Seriously, anybody else think that "pirating" is a bit too strong a word for copying virtual information? I mean, sure, it's pretty close to stealing vast sums of gold, merchandise and supplies, torture, murder, rape and making war against your own country's navy, but, I dunno, maybe I'm just looking at it from the inside, but it doesn't seem *quite* as bad to me.
Actually, the vast majority of pirates were English-- Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Black Bart (Bartholemew Roberts), Edward England, Henry Every, etc. Just about all the famous ones. Spain mostly got screwed by the pirates when they were privateers (privateering was the practice of looting ships of an enemy country while at war with them. You got a special commision from the king and plundered away. This was a very cheap way to increase a countries standing navy). Of course, when the warring ended, the privateers had nowhere to go (since there were no unemployment benefits for the equivelant of dot-commers those days) and turned pirate, screwing everybody! Most notably, the East India Company (the closest thing to Microsoft back then). But the public ate it up, since in those days (late 1600's), 75% of Britian's national income went to barely 20% of the population.
And since I'm now miles off topic (sniff, is that my karma burning?) without a gps or even an astrolabe, I'll also mention that there are no recorded incidents of pirates making anyone walk the plank. Apparently it was made up by storytellers.
Oh well, just some useless information that might be interesting...
Poker is about the geekest non-computer game outside of D&D that I can think of. All the math involved with judging the pot odds and expectations and # of outs you have gives any geek an advantage. I especially love playing it with my friends, because I can then try to apply what I know about their personalities to how they're playing their game. That and we're all pretty equally mediocre at it. If you haven't seen it, rent "Rounders." It's a kick ass movie and will get you really pumped to play some hold 'em. Plus it's got Ed Norton and John Malkovitch, two amazing actors. It's also got Matt Damon, but he's actually palatable.
Definitely. Fly fishing is pretty damn geeky too. I've been getting into it more and more lately. The thing that got me hooked was when I learned that to be a good fly fisherman, you need to know just as much about the insects of the area as the fish! But the really weird thing is that you can pick the perfect fly to match what's hatching on that river and not catch anything while some other guy fishes with a generic fly (like a Royal Wulff) and hauls 'em in! Of course, in general, the more you know, the better off you'll be. It's an amazing mixture of knowledge, skill and luck. Kinda like poker in that respect. There's also something zen-like about making a perfect cast where the line just floats down to the surface of the water and you see your fly land on it looking just like a real one. Or finding a trout that's rising and casting right in front of his nose, practically force-feeding him! And when you want to really geek it out, you can start tying your own flies. I don't myself, but seeing the work area at the store nearby, it's so cool with all the exotic feathers and whatnot. Ahhh...
Okay, let's say you're inside a castle, fragging away. You just picked up the rail gun, and you want to do some long-range shooting. Well, if you leave the castle, you come to an wide open area where oftentimes there are people not running around as much that might not notice you aiming at them from far away. Also, you'll see a sky and clouds and stuff. This is the outdoors.
I have to agree with the above reply. I've been using a QPS firewire 12x10x32 for almost a year now and it really kicks ass. I've also heard that USB burners suck across the board. Does your iMac have PCI slots? Maybe you can get a firewire card?
Incidentally, I hear that when you're burning at faster speeds, the pits get burned with less definition, so they're more prone to errors and degradation over time. So I'm glad I didn't spend more money on a faster drive. Because of this, I usually burn at 4x or 8x these days. For audio CDs, they'll stil sound alright if there's errors, since CD players can compensate. Here's a quote from a Q&A in "Keyboard" magazine:
"I've found that I can burn at 4x without any problems, but I make sure I've allocated the maximum amount of memory to the burning software's RAM cache (64MB in the case of Toast)."
I don't know, I think encryption is in pretty wide usage. I know a lot of people who only use encrypted email at work, simply to prevent their bosses from snooping. I think it's a great habit to get into. I've had bosses who, just for something to do on their lunch hour, go through the mail server and look through emails. They're in their rights, since they own the servers, but still...ugh.
This is $100 cheaper than the US version. What's to stop Americans from getting a PAL --> NTSC converter and ordering one from Australia? Are there any other differences? Is the DVD playback just region [AUS]? If so, maybe there's a mod to get around it?
If they're sending so many subpoenas that ISPs can't keep up, then doesn't that make it harder for the really important requests to go through? I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?
I'm amazed that so many people's views aren't based on any sort of truth or reality, but the product of TV and an Ameri-centric attitude. Saying Africa is backwater is like seeing a trailer park in the US and saying America is just a bunch of rednecks. Africa is full of green hills, farmland, and industry, in addition to its famous deserts.
Get rid of corruption? Who, us? News flash, we're causing it. Did you know that Chevron loaned the government its own helicopters when they were the revolutionaries? That US oil presence in Nigeria is directly responsible for the public hanging of some protestors (protesting the ugly refineries) there? Next time learn a little about a place before you badmouth it.
My parents had this really cool stereo that included a circuit diagram. (Who does that anymore?)
Audio equipment manufacturers. Both my Mackie mixer and my Fender amp came with circuit diagrams. They're not much good to me now, but hopefully sooner or later I'll know enough about the stuff to be able to fix or tweak them myself. The Mackie even gives you instructions on how to do a couple basic hacks! I've also heard that a lot of people who go to music school build their own amps and speakers.
Try Elenco. I got a little kit to make a "clapper" (a led lights up when you clap). The box said I'd learn everything I needed to know as I went along, but I ended up just soddering everything together like it said and not actually learning much of anything. It was fun though. They have a phone bug kit that I want to get for sampling phone conversations. Everyone and his mother samples answering maching tapes, but I want the actual conversation! Anyways, I wound up getting Charles Ryan's "Basic Electricity" book, which has since taught me a lot.
maybe most of these kids have already learned that most of the text on the Internet is useless filler copy written by marketing droids, and they're just going straight for the interactivity.
Hell, I think most adults have learned that too. Probably everyone except anyone in marketing...
This project is dedicated to my cat, Precious, who passed away January 8, 2002
Forget about building a church out of Legos-- just naming your cat "Precious" is enough to qualify as a kook.
Building block of the universe binary?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
If they are the same, or even just similarly grouped, does that mean that physical existence is basically a binary system? I wouldn't be suprised, it's kinda everywhere: chinese philosophy (yin/yang, thing/no-thing), sex (male/female), life/death; I don't think it's any accident that binary worked out so well for computers.
[Teddy KGB]: Hawkeng, you're einto me for 30 deimes. The juice hias bieen running iat 5 points a veek for a month. I miake thiat over 36 large. I'm going to hiave to break your legs.
[Hawking]: Okay.
[Teddy KGB]: Errr, I'm going to break your thumbs then.
I've never understood how anyone could be at a loss for something to read. It seems like every one book I read leads to three more that I want to. Right now i'm in the middle of:
Joseph Campbell "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"
Jeremy Yudkin "Music in medieval europe"
The complete poems of Emily Dickenson
RH Blyth, Haiku (4 volumes)
The complete fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson
Sklansky, "The theory of poker"
Just finished:
Hunter S Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
Warhol, "The philosophy of Andy Warhol" (a hoot!)
Cordingly, "Under the Black Flag" A (really engaging) history of real pirates, you know the ones who loot, pillage and murder (as opposed to the ones who click and drag a mouse).
Can't wait to start:
Hemingway, "A farewell to arms"
Nabokov, "Lolita"
Burgess, "A Clockwork Orange"
Russian Fairy Tales (Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, aw yeah)
that William Gibson one (Neuromancer, is it?)
Stephen King's "The Stand" (and The Shining while i'm at it)
of course, Hawking's books!
I have to note, I adamantly (snikt?) refuse to read any more (I read the first two) Harry Potter books until I get a British language edition.
And will probably reread soon:
all my Salinger
Raymond Chandler, "The Big Sleep"
Hammett, "The Maltese Falcon"
all my Raymond Carver
some Douglas Adams
Okay, i kinda got carried away, but you get my point. I wish I had more sci-fi to recommend, but it generally tends to be less engaging for me (though I remember absolutely loving "Dune" when I read it years ago, and I'm sure you're aware of Stephenson). Oh, almost forgot about Robert Anton Wilson's "Prometheus Rising." Not so much sci-fi as philosophy, but amazing nonetheless. I guess I have to echo your statement--It'd be nice to see a list of sci-fi recommendations by Hawking (or anyone else for that matter), but my wallet is glad there isn't one. The only thing I'm at a loss for when I go into Borders is information about how I'm going to pay for all the books I picked up. But I definitely gotta recommend those hard-boiled dective novels (Chandler or Hammett); they're damn fun to read and amazingly well-written too.
James Joyce said something like "I've never met an uninteresting person." I think one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make is to underestimate anyone, and write them off somehow. Perhaps, if Hawking views a conversation with you as a waste of time, that shows a deficincy in him? I think if you can't learn something interesting from talking to anyone, you need to improve your communication skills. That's the rub though. Most people just talk small talk, and need to figure out how to really communicate. I know I do.
10 mb is probably just the minimum install. I'll bet doing a complete install gives you hundreds of mb of options. I'd also be willing to bet they include some cool extra movies and stuff.
Re:We should be encouraging these people
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
Oh I think it's very cool, and he deserves all sorts of encouragement. But he's a nitwit for claiming he can do it before he actually does it. Hell, something as *simple* as putting up a website routinely takes at least twice as long as you estimate it will, even when you take that into account. If I was him, I'd freely talk about my interests and current experiments, but i'd refrain from making cocky assertions until after I could prove them.
Interesting. I didn't know EFF was making licenses like this. I got in touch with opensource.org and gnuart.org, but neither were able to offer too much help in the way of writing a new license, so I just started writing it up on my own. Well, I emailed them, maybe they'll be willing to work with me on this...
Their existing license, the Open Music License, is nice, and the closest thing I've seen to what I want to do, but it says nothing about making available the source audio, which is pretty important to me. I really want to see a day where the open source music community is as rich as the software one; where massive amounts of samples and patches are freely available to everyone, and anyone with a cheap midi controller can make pro-quality music. We're not too far away as it is, but I think that opening up the source to some tunes will bring things along a little further.
Slashdot Mirror
And the pirates got em both! Yarr!
Seriously, anybody else think that "pirating" is a bit too strong a word for copying virtual information? I mean, sure, it's pretty close to stealing vast sums of gold, merchandise and supplies, torture, murder, rape and making war against your own country's navy, but, I dunno, maybe I'm just looking at it from the inside, but it doesn't seem *quite* as bad to me.
Actually, the vast majority of pirates were English-- Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Black Bart (Bartholemew Roberts), Edward England, Henry Every, etc. Just about all the famous ones. Spain mostly got screwed by the pirates when they were privateers (privateering was the practice of looting ships of an enemy country while at war with them. You got a special commision from the king and plundered away. This was a very cheap way to increase a countries standing navy). Of course, when the warring ended, the privateers had nowhere to go (since there were no unemployment benefits for the equivelant of dot-commers those days) and turned pirate, screwing everybody! Most notably, the East India Company (the closest thing to Microsoft back then). But the public ate it up, since in those days (late 1600's), 75% of Britian's national income went to barely 20% of the population.
And since I'm now miles off topic (sniff, is that my karma burning?) without a gps or even an astrolabe, I'll also mention that there are no recorded incidents of pirates making anyone walk the plank. Apparently it was made up by storytellers.
Oh well, just some useless information that might be interesting...
Poker is about the geekest non-computer game outside of D&D that I can think of. All the math involved with judging the pot odds and expectations and # of outs you have gives any geek an advantage. I especially love playing it with my friends, because I can then try to apply what I know about their personalities to how they're playing their game. That and we're all pretty equally mediocre at it. If you haven't seen it, rent "Rounders." It's a kick ass movie and will get you really pumped to play some hold 'em. Plus it's got Ed Norton and John Malkovitch, two amazing actors. It's also got Matt Damon, but he's actually palatable.
Definitely. Fly fishing is pretty damn geeky too. I've been getting into it more and more lately. The thing that got me hooked was when I learned that to be a good fly fisherman, you need to know just as much about the insects of the area as the fish! But the really weird thing is that you can pick the perfect fly to match what's hatching on that river and not catch anything while some other guy fishes with a generic fly (like a Royal Wulff) and hauls 'em in! Of course, in general, the more you know, the better off you'll be. It's an amazing mixture of knowledge, skill and luck. Kinda like poker in that respect. There's also something zen-like about making a perfect cast where the line just floats down to the surface of the water and you see your fly land on it looking just like a real one. Or finding a trout that's rising and casting right in front of his nose, practically force-feeding him! And when you want to really geek it out, you can start tying your own flies. I don't myself, but seeing the work area at the store nearby, it's so cool with all the exotic feathers and whatnot. Ahhh...
Okay, let's say you're inside a castle, fragging away. You just picked up the rail gun, and you want to do some long-range shooting. Well, if you leave the castle, you come to an wide open area where oftentimes there are people not running around as much that might not notice you aiming at them from far away. Also, you'll see a sky and clouds and stuff. This is the outdoors.
I have to agree with the above reply. I've been using a QPS firewire 12x10x32 for almost a year now and it really kicks ass. I've also heard that USB burners suck across the board. Does your iMac have PCI slots? Maybe you can get a firewire card?
Incidentally, I hear that when you're burning at faster speeds, the pits get burned with less definition, so they're more prone to errors and degradation over time. So I'm glad I didn't spend more money on a faster drive. Because of this, I usually burn at 4x or 8x these days. For audio CDs, they'll stil sound alright if there's errors, since CD players can compensate. Here's a quote from a Q&A in "Keyboard" magazine:
"I've found that I can burn at 4x without any problems, but I make sure I've allocated the maximum amount of memory to the burning software's RAM cache (64MB in the case of Toast)."
What, do the circular cursors spin the other way? Maybe I'll place a collect call to some Aussie to find out...
I could be wrong, but I've heard you can play a lot of games (even FPS ones) in the dock in OS X.
I don't know, I think encryption is in pretty wide usage. I know a lot of people who only use encrypted email at work, simply to prevent their bosses from snooping. I think it's a great habit to get into. I've had bosses who, just for something to do on their lunch hour, go through the mail server and look through emails. They're in their rights, since they own the servers, but still...ugh.
This is $100 cheaper than the US version. What's to stop Americans from getting a PAL --> NTSC converter and ordering one from Australia? Are there any other differences? Is the DVD playback just region [AUS]? If so, maybe there's a mod to get around it?
If they're sending so many subpoenas that ISPs can't keep up, then doesn't that make it harder for the really important requests to go through? I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?
I'm amazed that so many people's views aren't based on any sort of truth or reality, but the product of TV and an Ameri-centric attitude. Saying Africa is backwater is like seeing a trailer park in the US and saying America is just a bunch of rednecks. Africa is full of green hills, farmland, and industry, in addition to its famous deserts.
Get rid of corruption? Who, us? News flash, we're causing it. Did you know that Chevron loaned the government its own helicopters when they were the revolutionaries? That US oil presence in Nigeria is directly responsible for the public hanging of some protestors (protesting the ugly refineries) there? Next time learn a little about a place before you badmouth it.
My parents had this really cool stereo that included a circuit diagram. (Who does that anymore?)
Audio equipment manufacturers. Both my Mackie mixer and my Fender amp came with circuit diagrams. They're not much good to me now, but hopefully sooner or later I'll know enough about the stuff to be able to fix or tweak them myself. The Mackie even gives you instructions on how to do a couple basic hacks! I've also heard that a lot of people who go to music school build their own amps and speakers.
Try Elenco. I got a little kit to make a "clapper" (a led lights up when you clap). The box said I'd learn everything I needed to know as I went along, but I ended up just soddering everything together like it said and not actually learning much of anything. It was fun though. They have a phone bug kit that I want to get for sampling phone conversations. Everyone and his mother samples answering maching tapes, but I want the actual conversation! Anyways, I wound up getting Charles Ryan's "Basic Electricity" book, which has since taught me a lot.
maybe most of these kids have already learned that most of the text on the Internet is useless filler copy written by marketing droids, and they're just going straight for the interactivity.
Hell, I think most adults have learned that too. Probably everyone except anyone in marketing...
This project is dedicated to my cat, Precious, who passed away January 8, 2002
Forget about building a church out of Legos-- just naming your cat "Precious" is enough to qualify as a kook.
If they are the same, or even just similarly grouped, does that mean that physical existence is basically a binary system? I wouldn't be suprised, it's kinda everywhere: chinese philosophy (yin/yang, thing/no-thing), sex (male/female), life/death; I don't think it's any accident that binary worked out so well for computers.
[Teddy KGB]: Hawkeng, you're einto me for 30 deimes. The juice hias bieen running iat 5 points a veek for a month. I miake thiat over 36 large. I'm going to hiave to break your legs.
[Hawking]: Okay.
[Teddy KGB]: Errr, I'm going to break your thumbs then.
[Hawking]: Go ahead.
[Teddy KGB]: Eahhh! (scuttles off in frustration)
I've never understood how anyone could be at a loss for something to read. It seems like every one book I read leads to three more that I want to. Right now i'm in the middle of:
Joseph Campbell "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"
Jeremy Yudkin "Music in medieval europe"
The complete poems of Emily Dickenson
RH Blyth, Haiku (4 volumes)
The complete fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson
Sklansky, "The theory of poker"
Just finished:
Hunter S Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
Warhol, "The philosophy of Andy Warhol" (a hoot!)
Cordingly, "Under the Black Flag" A (really engaging) history of real pirates, you know the ones who loot, pillage and murder (as opposed to the ones who click and drag a mouse).
Can't wait to start:
Hemingway, "A farewell to arms"
Nabokov, "Lolita"
Burgess, "A Clockwork Orange"
Russian Fairy Tales (Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, aw yeah)
that William Gibson one (Neuromancer, is it?)
Stephen King's "The Stand" (and The Shining while i'm at it)
of course, Hawking's books!
I have to note, I adamantly (snikt?) refuse to read any more (I read the first two) Harry Potter books until I get a British language edition.
And will probably reread soon:
all my Salinger
Raymond Chandler, "The Big Sleep"
Hammett, "The Maltese Falcon"
all my Raymond Carver
some Douglas Adams
Okay, i kinda got carried away, but you get my point. I wish I had more sci-fi to recommend, but it generally tends to be less engaging for me (though I remember absolutely loving "Dune" when I read it years ago, and I'm sure you're aware of Stephenson). Oh, almost forgot about Robert Anton Wilson's "Prometheus Rising." Not so much sci-fi as philosophy, but amazing nonetheless. I guess I have to echo your statement--It'd be nice to see a list of sci-fi recommendations by Hawking (or anyone else for that matter), but my wallet is glad there isn't one. The only thing I'm at a loss for when I go into Borders is information about how I'm going to pay for all the books I picked up. But I definitely gotta recommend those hard-boiled dective novels (Chandler or Hammett); they're damn fun to read and amazingly well-written too.
James Joyce said something like "I've never met an uninteresting person." I think one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make is to underestimate anyone, and write them off somehow. Perhaps, if Hawking views a conversation with you as a waste of time, that shows a deficincy in him? I think if you can't learn something interesting from talking to anyone, you need to improve your communication skills. That's the rub though. Most people just talk small talk, and need to figure out how to really communicate. I know I do.
Taco must have his own cerebro.
until it became apparent that my new "movie" was nothing more than Natalie Portman footage and light saber duels.
Your point being...?
10 mb is probably just the minimum install. I'll bet doing a complete install gives you hundreds of mb of options. I'd also be willing to bet they include some cool extra movies and stuff.
Oh I think it's very cool, and he deserves all sorts of encouragement. But he's a nitwit for claiming he can do it before he actually does it. Hell, something as *simple* as putting up a website routinely takes at least twice as long as you estimate it will, even when you take that into account. If I was him, I'd freely talk about my interests and current experiments, but i'd refrain from making cocky assertions until after I could prove them.
Interesting. I didn't know EFF was making licenses like this. I got in touch with opensource.org and gnuart.org, but neither were able to offer too much help in the way of writing a new license, so I just started writing it up on my own. Well, I emailed them, maybe they'll be willing to work with me on this...
Their existing license, the Open Music License, is nice, and the closest thing I've seen to what I want to do, but it says nothing about making available the source audio, which is pretty important to me. I really want to see a day where the open source music community is as rich as the software one; where massive amounts of samples and patches are freely available to everyone, and anyone with a cheap midi controller can make pro-quality music. We're not too far away as it is, but I think that opening up the source to some tunes will bring things along a little further.