Speaking personally as someone who hires freelancers, and who's been a staff journalist and editor for somewhat more than a week myself, if your post is indicative of your grasp of the ethical standards of journalism, you can be sure this is one editor who wouldn't call on your abilities as a stringer, or anything else.
LOL! Nice shot! If I had needed the work at the time, I'd even have been a little hurt by that.
If even half of the additional points you raise were true, then it changes the focus somewhat. In a letter to the Post Ombudsman about, what, journalistic laziness, your boss, how do I put this delicately, left some things out?
If someone else does a story, especially a big story like yours, a magazine/newspaper has two options:
1. Reprint your story. Credit you. Pay your organisation money. Look, to their readers, like schmucks because they missed a big story.
Or, and here's what usually happens:
2. Match the story. Re-interview the same sources. Go over the same ground. And then publish a very similar story. This way you not only VERIFY that the original story is true and well reported, but you appear to your readers as if you're out there getting the news.
Shoddy lazy journalism? No. That would have been uncritically reprinting your original story.
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
Um, yeah, let's all accuse each other of not reading the article:
a fire that was detected as a United Parcel Service cargo plane began its descent into Philadelphia in February. Though a cause of that fire, which consumed and destroyed the plane after it landed, has not been determined, lithium-ion batteries are suspected. No one was hurt. (emphasis mine)
I didn't say it wasn't a problem. Did you catch the bit where I said all batteries can catch fire?
Dell made a $300 million recall, Sony is doing the honourable thing, and your comment is "look[s] very bad for Dell and Sony".
The first fire was April last year, and you go on to say "...a year late."
Issues like this are fascinating for what they reveal about people's preconceptions and habits.
On the face of it, it's simply a "large company recalls large number of items after small (relatively) number of incidents" story.
But look at all the Dell, Sony, Apple, etc. etc. conspiracy theorists and wingnuts come out of the woodwork! So much blaming, everyone certain that their already pre-selected villain company is trying to end civilisation as we know it.
Come on, people. This is News for Nerds. It's not News for Mouthbreathers, although sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Batteries have been causing fires forever. Even the old D-cells you stick in your torch will self-immolate given the right conditions. Think about it. Acid. Metal. Electricity. It's not amazing there are fires, it's amazing there are so few. Laptops have been catching on fire since the very first luggables rolled off the line at Compaq, IBM, etc.
So let's just keep this in perspective. If you want to jump up and down about unsafe products, then go nuts about SUVs. Oh, and don't think that starting your post "I used to like Company X but now..." makes you any more of an intellectual and any less of a wingnut. Just read the numbers again. How many batts recalled? And how many incidents again? Jeez... Move on, nothing to see here...
There are sounds in most other languages that simply don't exist in English, and viky verka.
For example, a Chinese person called Shi Cu could tell a native English speaker -- even a native English speaker with a wonderful "ear" for languages -- how to pronounce his or her name for several hours without getting a return pronunciation anywhere near "authentic".
This is not anyone's fault, the English speaker's brain simply translates the sounds they are hearing into English-language sounds that they know. It takes hundreds of hours of teaching, and thousands of hours of exposure for a native English speaker to correctly make several of the key sounds in Chinese -- let alone get the tones right.
The number of people who get it right the first time? Zero.
You may be quite proud of your ability to get Thai, Cambodian & Hindi names "right". My bet is that people say their names to you several times, hear their names butchered several times, and then smile and say "Yes! That's it!"
They probably even compliment you to protect your feelings. After all, you've made an effort and that's more than most people do.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that you are pronouncing foreign names "right". That almost never happens, and when it does it's almost always because of the closeness of the sounds in a particular name to common sounds in English. Mr Hao, to return to Chinese, is probably pretty ok with people calling him "Mr. How". And even that isn't exactly right.
In fact, your reverse hostility -- "How dare you tell me I can't pronouce your name right!?!" -- is probably one of the very good reasons that Haakon tells people to call him "Howcome"....
Australia, ranked 88th in the world of football, played Brazil, ranked 1st in the world of football, almost to a standstill in the first half.
They had two clear chances to equalize Brazil's first goal, but couldn't quite get there.
Then, late in the game, Brazil helped themselves to a freakish goal off a goalpost rebound, which made the score 2:0.
Australia losing to Brazil ONLY 2:0 is a testament to the Aussie's coach, Gus Hiddink, fearless play, and, very probably, the software that you're saying "didn't do it".
Look, I know you don't really understand "soccer" but this is as if, off the back of a crushing Superbowl victory, the best team in the NFL played the wooden-spooners, and ONLY won by one touchdown...
Your question -- and an answer
on
The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You asked: "Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission)"
The answer, sadly, is a resounding no.
Your individual skills (troubleshooting, coding, organising, selling, whatever) are the stuff that you _do_. The "work" part of work IS the politics. The "work" part of work is dealing with 9-5, 5 days a week on the books, and 8-7 and sometimes on weekends in reality.
That's why it's called "work" and not "play". That's why you get paid money -- because while we would probably all continue to code, mess with hardware, organise, conceptualise in our free time should we not be working -- we expect a big pay packet to deal with the bullshit.
It's the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. You can micro-evolve in any company -- go from Programmer 3rd Class to Programmer 2nd Class, for example -- but to completely move up or even across the ladder is rare, precisely because if you're actually good at what you do, you won't be good at the things that guarantee promotion.
Google the "Peter Principle". Look up the "60% rule" (60% of your time inside any company bigger than 10 people will be spent on servicing "how things are done around here" -- not actually your "job description" stuff).
Work is work, and if you're lucky the stuff you're actually good at will align slightly with it.
Oh, cool, we're doing game ideas! Ok, here's mine.
You play this third-rate lawyer. Points are accrued by:
* Chasing ambulances * Finding extremely disturbed people who did something terrible, and blaming their actions on something that millions of people do every day for fun. (The murderers played Frisbee, which gave them the hand-eye co-ordination required to commit the crime, your honor. I rest my case.) * Pretending you are associated with large, responsible, lobby groups * Takin' the fight to the web, setting up lots of different "message" websites * Preying on grieving families to drum up unwinnable, but really high profile, cases
Points are lost by:
* Attacking the wrong online cartoonists * Ripping off Swift's "A Modest Proposal" but not actually understanding the satire of the original * Getting disavowed by the lobby groups you're trying to shelter under
And you "win" when you gain enough "noteriety points" to:
* Convince a backwards state to pass broken legislation that keeps you in gravy essentially forever, by making things illegal when you say they are.
In other news, 50% of people have below-average intelligence.
Jokes about statistics aside, people falling for phishing is our fault. Our fault as in our industry's fault.
We've spent so long training our parents, help-desk clients, and other tech-stupid creatures that the way to respond to mysterious dialog boxes is to "Just click OK!" that at this stage the damage is essentially permanent.
Their natural instinct was to treat computers with suspicion, and we beat it out of them.
If the Chinese govt. wants to shut this down, they simply require financial institutions to "register" their subdomains at both ends (a whitelist, in effect), or, even more simply, require financial traffic to be port-shifted.
But you overestimate the effectiveness of trying to circumvent keyword restrictions. Keywords are the least effective of the three primary methods the Great Firewall uses.
Method 1: keywords. Method 2: whole-site blacklists (wikipedia, bbc, etc. etc.) Method 3: an army of browsers/searchers proactively looking for "bad" content
So any "keyword shifting" sites would be found in short order, and Method 2 employed.
It seems like every time there's a Slashdot story on Mars, someone runs around like Chicken Little shouting "The Radiation! The Radiation!"
Of course, as anyone with any real interest in the topic would quickly find out, it's not in any way, shape, or form, a mission-stopper.
There's so much research out there about this! Even NASA - sensibly conservative and cranking up the "danger" to manufacture a mission for the ISS ("Seeing what radiation in space does" as if we don't know from 30+ years of space flight) - isn't as strident as some people who should search before they post.
I guess if the New York Times can get "space radiation" wrong, as they did in 2003, then Slashdot denizens can too, but I foolishly expect more tech-aware people here. Here's the real deal on Mars Mission radiation from the Mars Society based on real science, not on half-remembered sci-fi movies.
To the second point, "bone and muscle degeneration", there are two sets of data on this. First, the very real bone and muscle degeneration experienced by long-term Soviet Mir-jockeys, who simply didn't do their exercises, and second, the remarkable amelioration of these "effects" by all long-term US astronauts, who did do their exercises.
I guess we'll have to recruit the Mars crews from the pool of "following the doctor's orders" astronauts rather than the "ignoring sensible medical advice" group.
So the first thing you have to do is explain how your new product name is pronounced? Dud.
>>While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer.
Um, you "answer" a question. You don't "answer" a "direction". This doesn't make sense.
>>Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.
No it won't. Humans are tribal. The thing that separates gamers from others is GAMERS. We like it that way.
>>Wii will put people more in touch with their games... and each other. But you're probably asking: What does the name mean?
No, I wasn't. And saying "thanks for asking" is a sure-fire way to notify everyone under 30 that you're full of shit and trying to sell something.
>>Wii sounds like "we," which emphasizes this console is for everyone.
Only in English, where it also sounds like "small" or "urinate".
>>Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.
Bullshit. Many languages make no distinction between the "w" sound and the "v" sound. Chinese, spoken by 20% of the people on the planet, doesn't have a "we" sound.
>>Wii has a distinctive "ii" spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.
Distinctive?? "ii" means "2" in almost every table of contents I've ever seen. It's as unique as that slightly dissapointed feeling which follows every concrete announcement by Nintendo.
>>>And Wii, as a name and console, *snip marketing bullshit*
This will be the event that finally proves that all publicity is NOT good publicity.
>> for ALL planes, falling to the ground is the default.
No it isn't. That's the default for bricks.
For all planes the glide ratio is the default.
Even if you star-trek-transported a plane to 10,000 feet off the ground, with zero speed, it would start to fall, nose over, and then begin to glide --- and that's hands off.
It takes violent and precise inputs (or, catastrophically wrong inputs at precisely the wrong moment, or something terribly terribly structurally wrong) to send a plane into "falling out of the sky" mode.
The exceptions to this _very_ general rule would be some exotic flying bodies, but a little-known aviation fact is that a 747 will glide about as well as a light plane, in any terms that matter (ie. in terms of finding a flat, clear patch of ground to do an emergency landing on.)
One of the enduring Hollywoodisms that seems to now be permanently embedded in the brains of even people who should know better is that if you turn off the engines in a plane it drops immediately, like a brick.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I used the "castoring" analogy in the GP, because that was the analogy my flying instructor used.
While it's true that an F-22 Raptor is a different bird to the docile Cessnas and Pipers that I trained on, for most planes "straight and level" is the default.
Like when you let the steering wheel go in a car (DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!) your wheels castor so that the car stays straight ahead (and in most cars, slightly away from the oncoming traffic).
If the rat brain could land a plane in a crosswind - then I'd be impressed!
Assertion 1: "They are screen scraping other people's content" Assertion 2: "the second they let it be legally defined...a million lawsuits...Google won't have a legal leg to stand on"
Both assertions are, IMO, completely untrue. It is not illegal, and I don't think it's ever been illegal in any jurisdiction, to stand on a street corner and say "Hey! There's a guy selling icecream over there!" Unless you cause a riot, or yell too loud, or block the footpath.
Google News doesn't "screen scrape" any content. They list headlines from news sites. "Hey! There's a guy telling a story over there!" Not illegal. Never will be illegal.
To your second point. There are companies out there, right now, even as we type, called clipping services. They literally cut whole articles out of newspapers, magazines, journals, and compile folders of them according to criteria set by the people who pay them money.
According to you, they "don't have a legal leg to stand on" and yet they are amazingly unsued, making revenue from other people's content. If Google removed the "beta" sign tomorrow, they would still be doing far less than a standard, real-world clipping service.
It's also not illegal to watch someone buy a sports magazine at a newsstand and say "Excuse me sir. Do you mind if I ask you a question? I notice you are into sports. Would you like to buy this fine *related product here*?" Again, if you do this wrong you could be arrested for bugging people, but the act of making a recommendation based on observed public behaviour is not illegal.
"You want the Model A? Well, ma'am, I couldn't help noticing you have two kids in the store with you today. The Model B is specifically designed for families with young children." Not illegal. Never will be illegal.
But, of course, IANAL, and I am simply operating in the plain old world of "logic", not the rarified atmosphere of "the law". Now, those two environments usually intersect, but of course we all know of times when they haven't.
>>the part of the universe that is not observable by physical experimentation.
Funny you should use this phrase, because that's the part of the universe that can, by definition, have no physical effect on the universe. Look up "Planck" in a good scientific dictionary.
So it's just as well that you defined your god previously as "not omnipotent". Because it would appear that he/she/it cannot do _anything at all_.
"Something that doesn't do anything at all and that can't be measured or observed" -- is in the dictionary under the definition of "nothing".
By the way, if your god is not omnipotent, not omnipresent, etc. then you're talking about something that cannot be labelled with the word "god". That's another definition you should probably look up before you start debating about things you refer to using that word.
Your "god" then, is something that can't be measured, has no measurable effect, cannot by definition effect the material universe, doesn't know anything at all with anything approaching certainty (because that would, as you correctly point out, be a paradox). So what is it you're believing in again?
Re:Dude! You gotta stop buying Britney Spears CDs!
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Barenaked USB Drive
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· Score: 5, Informative
> As a side note, why do audio discussions bring out the vitrol in people?
I'll (probably foolishly) assume this is a serious question.
Audio "wars" happen for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's in the interests of so many people to "stretch the truth" about sound.
From the makers and sellers of audio equipment (500 watts per channel!!!!) to the goldenears who run mastering studios (gotta have NS1s, dude, anything else is, like, seriously shit) to amateurs who want to justify the fact that they paid $70 for 7 cents worth of copper cable (most of the quality loss comes betweent the amp and the speaker, you know).
All those people -- the first two categories, you'll notice, could be referred to as "audio professionals" -- are lying, or at the very least being very casual with the truth in an effort to either sell more product, book more business, or not seem like a schmuck.
Your original post, and your confusion about what "compression" actually means wrt mastering techniques is a classic example of a classic misunderstanding that's been banging around in pro-audio circles for a long, long time, and has its origin in the "tape wars" of the 1960s. That war was started by the proponents of the two different ways of aligning the magnetic bits on a section of tape.... needless to say both ways worked, but there were two competing sales teams at work.
The article you linked to suffers from a combination of diseases: the "good old days" virus combined with a heavy dose of the "misunderstanding basic physical principles" 'flu. Someone else, in other words, wanting to sound like an "expert" on sound so they can "we don't do that shit here" in their sales pitch and grab a few more customers.
Please, don't think I expect you to believe me! I only worked fixing the computers in one of the world's top mastering studios for 4 years, and kept my ears open, so what the f*** do I know? You gotta bi-wire _everything_ dude, it's the only way...
Dude! You gotta stop buying Britney Spears CDs!
on
Barenaked USB Drive
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Your post shows (yet again) why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Compression" -- ie lossy data stuffing -- is a totally different thing to "compression" -- ie fiddling the freqs to make a CD seem "louder". I can understand why you'd be confused, since they use the same word for both. Kinda like "bad" meaning "bad" - but also, if you're Michael Jackson, meaning "really really good". English is a bitch like that. "Bitch" as in "bitching" -- it's a vital feature of all languages that words can mean more than one thing.
And far from being a common thing, the misuse of the kind of compression you are wailing about is usually limited to the worst of the worst of throwaway pop music.
Most artists, labels, studios, and mastering engineers are, literally, psychotic about maintaining sound quality, which is one of the reasons a CD that's even just averagely mastered will beat your "well mastered cassette" any day of the week and six times on Sunday.
Simply _playing_ a cassette stretches the tape and starts scrubbing away at the data. And that's not even to mention the difference in dynamic range. From the article that you linked to yet obviously didn't read:
"[with CDs] consumers could purchase a recording in a medium whose dynamic range exceeded that of $20,000 professional tape machines."
"Returning more results" has not been the benchmark of search-engines since Alta Vista became irrelevant.
Which means about 5 years. An eternity in internet time.
Google beat Alta Vista, Yahoo, dogpile, Lycos, etc. etc. etc. etc. because they did something different -- most of the time the pages you want are front and center, or maybe a single revision of your search terms.
Here is a link to the story in the English version of China Daily, the online news site in People's Republic of China.
Might be more accurate to say "an" online news site. There is of course People's Daily, Xinhua Net, etc. etc. etc.
Seeing China as this huge, backward giant with one, monolithic information source is so 1978. I mean, really, this story alone surely debunks that simplistic, wrongheaded, sadly common view...
When I first heard about this telescope on the grapevine, I jumped onto the web and found the email of the project lead (people were rather careless about putting live emails on webpages in those days) and emailed about this very topic.
My questions was "Will this be able to resolve earth-like planets around nearby stars?" To which the answer was "No. Need 2 orders of magnitude better resolution."
In fact, in some rather extended searching, it appears there isn't even anything on the drawing board which would be able to achieve this feat. That's not to say that this is important, or anything, just cool! Who wouldn't take a second look at the first pictures of another "earth" around another star in their morning newspaper?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking personally as someone who hires freelancers, and who's been a staff journalist and editor for somewhat more than a week myself, if your post is indicative of your grasp of the ethical standards of journalism, you can be sure this is one editor who wouldn't call on your abilities as a stringer, or anything else.
LOL! Nice shot! If I had needed the work at the time, I'd even have been a little hurt by that.
If even half of the additional points you raise were true, then it changes the focus somewhat. In a letter to the Post Ombudsman about, what, journalistic laziness, your boss, how do I put this delicately, left some things out?
Pot. Kettle. Black.
How long have you worked in journalism, Susan?
If someone else does a story, especially a big story like yours, a magazine/newspaper has two options:
1. Reprint your story. Credit you. Pay your organisation money. Look, to their readers, like schmucks because they missed a big story.
Or, and here's what usually happens:
2. Match the story. Re-interview the same sources. Go over the same ground. And then publish a very similar story. This way you not only VERIFY that the original story is true and well reported, but you appear to your readers as if you're out there getting the news.
Shoddy lazy journalism? No. That would have been uncritically reprinting your original story.
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
I didn't say it wasn't a problem. Did you catch the bit where I said all batteries can catch fire?
Dell made a $300 million recall, Sony is doing the honourable thing, and your comment is "look[s] very bad for Dell and Sony".
The first fire was April last year, and you go on to say "...a year late."
Yep. No wingnuts here...
Issues like this are fascinating for what they reveal about people's preconceptions and habits.
On the face of it, it's simply a "large company recalls large number of items after small (relatively) number of incidents" story.
But look at all the Dell, Sony, Apple, etc. etc. conspiracy theorists and wingnuts come out of the woodwork! So much blaming, everyone certain that their already pre-selected villain company is trying to end civilisation as we know it.
Come on, people. This is News for Nerds. It's not News for Mouthbreathers, although sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Batteries have been causing fires forever. Even the old D-cells you stick in your torch will self-immolate given the right conditions. Think about it. Acid. Metal. Electricity. It's not amazing there are fires, it's amazing there are so few. Laptops have been catching on fire since the very first luggables rolled off the line at Compaq, IBM, etc.
So let's just keep this in perspective. If you want to jump up and down about unsafe products, then go nuts about SUVs. Oh, and don't think that starting your post "I used to like Company X but now..." makes you any more of an intellectual and any less of a wingnut. Just read the numbers again. How many batts recalled? And how many incidents again? Jeez... Move on, nothing to see here...
There are sounds in most other languages that simply don't exist in English, and viky verka.
For example, a Chinese person called Shi Cu could tell a native English speaker -- even a native English speaker with a wonderful "ear" for languages -- how to pronounce his or her name for several hours without getting a return pronunciation anywhere near "authentic".
This is not anyone's fault, the English speaker's brain simply translates the sounds they are hearing into English-language sounds that they know. It takes hundreds of hours of teaching, and thousands of hours of exposure for a native English speaker to correctly make several of the key sounds in Chinese -- let alone get the tones right.
The number of people who get it right the first time? Zero.
You may be quite proud of your ability to get Thai, Cambodian & Hindi names "right". My bet is that people say their names to you several times, hear their names butchered several times, and then smile and say "Yes! That's it!"
They probably even compliment you to protect your feelings. After all, you've made an effort and that's more than most people do.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that you are pronouncing foreign names "right". That almost never happens, and when it does it's almost always because of the closeness of the sounds in a particular name to common sounds in English. Mr Hao, to return to Chinese, is probably pretty ok with people calling him "Mr. How". And even that isn't exactly right.
In fact, your reverse hostility -- "How dare you tell me I can't pronouce your name right!?!" -- is probably one of the very good reasons that Haakon tells people to call him "Howcome"....
Australia, ranked 88th in the world of football, played Brazil, ranked 1st in the world of football, almost to a standstill in the first half.
They had two clear chances to equalize Brazil's first goal, but couldn't quite get there.
Then, late in the game, Brazil helped themselves to a freakish goal off a goalpost rebound, which made the score 2:0.
Australia losing to Brazil ONLY 2:0 is a testament to the Aussie's coach, Gus Hiddink, fearless play, and, very probably, the software that you're saying "didn't do it".
Look, I know you don't really understand "soccer" but this is as if, off the back of a crushing Superbowl victory, the best team in the NFL played the wooden-spooners, and ONLY won by one touchdown...
You asked: "Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission)"
The answer, sadly, is a resounding no.
Your individual skills (troubleshooting, coding, organising, selling, whatever) are the stuff that you _do_. The "work" part of work IS the politics. The "work" part of work is dealing with 9-5, 5 days a week on the books, and 8-7 and sometimes on weekends in reality.
That's why it's called "work" and not "play". That's why you get paid money -- because while we would probably all continue to code, mess with hardware, organise, conceptualise in our free time should we not be working -- we expect a big pay packet to deal with the bullshit.
It's the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. You can micro-evolve in any company -- go from Programmer 3rd Class to Programmer 2nd Class, for example -- but to completely move up or even across the ladder is rare, precisely because if you're actually good at what you do, you won't be good at the things that guarantee promotion.
Google the "Peter Principle". Look up the "60% rule" (60% of your time inside any company bigger than 10 people will be spent on servicing "how things are done around here" -- not actually your "job description" stuff).
Work is work, and if you're lucky the stuff you're actually good at will align slightly with it.
Oh, cool, we're doing game ideas! Ok, here's mine.
You play this third-rate lawyer. Points are accrued by:
* Chasing ambulances
* Finding extremely disturbed people who did something terrible, and blaming their actions on something that millions of people do every day for fun. (The murderers played Frisbee, which gave them the hand-eye co-ordination required to commit the crime, your honor. I rest my case.)
* Pretending you are associated with large, responsible, lobby groups
* Takin' the fight to the web, setting up lots of different "message" websites
* Preying on grieving families to drum up unwinnable, but really high profile, cases
Points are lost by:
* Attacking the wrong online cartoonists
* Ripping off Swift's "A Modest Proposal" but not actually understanding the satire of the original
* Getting disavowed by the lobby groups you're trying to shelter under
And you "win" when you gain enough "noteriety points" to:
* Convince a backwards state to pass broken legislation that keeps you in gravy essentially forever, by making things illegal when you say they are.
In other news, 50% of people have below-average intelligence.
Jokes about statistics aside, people falling for phishing is our fault. Our fault as in our industry's fault.
We've spent so long training our parents, help-desk clients, and other tech-stupid creatures that the way to respond to mysterious dialog boxes is to "Just click OK!" that at this stage the damage is essentially permanent.
Their natural instinct was to treat computers with suspicion, and we beat it out of them.
Yay for us.
You're exactly correct about SSL.
If the Chinese govt. wants to shut this down, they simply require financial institutions to "register" their subdomains at both ends (a whitelist, in effect), or, even more simply, require financial traffic to be port-shifted.
But you overestimate the effectiveness of trying to circumvent keyword restrictions. Keywords are the least effective of the three primary methods the Great Firewall uses.
Method 1: keywords.
Method 2: whole-site blacklists (wikipedia, bbc, etc. etc.)
Method 3: an army of browsers/searchers proactively looking for "bad" content
So any "keyword shifting" sites would be found in short order, and Method 2 employed.
Of course, as anyone with any real interest in the topic would quickly find out, it's not in any way, shape, or form, a mission-stopper.
There's so much research out there about this! Even NASA - sensibly conservative and cranking up the "danger" to manufacture a mission for the ISS ("Seeing what radiation in space does" as if we don't know from 30+ years of space flight) - isn't as strident as some people who should search before they post.
I guess if the New York Times can get "space radiation" wrong, as they did in 2003, then Slashdot denizens can too, but I foolishly expect more tech-aware people here. Here's the real deal on Mars Mission radiation from the Mars Society based on real science, not on half-remembered sci-fi movies.
To the second point, "bone and muscle degeneration", there are two sets of data on this. First, the very real bone and muscle degeneration experienced by long-term Soviet Mir-jockeys, who simply didn't do their exercises, and second, the remarkable amelioration of these "effects" by all long-term US astronauts, who did do their exercises.
I guess we'll have to recruit the Mars crews from the pool of "following the doctor's orders" astronauts rather than the "ignoring sensible medical advice" group.
>>Introducing ... Wii.
... and each other. But you're probably asking: What does the name mean?
>>As in "we."
So the first thing you have to do is explain how your new product name is pronounced? Dud.
>>While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer.
Um, you "answer" a question. You don't "answer" a "direction". This doesn't make sense.
>>Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.
No it won't. Humans are tribal. The thing that separates gamers from others is GAMERS. We like it that way.
>>Wii will put people more in touch with their games
No, I wasn't. And saying "thanks for asking" is a sure-fire way to notify everyone under 30 that you're full of shit and trying to sell something.
>>Wii sounds like "we," which emphasizes this console is for everyone.
Only in English, where it also sounds like "small" or "urinate".
>>Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.
Bullshit. Many languages make no distinction between the "w" sound and the "v" sound. Chinese, spoken by 20% of the people on the planet, doesn't have a "we" sound.
>>Wii has a distinctive "ii" spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.
Distinctive?? "ii" means "2" in almost every table of contents I've ever seen. It's as unique as that slightly dissapointed feeling which follows every concrete announcement by Nintendo.
>>>And Wii, as a name and console, *snip marketing bullshit*
This will be the event that finally proves that all publicity is NOT good publicity.
No, we don't.
From the FIRST PARAGRAPH of the link you so helpfully supplied:
"R 18+ and X 18+ are not classifications for computer games."
Forget RTFA -- this is more RYOFL.
The best guitar shop in Sydney, Australia has a sign:
"Play 'Stairway' or 'Classical Gas' and we'll staple your elbows together."
They're letting people off _way_ too easy IMO.
>> for ALL planes, falling to the ground is the default.
No it isn't. That's the default for bricks.
For all planes the glide ratio is the default.
Even if you star-trek-transported a plane to 10,000 feet off the ground, with zero speed, it would start to fall, nose over, and then begin to glide --- and that's hands off.
It takes violent and precise inputs (or, catastrophically wrong inputs at precisely the wrong moment, or something terribly terribly structurally wrong) to send a plane into "falling out of the sky" mode.
The exceptions to this _very_ general rule would be some exotic flying bodies, but a little-known aviation fact is that a 747 will glide about as well as a light plane, in any terms that matter (ie. in terms of finding a flat, clear patch of ground to do an emergency landing on.)
One of the enduring Hollywoodisms that seems to now be permanently embedded in the brains of even people who should know better is that if you turn off the engines in a plane it drops immediately, like a brick.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I used the "castoring" analogy in the GP, because that was the analogy my flying instructor used.
While it's true that an F-22 Raptor is a different bird to the docile Cessnas and Pipers that I trained on, for most planes "straight and level" is the default.
Like when you let the steering wheel go in a car (DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!) your wheels castor so that the car stays straight ahead (and in most cars, slightly away from the oncoming traffic).
If the rat brain could land a plane in a crosswind - then I'd be impressed!
Assertion 1: "They are screen scraping other people's content"
Assertion 2: "the second they let it be legally defined...a million lawsuits...Google won't have a legal leg to stand on"
Both assertions are, IMO, completely untrue. It is not illegal, and I don't think it's ever been illegal in any jurisdiction, to stand on a street corner and say "Hey! There's a guy selling icecream over there!" Unless you cause a riot, or yell too loud, or block the footpath.
Google News doesn't "screen scrape" any content. They list headlines from news sites. "Hey! There's a guy telling a story over there!" Not illegal. Never will be illegal.
To your second point. There are companies out there, right now, even as we type, called clipping services. They literally cut whole articles out of newspapers, magazines, journals, and compile folders of them according to criteria set by the people who pay them money.
According to you, they "don't have a legal leg to stand on" and yet they are amazingly unsued, making revenue from other people's content. If Google removed the "beta" sign tomorrow, they would still be doing far less than a standard, real-world clipping service.
It's also not illegal to watch someone buy a sports magazine at a newsstand and say "Excuse me sir. Do you mind if I ask you a question? I notice you are into sports. Would you like to buy this fine *related product here*?" Again, if you do this wrong you could be arrested for bugging people, but the act of making a recommendation based on observed public behaviour is not illegal.
"You want the Model A? Well, ma'am, I couldn't help noticing you have two kids in the store with you today. The Model B is specifically designed for families with young children." Not illegal. Never will be illegal.
But, of course, IANAL, and I am simply operating in the plain old world of "logic", not the rarified atmosphere of "the law". Now, those two environments usually intersect, but of course we all know of times when they haven't.
>>the part of the universe that is not observable by physical experimentation.
Funny you should use this phrase, because that's the part of the universe that can, by definition, have no physical effect on the universe. Look up "Planck" in a good scientific dictionary.
So it's just as well that you defined your god previously as "not omnipotent". Because it would appear that he/she/it cannot do _anything at all_.
"Something that doesn't do anything at all and that can't be measured or observed" -- is in the dictionary under the definition of "nothing".
By the way, if your god is not omnipotent, not omnipresent, etc. then you're talking about something that cannot be labelled with the word "god". That's another definition you should probably look up before you start debating about things you refer to using that word.
Your "god" then, is something that can't be measured, has no measurable effect, cannot by definition effect the material universe, doesn't know anything at all with anything approaching certainty (because that would, as you correctly point out, be a paradox). So what is it you're believing in again?
> As a side note, why do audio discussions bring out the vitrol in people?
I'll (probably foolishly) assume this is a serious question.
Audio "wars" happen for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's in the interests of so many people to "stretch the truth" about sound.
From the makers and sellers of audio equipment (500 watts per channel!!!!) to the goldenears who run mastering studios (gotta have NS1s, dude, anything else is, like, seriously shit) to amateurs who want to justify the fact that they paid $70 for 7 cents worth of copper cable (most of the quality loss comes betweent the amp and the speaker, you know).
All those people -- the first two categories, you'll notice, could be referred to as "audio professionals" -- are lying, or at the very least being very casual with the truth in an effort to either sell more product, book more business, or not seem like a schmuck.
Your original post, and your confusion about what "compression" actually means wrt mastering techniques is a classic example of a classic misunderstanding that's been banging around in pro-audio circles for a long, long time, and has its origin in the "tape wars" of the 1960s. That war was started by the proponents of the two different ways of aligning the magnetic bits on a section of tape.... needless to say both ways worked, but there were two competing sales teams at work.
The article you linked to suffers from a combination of diseases: the "good old days" virus combined with a heavy dose of the "misunderstanding basic physical principles" 'flu. Someone else, in other words, wanting to sound like an "expert" on sound so they can "we don't do that shit here" in their sales pitch and grab a few more customers.
Please, don't think I expect you to believe me! I only worked fixing the computers in one of the world's top mastering studios for 4 years, and kept my ears open, so what the f*** do I know? You gotta bi-wire _everything_ dude, it's the only way...
Your post shows (yet again) why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Compression" -- ie lossy data stuffing -- is a totally different thing to "compression" -- ie fiddling the freqs to make a CD seem "louder". I can understand why you'd be confused, since they use the same word for both. Kinda like "bad" meaning "bad" - but also, if you're Michael Jackson, meaning "really really good". English is a bitch like that. "Bitch" as in "bitching" -- it's a vital feature of all languages that words can mean more than one thing.
And far from being a common thing, the misuse of the kind of compression you are wailing about is usually limited to the worst of the worst of throwaway pop music.
Most artists, labels, studios, and mastering engineers are, literally, psychotic about maintaining sound quality, which is one of the reasons a CD that's even just averagely mastered will beat your "well mastered cassette" any day of the week and six times on Sunday.
Simply _playing_ a cassette stretches the tape and starts scrubbing away at the data. And that's not even to mention the difference in dynamic range. From the article that you linked to yet obviously didn't read:
"[with CDs] consumers could purchase a recording in a medium whose dynamic range exceeded that of $20,000 professional tape machines."
"Returning more results" has not been the benchmark of search-engines since Alta Vista became irrelevant.
Which means about 5 years. An eternity in internet time.
Google beat Alta Vista, Yahoo, dogpile, Lycos, etc. etc. etc. etc. because they did something different -- most of the time the pages you want are front and center, or maybe a single revision of your search terms.
Quality is already the benchmark.
Might be more accurate to say "an" online news site. There is of course People's Daily, Xinhua Net, etc. etc. etc.
Seeing China as this huge, backward giant with one, monolithic information source is so 1978. I mean, really, this story alone surely debunks that simplistic, wrongheaded, sadly common view...
Get TSIRT into print, so you can be the originator! I've already used it twice in conversation today...
My questions was "Will this be able to resolve earth-like planets around nearby stars?" To which the answer was "No. Need 2 orders of magnitude better resolution."
In fact, in some rather extended searching, it appears there isn't even anything on the drawing board which would be able to achieve this feat. That's not to say that this is important, or anything, just cool! Who wouldn't take a second look at the first pictures of another "earth" around another star in their morning newspaper?
But the fact that this story contains the magic words porn, internet, & communist is likely to generate 1,000 responses. Sigh.
For something truly fun and interesting along the same lines, recently the Chinese had a brilliant spin on "citizen crime busters", offering bounties for people with camcorders who caught drivers breaking the law! Now there is a great idea!