ESPECIALLY unfortunate name in German...
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
...since the German verb "ficken", which is homophonous to "FIQin" means "to fuck" and the prefix "er-", though not normally used with this verb, usually designates a successful completion of the action indicated by the stem. Not a clever choice of letters.
What I meant is that the connector socket on the iPod side is not a standard USB type. Instead of using a standardized USB (or mini-USB) socket together with a standardized stereo line out Apple created their own version. That means that you have to take your cable with you if you want to hook up your iPod since none of the standard USB cables will fit.
I would guess that's one of the reasons why they made it quite difficult to use an iPod to swap music. They don't use a standard USB cable; unless you enable certain options they won't show up as a standard external drive when plugged in; and even if you set them to this behaviour the folders with the actual music files in them are hard to find, spread out according to an internal database and renamed. Also, files protected by Apple's PlayFair can be copied but won't play on an unlicensed computer.
I have no experience with iPods on Macs, I only use mine under ubuntu and win2k, but there are quite a lot of hurdles to jump; not enough to make copying impossible, but so that a casual user will be discouraged.
...at least for this kind of design. Why? Because of its modularity. Say, I visit a friend who also has a computer like that: I simply remove one of my hard disk modules at home and plug it into his setup. All of my music, videos and other data is immediately available and ready to be copied to another drive, no hassle with copying stuff to DVD and back, just plug & play.
Oh, and if the hard disks are swapable: what about games, commercial applications or other stuff that is installed on them? This new modularity concept will bring a lot of headaches to people who wish to tie information to a certain user. Currently hotpluggable external drives are not the norm, nor are they easily transportable (hassle with power supply wall warts, sensitivity to jolting movements etc.) but if they become standard, won't the sneakernet gain increased relevance?
No offense, but I've read lots on this topic in the last couple of days, and I just don't like it when people use that sort of argument. I did not mean to offend you personally, sorry.
I know that it would be easier to leave it as it is, but you have to take into account that an America First argument doesn't hold a lot of water with the rest of the world. The US has lost a lot of trust and political capital in the last few years, and there seems to be no change of course in sight. What if your government decides to unilaterally change the current status quo? Don't tell me that that would be improbable, politically stupid or unjustified - that goes for some other ventures I could name, too. The aim behind distributing the servers seems to be to guarantee a continued functioning in case of a... let's say "hiccup". The internet has become very important for states other than the US, and an attitude of "you are allowed to play with it, but the toy is still mine and I can take it home with me whenever I want to" just doesn't adequately reflect the current situation.
Man, whenever I hear stupid drivel like this I'd like to remind the poster that the Otto internal combustion engine, the Diesel motorand the Wankel engine all were invented by German engineers, funded by German money and patented in Germany. So please, do stop using them, then you're allowed to complain.
Or better yet, force the designers to include remote control kill-switches that allow the German government to shut down each one. Don't worry, we'd never abuse that.
I think he was making a point about Rove's defense: he is currently claiming that he didn't identify Valerie Plame by name, but only mentioned "Wilson's wife" worked as an undercover agent. So he didn't leak the name, which would be an act of treason.
The reporter shows that it is ludicrously easy to make the jump from that remark to identifying the person.
Is it just me or has the word "loss" been given a new definition?
A "loss" to me is something that means I'm financially worse off after a transaction than before. Why did this now all of a sudden come to mean "profit not made"? If I miss an opportunity to make a profit, that is not a "loss" - it's money not made (by me), but not money taken from my pocket. I have exactly as much money at my disposal as before. I have not, in any sense, "lost" anything.
Ok, there might be people who counter this with the argument of the cost of advertising etc. to which I would like to reply: so what? Nobody forced you to spend that money in the first place!
If I spent money to rent a billboard with the text "Send my money if you read this!", could I in good conscience call all the people who read this but do not send me money thieves? Could I sue them for my losses (I paid for the billboard, after all)?
If these things did exist in the form given above it would be the easiest thing in the world to defeat it: If you're a terrorist, get a little bomb-making material (a real tiny amount), rub it on your hands and thenjostle people on the street, on the buses, in shopping malls; dissolve some, put it in a mouth spray bottle and spray it on door knobs, floormats or clothes that are left hanging somewhere (I'm sure you can think of more ways to get that "smell" undetected on people). Soon enough the number of false positives will
a) bring the system grinding to a halt
or
b) cause the people at the sniffer to turn the detection sensitivity way, way down (probably enough to get a good sealed package through).
I'm not encouraging this behaviour, but it should be obvious that this particular solution is pretty much worthless for this particular application.
I'm not saying the implementations of communism were perfect, far from it. What I claimed and continue to claim is that Americans tend to have the mantra "communism=bad" internalized to such a degree that it is impossible to even discuss it rationally. What's worse, most Americans have a deep-rooted hatred for a political and economical system without even having the faintest idea of what it is all about. I've worked with Americans before, and a very interesting question to ask is "What exactly do you hate about communism?" Turns out no one I spoke to has even a basic grasp of the underlying ideas of communism. When I tell them that one way of overreducing communism and capitalism to better contrast them is to say "communism basically believes man is good, capitalism basically believes man is evil" they react with disbelief.
Thanks for the clarification and not being offended. On second reading that post came across a little harsher than I intended - what I tried to express was the fact that many Americans simply do not know any economic principles apart from those of capitalism, which shapes their world view to the extent of excluding other possibilities before even looking at them. Good work in initiating a discussion.:)
I'm sorry, but you're making a wrong assumption: this is not a zero-sum game.
A zsg would require a situation where every gain on your opponent's side is a loss for you. Software development doesn't work that way. If you "invest" in creating new software that's freely shared you increase the pie, so to speak. By allowing other people to use your work and not requiring them to re-invent the wheel there is a net gain for the community, including you, since you benefit from others.
This is a principle that might be hard to understand for someone who accepts the tenets of capitalism as the only ones possible (I do not wish to insult you, but many Americans seem terribly narrow-minded and uninformed in that respect, having been tought from childhood that everything related to communism is "bad" without ever going into detail).
Just because you're a mentally challenged, nazi-voting, mouth-breathing American doesn't give you the right to condescend to other countries. Apart from that, most of the spam I get advertises American websites, American fake Rolex watches and American drugs - in fact, I can use that as a pretty good spamfilter, since I'm a German living in Germany; I need only check for American English as the language and can dump it in my spam folder.
Go read a good book about this, namely:
On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
He's a psychiatrist who considered the effects of different ways of killing on the mental health of the soldier and has come the conclusion that, while the US army has become extremely efficient at breaking down the natural inhibitions against murder it has not been as successfull in dealing with its aftermath.
One step has always been the adding of physical distance between the soldier and his victim, in the progression you so proudly cite (have you ever thought about the "collateral damage" of a sword vs. that of a cruise missile?).
Go read that, and then reconsider your opinion.
Formation of Barr bodies is a result of inactivation of one x chromosome, thus keeping all genes on of them from being expressed, resulting in a different genotype from a cell where the other one is inactivated. Meaning there are two different possible genetic informations for each cell depending on which one forms the Barr body. A chimera is defined as an organism consisting of cells containing more than one genotype (usually created by combining embryonic cells at an early development stage), which human women fit. And I took a genetics course, thankyouverymuch.
...at least on the genetic level. Since one of the x chromosomes in every female is "deactivated" and turned into a Barr body (to avoid aneuploidy) and which one is chosen is completely random, it can be said that all women contain two separate genetic makeups, resulting in a genetic mosaic: a chimera.
How is this supposed to work? I can imagine only two ways in which a watermark could be implemented:
A) The audible component of the sound is mixed with some sort of signal. Result: the sound becomes distorted, and if you're going to make sure the signal gets through it has to have a high amplitude, meaning strong distortions.
B) The inaudible component is used as a carrier wave (ultra- or infra-sound) which means it will not be recorded by audio equipment designed to mimic the human ear or by a compression algorithm that removes signals not noticeable to the ear (mp3, AAC, basically all lossy codecs).
So it either interferes with my enjoyment of the movie (which means I will not put up with it) or it is worthless. Great idea.
I have a Logitech Cordless Desktop MX connected to my linux box, and using Hotkeys I can easily set the volume with the spinning disc in the top center of the keyboard. This is very useful since I often watch movies with large volume ranges and I can very quickly and very precisely adjust the loudness that way. I especially like the fact that the disc doesn't have a fixed "start" and "end" position but rather spins freely, making it similar to the iPod scroll wheel.
The idea behind the media primer is to get journalists to better understand how electronic voting technology works and not always assume that problems with voting are due to failures of electronic voting technology, said Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the ITAA.
What kind of distortion of reality is that??? If there are problems that exist solely because of the fact that electronic systems are introduced into the voting process then those systems are at fault for all delays, failures and problems that occur simply due to their being there.
If a problem would not exist if some entity was not there, then that entity can be considered a cause of that problem; this statement is true no matter what your stance on e-voting is!
Just as a thought - why advance military technology at all? Just get the soldiers of one side, the soldiers of the other side and let them fight it out in a big arena. Give 'em sticks and stones if you feel generous. Result: one clear winner, no civilian casualties and collateral damage and nearly no monetary expense. Would make for better television, too.
Seriously: do we really need better and better tools to kill?
...might be this site: Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik - Deutschland e.V.
This is the homepage of a registered association devoted to the sport of opening locks. If you become a member you're allowed to carry picks as they are now sports equipment; make sure you only use them for legal purposes, though!
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...since the German verb "ficken", which is homophonous to "FIQin" means "to fuck" and the prefix "er-", though not normally used with this verb, usually designates a successful completion of the action indicated by the stem. Not a clever choice of letters.
What I meant is that the connector socket on the iPod side is not a standard USB type. Instead of using a standardized USB (or mini-USB) socket together with a standardized stereo line out Apple created their own version. That means that you have to take your cable with you if you want to hook up your iPod since none of the standard USB cables will fit.
I would guess that's one of the reasons why they made it quite difficult to use an iPod to swap music. They don't use a standard USB cable; unless you enable certain options they won't show up as a standard external drive when plugged in; and even if you set them to this behaviour the folders with the actual music files in them are hard to find, spread out according to an internal database and renamed. Also, files protected by Apple's PlayFair can be copied but won't play on an unlicensed computer. I have no experience with iPods on Macs, I only use mine under ubuntu and win2k, but there are quite a lot of hurdles to jump; not enough to make copying impossible, but so that a casual user will be discouraged.
...at least for this kind of design. Why? Because of its modularity. Say, I visit a friend who also has a computer like that: I simply remove one of my hard disk modules at home and plug it into his setup. All of my music, videos and other data is immediately available and ready to be copied to another drive, no hassle with copying stuff to DVD and back, just plug & play. Oh, and if the hard disks are swapable: what about games, commercial applications or other stuff that is installed on them? This new modularity concept will bring a lot of headaches to people who wish to tie information to a certain user. Currently hotpluggable external drives are not the norm, nor are they easily transportable (hassle with power supply wall warts, sensitivity to jolting movements etc.) but if they become standard, won't the sneakernet gain increased relevance?
No offense, but I've read lots on this topic in the last couple of days, and I just don't like it when people use that sort of argument. I did not mean to offend you personally, sorry.
I know that it would be easier to leave it as it is, but you have to take into account that an America First argument doesn't hold a lot of water with the rest of the world. The US has lost a lot of trust and political capital in the last few years, and there seems to be no change of course in sight.
What if your government decides to unilaterally change the current status quo? Don't tell me that that would be improbable, politically stupid or unjustified - that goes for some other ventures I could name, too. The aim behind distributing the servers seems to be to guarantee a continued functioning in case of a... let's say "hiccup". The internet has become very important for states other than the US, and an attitude of "you are allowed to play with it, but the toy is still mine and I can take it home with me whenever I want to" just doesn't adequately reflect the current situation.
Man, whenever I hear stupid drivel like this I'd like to remind the poster that the Otto internal combustion engine, the Diesel motor and the Wankel engine all were invented by German engineers, funded by German money and patented in Germany. So please, do stop using them, then you're allowed to complain.
Or better yet, force the designers to include remote control kill-switches that allow the German government to shut down each one. Don't worry, we'd never abuse that.
I think he was making a point about Rove's defense: he is currently claiming that he didn't identify Valerie Plame by name, but only mentioned "Wilson's wife" worked as an undercover agent. So he didn't leak the name, which would be an act of treason.
The reporter shows that it is ludicrously easy to make the jump from that remark to identifying the person.
Is it just me or has the word "loss" been given a new definition?
A "loss" to me is something that means I'm financially worse off after a transaction than before. Why did this now all of a sudden come to mean "profit not made"? If I miss an opportunity to make a profit, that is not a "loss" - it's money not made (by me), but not money taken from my pocket. I have exactly as much money at my disposal as before. I have not, in any sense, "lost" anything.
Ok, there might be people who counter this with the argument of the cost of advertising etc. to which I would like to reply: so what? Nobody forced you to spend that money in the first place!
If I spent money to rent a billboard with the text "Send my money if you read this!", could I in good conscience call all the people who read this but do not send me money thieves? Could I sue them for my losses (I paid for the billboard, after all)?
If these things did exist in the form given above it would be the easiest thing in the world to defeat it: If you're a terrorist, get a little bomb-making material (a real tiny amount), rub it on your hands and thenjostle people on the street, on the buses, in shopping malls; dissolve some, put it in a mouth spray bottle and spray it on door knobs, floormats or clothes that are left hanging somewhere (I'm sure you can think of more ways to get that "smell" undetected on people). Soon enough the number of false positives will
a) bring the system grinding to a halt
or
b) cause the people at the sniffer to turn the detection sensitivity way, way down (probably enough to get a good sealed package through).
I'm not encouraging this behaviour, but it should be obvious that this particular solution is pretty much worthless for this particular application.
Linux: Are you coming or what?
"No, I always walk like this!"
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week...
...and you probably have a "hard" time, too.
Works fine for me under Win2k, too. Thanks!
I'm not saying the implementations of communism were perfect, far from it. What I claimed and continue to claim is that Americans tend to have the mantra "communism=bad" internalized to such a degree that it is impossible to even discuss it rationally. What's worse, most Americans have a deep-rooted hatred for a political and economical system without even having the faintest idea of what it is all about. I've worked with Americans before, and a very interesting question to ask is "What exactly do you hate about communism?" Turns out no one I spoke to has even a basic grasp of the underlying ideas of communism. When I tell them that one way of overreducing communism and capitalism to better contrast them is to say "communism basically believes man is good, capitalism basically believes man is evil" they react with disbelief.
Thanks for the clarification and not being offended. On second reading that post came across a little harsher than I intended - what I tried to express was the fact that many Americans simply do not know any economic principles apart from those of capitalism, which shapes their world view to the extent of excluding other possibilities before even looking at them. Good work in initiating a discussion. :)
I'm sorry, but you're making a wrong assumption: this is not a zero-sum game. A zsg would require a situation where every gain on your opponent's side is a loss for you. Software development doesn't work that way. If you "invest" in creating new software that's freely shared you increase the pie, so to speak. By allowing other people to use your work and not requiring them to re-invent the wheel there is a net gain for the community, including you, since you benefit from others. This is a principle that might be hard to understand for someone who accepts the tenets of capitalism as the only ones possible (I do not wish to insult you, but many Americans seem terribly narrow-minded and uninformed in that respect, having been tought from childhood that everything related to communism is "bad" without ever going into detail).
Just because you're a mentally challenged, nazi-voting, mouth-breathing American doesn't give you the right to condescend to other countries. Apart from that, most of the spam I get advertises American websites, American fake Rolex watches and American drugs - in fact, I can use that as a pretty good spamfilter, since I'm a German living in Germany; I need only check for American English as the language and can dump it in my spam folder.
Go read a good book about this, namely: On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
He's a psychiatrist who considered the effects of different ways of killing on the mental health of the soldier and has come the conclusion that, while the US army has become extremely efficient at breaking down the natural inhibitions against murder it has not been as successfull in dealing with its aftermath. One step has always been the adding of physical distance between the soldier and his victim, in the progression you so proudly cite (have you ever thought about the "collateral damage" of a sword vs. that of a cruise missile?). Go read that, and then reconsider your opinion.
Formation of Barr bodies is a result of inactivation of one x chromosome, thus keeping all genes on of them from being expressed, resulting in a different genotype from a cell where the other one is inactivated. Meaning there are two different possible genetic informations for each cell depending on which one forms the Barr body. A chimera is defined as an organism consisting of cells containing more than one genotype (usually created by combining embryonic cells at an early development stage), which human women fit. And I took a genetics course, thankyouverymuch.
...at least on the genetic level.
Since one of the x chromosomes in every female is "deactivated" and turned into a Barr body (to avoid aneuploidy) and which one is chosen is completely random, it can be said that all women contain two separate genetic makeups, resulting in a genetic mosaic: a chimera.
How is this supposed to work? I can imagine only two ways in which a watermark could be implemented:
A) The audible component of the sound is mixed with some sort of signal. Result: the sound becomes distorted, and if you're going to make sure the signal gets through it has to have a high amplitude, meaning strong distortions.
B) The inaudible component is used as a carrier wave (ultra- or infra-sound) which means it will not be recorded by audio equipment designed to mimic the human ear or by a compression algorithm that removes signals not noticeable to the ear (mp3, AAC, basically all lossy codecs).
So it either interferes with my enjoyment of the movie (which means I will not put up with it) or it is worthless. Great idea.
I have a Logitech Cordless Desktop MX connected to my linux box, and using Hotkeys I can easily set the volume with the spinning disc in the top center of the keyboard. This is very useful since I often watch movies with large volume ranges and I can very quickly and very precisely adjust the loudness that way. I especially like the fact that the disc doesn't have a fixed "start" and "end" position but rather spins freely, making it similar to the iPod scroll wheel.
The idea behind the media primer is to get journalists to better understand how electronic voting technology works and not always assume that problems with voting are due to failures of electronic voting technology, said Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the ITAA.
What kind of distortion of reality is that??? If there are problems that exist solely because of the fact that electronic systems are introduced into the voting process then those systems are at fault for all delays, failures and problems that occur simply due to their being there.
If a problem would not exist if some entity was not there, then that entity can be considered a cause of that problem; this statement is true no matter what your stance on e-voting is!
Just as a thought - why advance military technology at all? Just get the soldiers of one side, the soldiers of the other side and let them fight it out in a big arena. Give 'em sticks and stones if you feel generous. Result: one clear winner, no civilian casualties and collateral damage and nearly no monetary expense. Would make for better television, too.
Seriously: do we really need better and better tools to kill?
...might be this site:
Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik - Deutschland e.V.
This is the homepage of a registered association devoted to the sport of opening locks. If you become a member you're allowed to carry picks as they are now sports equipment; make sure you only use them for legal purposes, though!