Re:He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
But it would be perfectly okay to go to alternate universes and completely alter their timelines and cause all sorts of nasty problems there?
I could be wrong, but I think that the whole multiple parallel universe thing assumes that you create a new one when you go back in time. So you're not screwing up the other timeline, because it has no future yet. But I always understood that to be dimensional travel, not time travel. It's just that the dimensions have their timelines shifted x years apart.
cause nasty time paradoxes (paradoxen?)
Ah, Brian Regan. Classic.I just posted this earlier tonight. What luck! Maybe/. should implement a multi-threaded(?) post for posting once to two different topics. Er, I gues that would be spam. Maybe not.
*SNIKT*
cripes, bub.
He's either a fruit that's a little nutty...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
...or a nut that's a little fruity. C'mon, any 15-year-old who daydreamed in math class knows that we will NEVER be able to send people back in time, for the simple reason that we'd have met them already.
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes
Not sure about the translation; I got it from Salinger's "Franny and Zooey." Or maybe "Seymour," can't remember which. I never said it had anything to do with property rights, it might've just looked that way in the context of my post. Your translation is pretty much how I understand it anyway--that it's talking about moral rights, not legal.
They wouldn't have a leg to stand on. "The little mermaid" is a classic fairy tale, written by Hans Christian Anderson. They'd be just asking for a countersuit. Now if you included those crab and fish characters that Disney made up, then you might have some trouble. I think you should anyway though, if just to prove a point about the hipocrasy of Disney.
I'm at this moment writing up a license based on the GPL except to be used for musical recordings. I've started a label, Root Records (www.rootrecords.org should be up sometime next week), to distribute this open source music. An interesting twist is that I've decided that open source for music means that the source audio (the separate tracks--bass track, drum track, etc) should be distributed like a program's source code. So people can remix the tracks any way they want. Since I've just started, the only artist under this label is myself. If you want to check out the music before the site goes up, my first album is available in its entirity in the audio section of www.joshuacsehak.com. It sounds something like a cross between Moby and William Orbit. I think it's great stuff, and the people I've had listen to it agree. One of my friends mentioned he'd been listening to the album every day since he downloaded it. CDs (and source CDs) should be available soon (less than a week) after the site goes up.
The problem with independent music isn't that it takes a lot of $$ to produce it (I actually like Liz Phair's Girlysounds CDs--demo recordings made on a cheap 4-track--better than her studio albums), the problem is that it takes, and will always take a lot of $$ to market it. Especially for musicians like myself who make music that can't really be performed live. Large labels will always have the advantage of being able to tell people what they want to listen to. But here's to "word of mouth!"
Would that really violate copyright? I think that would only be a trademark violation, if at all. What might make more sense is to set up a booth in Washington (or outside Disneyworld) where you gave away DVDs with "Steamboat Willy" on them, including of course, proper credit given to Walt Disney.
I think that's a great idea. If you contact Lessig or EFF or whoever and can get something set up where people can be sure it's not a scam, I'll chip in the $10.
is the aforementioned benefit of marking your works as copyable or not in a commercial or noncommercial setting worth it if it means that all commercial music will tag themselves as commercial and noncopyable?
First of all, I think it'll be proven trivial to hack files to change their tags from not-copyable to copyable (as another poster suggested, repeat after me hackers: "I will not decrypt a copy-protection scheme until it is a widely accepted standard."). But even if it wasn't, I simply won't support any musician who takes that kind of stand. And not even as a moral thing, more as a matter of taste. For example, I liked Metallica until I saw Lars being a prick over the whole Napster thing. Now I think they're greedy bastards and it's ruined any enjoyment I've gotten from listening to their music. Personally, I hope a lot of other people will do the same thing and only support musicians, authors and publishers who use a more open licensing scheme.
This would be great for recording audio direct into the computer, if you could cancel out the fan noise but still keep the full frequency range of what you're recording. Sounds unlikely though. It'd mean I can take my machine out of the closet though!
Hmm, now that I think of it, anyone have any ideas about a way to temorarily shut off the fan? I've got a Mac G4 tower. Maybe there's a way to get to it software wise, but I'd guess I'd probably have to wind up doing a hardware mod--make a switch to turn on/off the power to the fan (this would be so I could shut off the fan, record a few minutes of audio, then turn it back on). Or is it a bad idea to shut off the fan for even a few minutes?
I'd just about go into conniptions if this techology could be used to restore old blues recordings and get rid of the scratchiness. Some have so much scratch and hiss they're almost unlistenable, like some Skip James or Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks. You have to really listen to hear the nuances of what they're playing. But if they could take out the scratches and leave all the sound... Oooh, baby.
Good for you, for speaking up. I've been in a similar situation (not video-game or addiction related though). Even knowing the right thing to do is impossible, much less doing it. As far as I can tell, there generally is no right thing to do. But any kind of blame just hinders the healing process. I don't think there's really anything you can do except stay alive yourself. And don't listen to any of the assholes here who talk bad about you.
Myself, I've found that any kind of religious study helps put things in perspective. When you're reminded that we're all born to die, things don't seem so bad. Some of my favorites though are Chuang Tzu (Thomas Merton does great translation) and Zen stuff. One particular Chuang Tzu passage comes to mind: "Let's say you dream that your dog has died. In the dream, you're upset, but then you wake up, and find that your dog is alive and well, and realise it was just a dream. Well that's how it is when someone dies in real life. When you die, it's like waking up from life, and you find they weren't gone forever, just waiting for you to 'wake up' too." I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the point is there.
Not long ago the parents of a 34 year-old tried to sue/. for their son's "condition." It seems he was in his room for days. After breaking down the door, the parents found him seated at his computer, hitting "refresh" over and over again. The suit's been covered up, but to this day he sits in an undisclosed hospital repeating "must... get... first... post..." over and over again. Tragic.
hey, this would've been a great april fools joke...
Seriously, speaking from experience here, part of the reason for blaming someone else for this sort of thing is that it takes the blame off of you. The woman just needs to realise that blaming of any kind is fruitless and try to just accept what happened. No, it's not easy, and trust me, it never goes away, but hey! Whoever said life wasn't a struggle? The way I look at it, if you're not suffering somehow, you're probably not living.
so after conquering an API a day (JDOM, Swing,...)
There's the problem. You're all energized from your day at work, and your wife's just been sitting around bored. Try getting her a virtual machine.
It also helps if you have a fast/wide SCSI array. Some girls even like them striped. And the more RAM the better. Try importing Swing packages, but always make sure to examine the package contents first.
Re:It's not a throwaway line.
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 2
We won't see any changes in products today for the simple reason that it takes years for any technology to move from the lab to your bedroom.
How would you know which atoms hold which data if the particles in the vapor are floating around, mixing with each other?
Beats me. All I know is that the article said that they shone a laser into the vapor, the beam got converted into information stored in the atom's spin axes, and they later used this information to shoot another laser beam with identitcal qualities, effectively pausing a beam of light. HOW they did it is way beyond me. As far as I know, it was magic, and anyone who uses a computer with that technology will have to make an Intelligence check every time they boot up and look at pr0n. But then again, we already do that anyway (and fail)...
It's not a throwaway line.
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
He means that it won't mean any significant changes in how we build computers--that is, quantum comptuers are still a ways away. But it is a VERY significant step. If you read the article, they explain how they stopped a laser beam and turned it into information, stored in the up-and-down patterns of the vapor's atom's spin axes.
I mean, you don't have to be a scientist to imagine the possibilities of a vaporous hard drive, with a huge capacity, that gets written to by a laser that changes the state of the atoms within. Drool...
And the best part is no more annoying spinning noise!
... is not that they "found" the color of the universe, but that they convinced Johns Hopkins to give them lots of money and let them use their fancy equipment for THREE SEPERATE EXPERIMENTS! Here's what really happened:
Johns Hopkins Administration: Okay, what are you guys working on now?
Astronomers (quickly alt-tabbing from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to a spreadsheet): Uhhh... we're calculating... the... color of the universe! We'll need at least two weeks.
JHA: Right then. Talk to you in two weeks.
Astronomer 1: Whew. How're we gonna figure out the color of the universe?
Astronomer 2: Who cares? It's turquoise. Now be quiet. I'm sniping.
[two weeks later]
Astronomer 1: Hey check it out! The Warcraft III beta is out!
[JH Admin comes in]
JHA: Hey guys, got your report on the universe being turquoise. Great work.
Astronomer 2: Yeah, um, we've got a problem. We think it might be beige. We've got to do spectral graphalisys and whatnot. we'll need another two weeks.
I hear you, but I just keep thinking that there's gotta be so much little stuff that just really adds up. That's the way it is with everything--why should DVD production be any different? More importantly, the movie studios are all about making money, right? Well if it'd be any more profitable to lower the price of DVDs, why aren't they doing it? It'd be in they're own best interest. In a psychology class, I heard about a store owner who had these golf clubs that just wouldn't sell. He lowered the price again and again, but still they stuck around. Then one day, for the hell of it, he marked them up to be more expensive than the top-of-the-line clubs. Within days, they were gone. Maybe the studios are afraid of the reverse of that happening? I dunno.
At any rate, I think the manufacturing costs have exactly nothing to do with how the studios determine the final price of a DVD or VHS tape. I think they basically try to figure out the proper expense-to-total-profit ratio and go with that, which seems to be around $20 for a DVD. I'm sure they'd sell more if they sold them at $10 a pop, but would they sell twice as many? The American way: charge as much as you can until people don't want them any more, then lower your prices. People don't want VHS as much as DVD. That's the only reason they're less expensive.
That moviefx dvd/mag looks interesting; there's nothing I like more than behind the scenes stuff. It's too bad they're too late to get some Stan "The Man" Kubrick stuff...
I really don't think that was a troll. Even though his name is AssFace. Or at least, even if it was, he's right. Come on moderators, ease up with the negative mods.
I completely agree with him (with the letter, not the spirit). I've been using Macs for years, and I always thought the one-button thing was needlessly dumbing things down. I've been using an intellimouse recently, and I love that I can use the right-button instead of having to go *all the way over* to the keyboard to cmd-click. And the scroll wheel is heaven. I see no reason (including the distant future of touch-pad thingies) why Apple shouldn't ship their machines with multi-button mice. It's not so much that I mind spending the extra $30-40 on an intellimouse, but it's Microsoft, dammit! It's not really much to whine about, since in OS X, multibutton mice (at least the intellimouse) work great without installing any drivers, but the guy makes a point about it being a problem on a laptop. It's not like you can buy a replacement 2-button touch pad.
It's a little hard to pay $35 (in an extreme case, RoboCop Director's cut was about that much...) for a DVD when you know they cost pennies to make.
Okay, CDs and DVDs are not cheap to produce. Everyone seems to think that the only money studios spend on discs is the actual manufacturing costs. Think about all the extra things that go into a DVD. And the insane amount of money it costs to have a top-quality video and sound studio. Also, the packaging, printing and advertising costs. And the retail markup, which usually doubles the cost (it does with CDs, anyway). Then think about how the people who would watch Robocop is a niche, and the people who would buy the director's cut on DVD is a niche of that niche; and you'll have some idea of where the $35 comes from. I'm not saying they're not making a lot of profit, or they wouldn't make more if they halved their prices, but movie and music studios aren't price-gouging as much as everyone thinks (I do think they're price gouging, for the record, but not as much as everyone thinks.)
Slashdot Mirror
But it would be perfectly okay to go to alternate universes and completely alter their timelines and cause all sorts of nasty problems there?
I could be wrong, but I think that the whole multiple parallel universe thing assumes that you create a new one when you go back in time. So you're not screwing up the other timeline, because it has no future yet. But I always understood that to be dimensional travel, not time travel. It's just that the dimensions have their timelines shifted x years apart.
cause nasty time paradoxes (paradoxen?)
Ah, Brian Regan. Classic.I just posted this earlier tonight. What luck! Maybe
*SNIKT*
cripes, bub.
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes
Can we get Sen. Hollings on this?
[teacher]: Brian, tell me the plural of ox, and use it in a sentence.
[brian]: Uh, oxen. I saw a herd of oxen.
[teacher]: Good. Now try "box."
[brian]: Boxen. I ate two boxen of doughnuts.
[teacher]: No Brian, it's boxes. Let's try another one. What's the plural of goose?
[brian]: Geese. I saw a flock of geese.
[teacher]: Good. Now how about "moose?"
[brian]: Mee... MOOSEN! I saw a flock of moosen! There were many much moosen! They were in the woodses--woodsen! They were eatinen the foodeninen!
[teacher]: Brian, you're an imbecile.
[brian]: Imbecilen!
(transcribed from memory. probably lots of mistakes)
Not sure about the translation; I got it from Salinger's "Franny and Zooey." Or maybe "Seymour," can't remember which. I never said it had anything to do with property rights, it might've just looked that way in the context of my post. Your translation is pretty much how I understand it anyway--that it's talking about moral rights, not legal.
They wouldn't have a leg to stand on. "The little mermaid" is a classic fairy tale, written by Hans Christian Anderson. They'd be just asking for a countersuit. Now if you included those crab and fish characters that Disney made up, then you might have some trouble. I think you should anyway though, if just to prove a point about the hipocrasy of Disney.
I'm at this moment writing up a license based on the GPL except to be used for musical recordings. I've started a label, Root Records (www.rootrecords.org should be up sometime next week), to distribute this open source music. An interesting twist is that I've decided that open source for music means that the source audio (the separate tracks--bass track, drum track, etc) should be distributed like a program's source code. So people can remix the tracks any way they want. Since I've just started, the only artist under this label is myself. If you want to check out the music before the site goes up, my first album is available in its entirity in the audio section of www.joshuacsehak.com. It sounds something like a cross between Moby and William Orbit. I think it's great stuff, and the people I've had listen to it agree. One of my friends mentioned he'd been listening to the album every day since he downloaded it. CDs (and source CDs) should be available soon (less than a week) after the site goes up.
The problem with independent music isn't that it takes a lot of $$ to produce it (I actually like Liz Phair's Girlysounds CDs--demo recordings made on a cheap 4-track--better than her studio albums), the problem is that it takes, and will always take a lot of $$ to market it. Especially for musicians like myself who make music that can't really be performed live. Large labels will always have the advantage of being able to tell people what they want to listen to. But here's to "word of mouth!"
Would that really violate copyright? I think that would only be a trademark violation, if at all. What might make more sense is to set up a booth in Washington (or outside Disneyworld) where you gave away DVDs with "Steamboat Willy" on them, including of course, proper credit given to Walt Disney.
I think that's a great idea. If you contact Lessig or EFF or whoever and can get something set up where people can be sure it's not a scam, I'll chip in the $10.
is the aforementioned benefit of marking your works as copyable or not in a commercial or noncommercial setting worth it if it means that all commercial music will tag themselves as commercial and noncopyable?
First of all, I think it'll be proven trivial to hack files to change their tags from not-copyable to copyable (as another poster suggested, repeat after me hackers: "I will not decrypt a copy-protection scheme until it is a widely accepted standard."). But even if it wasn't, I simply won't support any musician who takes that kind of stand. And not even as a moral thing, more as a matter of taste. For example, I liked Metallica until I saw Lars being a prick over the whole Napster thing. Now I think they're greedy bastards and it's ruined any enjoyment I've gotten from listening to their music. Personally, I hope a lot of other people will do the same thing and only support musicians, authors and publishers who use a more open licensing scheme.
This would be great for recording audio direct into the computer, if you could cancel out the fan noise but still keep the full frequency range of what you're recording. Sounds unlikely though. It'd mean I can take my machine out of the closet though!
Hmm, now that I think of it, anyone have any ideas about a way to temorarily shut off the fan? I've got a Mac G4 tower. Maybe there's a way to get to it software wise, but I'd guess I'd probably have to wind up doing a hardware mod--make a switch to turn on/off the power to the fan (this would be so I could shut off the fan, record a few minutes of audio, then turn it back on). Or is it a bad idea to shut off the fan for even a few minutes?
I'd just about go into conniptions if this techology could be used to restore old blues recordings and get rid of the scratchiness. Some have so much scratch and hiss they're almost unlistenable, like some Skip James or Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks. You have to really listen to hear the nuances of what they're playing. But if they could take out the scratches and leave all the sound... Oooh, baby.
Good for you, for speaking up. I've been in a similar situation (not video-game or addiction related though). Even knowing the right thing to do is impossible, much less doing it. As far as I can tell, there generally is no right thing to do. But any kind of blame just hinders the healing process. I don't think there's really anything you can do except stay alive yourself. And don't listen to any of the assholes here who talk bad about you.
Myself, I've found that any kind of religious study helps put things in perspective. When you're reminded that we're all born to die, things don't seem so bad. Some of my favorites though are Chuang Tzu (Thomas Merton does great translation) and Zen stuff. One particular Chuang Tzu passage comes to mind: "Let's say you dream that your dog has died. In the dream, you're upset, but then you wake up, and find that your dog is alive and well, and realise it was just a dream. Well that's how it is when someone dies in real life. When you die, it's like waking up from life, and you find they weren't gone forever, just waiting for you to 'wake up' too." I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the point is there.
Hope this helps. Good luck, and God be with you.
Ahh, electronic communication--where you can talk to someone and still feel lonely at the same time.
Not long ago the parents of a 34 year-old tried to sue
hey, this would've been a great april fools joke...
Seriously, speaking from experience here, part of the reason for blaming someone else for this sort of thing is that it takes the blame off of you. The woman just needs to realise that blaming of any kind is fruitless and try to just accept what happened. No, it's not easy, and trust me, it never goes away, but hey! Whoever said life wasn't a struggle? The way I look at it, if you're not suffering somehow, you're probably not living.
Gotta hand it to ya, that's the most believable April fool's post yet!
so after conquering an API a day (JDOM, Swing,...)
There's the problem. You're all energized from your day at work, and your wife's just been sitting around bored. Try getting her a virtual machine.
It also helps if you have a fast/wide SCSI array. Some girls even like them striped. And the more RAM the better. Try importing Swing packages, but always make sure to examine the package contents first.
We won't see any changes in products today for the simple reason that it takes years for any technology to move from the lab to your bedroom.
How would you know which atoms hold which data if the particles in the vapor are floating around, mixing with each other?
Beats me. All I know is that the article said that they shone a laser into the vapor, the beam got converted into information stored in the atom's spin axes, and they later used this information to shoot another laser beam with identitcal qualities, effectively pausing a beam of light. HOW they did it is way beyond me. As far as I know, it was magic, and anyone who uses a computer with that technology will have to make an Intelligence check every time they boot up and look at pr0n. But then again, we already do that anyway (and fail)...
He means that it won't mean any significant changes in how we build computers--that is, quantum comptuers are still a ways away. But it is a VERY significant step. If you read the article, they explain how they stopped a laser beam and turned it into information, stored in the up-and-down patterns of the vapor's atom's spin axes.
I mean, you don't have to be a scientist to imagine the possibilities of a vaporous hard drive, with a huge capacity, that gets written to by a laser that changes the state of the atoms within. Drool...
And the best part is no more annoying spinning noise!
Johns Hopkins Administration: Okay, what are you guys working on now?
Astronomers (quickly alt-tabbing from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to a spreadsheet): Uhhh... we're calculating... the... color of the universe! We'll need at least two weeks.
JHA: Right then. Talk to you in two weeks.
Astronomer 1: Whew. How're we gonna figure out the color of the universe?
Astronomer 2: Who cares? It's turquoise. Now be quiet. I'm sniping.
[two weeks later]
Astronomer 1: Hey check it out! The Warcraft III beta is out!
[JH Admin comes in]
JHA: Hey guys, got your report on the universe being turquoise. Great work.
Astronomer 2: Yeah, um, we've got a problem. We think it might be beige. We've got to do spectral graphalisys and whatnot. we'll need another two weeks.
JHA: Okay.
etc...
I hear you, but I just keep thinking that there's gotta be so much little stuff that just really adds up. That's the way it is with everything--why should DVD production be any different? More importantly, the movie studios are all about making money, right? Well if it'd be any more profitable to lower the price of DVDs, why aren't they doing it? It'd be in they're own best interest. In a psychology class, I heard about a store owner who had these golf clubs that just wouldn't sell. He lowered the price again and again, but still they stuck around. Then one day, for the hell of it, he marked them up to be more expensive than the top-of-the-line clubs. Within days, they were gone. Maybe the studios are afraid of the reverse of that happening? I dunno.
At any rate, I think the manufacturing costs have exactly nothing to do with how the studios determine the final price of a DVD or VHS tape. I think they basically try to figure out the proper expense-to-total-profit ratio and go with that, which seems to be around $20 for a DVD. I'm sure they'd sell more if they sold them at $10 a pop, but would they sell twice as many? The American way: charge as much as you can until people don't want them any more, then lower your prices. People don't want VHS as much as DVD. That's the only reason they're less expensive.
That moviefx dvd/mag looks interesting; there's nothing I like more than behind the scenes stuff. It's too bad they're too late to get some Stan "The Man" Kubrick stuff...
I think a lot of people would switch over to Apple if there was a decent Windows emulator freely available.
Last I checked, the Wine site said they were *thinking* about it. Why not have some Apple developers help 'em out? Or at least give them some funding.
I really don't think that was a troll. Even though his name is AssFace. Or at least, even if it was, he's right. Come on moderators, ease up with the negative mods.
I completely agree with him (with the letter, not the spirit). I've been using Macs for years, and I always thought the one-button thing was needlessly dumbing things down. I've been using an intellimouse recently, and I love that I can use the right-button instead of having to go *all the way over* to the keyboard to cmd-click. And the scroll wheel is heaven. I see no reason (including the distant future of touch-pad thingies) why Apple shouldn't ship their machines with multi-button mice. It's not so much that I mind spending the extra $30-40 on an intellimouse, but it's Microsoft, dammit! It's not really much to whine about, since in OS X, multibutton mice (at least the intellimouse) work great without installing any drivers, but the guy makes a point about it being a problem on a laptop. It's not like you can buy a replacement 2-button touch pad.
Is there a keyboard vacuum that sucks and blows at the same time?
It's a little hard to pay $35 (in an extreme case, RoboCop Director's cut was about that much...) for a DVD when you know they cost pennies to make.
Okay, CDs and DVDs are not cheap to produce. Everyone seems to think that the only money studios spend on discs is the actual manufacturing costs. Think about all the extra things that go into a DVD. And the insane amount of money it costs to have a top-quality video and sound studio. Also, the packaging, printing and advertising costs. And the retail markup, which usually doubles the cost (it does with CDs, anyway). Then think about how the people who would watch Robocop is a niche, and the people who would buy the director's cut on DVD is a niche of that niche; and you'll have some idea of where the $35 comes from. I'm not saying they're not making a lot of profit, or they wouldn't make more if they halved their prices, but movie and music studios aren't price-gouging as much as everyone thinks (I do think they're price gouging, for the record, but not as much as everyone thinks.)
Usually it's something like "You're a clenched fist away from a suprise visit to the dentist..."