaibility of MP3 players and compressed audio file from other companies, go for it. That's a REAL (no pun intended) alternative.
Engineers found that people actually prefer a small amount of even order distortion compared to unmeasurable distortion. Having a slight bit makes the but music have a "warmer" sound. Pure digital is cold and somewhat harsh by comparison.
This does nothing to invalidate my point. TONS of people like electric guitar, but if your "recording device" distorts everything to that extent, it's a POS recording device. It may be an awesome "effects box" though.
Zero distortion does not equal the best sound.
Actually, that's EXACTLY what "best sound" is!
The idea of a sound REPRODUCTION system is to replay the sound as it was played originally.
Theres plenty of speakers with a flat frequency response that sound like garbage compared to something with some spikes or dips.
What you're saying is silly. It's like saying, "there are plenty of Ferraris that drive like crap compared to my Pinto". Sure that may be you opinion, but by any objective measure the Ferrari is better. You might LIKE the feeling of sliding out in a corner that the Ferrari might have handled uneventfully.
I think all that really does is say that you have poor taste.
I'm not trying to be a snob, and I certainly don't always leave my EQ set at "flat", but if you're going to have a rational discussion about the merits of a sound playback system it's important to recognize what the fundamental goal is. I'm not trying to force you to buy a Ferrari, saying that your system is "better" when every objective measure says otherwise is just as foolish as saying that your Pinto is better than a Ferrari.
To put it another way:
It's possible to make a "perfect" stereo system sound like that noisy system you like, but it's fundamentally impossible to do the reverse. You simply can't do it.
Think of a good system as one that can do everything yours can do and more. A perfect system would reproduce any kind of noise you liked.
Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration,
That's right where you lost me.
See I have this funny view that the purpose of recording equipment is to record sounds. The closer you get to a "perfect" recording, the better.
If certain artists like to use tapes decks as "signal processors", that's all fine and dandy, but it only speaks negatively about their usefulness as recording devices.
The minute you start saying things like, "sure it adds noise, but it's good noise" you loose all credibility. At that point there's no way to say that ANY equipment is better because you're treating them like sound effects boxes instead of SOUND REPRODUCTION DEVICES.
Except for special circumstances (like on an airplane), you cannot kill 100 people with a pocket knife unless your name is Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, in which case you don't even need the knife.
I presume Chuck Norris would try to kill them by acting out a scene from "Walker: Texas Ranger"?
.....or did you not mean the fall-over-laughing type of kill?
It Weighs More - and that weight has a huge impact because rolling mass is much more difficult to move
Perhaps even more importantly IT'S ALSO HARD TO STOP.
Another point you failed to metion is that in addition the the myriad of tires widths, aspect ratios and size we have already, the air pressure can no longer be adjusted for the weight of the vehicle. Instead of stocking ONE 205 50 15 tire you'll need to stock a number of them in various "equivalent tire pressures".
Yet another potenital problem I with solid tires is that small failures in the structure of the tire may go unnoticed until your run-flat tire rips itself apart at 80 MPH. In the case of pneumatic tires, a crack will lead to a lead, which will lead to you replacing the tire.
The author of this worm still doesn't have permission to modify the source code running on people's servers. Yes, they may be idiots, but idiots still have rights (for the moment).
Actually, there's a really nice KDE app called kbarcode that handles barcodes, label printing, and ties into databases.
And of course there's no reason you can't print barcodes on a normal printer, it's just more work.
But you don't want such a tiny beam, and you aren't aiming at such a tiny target.
Wrong.
You want a tiny beam because, the more your spread out you beam, the more you spread out your power. You could take a 100mW laser and make it 10ft wide, but the power level would no longer be large enough to do damage. And NO, GE is not going to sell you a multi-megawatt 5ft diameter beam laser without calling a few gov't agencies. And, they're going to want to know how you're going to come up with the 7 or more figures something like that is going to cost. Something like that is NOT an off the shelf product, nor would it be light enough for a typical tripod.
And... Your target IS that tiny because you're trying to hit someone in the eye!
No NASA boys required. Just a good sharpshooter.
Have you ever even fired a gun? You're really overestimating how easy this is. You speak as if being able to hit a target a mile away is the norm. And you're forgetting the fact that the airplane is moving at a couple hundred miles per hour.Know any sharpshooters who can shoot the eye out of a cheetah in full sprint at a mile away?
Whoever the guy is that's making this shot unassisted, he's the frickin mac daddy of all sharpshooters. You might want to check out the NRA records page to get even a small clue about how hard what you're suggesting is. There's a reason people hunt foul with a shotgun instead of a.22 rifle.
Ah yes, I forgot about the new Cavalier, er, I mean GTO. Good powertrain but boring styling.
Actually the powertrain is crap compared to what they were selling. The last generation Trans Am's were getting over 300 hp in stock trim from their 5.7 LS-1 V8 and came with Tremec T-56 transmissions. They were that fastest production car under $30,000 in the US. Pontiac has managed to produce an uglier, slower, and more expensive car with the GTO.
I'm assuming the laser used was a large one, not some little pencil laser. A large one could easily be set up on a bipod or tripod mount (think of rifles or large caliber guns on mounts). Sharpshooters can hit things at extreme distance when their guns are properly braced. Snipers have taken out individual people with bullets at well over a miles distance.
Which makes the obvious point: Why the hell are you going to bother producing a one-of-a-kind "laser rifle" that *MIGHT* blind a pilot when you could just shoot them with an actual rifle?
This article is just another bunch of paranoid "homeland security" bullshit.
Ever look at a plane several miles away that is coming straight or almost straight in your direction? Sometimes it seems like they aren't moving at all. The number of arc seconds they will move in 10 seconds time relative to you is very small. I don't think a gyroscope/mechanical tracker would be necessary.
It's not a question of "arc seconds" it's a question of precision. Ever try to actually do the math?
Say you want to hit a 5mm target with a 10mm beam from 2km away, that means you need a precision of 2.5 × 10E-09 radians! That's fucking accurate. It's just not something that you're going to be able to build in your garage. There are probably some NASA guys and few spy satellite engineers who might be able to make it happen, but with that level of talent, you may as well just make your own stinger missile.
So you care about being able to play Real's DRMd content. Ergo you buy an iRiver.
No, I care about not having DRM built into a device i just paid $300-400 for.
I care about being able to play my mp3s, the one or two tracks I buy from iTMS, and getting a player that I know will work flawlessly with my Apple laptop. Ergo I get an iPod.
Anything that works a a mass storage device should work "flawlessly". If it doesn't, it's Apple's fault. As for "buying" songs from itunes, the only way you'll ever really have them is if you (illegally) remove the DRM. If you keep them in a DRM format on a DRM piece of equipment, whatever rights you think you "bought" can arbitrarily be changed at Apple's will.
I don't see the need for such anger over one's choice of hardware.
I'm not angry that you bought an ipod, I'm angry for being modded down to -1 Troll, for a factual, on-topic, non-troll comment.
The simple fact is that the iriver players, provide more "freedom" than Apple's player. If you're willing to deal with less, that's up to you but you are losing something when you buy a device that is designed to lock you out of certain functions.
It's not like Apple is being secretive about this stuff... they say quite blatantly what to expect and not expect from your iPod.
I've never known Apple to be "blatant" about any of the tecnical features of their products. Their marketing is almost always based on asthetics. They may mention technical issues occasionally, but they're a lot less focued on that aspect than their competitors.
"2600.com had a similar case where they were ordered not to link to any site that had decss. Never mind the fact that google and pletny of other sites did and still do."
Personally, I believe they lost this case due to attacks on their character, rather than actual laws. 2600 was portrayed as group of crazed anarchists who like to flaunt the system. As a result, the judge had little sympathy for them.
IMO, this is why 2600 is forbidden from even linking to DeCSS, but Felten's Gallery of CSS Descramblers is still up. The MPAA would have a much tougher case fighting a CS professor at a famous university, with the money to win.
If anyone considered the 2600, ruling to be precedent, it seems like they would try to use it to get the gallery shut down. IMO (IANAL), that the gallery itself hasn't been shut down speaks to the stupidity of that ruling.
I think the 2600 case shows how character assasination can win you a case by playing to the judge's prejudices.
as for real's songs, real's songs WERE NEVER SUPPORTED in the first place. real hacked their own DRM to make it work on the ipod, and apple hacked the ipod back to make the DRM not work.
It's funny how deliberately obtuse you're being.
The whole point with my iriver is that I don't have to worry about whether my songs are "supported" (read as "not deliberately blocked"), or figuring out some secret filesystem. It just works, and iriver's not going to sneak code onto my player to make it not work.
It's not a matter of them suddenly not working, it's a matter of not playing on something that it IS NOT NATIVELY SUPPORTED ON.
IT IS EXACTLY A MATTER OF THE SONGS SUDDENLY NOT WORKING.
That's really what happened! The words "not natively supported" don't change that. One day the songs worked, the next day they didn't. It was a deliberate change by apple.
Sure Apple didn't guarantee that Real's song would work, but then you're getting back to my original point: With my player I don't have to worry about what company my songs are from.
I have that freedom. Anything it has a codec for, it will play. The device is not deliberately making my life harder than it needs to be.
Why are you being an apologist for a big corporation that is deliberately limiting consumer choice? Would you like it if all of a sudden your sony cd player refused to play anything but sony cds?
Those people doubting her hardware skills really shouldn't talk without checking facts, and if you think that designing things in VHDL is as simple as programming in C you need a clue.
Sorry, but that's exactly as simple as it is.
I've done FPGA designs AND I've actually done a REAL "VLSI" chip design (one of the neatest things I did as an undergrad). Doing an actual chip design means dealing with things like the actual W/L ratios of your transistors, manually routing your busses, etc.
VHDL or "schematic capture" (basically grapical VHDL) are really simple by comparison. In a VHDL design if you want to XOR two signals it's a simple one line command JUST LIKE C. If you're doing the actual "chip design" you're acually laying out the size, position and interconnection of individual transistors.
I'm not disrespecting this girl or her talents, but you're distoring the complexity of HDL's like VHDL. When working in one of these languages you can almost prentend it's a normal computing language, with the caveat that saying "A+B=C" means A+B=C ALWAYS, rather than just after an instruction is executed.
If you knew anything about the iPod (it's likely you are some dipshit Euro trash lib, so you probably don't know much about anything), you'd know that the only DRM scheme used, beyond the DRM in Apple's AAC format, is a frickin' "." in front of files and a mixed up directory structure that makes it a little bit difficult to find music files put their by iTunes.
And if you spent 30s on Google, you'd find a million and one OSS, free programs that'll browse the iPod directory structure and copy the content you want.
Your argument is "Yeah, the ipod DOES have DRM but it's crappy" ?
So what? My iRiver DOESN'T EVEN TRY TO LOCK ME OUT!
Imagine that, not having to fuck around and seach all day trying to get your damn music off the player, just drag and drop under Windows, Mac, or Linux.
You are a piece of shit.
Everything I've posted is true and you really don't have any real rebuttal except childish insults. This is why not a single reply has actually countered my points.
If you don't buy a DRM'd song from the iTunes store, why don't you tell me where this DRM is coming from?
THE SOFTWARE IS ON THE PLAYER THE DAY YOU BUY IT.
The player is designed to restrict your ability to copy files. It's designed to lock you, the guy who just shelled out hundreds of dollars for this piece of hardware, out.
Sure there are lots of short-sighted folks who think the can avoid this one way or another. I wonder how those people like their songs from Real's store suddenly not working on their ipod anymore?
I wonder how many more examples like that it will take before people realize that not being in control of hardware they own is not such a good idea.
Wow, the apple apologists are out in full force!
My clearly non-troll post is now at -1 troll.
.
Let me explain this a little better, for the really dense. On the iRiver player, THERE IS NO FILE YOU CANNOT COPY OFF THE DEVICE. You do not need special software.
That's not a troll, it's the truth. Yes, an ipod can be used as a hard disk, but it's protected by DRM. If Apple says you can't copy that file, you can't.
So far I have three replies from ipod-apologists, distoring the issue and my comment is at -1. If you like your ipod, fine but don't mod down a factual post because it makes the ipod look bad.
Plus it plays WMA, which is an advantage for a lot of people.
Forget the WMA, most iRiver players are FREE OF DRM.
Any iRiver player I've seen behaves exactly as a standard USB mass storage device. What to copy you files back to your PC? To ANY PC?
iRiver players don't just beat Apple in features, the beat Apple in FREEDOM. Who wants to shell out hundred of dollars for something that refuses to do what they want.
Agree 100%. The people I went to high school with never went to college, because the union would get them US$40K a year jobs with full benefits right after high school. They scoffed at college.
What the hell is wrong with being able to make a reasonable living without going to college?
Shit, I went to college....a good one to, but it's not for everybody. We NEED dishwashers, electricians, plumbers, etc and those people don't need a four year degree to do thier job.
The problem is not lazy teamsters, it is "free trade" and corporate political control.
Have you even thought about this very much? Say there was a country where EVERYONE was willing to work for less than us and ALL our jobs got shipped overseas, how is that good for us?
Grow up, people. Wal*Mart only controls the job supply if you let it. Train yourself for something other than stocking shelves or waving UPC's over scanners. Especially since we're automating that function, too.
Wow, you're a rotten SOB aren't you? See unlike you I realize that I was LUCKY to be able to go to the school I did. I worked hard, but I had advantages many others will never have. Sure I'm doing okay as an electrical engineer, but suggesting that everyone get an advanced degree is like suggesting that everyone become a pro football player. If you had a real grasp of the economics involved, you'd realize that there are other issues here, like distribuation of wealth, free trade, corporate welfare, limited demand for skilled labor, etc.
Just as not everyone can get rich throwing a ball through a hoop, not everyone can get rich by going to college.
PS Don't get me wrong. I'm not agaist as many people going to college as possible, but you're a fucked-up social darwinist if you believe those who can't succed at it deserve no quality of life whatsoever. It's sad to see someone have so much contempt for their fellow man just because HE doesn't think they studied enough.
I think that anybody who leaves their system running when they don't need it is an environmentally insensitive dipshit.
I think anybody who makes ridiculous blanket statements like that is an asshole.
Let's say you have electric heat and it's winter. Leaving your computer on 24/7 costs you NOTHING and does NO ADDITIONAL HARM TO THE ENVIRONMENT. All of a sudden, all your reasoning is invalid yert you're still calling this person a dipshit.
Anyways, holier-than-thou jerks like yourself are just annoying. Do you unplug everything in your house when you're not using it? If not, all those transformers are sitting there buring energy and you're an "environmentally insensitive dipshit." (That includes your TV.... no more remote power on for you.)
Get a grip. Maybe it would be better if more people turn their PC off during the day, but down act like they dump mercury into the nearest river. People like you do more to HURT the cause of environmentalism than to help it.
The avergae person thinks:
"Man, what a nutjob. I don't wanna have a damn thing to do with anything they're involved in. The whole issuse must be blown out of proportion, just like this blowhard's comments."
You are making no sense. By your logic, because each device's needs are uniquely different, we should not even have standardized the AC supply.
Not true. What I'm saying is that there's not a lot of benfit to forcing things that have already standardized on AC power to re-standize onto DC power. You will still need a "brick" to convert to power and to filter it for each device AND you're going to need a NEW brick to convert your AC to DC.
My VCR and DVD are "jumped together" -- as is the TV. What is the reason, I don't want that, again?
You're ignoring the fact that I said DC!
As the lovers' portraits get longer on the breasts of aging women, so will this discussion increasingly embarass you, as more and more devices begin using the power-over-etherner and/or power-over-USB (like Blackberry does already) to work and to charge their batteries.
All this talk by boobs about boobs isn't going to change that facts you're ignoring.
If you want to be willfully ignorant of power supply filtering, wattage, battery technology and a whole mess of other issues, that's your deal, but don't expect a bunch of electrical engineers (like myself) to listen to you.
Do you realize how retarded it is to use POE for something that DOESN'T NEED ETHERNET? You're using 2 pairs out of the whole damn cable and you're paying for signal quality you don't need. Maybe you're even paying for ethernet hardware one the other side of the cable you don't need.
The same applies to USB, except it's even worse because you're limited even more in power, the cable is even more expensive, and you'll probably be violating the USB standard. (Don't expect manufacturer of electic razors to shell out for interface chips that broadcast "I am an electric razor".)
The real fun will start when your new "USB-powered" speakers start demanding multiple ports to get the necessary wattage (or "special" high current ports). Then you'll need even more ports than you have devices:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but this doesn't have to be any more accurate that say.....Google. And the computer doesn't actually have to "comprehend" the image like a human, it just has to recognize something close to it.
Personally I think it'd make a great reseach topic for a grad student studying DSP.
Here's how I would do it:
- First, you downsample any ridiculously large images. (This can cut your processing and bandwidth costs signifcantly.)
- Then, you convert the color space to HSV. (Brightness and shape information is probably more important than colors.)
- Next, you might choose to normalize some or all the channels. (You want a bright picture of something to show up when you submit a dark picture, a picture taken with a diffent camera, etc.) You probably also want to reduce the color depth to something easy.
- So you've got this image in a reasonable shape, now you need to extract something to search with (as well as create a database key for the image you were just given). The thing I'd try here would be various mathematical transforms (Fourier, etc). I bet you could have some luck with using wavelets.
- Now you've got a 3 dimensional matrix of coefficients. Thing is, you probably don't want all of them so you can throw out all but the most important ones. So you keep only the first N coeffiecients from each channel.
- Take all those coeffients and apply a weighting/importance to them. Use them in chunks, so your seach can be handled with a tree.
There are some tricks you'd want to develop, like being able to find an image that of something that's been offset, or finding close ups from wide shots, etc but I think it's worth a shot.No, that is still a nonsequitor. I am a feminist. Dunno wtf you mean by "the Gloria Steinem sense of the word"
I mean that by saying the word feminist, you're actually referring to the set of ideals held by the feminist movement rather than some aribtrary subset of less extreme viewpoints. If you don't know much about her viewpoints, you might care to research them more before claiming to agree with them.
If you objected to some videogame saying that it was somehow anti-semitic, and I refuted you and said that the lead designer was a Jew, that would also be a nonsequitor. Women can be anti-feminist. Jews can be anti-semitic.
Sure it's POSSIBLE, but that does not automatically make it irrelevant. The interesting thing about saying that this person is a woman, is that it makes even more clear the point that you haven't made a very strong argument. Here someone is, a woman, saying these games are bad. Here is another woman, who doesn't seem to think so. Where's the objective evidence?
Think about what you're saying!
Based on that twisted logic I can say that just about ANYTHING is anti-somegroup, and you'll automatically dismiss an entire side of the argument from those within that group.
is completely irrelevant, whether you are a feminist or not. If you are suggesting otherwise, you're dumb.
I would say that suggesting that a person's viewpoint and the vital statistics which influence that are definately NOT irrelevant and that ad hominem attacks are dumb.
It comes down to this:
A black man has a good idea what's keeping the black man down. He has EXPERIENCE being a black man.
Saying that his viewpoint or his race is IRRELEVANT, because he might be anti-black is really foolish and silly.
To really point out the silliness of this viewpoint:
How do you know that the FIRST person isn't anti-somegroup, rather than the second?
Suddenly it's now irrelevant that the woman this article is about is in fact a woman, and this is because it's possible that she may be anti-woman.
"Playboy: Mansion's lead designer is a woman."
Nonsequitor.
Sure it is....to someone with a rational viewpoint of the world.
To "feminists" (used in the correct Gloria Steinhem sense of the word) it is very much relevant.
A good Steinhem quote the illustrate this would be:
"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."
Of course, this viewpoint shows an unbelieveably messed-up view of the world but many people have it. Here is one of the more interesting views on the subject:
I have read this thread people. I'll tell you, the CENSORS are active.
I am a young gay man and a depiction of a female body does not in any way affect me on a sexual level. Most of the time a depiction of male nudity doesn't even have that effect. Hot-Babe to me isn't even interesting software, but....
After reading the "Womens Rights" posts, I am certainly going to install Hot-Babe out of principle.
So it is forbidden to depict nudity, because it objectifies people?
Well it would only objectify people if many generations were raised with the idea that their bodies are not something natural and should not be depicted, lest they "lose" their pent-up, prude, bourgeoise, narrowminded mentality.
So it is "not done" to depict female nudity because it does not respect Women? Well, sorry, respect is something earned and personal, not something out of entitlement just because one was born with a penis or a vagina.
The notion "I am female, I have a vagina, I am entitled to respect, so others shouldn't dare to depict female nudity, because I find it offensive to my vaginally bestowed respect entitlement" is absolutely ludicrous.
Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing
Doesn't it?
It think there are a great many reasonable people out there who believe that blind, dogmatic belief in the supernatural is a fundamentally bad idea.
When you base your moral and social values on a bunch of fiction, it makes them very easy to manipulate.
IMO, this has a LOT to do so many people being killed in the name of religion (the worst offender being Christianity). If the moral values of those holy warriors were based on philosphy rather than religion, honest intellectual thought might come into play, giving them a chance to realize that they were being manipulated.
Without a belief in the supernatural, it's possible to sit down and evaluate the consequences of your actions. Putting mythology before reality is antithetical to rational behavior.
Oh, and of course the other obvious alternative this guy could choose is to burn the songs he purchases to CD and then get any bloody portable CD player he wants to play his songs (even those purchase through the iTMS).
That's like saying:
"I don't have a monopoly, because even though I own every bus in the country, you can always buy a car or ride a bike."
Obviously there are alternatives in ANY situation, but they are simply not equivalent.
The alternative you're suggesting is simply not equivalent. Do you have ANY idea how many CD's you have to walk around with to equal the number of minutes of compressed audio you can hold on an ipod?
You're talking about walking around with a frickin backpack full of CDs.
If you want to make an actually *valid* point about the avaibility of MP3 players and compressed audio file from other companies, go for it. That's a REAL (no pun intended) alternative.
Engineers found that people actually prefer a small amount of even order distortion compared to unmeasurable distortion. Having a slight bit makes the but music have a "warmer" sound. Pure digital is cold and somewhat harsh by comparison.
This does nothing to invalidate my point. TONS of people like electric guitar, but if your "recording device" distorts everything to that extent, it's a POS recording device. It may be an awesome "effects box" though.
Zero distortion does not equal the best sound.
Actually, that's EXACTLY what "best sound" is!
The idea of a sound REPRODUCTION system is to replay the sound as it was played originally.
Theres plenty of speakers with a flat frequency response that sound like garbage compared to something with some spikes or dips.
What you're saying is silly. It's like saying, "there are plenty of Ferraris that drive like crap compared to my Pinto". Sure that may be you opinion, but by any objective measure the Ferrari is better. You might LIKE the feeling of sliding out in a corner that the Ferrari might have handled uneventfully.
I think all that really does is say that you have poor taste.
I'm not trying to be a snob, and I certainly don't always leave my EQ set at "flat", but if you're going to have a rational discussion about the merits of a sound playback system it's important to recognize what the fundamental goal is. I'm not trying to force you to buy a Ferrari, saying that your system is "better" when every objective measure says otherwise is just as foolish as saying that your Pinto is better than a Ferrari.
To put it another way:
It's possible to make a "perfect" stereo system sound like that noisy system you like, but it's fundamentally impossible to do the reverse. You simply can't do it.
Think of a good system as one that can do everything yours can do and more. A perfect system would reproduce any kind of noise you liked.
Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration,
That's right where you lost me.
See I have this funny view that the purpose of recording equipment is to record sounds. The closer you get to a "perfect" recording, the better.
If certain artists like to use tapes decks as "signal processors", that's all fine and dandy, but it only speaks negatively about their usefulness as recording devices.
The minute you start saying things like, "sure it adds noise, but it's good noise" you loose all credibility. At that point there's no way to say that ANY equipment is better because you're treating them like sound effects boxes instead of SOUND REPRODUCTION DEVICES.
Except for special circumstances (like on an airplane), you cannot kill 100 people with a pocket knife unless your name is Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, in which case you don't even need the knife.
.....or did you not mean the fall-over-laughing type of kill?
I presume Chuck Norris would try to kill them by acting out a scene from "Walker: Texas Ranger"?
It Weighs More - and that weight has a huge impact because rolling mass is much more difficult to move
Perhaps even more importantly IT'S ALSO HARD TO STOP.
Another point you failed to metion is that in addition the the myriad of tires widths, aspect ratios and size we have already, the air pressure can no longer be adjusted for the weight of the vehicle. Instead of stocking ONE 205 50 15 tire you'll need to stock a number of them in various "equivalent tire pressures".
Yet another potenital problem I with solid tires is that small failures in the structure of the tire may go unnoticed until your run-flat tire rips itself apart at 80 MPH. In the case of pneumatic tires, a crack will lead to a lead, which will lead to you replacing the tire.
The author of this worm still doesn't have permission to modify the source code running on people's servers. Yes, they may be idiots, but idiots still have rights (for the moment).
Which raises the question:
Should the law change?
Actually, there's a really nice KDE app called kbarcode that handles barcodes, label printing, and ties into databases.
And of course there's no reason you can't print barcodes on a normal printer, it's just more work.
But you don't want such a tiny beam, and you aren't aiming at such a tiny target.
.22 rifle.
Wrong.
You want a tiny beam because, the more your spread out you beam, the more you spread out your power. You could take a 100mW laser and make it 10ft wide, but the power level would no longer be large enough to do damage. And NO, GE is not going to sell you a multi-megawatt 5ft diameter beam laser without calling a few gov't agencies. And, they're going to want to know how you're going to come up with the 7 or more figures something like that is going to cost. Something like that is NOT an off the shelf product, nor would it be light enough for a typical tripod.
And...
Your target IS that tiny because you're trying to hit someone in the eye!
No NASA boys required. Just a good sharpshooter.
Have you ever even fired a gun? You're really overestimating how easy this is. You speak as if being able to hit a target a mile away is the norm. And you're forgetting the fact that the airplane is moving at a couple hundred miles per hour. Know any sharpshooters who can shoot the eye out of a cheetah in full sprint at a mile away?
Whoever the guy is that's making this shot unassisted, he's the frickin mac daddy of all sharpshooters. You might want to check out the NRA records page to get even a small clue about how hard what you're suggesting is. There's a reason people hunt foul with a shotgun instead of a
Ah yes, I forgot about the new Cavalier, er, I mean GTO. Good powertrain but boring styling.
Actually the powertrain is crap compared to what they were selling. The last generation Trans Am's were getting over 300 hp in stock trim from their 5.7 LS-1 V8 and came with Tremec T-56 transmissions. They were that fastest production car under $30,000 in the US. Pontiac has managed to produce an uglier, slower, and more expensive car with the GTO.
I'm assuming the laser used was a large one, not some little pencil laser. A large one could easily be set up on a bipod or tripod mount (think of rifles or large caliber guns on mounts). Sharpshooters can hit things at extreme distance when their guns are properly braced. Snipers have taken out individual people with bullets at well over a miles distance.
Which makes the obvious point:
Why the hell are you going to bother producing a one-of-a-kind "laser rifle" that *MIGHT* blind a pilot when you could just shoot them with an actual rifle?
This article is just another bunch of paranoid "homeland security" bullshit.
Ever look at a plane several miles away that is coming straight or almost straight in your direction? Sometimes it seems like they aren't moving at all. The number of arc seconds they will move in 10 seconds time relative to you is very small. I don't think a gyroscope/mechanical tracker would be necessary.
It's not a question of "arc seconds" it's a question of precision.
Ever try to actually do the math?
Say you want to hit a 5mm target with a 10mm beam from 2km away, that means you need a precision of 2.5 × 10E-09 radians! That's fucking accurate. It's just not something that you're going to be able to build in your garage. There are probably some NASA guys and few spy satellite engineers who might be able to make it happen, but with that level of talent, you may as well just make your own stinger missile.
So you care about being able to play Real's DRMd content. Ergo you buy an iRiver.
... they say quite blatantly what to expect and not expect from your iPod.
No, I care about not having DRM built into a device i just paid $300-400 for.
I care about being able to play my mp3s, the one or two tracks I buy from iTMS, and getting a player that I know will work flawlessly with my Apple laptop. Ergo I get an iPod.
Anything that works a a mass storage device should work "flawlessly". If it doesn't, it's Apple's fault. As for "buying" songs from itunes, the only way you'll ever really have them is if you (illegally) remove the DRM. If you keep them in a DRM format on a DRM piece of equipment, whatever rights you think you "bought" can arbitrarily be changed at Apple's will.
I don't see the need for such anger over one's choice of hardware.
I'm not angry that you bought an ipod, I'm angry for being modded down to -1 Troll, for a factual, on-topic, non-troll comment.
The simple fact is that the iriver players, provide more "freedom" than Apple's player. If you're willing to deal with less, that's up to you but you are losing something when you buy a device that is designed to lock you out of certain functions.
It's not like Apple is being secretive about this stuff
I've never known Apple to be "blatant" about any of the tecnical features of their products. Their marketing is almost always based on asthetics. They may mention technical issues occasionally, but they're a lot less focued on that aspect than their competitors.
"2600.com had a similar case where they were ordered not to link to any site that had decss. Never mind the fact that google and pletny of other sites did and still do."
Personally, I believe they lost this case due to attacks on their character, rather than actual laws. 2600 was portrayed as group of crazed anarchists who like to flaunt the system. As a result, the judge had little sympathy for them.
IMO, this is why 2600 is forbidden from even linking to DeCSS, but Felten's Gallery of CSS Descramblers is still up. The MPAA would have a much tougher case fighting a CS professor at a famous university, with the money to win.
If anyone considered the 2600, ruling to be precedent, it seems like they would try to use it to get the gallery shut down. IMO (IANAL), that the gallery itself hasn't been shut down speaks to the stupidity of that ruling.
I think the 2600 case shows how character assasination can win you a case by playing to the judge's prejudices.
as for real's songs, real's songs WERE NEVER SUPPORTED in the first place. real hacked their own DRM to make it work on the ipod, and apple hacked the ipod back to make the DRM not work.
It's funny how deliberately obtuse you're being.
The whole point with my iriver is that I don't have to worry about whether my songs are "supported" (read as "not deliberately blocked"), or figuring out some secret filesystem. It just works, and iriver's not going to sneak code onto my player to make it not work.
It's not a matter of them suddenly not working, it's a matter of not playing on something that it IS NOT NATIVELY SUPPORTED ON.
IT IS EXACTLY A MATTER OF THE SONGS SUDDENLY NOT WORKING.
That's really what happened! The words "not natively supported" don't change that. One day the songs worked, the next day they didn't. It was a deliberate change by apple.
Sure Apple didn't guarantee that Real's song would work, but then you're getting back to my original point:
With my player I don't have to worry about what company my songs are from.
I have that freedom. Anything it has a codec for, it will play.
The device is not deliberately making my life harder than it needs to be.
Why are you being an apologist for a big corporation that is deliberately limiting consumer choice? Would you like it if all of a sudden your sony cd player refused to play anything but sony cds?
Those people doubting her hardware skills really shouldn't talk without checking facts, and if you think that designing things in VHDL is as simple as programming in C you need a clue.
Sorry, but that's exactly as simple as it is.
I've done FPGA designs AND I've actually done a REAL "VLSI" chip design (one of the neatest things I did as an undergrad). Doing an actual chip design means dealing with things like the actual W/L ratios of your transistors, manually routing your busses, etc.
VHDL or "schematic capture" (basically grapical VHDL) are really simple by comparison.
In a VHDL design if you want to XOR two signals it's a simple one line command JUST LIKE C. If you're doing the actual "chip design" you're acually laying out the size, position and interconnection of individual transistors.
I'm not disrespecting this girl or her talents, but you're distoring the complexity of HDL's like VHDL. When working in one of these languages you can almost prentend it's a normal computing language, with the caveat that saying "A+B=C" means A+B=C ALWAYS, rather than just after an instruction is executed.
If you knew anything about the iPod (it's likely you are some dipshit Euro trash lib, so you probably don't know much about anything), you'd know that the only DRM scheme used, beyond the DRM in Apple's AAC format, is a frickin' "." in front of files and a mixed up directory structure that makes it a little bit difficult to find music files put their by iTunes. And if you spent 30s on Google, you'd find a million and one OSS, free programs that'll browse the iPod directory structure and copy the content you want.
Your argument is "Yeah, the ipod DOES have DRM but it's crappy" ?
So what? My iRiver DOESN'T EVEN TRY TO LOCK ME OUT!
Imagine that, not having to fuck around and seach all day trying to get your damn music off the player, just drag and drop under Windows, Mac, or Linux.
You are a piece of shit.
Everything I've posted is true and you really don't have any real rebuttal except childish insults. This is why not a single reply has actually countered my points.
If you don't buy a DRM'd song from the iTunes store, why don't you tell me where this DRM is coming from?
THE SOFTWARE IS ON THE PLAYER THE DAY YOU BUY IT.
The player is designed to restrict your ability to copy files. It's designed to lock you, the guy who just shelled out hundreds of dollars for this piece of hardware, out.
Sure there are lots of short-sighted folks who think the can avoid this one way or another. I wonder how those people like their songs from Real's store suddenly not working on their ipod anymore?
I wonder how many more examples like that it will take before people realize that not being in control of hardware they own is not such a good idea.
Wow, the apple apologists are out in full force!
My clearly non-troll post is now at -1 troll.
. Let me explain this a little better, for the really dense. On the iRiver player, THERE IS NO FILE YOU CANNOT COPY OFF THE DEVICE. You do not need special software.
That's not a troll, it's the truth. Yes, an ipod can be used as a hard disk, but it's protected by DRM. If Apple says you can't copy that file, you can't.
So far I have three replies from ipod-apologists, distoring the issue and my comment is at -1. If you like your ipod, fine but don't mod down a factual post because it makes the ipod look bad.
Plus it plays WMA, which is an advantage for a lot of people.
Forget the WMA, most iRiver players are FREE OF DRM.
Any iRiver player I've seen behaves exactly as a standard USB mass storage device. What to copy you files back to your PC? To ANY PC?
iRiver players don't just beat Apple in features, the beat Apple in FREEDOM. Who wants to shell out hundred of dollars for something that refuses to do what they want.
Agree 100%. The people I went to high school with never went to college, because the union would get them US$40K a year jobs with full benefits right after high school. They scoffed at college.
What the hell is wrong with being able to make a reasonable living without going to college?
Shit, I went to college....a good one to, but it's not for everybody. We NEED dishwashers, electricians, plumbers, etc and those people don't need a four year degree to do thier job.
The problem is not lazy teamsters, it is "free trade" and corporate political control.
Have you even thought about this very much? Say there was a country where EVERYONE was willing to work for less than us and ALL our jobs got shipped overseas, how is that good for us?
Grow up, people. Wal*Mart only controls the job supply if you let it. Train yourself for something other than stocking shelves or waving UPC's over scanners. Especially since we're automating that function, too.
Wow, you're a rotten SOB aren't you?
See unlike you I realize that I was LUCKY to be able to go to the school I did. I worked hard, but I had advantages many others will never have. Sure I'm doing okay as an electrical engineer, but suggesting that everyone get an advanced degree is like suggesting that everyone become a pro football player. If you had a real grasp of the economics involved, you'd realize that there are other issues here, like distribuation of wealth, free trade, corporate welfare, limited demand for skilled labor, etc.
Just as not everyone can get rich throwing a ball through a hoop, not everyone can get rich by going to college.
PS Don't get me wrong. I'm not agaist as many people going to college as possible, but you're a fucked-up social darwinist if you believe those who can't succed at it deserve no quality of life whatsoever. It's sad to see someone have so much contempt for their fellow man just because HE doesn't think they studied enough.
I think that anybody who leaves their system running when they don't need it is an environmentally insensitive dipshit.
I think anybody who makes ridiculous blanket statements like that is an asshole.
Let's say you have electric heat and it's winter. Leaving your computer on 24/7 costs you NOTHING and does NO ADDITIONAL HARM TO THE ENVIRONMENT. All of a sudden, all your reasoning is invalid yert you're still calling this person a dipshit.
Anyways, holier-than-thou jerks like yourself are just annoying. Do you unplug everything in your house when you're not using it? If not, all those transformers are sitting there buring energy and you're an "environmentally insensitive dipshit." (That includes your TV.... no more remote power on for you.)
Get a grip. Maybe it would be better if more people turn their PC off during the day, but down act like they dump mercury into the nearest river. People like you do more to HURT the cause of environmentalism than to help it.
The avergae person thinks:
"Man, what a nutjob. I don't wanna have a damn thing to do with anything they're involved in. The whole issuse must be blown out of proportion, just like this blowhard's comments."
You are making no sense. By your logic, because each device's needs are uniquely different, we should not even have standardized the AC supply.
:)
Not true. What I'm saying is that there's not a lot of benfit to forcing things that have already standardized on AC power to re-standize onto DC power. You will still need a "brick" to convert to power and to filter it for each device AND you're going to need a NEW brick to convert your AC to DC.
My VCR and DVD are "jumped together" -- as is the TV. What is the reason, I don't want that, again?
You're ignoring the fact that I said DC!
As the lovers' portraits get longer on the breasts of aging women, so will this discussion increasingly embarass you, as more and more devices begin using the power-over-etherner and/or power-over-USB (like Blackberry does already) to work and to charge their batteries.
All this talk by boobs about boobs isn't going to change that facts you're ignoring.
If you want to be willfully ignorant of power supply filtering, wattage, battery technology and a whole mess of other issues, that's your deal, but don't expect a bunch of electrical engineers (like myself) to listen to you.
Do you realize how retarded it is to use POE for something that DOESN'T NEED ETHERNET? You're using 2 pairs out of the whole damn cable and you're paying for signal quality you don't need. Maybe you're even paying for ethernet hardware one the other side of the cable you don't need.
The same applies to USB, except it's even worse because you're limited even more in power, the cable is even more expensive, and you'll probably be violating the USB standard. (Don't expect manufacturer of electic razors to shell out for interface chips that broadcast "I am an electric razor".)
The real fun will start when your new "USB-powered" speakers start demanding multiple ports to get the necessary wattage (or "special" high current ports). Then you'll need even more ports than you have devices