You might think that, but you'd be incorrect. All the freedom of speech clause says is that the government will make no law abridging your ability to express free speech. It is perfectly legal for the government not to help other people hear your speech.
In legal terms, this is the distinction between a positive law and a negative law: a positive law demands action (the law requiring that you protect your children, for example, from negligence), whereas a negative law prohibits action (laws prohibiting murder, for example). The 1st amendment clause is a negative law prohibiting the expression of speech, not its reception.
Frankly, this sort of misinterpretation is civil law is not usually a jury-decision. Instead, its left in the hands of judges or arbitrators who are trained in the reading and interpretation of law and jurisprudence.
Not only are you incorrect, but clearly have no background here.
I did not say that the government had a right to prevent you from accessing information. What I said was, it has a right to prevent you from accessing that information using their equipment. The difference is, you can access it fine through all the other legal methods, but the government doens't have to help you access it.
At least they're being frank...
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: -1, Insightful
I think that those responsible deserve at least a little credit for being so forward with not only the nature of the problem but their failure to attend to this earlier. It would be simple to take a MS-esque stance on this, but instead they're taking the bull by the horns.
Frankly, given the time that this exploit has been known amongst the internet community, I'm shocked UT servers haven't yet been utilized maliciously in this way.
Okay, first, colleges [both state-funded and private] have been shown to have a vested interest in not only discussing pornography [i.e. within the context of art, sociology, english, philosophy, history, science among other fields], so while it might be appropriate to have Playboy and other erotica in a college library [which, by nature, is focused if not limited to college students, i.e. those old enough to legally acquire pornography] that isn't an argument for it being in all libraries.
Second, as pointed out, the first amendment makes no discussion of morality whatsoever. Moreover it does not prohibit state-sponsored religion. It prohibits sponsoring one religion over another. In other words, if a state or the federal government wants to sponsor one religion through some resource, it must make that resource equally available to all other religions. This, of course, is why they dont [ostensibly] support a specific religion: there are a billion other religions that would lay economic claim against them.
Okay, this is a common mistake: the first amendment makes it illegal to restrict the creation and broadcast of speech [however defined], but does not make it illegal to restrict government-provided means of accessing that speech.
In other words, its not censoring speech to limit the access in the libraries [I believe], but it would be censoring speech to limit the ability of certain individuals/groups to create that speech.
Fact is, you dont have a right to hear other people's speech, if you're hearing it through a service that the government isn't required to provide.
You're a fool. A notable point in Dune is that there are no computers. In fact, Herbert explains that millenia before there was a robotic revolution, leading to a banning of computers of any sophistication. The Mentats are human computers, performing such calculations, although they are an industrial society. Spaceflight is accomplished through the mental powers of Navigators to bend space.
Your post was completely off-topic and irrelevant.
Sorry if this is harsh, but you shouldn't post just to post.
It says something about a show that the best episodes are almost exclusively from several years ago.
Before I'm modded down for heresy, I adore The Simpsons. Yet, I still believe that the show was far greated from seasons 3-7 than from 8-today. The show has lost its ability to be intellectual at the same degree, in losing writers such as Conan O'Brian.
Frankly, I'm not entirely sure they should keep making the series: Homer is now retarded (whereas he's merely simple in the beginning), Homer has no Job (or actually, he's had well over 70 jobs, as listed in a recent episode...which means roughly a quarter of the episodes have been "Homer becomes a "), they no longer make subtle erudite references...its falling apart.
Among other ways, you could have something analagous to how in some current EULAs you have to scroll to the bottom of the text to find the "yes I agree" button. In the case of the paper, for example, you could have a sticker over the "I agree" part, where a sensor detects whether or not it was exposed to light, possibly remembering the timestamp, etc.
Outsourcing is a bad thing: Outsource Australia is a company I've worked with that dramatically increases the value and productivity of a company when they work to refine their procedures, structures.
I think the fear that our [american] economy will collapse if jobs move out of the geographic country is naive, in that it doesn't properly examine whether or not the money actually flows in different directions: if the money still comes into the US eventually, it works.
Spider-man got organic webshooters for a simple reason: the web-fluid constitutes one of the greatest industrial design breakthroughs in the last century, if not in all history. Its a compressed compound (hundreds of kilometers of the webs fit in a small box that fits on his wrist) that upon exposure to air dries instantly (or can remain partially sticky if desired) and becomes stronger than steel. Moreover, it dissolves into insignificant matter at about an hour's time.
Now...do we really want to have the protagonist of a story - with no more science background than simple high school stuff and personal hobby interest - to develop such a compound when 3M cant?
Lucas wrote ANH on his own, but Empire (usually regarded as the best of the series) was primarily written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas only "wrote" a small story treatment (that was several dozen pages long), which was dramatically changed and fleshed out by the real writers. The only reason GL even got credit was because it was "his" film, so he wrote the credits. His contribution was similar to James Cameron's contribution to the recent Spider Man film (all that remained from JC's treatment was the organic webshooters, incidentally).
Jedi, which uncoincidentally is usually rated between Empire and ANH, was done similarly although with only Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas basically phoned in a concept, and Kasdan pulled it off. Most importantly, it was Lucas who insisted on the introduction of the god-awful Ewoks [as opposed to Kasdan who wanted to have Kashyyk, the homeworld of the wookies - Lucas dind't think they were "cute" enough, given our experience with Chewbacca].
Unsurprisingly, the "new" trilogy is written solely by Lucas. He no longer is tempered by good writing, and so we have the largely panned films "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones".
There's also a parallel to be drawn to Sony (as discussed by the recent WiReD article, and as linked to here on/.) that keeping cooporating companies seperated (like the Lucas* units were) in order to prevent mutually exclusive or mutually confusing goals.
Consider the artists at LucasArts who worked independently from LucasFilm and SkywalkerSound. While they may often have reason to work together, some people might find it easier (if they're from, say, Dreamworks) to work with ILM if its not attached directly to LucasFilm.
Re:that makes no sense
on
Kazaa Fights Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No, thats not quite right. Kazaa lite has legal uses in the form of legitimate sharing of appropriately licensed material. For example, if I'm a musician, I can upload my own music. Similarly, you can acquire copyrighted material for fair-use purposes (i.e. searching for a specific image for a school project, etc.). The presence of legal uses for a peice of equipment was all you needed, until recently, to guarentee the right to produce it. This was essentially Sony's argument ages ago in the home VCR disputes, and was supported by the courts.
Kazaa's new argument is seperate from this: they claim that the sister-app to Kazaa, Altnet, is an entirely legal (i.e. no illegal purposes possible) means of profit-making for Kazaa. Moreover, they claim that it offers a means to directly cut the profits of those companies which are suing Kazaa. These two points together mean that they're able to claim that the suing companies (i.e. rcaa, etc.) are not out to protect their copyrights legally, but are instead attempting to act as an illegal trust seeking to protect their monopoly.
Its quite ballsy, in my opinion, but it just might work.
There's an erroneous comparison to be made between imprisoning people for drugs (a criminal violation currently) and for violating copyright (a civil violation). You cannot be imprisoned for violation of civil law, only criminal law.
I'll grant you that many people, myself included, believe drugs should be regulated under civil and not criminal law, but that's besides the point.
Moreover, I have a strong disagreement with the article you link to. While its clearly true that children engage in activities more due to personal interest than reward, it is _not_ shown to be the case with professional artists. Again, your example about the internet and open-coding is an erroneous one. If GNU/Linux was producing music, that would be one thing. You'll notice, its not, and neither is its community. Part of that is the membership: there may be fewer artists, etc. Another part is the distribution system: it may be too difficult for any such musicians to be getting proper attention. The final part though is that creative goods which have no practical result (thus excluding programming which is often pragmatic, and thus including onyl aesthetic arts such as music or painting) are not at all demonstrated to be negatively affected by rewards. All the contrary, our everyday experience indicates that the more you pay an artist, the more they are enabled to craft.
Yes, we've thought about it, and anyone who's somewhat rational has realized that everyone loses without copyrights.
Consider, first, the Marxist system of communism. Therein, no one profits: they are all given the same [insert thing of value here, i.e. food, money, etc.] no matter how they perform. As a [proven] result, the culture stagnates economically, socially, artistically and scientifically.
The elimination of copyrights is tantamount to instituting a Marxist model of economics of intellectual property. If I'm a producer of intellectual property, all my money comes from one of the following, Wages, Royalties and Contractual fees.
Wages refers to the idea that I may be simply receiving an hourly fee for my work. This is like a company code-writer. They're already shown to feel less motivated than when they have a stake in their creations.
Contractual Fees are akin to wages, and are a lump-sum payment for a peice of intellectual property.
Royalties are repeating payments each time a peice of intellectual property is employed. This is the best way to attach value to intellectual property, as you receive payment directly in correspondance to value of a product. Thus, the incentive to create new intellectual property is the greatest in a royalty system.
The ability to negotiate these fees is key for producers of intellectual property, as they can only negotiate the value of that property based on their ability to control the use/reproduction of it. If you cannot contorl that use/reproduction, then why should anyone pay for what you created? They can just use it for free.
First of all: it _is_ possible to control all aspects of your childrens' lives. How? Keep them at home, 24-7, and raise them in isolation.
Don't want to do that? Then you're going to have to equip them to deal with the real world: they'll need the social skills to understand the violence, sex, drugs and other issues in the real world as a whole. How do you do that? Expose them to those problems, explain them, and help them to understand why they exist.
No well-balanced child ever killed people, stole things or any other crime. If you're well-raised, you're a good person, end of story. My parents raised me well, and that quite simply is why I dont have the impulse to be a criminal.
Unless your child is mentally ill, you have no excuse if you raise them wrong.
I'm not looking troll: I'm not trying to tell you how to raise your kids, or accuse anyone of having bad parents. I'm here to make the point that we need to take responsibility for our actions, including raising our children.
The truth is, wearable displays will be a huge target marget in the second or third generation of these devices.
A significant amount of money is spent by teenagers and young adults to buy tech gadgets. Just look at the massive amounts spent on video games and personal audio devices [by these demographics].
Now considering the number of people in this group that also go to parties/concerts/raves, I dont think it will be long before your shirt has a wireless hookup so that the DJ at whatever club you're at can project a Geiss/Milkdrop/whatever visualization not just with light, but through your clothes. Imagine being pill'ing and looking around to see the world itself as the visualization?
Also, lets not forget the obligatory link back to the concept of adaptive camoflauge for military/police? Anyone go the url handy?
This brings up something interesting: if you look at a new Philips digital tv, you'll probably find a feature called DNM (Dynamic Natural Motion). What this does is, it takes a video-source of any type and ups it to 60fps, interpolating [quite well] between frames. The result is that even things shot for film (i.e. originally 24fps, now on DVD at 29.97fps with no interpolation) look like they were shot at 60fps, resulting in the visual feel of [home]video! Its disturbing at first (it feels cheap, some how, since we associate the look of video as being cheaper than film), but after watching for awhile it becomes addictive...
Part of why film [at the aformentioned 24fps] seems smooth is that motion blur is recorded on the film: when an object is moving too quickly for hte light to capture a still image on the film [due to exposure], it captures a blur. Our brain loves to use that blur to assemble motion. Since computers lack this motion blur, they need more fps.
Its true that there's a maximum frame-rate that the human brain (not eye) can perceive. Its somewhere between 60-120 in most humans. Film is displayed [in the US] at 24 frames per second, video is 29.97. This leads to the common misconception that 30fps is the max framerate that means anything.
There is also the fact that these are "average" frame rates: if your average fps is 30, you're going to quite often be getting sub-30 fps, resulting in jerkiness. So the ideal FPS is somewhere around an average of 75-135, so as to remain in perfect smoothness. (this refers to your question about why a gamer would want a new card).
It gets less protection for the same reason that experts aren't trusted for their education:
Most Americans are resentful of those who are either more successful or more educated than they. One needn't look far to see how many people are always happy when a big company makes a mistake - not because of the mistake, but because they resent the size. Similarly, its a common (and terrifically incorrect) argument to say that an expert isn't a valid source of info, by simply dismissing their education as irrelevant. How many people have you heard using the phrase "egg-head"? Its just another way of dismissing your own failures, to say something like that...
Its hard [to imagine imaginary mass] only because of a nominative problem. "Imaginary" only means that the mass occupies a perpendicular dimension. While its not _easy_, you could conceive of mass occupying alternate dimensions (this would, of course, blur into the other categories I already described).
No, some matter could (according to both relativity and quantum physics, not to mention string physics) have not only negative energy (and thus negative mass), but also travel through different dimensions in different directions.
Tachyon's, the result of solving Einstein's equations for an object travelling faster than light, would have negative mass (but positive energy) and would travel backwards through time. Before you say it, yes its impossible to accelerate to lightspeed. On the other hand, there's no reason a certain class of particles couldn't come into existence at faster than light speeds.
Kaluza-Klein particles, a recent idea, are another option for dark matter. They're so-named because they're believed to travel primarily through the 9 folded-up dimensions of string theory. (Kaluza and Klein devised the mathetical methods and theories which explain how string theory functions in an 11 or 12 dimensional universe). These particles, but flitting in and out of "our" four dimensions would only be weakly interacting (and thus qualify as dark matter) but would interact quite powerfully when they were present (due to extremely high mass).
You're somewhat incorrect. What you refer to - matter with negative energy or "quintessence" - is not what is meant by dark matter. It is "dark energy". I know the name seems to imply similarity or identity, but they're different.
Dark matter is the [largely] undetectable matter that is proposed to contain a significant portion of the mass of the universe; the mass which is unaccounted for by visible matter. There are three main [current] theories about this:
MACHOs. I forget what the acronym stands for, but these are essentially hugely massive particles which are still small. As such, they account for a significant amount of mass without occupying much volume in space. This lack of significant volume (and their relative seperation) makes them difficult to detect.
WIMPs. This acronym was chosen to compete with MACHOs, actually, in a fit of playfullness by scientists. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These are actually quite similar to machos, but are formulated differently mathematically.
Massive neutrinos. Without getting too much into theory, there are many types of neutrinos. If some of them are at all massive (and current experiments suggests that they are) then their massive numbers could account for a significant amount of the missing mass.
Slashdot Mirror
You might think that, but you'd be incorrect. All the freedom of speech clause says is that the government will make no law abridging your ability to express free speech. It is perfectly legal for the government not to help other people hear your speech.
In legal terms, this is the distinction between a positive law and a negative law: a positive law demands action (the law requiring that you protect your children, for example, from negligence), whereas a negative law prohibits action (laws prohibiting murder, for example). The 1st amendment clause is a negative law prohibiting the expression of speech, not its reception.
Frankly, this sort of misinterpretation is civil law is not usually a jury-decision. Instead, its left in the hands of judges or arbitrators who are trained in the reading and interpretation of law and jurisprudence.
Not only are you incorrect, but clearly have no background here.
I did not say that the government had a right to prevent you from accessing information. What I said was, it has a right to prevent you from accessing that information using their equipment. The difference is, you can access it fine through all the other legal methods, but the government doens't have to help you access it.
I think that those responsible deserve at least a little credit for being so forward with not only the nature of the problem but their failure to attend to this earlier. It would be simple to take a MS-esque stance on this, but instead they're taking the bull by the horns.
Frankly, given the time that this exploit has been known amongst the internet community, I'm shocked UT servers haven't yet been utilized maliciously in this way.
Okay, first, colleges [both state-funded and private] have been shown to have a vested interest in not only discussing pornography [i.e. within the context of art, sociology, english, philosophy, history, science among other fields], so while it might be appropriate to have Playboy and other erotica in a college library [which, by nature, is focused if not limited to college students, i.e. those old enough to legally acquire pornography] that isn't an argument for it being in all libraries.
Second, as pointed out, the first amendment makes no discussion of morality whatsoever. Moreover it does not prohibit state-sponsored religion. It prohibits sponsoring one religion over another. In other words, if a state or the federal government wants to sponsor one religion through some resource, it must make that resource equally available to all other religions. This, of course, is why they dont [ostensibly] support a specific religion: there are a billion other religions that would lay economic claim against them.
Okay, this is a common mistake: the first amendment makes it illegal to restrict the creation and broadcast of speech [however defined], but does not make it illegal to restrict government-provided means of accessing that speech.
In other words, its not censoring speech to limit the access in the libraries [I believe], but it would be censoring speech to limit the ability of certain individuals/groups to create that speech.
Fact is, you dont have a right to hear other people's speech, if you're hearing it through a service that the government isn't required to provide.
Quick note: heat death would be if the universe was becoming hotter and hotter. This is more of a cold-death, AFAIK.
You're a fool. A notable point in Dune is that there are no computers. In fact, Herbert explains that millenia before there was a robotic revolution, leading to a banning of computers of any sophistication. The Mentats are human computers, performing such calculations, although they are an industrial society. Spaceflight is accomplished through the mental powers of Navigators to bend space.
Your post was completely off-topic and irrelevant.
Sorry if this is harsh, but you shouldn't post just to post.
It says something about a show that the best episodes are almost exclusively from several years ago.
Before I'm modded down for heresy, I adore The Simpsons. Yet, I still believe that the show was far greated from seasons 3-7 than from 8-today. The show has lost its ability to be intellectual at the same degree, in losing writers such as Conan O'Brian.
Frankly, I'm not entirely sure they should keep making the series: Homer is now retarded (whereas he's merely simple in the beginning), Homer has no Job (or actually, he's had well over 70 jobs, as listed in a recent episode...which means roughly a quarter of the episodes have been "Homer becomes a "), they no longer make subtle erudite references...its falling apart.
Among other ways, you could have something analagous to how in some current EULAs you have to scroll to the bottom of the text to find the "yes I agree" button. In the case of the paper, for example, you could have a sticker over the "I agree" part, where a sensor detects whether or not it was exposed to light, possibly remembering the timestamp, etc.
Outsourcing is a bad thing: Outsource Australia is a company I've worked with that dramatically increases the value and productivity of a company when they work to refine their procedures, structures.
I think the fear that our [american] economy will collapse if jobs move out of the geographic country is naive, in that it doesn't properly examine whether or not the money actually flows in different directions: if the money still comes into the US eventually, it works.
Spider-man got organic webshooters for a simple reason: the web-fluid constitutes one of the greatest industrial design breakthroughs in the last century, if not in all history. Its a compressed compound (hundreds of kilometers of the webs fit in a small box that fits on his wrist) that upon exposure to air dries instantly (or can remain partially sticky if desired) and becomes stronger than steel. Moreover, it dissolves into insignificant matter at about an hour's time.
Now...do we really want to have the protagonist of a story - with no more science background than simple high school stuff and personal hobby interest - to develop such a compound when 3M cant?
You'll note the following:
Lucas wrote ANH on his own, but Empire (usually regarded as the best of the series) was primarily written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas only "wrote" a small story treatment (that was several dozen pages long), which was dramatically changed and fleshed out by the real writers. The only reason GL even got credit was because it was "his" film, so he wrote the credits. His contribution was similar to James Cameron's contribution to the recent Spider Man film (all that remained from JC's treatment was the organic webshooters, incidentally).
Jedi, which uncoincidentally is usually rated between Empire and ANH, was done similarly although with only Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas basically phoned in a concept, and Kasdan pulled it off. Most importantly, it was Lucas who insisted on the introduction of the god-awful Ewoks [as opposed to Kasdan who wanted to have Kashyyk, the homeworld of the wookies - Lucas dind't think they were "cute" enough, given our experience with Chewbacca].
Unsurprisingly, the "new" trilogy is written solely by Lucas. He no longer is tempered by good writing, and so we have the largely panned films "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones".
There's also a parallel to be drawn to Sony (as discussed by the recent WiReD article, and as linked to here on /.) that keeping cooporating companies seperated (like the Lucas* units were) in order to prevent mutually exclusive or mutually confusing goals.
Consider the artists at LucasArts who worked independently from LucasFilm and SkywalkerSound. While they may often have reason to work together, some people might find it easier (if they're from, say, Dreamworks) to work with ILM if its not attached directly to LucasFilm.
No, thats not quite right. Kazaa lite has legal uses in the form of legitimate sharing of appropriately licensed material. For example, if I'm a musician, I can upload my own music. Similarly, you can acquire copyrighted material for fair-use purposes (i.e. searching for a specific image for a school project, etc.). The presence of legal uses for a peice of equipment was all you needed, until recently, to guarentee the right to produce it. This was essentially Sony's argument ages ago in the home VCR disputes, and was supported by the courts.
Kazaa's new argument is seperate from this: they claim that the sister-app to Kazaa, Altnet, is an entirely legal (i.e. no illegal purposes possible) means of profit-making for Kazaa. Moreover, they claim that it offers a means to directly cut the profits of those companies which are suing Kazaa. These two points together mean that they're able to claim that the suing companies (i.e. rcaa, etc.) are not out to protect their copyrights legally, but are instead attempting to act as an illegal trust seeking to protect their monopoly.
Its quite ballsy, in my opinion, but it just might work.
There's an erroneous comparison to be made between imprisoning people for drugs (a criminal violation currently) and for violating copyright (a civil violation). You cannot be imprisoned for violation of civil law, only criminal law.
I'll grant you that many people, myself included, believe drugs should be regulated under civil and not criminal law, but that's besides the point.
Moreover, I have a strong disagreement with the article you link to. While its clearly true that children engage in activities more due to personal interest than reward, it is _not_ shown to be the case with professional artists. Again, your example about the internet and open-coding is an erroneous one. If GNU/Linux was producing music, that would be one thing. You'll notice, its not, and neither is its community. Part of that is the membership: there may be fewer artists, etc. Another part is the distribution system: it may be too difficult for any such musicians to be getting proper attention. The final part though is that creative goods which have no practical result (thus excluding programming which is often pragmatic, and thus including onyl aesthetic arts such as music or painting) are not at all demonstrated to be negatively affected by rewards. All the contrary, our everyday experience indicates that the more you pay an artist, the more they are enabled to craft.
Yes, we've thought about it, and anyone who's somewhat rational has realized that everyone loses without copyrights.
Consider, first, the Marxist system of communism. Therein, no one profits: they are all given the same [insert thing of value here, i.e. food, money, etc.] no matter how they perform. As a [proven] result, the culture stagnates economically, socially, artistically and scientifically.
The elimination of copyrights is tantamount to instituting a Marxist model of economics of intellectual property. If I'm a producer of intellectual property, all my money comes from one of the following, Wages, Royalties and Contractual fees.
Wages refers to the idea that I may be simply receiving an hourly fee for my work. This is like a company code-writer. They're already shown to feel less motivated than when they have a stake in their creations.
Contractual Fees are akin to wages, and are a lump-sum payment for a peice of intellectual property.
Royalties are repeating payments each time a peice of intellectual property is employed. This is the best way to attach value to intellectual property, as you receive payment directly in correspondance to value of a product. Thus, the incentive to create new intellectual property is the greatest in a royalty system.
The ability to negotiate these fees is key for producers of intellectual property, as they can only negotiate the value of that property based on their ability to control the use/reproduction of it. If you cannot contorl that use/reproduction, then why should anyone pay for what you created? They can just use it for free.
First of all: it _is_ possible to control all aspects of your childrens' lives. How? Keep them at home, 24-7, and raise them in isolation.
Don't want to do that? Then you're going to have to equip them to deal with the real world: they'll need the social skills to understand the violence, sex, drugs and other issues in the real world as a whole. How do you do that? Expose them to those problems, explain them, and help them to understand why they exist.
No well-balanced child ever killed people, stole things or any other crime. If you're well-raised, you're a good person, end of story. My parents raised me well, and that quite simply is why I dont have the impulse to be a criminal.
Unless your child is mentally ill, you have no excuse if you raise them wrong.
I'm not looking troll: I'm not trying to tell you how to raise your kids, or accuse anyone of having bad parents. I'm here to make the point that we need to take responsibility for our actions, including raising our children.
The truth is, wearable displays will be a huge target marget in the second or third generation of these devices.
A significant amount of money is spent by teenagers and young adults to buy tech gadgets. Just look at the massive amounts spent on video games and personal audio devices [by these demographics].
Now considering the number of people in this group that also go to parties/concerts/raves, I dont think it will be long before your shirt has a wireless hookup so that the DJ at whatever club you're at can project a Geiss/Milkdrop/whatever visualization not just with light, but through your clothes. Imagine being pill'ing and looking around to see the world itself as the visualization?
Also, lets not forget the obligatory link back to the concept of adaptive camoflauge for military/police? Anyone go the url handy?
This brings up something interesting: if you look at a new Philips digital tv, you'll probably find a feature called DNM (Dynamic Natural Motion). What this does is, it takes a video-source of any type and ups it to 60fps, interpolating [quite well] between frames. The result is that even things shot for film (i.e. originally 24fps, now on DVD at 29.97fps with no interpolation) look like they were shot at 60fps, resulting in the visual feel of [home]video! Its disturbing at first (it feels cheap, some how, since we associate the look of video as being cheaper than film), but after watching for awhile it becomes addictive...
Oh, a quick addendum re: fps.
Part of why film [at the aformentioned 24fps] seems smooth is that motion blur is recorded on the film: when an object is moving too quickly for hte light to capture a still image on the film [due to exposure], it captures a blur. Our brain loves to use that blur to assemble motion. Since computers lack this motion blur, they need more fps.
Its true that there's a maximum frame-rate that the human brain (not eye) can perceive. Its somewhere between 60-120 in most humans. Film is displayed [in the US] at 24 frames per second, video is 29.97. This leads to the common misconception that 30fps is the max framerate that means anything.
There is also the fact that these are "average" frame rates: if your average fps is 30, you're going to quite often be getting sub-30 fps, resulting in jerkiness. So the ideal FPS is somewhere around an average of 75-135, so as to remain in perfect smoothness. (this refers to your question about why a gamer would want a new card).
It gets less protection for the same reason that experts aren't trusted for their education:
Most Americans are resentful of those who are either more successful or more educated than they. One needn't look far to see how many people are always happy when a big company makes a mistake - not because of the mistake, but because they resent the size. Similarly, its a common (and terrifically incorrect) argument to say that an expert isn't a valid source of info, by simply dismissing their education as irrelevant. How many people have you heard using the phrase "egg-head"? Its just another way of dismissing your own failures, to say something like that...
Its hard [to imagine imaginary mass] only because of a nominative problem. "Imaginary" only means that the mass occupies a perpendicular dimension. While its not _easy_, you could conceive of mass occupying alternate dimensions (this would, of course, blur into the other categories I already described).
No, some matter could (according to both relativity and quantum physics, not to mention string physics) have not only negative energy (and thus negative mass), but also travel through different dimensions in different directions.
Tachyon's, the result of solving Einstein's equations for an object travelling faster than light, would have negative mass (but positive energy) and would travel backwards through time. Before you say it, yes its impossible to accelerate to lightspeed. On the other hand, there's no reason a certain class of particles couldn't come into existence at faster than light speeds.
Kaluza-Klein particles, a recent idea, are another option for dark matter. They're so-named because they're believed to travel primarily through the 9 folded-up dimensions of string theory. (Kaluza and Klein devised the mathetical methods and theories which explain how string theory functions in an 11 or 12 dimensional universe). These particles, but flitting in and out of "our" four dimensions would only be weakly interacting (and thus qualify as dark matter) but would interact quite powerfully when they were present (due to extremely high mass).
You're somewhat incorrect. What you refer to - matter with negative energy or "quintessence" - is not what is meant by dark matter. It is "dark energy". I know the name seems to imply similarity or identity, but they're different.
Dark matter is the [largely] undetectable matter that is proposed to contain a significant portion of the mass of the universe; the mass which is unaccounted for by visible matter. There are three main [current] theories about this:
MACHOs. I forget what the acronym stands for, but these are essentially hugely massive particles which are still small. As such, they account for a significant amount of mass without occupying much volume in space. This lack of significant volume (and their relative seperation) makes them difficult to detect.
WIMPs. This acronym was chosen to compete with MACHOs, actually, in a fit of playfullness by scientists. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These are actually quite similar to machos, but are formulated differently mathematically.
Massive neutrinos. Without getting too much into theory, there are many types of neutrinos. If some of them are at all massive (and current experiments suggests that they are) then their massive numbers could account for a significant amount of the missing mass.