Ok, let's get to the meat of this. Thanks for your patience with me, too.
Further honing where I'm going, I focused on the word "bad" when I should have been paying more attention to the whole statement: "guns are bad." I strongly stand by my decision to not use such a broad statement--that is, making unverifiable statements about everything of a particular kind. Use of the descriptive qualifier "bad" in a statement like "I'd like to see all bad guns destroyed" is okay, and is greatly strengthened if the author explains what a "bad gun" is.
The thing that's interesting about guns is that they're designed to kill, and people like to think of them as bad for that reason. However, they are designed to kill discriminantly, unlike, say, a terrorist's bomb which is designed to kill indiscriminantly. People who get guns for self defense are really looking for a way to make themselves stronger in a conflict. Guns are cheap, easy to use, and effective to that end. Personally I think they're overrated in that by the time you need a gun to defend yourself, you're in way too much trouble to effectively use it, but that's not relevant right now. Let's say there was a shirt that could boost the wearers strength tenfold. I'm sure that would be a pleasing alternative to people afraid of being mugged or raped. Currently your best bet is stun guns and pepper spray which are non-lethal, but in part because of that, are not as effective as a gun.
Anyway, I still stand by my avoidance of (put more generally) unverifiable statements applied to any general group--things like "[all] lawyers are evil," "[all] fruitcakes are hard and inedible," or "[all] guns are bad." However, I'll concede the colloquial qualifiers of general groups, like "bad software" or "bad arguments," which is really just shorthand for a more descriptive qualification.
I still believe that objects cannot be good or bad because there needs to be an action with which to measure morality. It wasn't until a hunter used his knife to kill another man that the knife "became bad." Likewise, a gun is just a tool--its creators rationale is irrelevant. It cannot be considered either good or bad, only the actions it is used for can.
I guess the heart of what I was getting at in the beginning was that the statement "guns are bad" does not make sense. Making a statement like "it's easy to kill people with guns and it's bad to kill people" is much better because it is a statement that can be explored and tested in a tangible way.
I'll just leave it at that rather than discuss how one can assess the "badness" of killing.
1. Set a gun on a table and watch it. Let me know how many times it does something bad.
2. The action of making a gun can be judged good or bad, but the product of that action cannot. For instance, creating a gun that looks like a toy designed for little fingers could be considered bad, depending on the context. Giving it to a kid is sick. Putting it in an art show sounds is a provocative idea. The gun itself, though, is just a thing--it's only as bad as how its used.
3. If guns are bad, then someone who ordinarily does good things can be corrupted by having the gun and do something bad. Therefore, they can say they weren't bad, but rather "it was the gun." I say it's the person who did the bad act and you can type and yell for all of eternity and I will not believe it was the gun that was bad. It is always an action that is good or bad, and if that action is done by a person, they should be held accountable.
What SF writer could have imagined that humanity's dream of exploring space would be brought to the edge of extinction by the financial irresponsibility of a pop music star?
Ask anyone who knows anime, and they'll tell you that it takes a popular teenage girl singer to save a space station. It is natural to assume, therefore, that a popular teenage boy singer would destroy one.
you could just say "weapons" aren't allowed like most schools do....
Still, same problem--my law's better ("You can't bring items to a school that puts the people there at a risk higher than they'd experience in the ordinary course of the business of the school."). By avoiding higher risk, you also keep things like flea bombs or blowtorches out of schools and you also avoid getting into arguments about whether a baseball bat or a nail file is a weapon or not. I'm just trying to get my country (U.S.) out of the rut of writing millions of inane laws instead of dozens of good ones. Write the law to address the problem, not the symptoms.
christ man, off the caffeine and Plato, they don't mix. quit putting the "pretentious" in "pseudo-intellectual," ya know?
Let's say some kid walks through a bad neighborhood...
So, a neighborhood is not an object?
I tried so hard to avoid this, but you got me. D'oh!
How about this: ban knives for everybody, and have the lawful authority keep the streets safe.
Switch the chronology of the events and you may be onto something: safe streets first, ban knives second... except that it still reduces freedom unnecessarily. It's the act of using the knife that should be banned, not its existence. One kid can still choke another one to death but you don't ban hands in school.
Let me put it this way: you put the "think" in "ignorance."
I've got two points to make here...
First, the point of my original post was to state that it's very bad to teach someone that objects themselves can be "good" or "bad." The goal of the teacher was, presumably, to emphasize that using guns can be dangerous, so you shouldn't use a gun unless you know how to use a gun without being dangerous. Instead, they sent the confusing message that guns are bad.
To hone my point further: the statement, "guns are bad" does not make sense. It's doesn't make sense to say "tables are prompt" either because the promptness isn't part of what tables can be. No object can be good or bad (morally.) In other words, making a statement that doesn't make sense does not convey any understanding. Specifically, saying that "guns are bad" is a nonsense statement and only serves to confuse kids about guns, thereby making them even more curious.
The second point is that I think it's stupid when someone makes a law banning any specific thing when a description of the undesired effect would be much better. For instance, making a law that says you can't bring a gun to school is stupid. You'd need an infinite list--bombs, knives, swords, chainsaws, brass knuckles... etc. The law should state that you can't bring items to a school that puts the people there at a risk higher than they'd experience in the ordinary course of the business of the school.
Let's say some kid walks through a bad neighborhood to get to school so he carries a knife. If he's responsible about it, I say let him have the knife--it doesn't raise the risk. If another kid brings a knife to school and brandishes it and pretends to attack, well yes, then, he's raising the risk a lot. Don't just ban knives.
As for your bomb example, it's tough to argue because I can't think of a good reason to build one... ok, let's say as an example of the kinds of bombs terrorists use to kill people. What if they went to an explosives expert, and had a Lexan case built for it which would withstand its detonation, and talked about it beforehand with the school? Could they bring the bomb to school if they could demonstrate it wouldn't increase the risk to the students and faculty? Heck, what if they agreed to remove the explosives?
Your best argument in response is to consider that the people bringing in such a bomb could have bad intentions and would trick people. I'd respond that you'd let a cop come in in full uniform... but what if he's a crazy cop and goes on a rampage with his gun? Also, why wouldn't they just sneak a bomb in a book if they really wanted to kill people?
The thing is to always consider the real risk to the students. If it doesn't go up, don't worry about it. If it does, then do.
... my daughter... asked why it was OK for us to have guns when her teachers all say they are bad.
So you calmly explained that her teachers are simpletons and don't understand the basics of philosophy. It is impossible to assign a particular morality to an inanimate object, or even to a person--only to peoples actions and at that, really only to individual actions.
Lets say someone kills someone else with a gun. The act of killing can be judged based on many factors (although it is my opinion that it's easier to prove that any killing is in some way bad rather than that any killing is in some way good.) The act of being killed can also be judged, but only weakly... what if the person killed ran in front of an operating machine gun?
But the gun... no, the gun is neither good nor bad.
The sarcastic asshole liberal would also like to add, "I'm sure this is what you explained."
I don't know how "pro" you want to go with this, but I ran into a similar situation and resigned myeslf to the same solution. My DDS2 SCSI tape drive is getting to be too small at 4/8GB. I would like to have a tape solution, but it's too expensive for my purpose. I get drives as pulls and last-years-models so I only spent US$150, but with tapes at US$10, even 8GB is absurdly small. If I were to go with new equipment and step up to DDS-4, I'd be out about US$1000 for the drive and another US$20 for each 20-40GB tape. Total cost for a basic 3-tape rotating backup: US$1060.
On the other hand, I could spend (as I have) US$40 on a basic (a.k.a. el-cheapo) FireWire-IDE case, US$30 for 3 removeable IDE enclosures, and (eventually) about US$70 each for 3 60GB IDE drives. Total cost: US$280.
What do I sacrifice? Not much... one of the drives might fail. At that point I'd just replace it with another US$70 capacity drive (which would probably be larger.) If I needed to restore something from backup, I'm already looking at up-to 24-hour old data, and if that drive happened to die, possibly 48-hour... it's unlikely that all the drives would fail at once.
The advantages? I can use the US$780 I save for something else and I don't have to worry about shelling out another US$1000 every four years just to scale to "current" requirements. I don't know what the upper limit of an IDE drive is these days (i.e. what can the ATAPI bus handle) but even 200GB is pretty big for me right now.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. The basic thing is lower cost for nearly the same risk... tapes fail too, you know. Remember, too, that this story would be very different if I had to handle 50 machines instead of 2.
I thought the most important concept in the article was that of the artistic critique. From the beginning of an artists education, they are taught the methods of critique. The situation is relatively simple--put your work in front of a body of people and have them make critical comments about it. The presenter of the work leaves it to stand on its own and tries to remove their own personal involvement from it: attacking a work is not attacking the creator.
I received a bachelors in computer science in 1993 and have heard of these so-called "Peer Reviews" or "Code Reviews." However, not once was I taught that in school. It would have been extremely beneficial if computer science graduates had the skills of the peer review in the same way that recent fine arts graduates (theoretically) have the skills of the critique process.
The two very different disciplines share some important characteristics. Students are taught techniques and are given the opportunity to hone their expressive skills. In fine arts, the emphasis is on the expressive skills--it's better to create a work of art that is very expressive even if the techniques are poor. Computer science, on the other hand, emphasizes technique over expression--it's better to make a program that works poorly rather than an elegant algorithm that doesn't compile.
Unfortunately the computer science student is treated like an engineer and their creative skills are not taught, but left to the student to develop on their own, and, in part through attrition, functionally creative programmers leave college. Admittedly, a fine arts student isn't taught the way to express their creative ideas, but rather, given the opportunity to hone their implicit skills for expressing those ideas. Even better, through learning the process of the critique, they are given the skills necessary to continue to learn to improve on their own.
Wasn't there a problem about 10 years ago where one of the glue factories in the Far East (Korea, I think) stopped making glue--I think it was either an earthquake, fire, or strike. Anyway, the factory was one of the only suppliers of the glue to assemble IC packages... this led to problems getting RAM, in particular, driving prices up.
Nothing like doing no research and pretending to be helpful.
Consider the case of my Chumbawumba "Tubthumper" CD. I don't remember what I paid for it, but let's say it was US$12. I listened to all 12 tracks once, and have gone back to the Tubthumper track 6 more times (approximately...) Thus, I paid US$12/18 = US$0.67 per listen to each track.
If I were to pay for songs on a per-listen-per-track basis, I'd certainly never pay US$0.67 each... I'd probably only be willing to pay US$0.05 or less. In fact, with that particular CD, I'd only have listened to the Tubthumper track 6 times.
Thus, under First Sale I paid $12 but under a licensed system at $0.05 per song, I'd have paid $0.30. In other words, I'm willing to pay an $11.70 premium just so I can do as I please with the media.
Answers to slews of dumb responses
on
Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 5, Informative
First, the MPEG-1 stream they're getting is VideoCD quality. VideoCD quality was designed to come from 1x CD-ROM drives which spit data at 150 kbytes/s which leaves plenty of bandwidth on the 1.2 mbytes/s USB.
Second, the picture quality is pretty low, but the files are "small" (i.e. the same as raw audio CD or about 600 mbytes/hour.) In all, it looks like VideoCD quality. It's better quality than a lot of QuickTime movies on the web, but a far cry from DVD, or even Sorensen on a good day. But it's good enough. I'd rank it around the quality of a 5 year-old VHS tape at EP. Far from videophile acceptability, but also far from unwatchable (unless you're a real snob about it.)
I happen to own one and I didn't have aspirations to download copies of movies and be able to watch them at DVD quality levels. It's so far worked fine to watch (oddly exactly the same as the reviewer) the Daily Show at work. I was looking for a quick way to create time-shifted copies of a handful of shows I watch. I also want to rip VHS tapes recorded at EP in 1995 and before to VideoCD and this looks like a great solution.
So anyway, my main point is, the tradeoffs are acceptable, and it's nice that it's bus-powered and includes its own tuner along with a video input.
Re:bitrate limitations
on
Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 4, Informative
Umm... USB is limited to 12 megabits/second or 1.2 megabytes/second which is about 10 times faster than low-quality VCD (150 kilobytes/second) and about 5 times faster than high-quality VCD (about 300 kilobytes/second.)
You might be thinking of low-speed devices which run at the slower 1.5 megabits/second if I recall correctly... I haven't seen one, though.
Usually sealed chambers, such as those containing secrets, will have a double door system to prevent the contents from leaking out. In all secret chamber systems I've seen, there is an interlock that prevents the inner door and outer door from being open at the same time.
I think it is most important to determine who defeated the interlock system. I'd be willing to bet that person is also the pirate, or could lead to the capture of the pirates.
Actually I was thinking of a Dixie cup as an actual object rather than a surface defined by the shape of a Dixie cup... get it? I meant a Dixie cup with thickness. Perhaps a clay cup would have been a better example to emphasize the thickness of the cup shape. I just wanted to use the Dixie trademark as much as I could.
Let's see if I've got this right. A manifold is just a way of describing some thingy in a some specific N-dimensional space. You would say that a Dixie cup is a manifold that is homeomorphic to a sphere because if the Dixie cup were maleable, you could stretch and push the outer surface of it to form a sphere.
You could take a magical rubber band and stretch it around a sphere and then slide the rubber band along the surface. As you work your way around, you'd find that the length of the rubber band varied along the surface. The important thing is that you can slide the rubber band so its length is essentially zero--a.k.a. a single point.
Poincare (Poincaré really but thanks a lot Slashdot for not letting me...) speculated that if you had any simply connected closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere (which I'm just parroting back from the Mathworld site at Wolfram.) The theory was later expanded to include the equivalent in N dimensions. In other words, if you take something that only has an "outside" and no holes, you could mash it into the shape of a sphere, or slide the rubber band right off it no matter what.
The other side of the story is things like a torus, or for a tastier example, donut. It's not "simply connected closed 3-manifold" because if you put a rubber band around the "meat" of the donut through the hollow middle and never be able to get the rubber band off without breaking the donut or the rubber band. Yum.
The thing that hasn't yet been proven is whether this is true for 3-dimensions as originally speculated. The Mathworld site at Wolfram says that it's been proven for N=1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and >=7, but not for 3. I don't know why... I mean, can't you just define a point that is in the center of a given manifold then make a sphere that is the average distance from all points on the surface and define a new surface that is half-way between the two surfaces, and repeat forever to show that you really get a sphere... for a torus, for instance, you'd get a point, but for a cube you'd get a finite sized sphere... same for a Dixie cup, except it'd be really small.
Ah yes, the standard response of sys admins. "The users are too {dumb | ignorant | stupid | incompetent}." Usually this is the case of the admins deliberately withholding information. In a current situation at my company, one of our admins was complaining that even if they send out a "server X will be down at noon," there's always someone who doesn't understand why a certain service is not available at that time. I suggested they send out a message that says, "server X will be down at noon which will affect services A, B, C" and they said no.
Good admins send out information to their users in a way that can be used by them. They pre-answer all the common questions--what, why, when, how long, and how will this make my life better... and in _advance_ of downtime. Should an unexpected outage occur, they spend only a few minutes determining what went wrong before getting out a message (e-mail or not) saying they are aware of the problem and are working on it. Again, answering quickly the same set of questions... especially what else can be expected to be down.
On the other hand, bad admins consider themselves more important than all others. They serve only themselves and don't understand that they are part of a support organization. Basically, they don't do anything the good admins do... or only part of it and claim they did all they could. Their goal is to claim superiority.
By the way, since this will get modded down as off-topic, remember that the original post should be modded down as flamebait.
Have you ever participated in a "scrapheap challenge" yourself (or something like it)... perhaps for testing the concept?
Is there any particular challenge you had particular interest in participating? Ever had an idea that you thought was way better than the competing teams?
For what it's worth, I'd probably liked to have my hand in the wind mill episode which just seemed to be a critical-point-of-failure nightmare for both teams.
They did... it's called iTorvalds. You'll need the actors package, location package, and movieprod package. Just compile it for your own system.
I heard that some guy even did a TTY-compatible port of the thing with iBrotha script.
Work ethic versus motivation
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Slack
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· Score: 1
There's something fishy about the concept of work ethic as it's used to day. To me, work ethic is what gets me to sit at work for 8 hours a day and do something.
What really differentiates people is the level of confidence they need to have in their own idea before they disobey their manager to do it. People with a low threshhold implement a lot of things... good or bad, depending if they're smarter than their manager.
Slashdot Mirror
Wee ... Offtopic +1!
Further honing where I'm going, I focused on the word "bad" when I should have been paying more attention to the whole statement: "guns are bad." I strongly stand by my decision to not use such a broad statement--that is, making unverifiable statements about everything of a particular kind. Use of the descriptive qualifier "bad" in a statement like "I'd like to see all bad guns destroyed" is okay, and is greatly strengthened if the author explains what a "bad gun" is.
The thing that's interesting about guns is that they're designed to kill, and people like to think of them as bad for that reason. However, they are designed to kill discriminantly, unlike, say, a terrorist's bomb which is designed to kill indiscriminantly. People who get guns for self defense are really looking for a way to make themselves stronger in a conflict. Guns are cheap, easy to use, and effective to that end. Personally I think they're overrated in that by the time you need a gun to defend yourself, you're in way too much trouble to effectively use it, but that's not relevant right now. Let's say there was a shirt that could boost the wearers strength tenfold. I'm sure that would be a pleasing alternative to people afraid of being mugged or raped. Currently your best bet is stun guns and pepper spray which are non-lethal, but in part because of that, are not as effective as a gun.
Anyway, I still stand by my avoidance of (put more generally) unverifiable statements applied to any general group--things like "[all] lawyers are evil," "[all] fruitcakes are hard and inedible," or "[all] guns are bad." However, I'll concede the colloquial qualifiers of general groups, like "bad software" or "bad arguments," which is really just shorthand for a more descriptive qualification.
I still believe that objects cannot be good or bad because there needs to be an action with which to measure morality. It wasn't until a hunter used his knife to kill another man that the knife "became bad." Likewise, a gun is just a tool--its creators rationale is irrelevant. It cannot be considered either good or bad, only the actions it is used for can.
I guess the heart of what I was getting at in the beginning was that the statement "guns are bad" does not make sense. Making a statement like "it's easy to kill people with guns and it's bad to kill people" is much better because it is a statement that can be explored and tested in a tangible way.
I'll just leave it at that rather than discuss how one can assess the "badness" of killing.
1. Set a gun on a table and watch it. Let me know how many times it does something bad.
2. The action of making a gun can be judged good or bad, but the product of that action cannot. For instance, creating a gun that looks like a toy designed for little fingers could be considered bad, depending on the context. Giving it to a kid is sick. Putting it in an art show sounds is a provocative idea. The gun itself, though, is just a thing--it's only as bad as how its used.
3. If guns are bad, then someone who ordinarily does good things can be corrupted by having the gun and do something bad. Therefore, they can say they weren't bad, but rather "it was the gun." I say it's the person who did the bad act and you can type and yell for all of eternity and I will not believe it was the gun that was bad. It is always an action that is good or bad, and if that action is done by a person, they should be held accountable.
I've got two points to make here ...
First, the point of my original post was to state that it's very bad to teach someone that objects themselves can be "good" or "bad." The goal of the teacher was, presumably, to emphasize that using guns can be dangerous, so you shouldn't use a gun unless you know how to use a gun without being dangerous. Instead, they sent the confusing message that guns are bad.
To hone my point further: the statement, "guns are bad" does not make sense. It's doesn't make sense to say "tables are prompt" either because the promptness isn't part of what tables can be. No object can be good or bad (morally.) In other words, making a statement that doesn't make sense does not convey any understanding. Specifically, saying that "guns are bad" is a nonsense statement and only serves to confuse kids about guns, thereby making them even more curious.
The second point is that I think it's stupid when someone makes a law banning any specific thing when a description of the undesired effect would be much better. For instance, making a law that says you can't bring a gun to school is stupid. You'd need an infinite list--bombs, knives, swords, chainsaws, brass knuckles ... etc. The law should state that you can't bring items to a school that puts the people there at a risk higher than they'd experience in the ordinary course of the business of the school.
Let's say some kid walks through a bad neighborhood to get to school so he carries a knife. If he's responsible about it, I say let him have the knife--it doesn't raise the risk. If another kid brings a knife to school and brandishes it and pretends to attack, well yes, then, he's raising the risk a lot. Don't just ban knives.
As for your bomb example, it's tough to argue because I can't think of a good reason to build one ... ok, let's say as an example of the kinds of bombs terrorists use to kill people. What if they went to an explosives expert, and had a Lexan case built for it which would withstand its detonation, and talked about it beforehand with the school? Could they bring the bomb to school if they could demonstrate it wouldn't increase the risk to the students and faculty? Heck, what if they agreed to remove the explosives?
Your best argument in response is to consider that the people bringing in such a bomb could have bad intentions and would trick people. I'd respond that you'd let a cop come in in full uniform ... but what if he's a crazy cop and goes on a rampage with his gun? Also, why wouldn't they just sneak a bomb in a book if they really wanted to kill people?
The thing is to always consider the real risk to the students. If it doesn't go up, don't worry about it. If it does, then do.
Lets say someone kills someone else with a gun. The act of killing can be judged based on many factors (although it is my opinion that it's easier to prove that any killing is in some way bad rather than that any killing is in some way good.) The act of being killed can also be judged, but only weakly ... what if the person killed ran in front of an operating machine gun?
But the gun ... no, the gun is neither good nor bad.
The sarcastic asshole liberal would also like to add, "I'm sure this is what you explained."
Step 2: save as a web page.
The result:
Of course, it breaks the rules because it uses style sheets, but who's counting...On the other hand, I could spend (as I have) US$40 on a basic (a.k.a. el-cheapo) FireWire-IDE case, US$30 for 3 removeable IDE enclosures, and (eventually) about US$70 each for 3 60GB IDE drives. Total cost: US$280.
What do I sacrifice? Not much ... one of the drives might fail. At that point I'd just replace it with another US$70 capacity drive (which would probably be larger.) If I needed to restore something from backup, I'm already looking at up-to 24-hour old data, and if that drive happened to die, possibly 48-hour ... it's unlikely that all the drives would fail at once.
The advantages? I can use the US$780 I save for something else and I don't have to worry about shelling out another US$1000 every four years just to scale to "current" requirements. I don't know what the upper limit of an IDE drive is these days (i.e. what can the ATAPI bus handle) but even 200GB is pretty big for me right now.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. The basic thing is lower cost for nearly the same risk ... tapes fail too, you know. Remember, too, that this story would be very different if I had to handle 50 machines instead of 2.
I received a bachelors in computer science in 1993 and have heard of these so-called "Peer Reviews" or "Code Reviews." However, not once was I taught that in school. It would have been extremely beneficial if computer science graduates had the skills of the peer review in the same way that recent fine arts graduates (theoretically) have the skills of the critique process.
The two very different disciplines share some important characteristics. Students are taught techniques and are given the opportunity to hone their expressive skills. In fine arts, the emphasis is on the expressive skills--it's better to create a work of art that is very expressive even if the techniques are poor. Computer science, on the other hand, emphasizes technique over expression--it's better to make a program that works poorly rather than an elegant algorithm that doesn't compile.
Unfortunately the computer science student is treated like an engineer and their creative skills are not taught, but left to the student to develop on their own, and, in part through attrition, functionally creative programmers leave college. Admittedly, a fine arts student isn't taught the way to express their creative ideas, but rather, given the opportunity to hone their implicit skills for expressing those ideas. Even better, through learning the process of the critique, they are given the skills necessary to continue to learn to improve on their own.
All you need to do is plug it in and you're all set. In fact, you could even plug it into the output of the device and get it to run forever*.
* Void where prohibited by thermodynamic laws.
Nothing like doing no research and pretending to be helpful.
If I were to pay for songs on a per-listen-per-track basis, I'd certainly never pay US$0.67 each ... I'd probably only be willing to pay US$0.05 or less. In fact, with that particular CD, I'd only have listened to the Tubthumper track 6 times.
Thus, under First Sale I paid $12 but under a licensed system at $0.05 per song, I'd have paid $0.30. In other words, I'm willing to pay an $11.70 premium just so I can do as I please with the media.
Second, the picture quality is pretty low, but the files are "small" (i.e. the same as raw audio CD or about 600 mbytes/hour.) In all, it looks like VideoCD quality. It's better quality than a lot of QuickTime movies on the web, but a far cry from DVD, or even Sorensen on a good day. But it's good enough. I'd rank it around the quality of a 5 year-old VHS tape at EP. Far from videophile acceptability, but also far from unwatchable (unless you're a real snob about it.)
I happen to own one and I didn't have aspirations to download copies of movies and be able to watch them at DVD quality levels. It's so far worked fine to watch (oddly exactly the same as the reviewer) the Daily Show at work. I was looking for a quick way to create time-shifted copies of a handful of shows I watch. I also want to rip VHS tapes recorded at EP in 1995 and before to VideoCD and this looks like a great solution.
So anyway, my main point is, the tradeoffs are acceptable, and it's nice that it's bus-powered and includes its own tuner along with a video input.
You might be thinking of low-speed devices which run at the slower 1.5 megabits/second if I recall correctly ... I haven't seen one, though.
I think it is most important to determine who defeated the interlock system. I'd be willing to bet that person is also the pirate, or could lead to the capture of the pirates.
It's interesting that it takes just about the same 1.6kg of fossil fuel to drive 10 miles to a store and back to buy that chip. Curious.
Actually I was thinking of a Dixie cup as an actual object rather than a surface defined by the shape of a Dixie cup ... get it? I meant a Dixie cup with thickness. Perhaps a clay cup would have been a better example to emphasize the thickness of the cup shape. I just wanted to use the Dixie trademark as much as I could.
You could take a magical rubber band and stretch it around a sphere and then slide the rubber band along the surface. As you work your way around, you'd find that the length of the rubber band varied along the surface. The important thing is that you can slide the rubber band so its length is essentially zero--a.k.a. a single point.
Poincare (Poincaré really but thanks a lot Slashdot for not letting me ...) speculated that if you had any simply connected closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere (which I'm just parroting back from the Mathworld site at Wolfram.) The theory was later expanded to include the equivalent in N dimensions. In other words, if you take something that only has an "outside" and no holes, you could mash it into the shape of a sphere, or slide the rubber band right off it no matter what.
The other side of the story is things like a torus, or for a tastier example, donut. It's not "simply connected closed 3-manifold" because if you put a rubber band around the "meat" of the donut through the hollow middle and never be able to get the rubber band off without breaking the donut or the rubber band. Yum.
The thing that hasn't yet been proven is whether this is true for 3-dimensions as originally speculated. The Mathworld site at Wolfram says that it's been proven for N=1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and >=7, but not for 3. I don't know why ... I mean, can't you just define a point that is in the center of a given manifold then make a sphere that is the average distance from all points on the surface and define a new surface that is half-way between the two surfaces, and repeat forever to show that you really get a sphere ... for a torus, for instance, you'd get a point, but for a cube you'd get a finite sized sphere ... same for a Dixie cup, except it'd be really small.
Good admins send out information to their users in a way that can be used by them. They pre-answer all the common questions--what, why, when, how long, and how will this make my life better ... and in _advance_ of downtime. Should an unexpected outage occur, they spend only a few minutes determining what went wrong before getting out a message (e-mail or not) saying they are aware of the problem and are working on it. Again, answering quickly the same set of questions ... especially what else can be expected to be down.
On the other hand, bad admins consider themselves more important than all others. They serve only themselves and don't understand that they are part of a support organization. Basically, they don't do anything the good admins do ... or only part of it and claim they did all they could. Their goal is to claim superiority.
By the way, since this will get modded down as off-topic, remember that the original post should be modded down as flamebait.
Is there any particular challenge you had particular interest in participating? Ever had an idea that you thought was way better than the competing teams?
For what it's worth, I'd probably liked to have my hand in the wind mill episode which just seemed to be a critical-point-of-failure nightmare for both teams.
I heard that some guy even did a TTY-compatible port of the thing with iBrotha script.
What really differentiates people is the level of confidence they need to have in their own idea before they disobey their manager to do it. People with a low threshhold implement a lot of things ... good or bad, depending if they're smarter than their manager.