It's real easy to scream "flame bait" then run away. Why don't you just address what I say? You seem to think that cartoons are serious business. Following your logic, Looney Toons sucks because of the massive inconsistencies that are found in its universe. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are no laws that govern the visual arts, as it's just a matter of taste - fiction, satire and comedy are not ruled by mathematical laws that you seem to have laid upon them. It's up to the imagination of the artist. If you don't like a movie, fine, but realize that it's just your subjective opinion an not a reflection of some objective measure.
Your comment makes a lot of sense until the end. The "food chain" is a myth. There is no top end and bottom end, with the humans at the top. It's more of a "food cycle". Humans DO have predators, but they are microscopic and invade in the millions, i.e. bacteria.
Who said that cigarettes had to be the delivery mechanism? I'm sure cigarette companies have a large stake in tobacco farms, and may even own them. Seeing the heavy legislation and the decline in smoking, they are doing what any well-run company would do, which is to pursue other markets. The nicotine has to come from somewhere.
Not to throw oil on any fires that should probably die out, but I have several gay friends, and have had two of them try to "convert" me. Basically they try to convince me that there is no such thing as homosexual or heterosexual, as they are just artificial boundaries drawn by those who are afraid to open themselves up to new experiences. After being very clear that I am oriented only towards those of the opposite sex, both of these men told me that they would have given me a blowjob otherwise. Mind you I am a very open person, and they probably wouldn't have been this open to anyone who might have gotten upset about such topics of conversation.
Also, different language would compress at different rates. For example, almost every phrase in a technical manual is concrete and will be repeated elsewhere, whereas a poem may have several combinations of words never before put together. And then, there are more layers of meaning in a poem, many of which can't be extracted by humans let alone AI. Wikipedia is probably a good test, because direct language makes up the majority of it's text. But it is by no means a representation of all human language.
I don't understand these statements about the government's ineptitude. They make it sound like the government is a singular entity with a single brain. That is simply not the case. There are both the dumbest of the dumb (just look at the current administration), and geniuses (many top scientists are on government salaries). The government sent humans to the moon, which is no small feat. Regardless of their competence, how could one possible judge the effectiveness of an organization's ability to keep secrets. If they were effective, there would be no way for you to know that.
Why would monopolizing the CPU for a bit be unreasonable? I could easily visualize a scenario where the installed antivirus software brings up a status dialog, which informs the user that the system will be undergoing a test for a period of time, and to please wait a moment. Uhhh, haven't applications been making users wait since the dawn of computers? Have you never seen an application utilize most of the CPU? Of course you have, why would AV software be exempt from this?
There may be another reason besides iPhone development that Safari has been brought to Windows. If you are a Mac user, you should know that Safari still doesn't work on a lot of websites, forcing you to use an alternative browser. Perhaps if Safari even got only 5% market share on Windows, the combined amount of safari installations out there would be enough for most commercial sites to make sure their pages are safari compatible. This would benefit Mac users as well, and drive more people to stick with Safari instead of installing Firefox, Camino, or Opera.
If it weren't for the adversarial existence of Firefox, what do you the IE 7 feature set would look like, if it even existed? Competition is a good thing, especially when pushing in directions outside of the status quo.
LS
Re:Once again your bluff is being called.
on
Internet Tax Imminent?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I moved to Beijing and do programming contracts remotely (I'm not Chinese BTW). I make a US salary, but since I live in the US less than 30 days a year, I don't have to pay any income tax on the first $80,000 that I make. And living in China is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US, and way more fun. Yes!
This "company" has got a lot of coverage over the last few years on Slashdot. This is not because of anything that they have done, but because of the type of company they are. The opportunity to go to space and participate in the creation of extra-terrestrial colonies and worlds is the dream of every nerd wishing to escape the mundane realities facing them.
Anyway, the first time I saw the website for Liftport, they had pictures of LEGO MODELS laying on carpet taken with a cheap digital camera, and poorly drawn visualizations that looked like pictures out of books about the future that I read when I was in the 3rd grade. These guys have built a toy that can climb ropes, and that's about it.
When I was 10 years old, I started a spy company and opened up shop in my bedroom. This was fantasy mind you, but I don't see how it's any different from Liftport. Follow your dreams, yes, but don't be a fool either. Seriously, these guys have done nothing more advanced than your average high school science project, but because they surround themselves with the vernier of a registered corporation that somehow legitimizes them?
For all of you that oppose the censorship of this number, but are for copyright, I'd like to know how you resolve the following contradiction. ALL information is just a number, and some numbers are larger than others. That DVD movie is really just a long binary number. How large does the number have to be before you can copyright it?
So you're saying the cost of these cards is going to be more than the massive amount of fraud that the credit companies face? That's not possible. Also, banking software is not general purpose, publicly usable software. The amount of software in this category that is written by open source authors is virtually nonexistent, and furthermore it's millions of lines of highly secure code. Who's going to write this "OSS banking system"?
did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.
I don't know who you are and how you operate, but most people who speak this way are materialists and came up with this idea while sitting behind their wide-screen TV eating pizza. The idea of you being the sum of your parts and actually experiencing the process directly are two entirely different things. Have you laid on your back in the grass and felt the blood course through your veins, and the palpitations of the heart, recognizing how fragile the system is? Have you sick with a disease that actually affects the functioning of the brain? It makes you TRULY realize that these supposed Platonic, monolithic steel ideas in your head are really just organized meat that will soon disintegrate into the surrounding environment. When you actually feel all the parts of your body working at once, wake up to it, the initial shock can be VERY scary.
Your logic is flawed. In fact it is riddled with several logical fallacies:
1. Black-or-White Fallacy - Either you stop can stop all murderers, or you can't stop any murderers. WRONG - you can stop SOME murderers. 2. Composition Fallacy - Certain murderers are this way, so all murderers are this way. WRONG - some murderers are in the heat of passion searching around their closet for a gun, and might calm down if they don't find one. Others plan for years to carry out international acts of war. 3. Red Herring Fallacy - Bring in something that has nothing to do with the topic at hand to draw attention away from the original issue. What the hell does 9/11 have to do with this??!?
So what bothers you, more than anything, is not the actual murders, but the fact that there is a lack of outrage over the murders? So you are outraged at the lack of outrage? I don't see the point to any of this outrage. I don't think the man with a knife on his throat cares whether we were outraged when he was being murdered. That's why I commented on the Slashdot preachers - the outrage is not about the suffering people but about themselves; it's about their egos. They aren't planning to do anything about it.
I'm as uncomfortable as anyone about what is happening in Darfur, but I'm not gonna get on people's cases for not taking action. There are uncountable horrors happening around the world as you read this, and unless you take a buddha-like oath to never rest until all human suffering has ended, then you are currently not helping resolve some tragedy somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that every single highly-modded preacher in this thread is not doing a single thing to remedy the situation in Darfur.
"Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF"
Does it matter whether the conversion is on the PC or on the PDA? Isn't a handheld PDF reader essentially just converting the PDF to a visual format more suitable for the PDA? The reason many documents are in PDF format is not only because of document size (8.5 x 11), but all images, irregular text flows, form fields, etc. None of this would convert to text anyway, so whether you reformat on the PC or the PDA doesn't really seem to matter, in fact for some PDFs, converting to text on the PC would render it unreadable on the PDA. I think the situation is basically that reading PDFs on PDAs sucks no matter what you do, unless you find a really simple PDF with no images or irregular layout.
Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but they can already get a pretty accurate location reading just based off of the tower signals. In fact it's already being used to determine highway traffic in some areas.
and in person I saw flier (flyer?) printers spitting out 1000s of pages a minute. This is not consumer tech, but the way it works is by arranging a diagonal array of several dozen standard photo printer cartridges. The only thing new about this tech is that it's in a small consumer form factor. bleh
Slashdot Mirror
It's real easy to scream "flame bait" then run away. Why don't you just address what I say? You seem to think that cartoons are serious business. Following your logic, Looney Toons sucks because of the massive inconsistencies that are found in its universe. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are no laws that govern the visual arts, as it's just a matter of taste - fiction, satire and comedy are not ruled by mathematical laws that you seem to have laid upon them. It's up to the imagination of the artist. If you don't like a movie, fine, but realize that it's just your subjective opinion an not a reflection of some objective measure.
LS
Stupid viewer. The movie is a live-action cartoon, were you expecting it to have the realism of a documentary?
Your comment makes a lot of sense until the end. The "food chain" is a myth. There is no top end and bottom end, with the humans at the top. It's more of a "food cycle". Humans DO have predators, but they are microscopic and invade in the millions, i.e. bacteria.
LS
Who said that cigarettes had to be the delivery mechanism? I'm sure cigarette companies have a large stake in tobacco farms, and may even own them. Seeing the heavy legislation and the decline in smoking, they are doing what any well-run company would do, which is to pursue other markets. The nicotine has to come from somewhere.
LS
Not to throw oil on any fires that should probably die out, but I have several gay friends, and have had two of them try to "convert" me. Basically they try to convince me that there is no such thing as homosexual or heterosexual, as they are just artificial boundaries drawn by those who are afraid to open themselves up to new experiences. After being very clear that I am oriented only towards those of the opposite sex, both of these men told me that they would have given me a blowjob otherwise. Mind you I am a very open person, and they probably wouldn't have been this open to anyone who might have gotten upset about such topics of conversation.
LS
Also, different language would compress at different rates. For example, almost every phrase in a technical manual is concrete and will be repeated elsewhere, whereas a poem may have several combinations of words never before put together. And then, there are more layers of meaning in a poem, many of which can't be extracted by humans let alone AI. Wikipedia is probably a good test, because direct language makes up the majority of it's text. But it is by no means a representation of all human language.
LS
I don't understand these statements about the government's ineptitude. They make it sound like the government is a singular entity with a single brain. That is simply not the case. There are both the dumbest of the dumb (just look at the current administration), and geniuses (many top scientists are on government salaries). The government sent humans to the moon, which is no small feat. Regardless of their competence, how could one possible judge the effectiveness of an organization's ability to keep secrets. If they were effective, there would be no way for you to know that.
LS
Why would monopolizing the CPU for a bit be unreasonable? I could easily visualize a scenario where the installed antivirus software brings up a status dialog, which informs the user that the system will be undergoing a test for a period of time, and to please wait a moment. Uhhh, haven't applications been making users wait since the dawn of computers? Have you never seen an application utilize most of the CPU? Of course you have, why would AV software be exempt from this?
LS
Definitely "Giant Douche"
Can anyone explain what the advantage of dual batteries is? TFA describes this "feature", but not what the benefits are.
LS
There may be another reason besides iPhone development that Safari has been brought to Windows. If you are a Mac user, you should know that Safari still doesn't work on a lot of websites, forcing you to use an alternative browser. Perhaps if Safari even got only 5% market share on Windows, the combined amount of safari installations out there would be enough for most commercial sites to make sure their pages are safari compatible. This would benefit Mac users as well, and drive more people to stick with Safari instead of installing Firefox, Camino, or Opera.
LS
If it weren't for the adversarial existence of Firefox, what do you the IE 7 feature set would look like, if it even existed? Competition is a good thing, especially when pushing in directions outside of the status quo.
LS
I moved to Beijing and do programming contracts remotely (I'm not Chinese BTW). I make a US salary, but since I live in the US less than 30 days a year, I don't have to pay any income tax on the first $80,000 that I make. And living in China is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US, and way more fun. Yes!
LS
This "company" has got a lot of coverage over the last few years on Slashdot. This is not because of anything that they have done, but because of the type of company they are. The opportunity to go to space and participate in the creation of extra-terrestrial colonies and worlds is the dream of every nerd wishing to escape the mundane realities facing them.
Anyway, the first time I saw the website for Liftport, they had pictures of LEGO MODELS laying on carpet taken with a cheap digital camera, and poorly drawn visualizations that looked like pictures out of books about the future that I read when I was in the 3rd grade. These guys have built a toy that can climb ropes, and that's about it.
When I was 10 years old, I started a spy company and opened up shop in my bedroom. This was fantasy mind you, but I don't see how it's any different from Liftport. Follow your dreams, yes, but don't be a fool either. Seriously, these guys have done nothing more advanced than your average high school science project, but because they surround themselves with the vernier of a registered corporation that somehow legitimizes them?
LS
For all of you that oppose the censorship of this number, but are for copyright, I'd like to know how you resolve the following contradiction. ALL information is just a number, and some numbers are larger than others. That DVD movie is really just a long binary number. How large does the number have to be before you can copyright it?
LS
So you're saying the cost of these cards is going to be more than the massive amount of fraud that the credit companies face? That's not possible. Also, banking software is not general purpose, publicly usable software. The amount of software in this category that is written by open source authors is virtually nonexistent, and furthermore it's millions of lines of highly secure code. Who's going to write this "OSS banking system"?
LS
did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.
I don't know who you are and how you operate, but most people who speak this way are materialists and came up with this idea while sitting behind their wide-screen TV eating pizza. The idea of you being the sum of your parts and actually experiencing the process directly are two entirely different things. Have you laid on your back in the grass and felt the blood course through your veins, and the palpitations of the heart, recognizing how fragile the system is? Have you sick with a disease that actually affects the functioning of the brain? It makes you TRULY realize that these supposed Platonic, monolithic steel ideas in your head are really just organized meat that will soon disintegrate into the surrounding environment. When you actually feel all the parts of your body working at once, wake up to it, the initial shock can be VERY scary.
Idiot, the Stephen King story IS called the Jaunt, regardless of who coined the word.
The wonderful thing is that many people now realize this. 6 years ago you would have been lumped in with the tin-foil hat conspiracy nut crowd
Your logic is flawed. In fact it is riddled with several logical fallacies:
1. Black-or-White Fallacy - Either you stop can stop all murderers, or you can't stop any murderers. WRONG - you can stop SOME murderers.
2. Composition Fallacy - Certain murderers are this way, so all murderers are this way. WRONG - some murderers are in the heat of passion searching around their closet for a gun, and might calm down if they don't find one. Others plan for years to carry out international acts of war.
3. Red Herring Fallacy - Bring in something that has nothing to do with the topic at hand to draw attention away from the original issue. What the hell does 9/11 have to do with this??!?
LS
So what bothers you, more than anything, is not the actual murders, but the fact that there is a lack of outrage over the murders? So you are outraged at the lack of outrage? I don't see the point to any of this outrage. I don't think the man with a knife on his throat cares whether we were outraged when he was being murdered. That's why I commented on the Slashdot preachers - the outrage is not about the suffering people but about themselves; it's about their egos. They aren't planning to do anything about it.
I'm as uncomfortable as anyone about what is happening in Darfur, but I'm not gonna get on people's cases for not taking action. There are uncountable horrors happening around the world as you read this, and unless you take a buddha-like oath to never rest until all human suffering has ended, then you are currently not helping resolve some tragedy somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that every single highly-modded preacher in this thread is not doing a single thing to remedy the situation in Darfur.
LS
"Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF"
Does it matter whether the conversion is on the PC or on the PDA? Isn't a handheld PDF reader essentially just converting the PDF to a visual format more suitable for the PDA? The reason many documents are in PDF format is not only because of document size (8.5 x 11), but all images, irregular text flows, form fields, etc. None of this would convert to text anyway, so whether you reformat on the PC or the PDA doesn't really seem to matter, in fact for some PDFs, converting to text on the PC would render it unreadable on the PDA. I think the situation is basically that reading PDFs on PDAs sucks no matter what you do, unless you find a really simple PDF with no images or irregular layout.
Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but they can already get a pretty accurate location reading just based off of the tower signals. In fact it's already being used to determine highway traffic in some areas.
LS
and in person I saw flier (flyer?) printers spitting out 1000s of pages a minute. This is not consumer tech, but the way it works is by arranging a diagonal array of several dozen standard photo printer cartridges. The only thing new about this tech is that it's in a small consumer form factor. bleh