Evidence yes. But what he kurzweilfreak was on about is repeatable evidence. You might get a lot of random shit happen, but it's a bit harder to get the same thing to happen more than once. And that's the problem with trying to investigate these phenomenon scientifically.
There is a lot of video and audio "evidence" out there, done during independent investigations. The problem is figuring out what's real and what's explainable or fraudulent. The other problem is figuring out, aside from video/audio evidence, what kind of other measurements can be done to become more comprehensive in this study. Which I think was the story's question.
Really. And you know that how exactly? From your own scientific investigations? It's amazing to me that geeks and scientists equate "ghosts" with deception, fraud, and religious hocus-pocus.
Which is fair I guess. We've all had issues we've been immovable rocks on, our feet firmly planted in ideological surety. And there's certainly been more than a bit of dubious evidence presented. But that's as fair to the subject at hand as saying cold fusion is a fraudulent idea because two guys claimed they could do it in their kitchen sink.
Once you're sitting in your apartment with someone, and suddenly a candle flies several feet off a shelf as you're looking at it, then you might begin to realize there's some truth to the idea that there are unseen forces operating in our environment. (happened to me) What these forces are requires investigation that "professional" scientists don't seem to have the balls to take on, so we have a lot of amateur investigators. If amateur astronomers can find exoplanets and supernovas, then I say more power to these paranormal investigators, as long as they approach it from a skeptical, scientific POV. We need some answers to what's going on. There is physical evidence to be found; it's not just delusion at work. Hell, there's a lot more evidence to be found than dark matter! And yet that's already accepted readily as near fact. Keep your minds cautious, but open and curious.
I'm not sure why your comment is modded funny. I thought the extreme ageism in the tech industry had died out, but perhaps the Zuckerberg factor has brought it back. Frankly, most of the successful startups I've met with were not founded by 19 year-olds, but 29 year-olds.
So let's get pragmatic here. While a pain, especially when handling e-bills, closing one's account is relatively easy. But finding a bank that would denounce what Bank of America has done will be a whole lot tougher. In fact, I'd say the best we can do is move funds to a new bank and hope they don't do evil. Perhaps a credit union?
I deleted all my bookmarks and closed my account. Yahoo is trying to sell delicious. Most of the money they expect to receive is not from the delicious codebase, but from all the user accounts and bookmark data. If you want to help them make money with your data after being such asshats about the service, go ahead. But I say, fuck 'em.
I wouldn't deny that some people enjoyed it. I was speaking from the perspective of someone who feels the first UT defined the blueprint for the series. Adding vehicles and open levels was a pretty severe departure from that gameplay formula. I like donuts, but that doesn't mean I want donuts in my cereal. YMMV.
I played the hell out of the first Unreal Tournament. The combination of interesting weapons, good level design, the teleport disk ("translocator"), and a great modding engine just made it an awesome package, and the community was quite vibrant. I was involved in one of the better clans at the time. Unfortunately they listened too much to whiney fans and nerfed the teleport disk, whom users were using...ahem... to its full potential (telefrags ahoy!). Nerfing the disk changed CTF game pace from basketball to football. Still a fun game, but that was the start of a slow decent.
The second iteration (UT 2003) in the series added some goofy combo system, and the feel of character movement was a bit more Quake-like. Level design wasn't as good as the first installment. Weapons didn't feel as impactful. A lot of UT players I talked to at the time felt similarly, but we played it because it was still basically UT. I got bored of it eventually.
The third iteration (UT 2004) jumped the shark, adding vehicles to the gameplay with huge outdoor levels. I guess they were feeling Halo-envy. It was a piece of shit. My memory is a bit hazy, because I played it only briefly, but the character movement and weapons felt even more Quake-like. And I didn't even bother trying UT3.
This is what happens when a company doesn't protect a game's "secret sauce" -- what makes it unique. Or perhaps Epic never knew why the first UT was so special. But more likely, they didn't care about UT and merely used it as a vehicle to showcase new Unreal Engine features. Sort of how advertising and reporting is kept separate at newspapers, so too should engine sales and creative development be kept apart.
Nope. Fortunately it was one of my lowest-tier passwords I used on sites where I was less concerned about hackery.
I agree that they get some bonus points for an export option (although it is not easily discoverable). But they easily could have not. They easily could have turned off the service tomorrow with a "thank you" e-mail. This is why I'm excited about the kind of paradigm that Diaspora suggests; a kind of distributed network of services where every user handles their own data.
The idea that any cloud-based service is free is a bit of a misnomer I think. Any time you post data to one, you trade the use of the service for insight and/or facts about your life.
Yup, paste fail. Sadly slashdot still doesn't allow post-submission editing.
Cloud-based services -- put your trust in the air!
on
Yahoo! To Close Delicious
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If this is not a tailor-made argument for not trusting cloud-based services, I don't know what is. I don't care how "do no evil" your corporation-of-choice is; you're in their playground. They make the rules and break the rules at their whim (or the government's whim).
Export your bookmarks while you still can: curl --user petsounds:sebad0h -o delicious_bookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'
Assange was originally a programmer; overinflated ego comes with the territory.
It's easy to armchair quarterback Wikileaks from your computer, isn't it? Assange is taking a very real stand with very real consequences against some very nasty people working in very compromised governments. You need to be a bit insane, a bit self-important, and more than a bit strong on your convictions and courage to have a mindset that enables to think this is a logical idea. You may not like the way Assange operates, but did you see anyone else do it? No? Exactly.
I read the linked Phrack file (brought me back to my BBS days), interesting read. Here's the relevant passage. Note the bolded text:
Not all magstripe cards operate on a digital encoding method. SOME cards encode AUDIO TONES, as opposed to digital data. These cards are usually used with old, outdated, industrial-strength equipment where security is not an issue and not a great deal of data need be encoded on the card. Some subway passes are like this. They require only expiration data on the magstripe, and a short series of varying frequencies and durations are enough. Frequencies will vary with the speed of swiping, but RELATIVE frequencies will remain the same (for instance, tone 1 is twice the freq. of tone 2, and.5 the freq of tone 3, regardless of the original frequencies!). Grab an oscilloscope to visualize the tones, and listen to them on your stereo. I haven't experimented with these types of cards at all.
Only being used with outdated equipment where security isn't an issue? This was written in 1992! Assuming the format hasn't changed much on these new systems, why the hell are ATMs now(still?) using this format?
Trust me, I know all about the audiophiles who swear by their snake-oil germanium-forged vacuum-levitated ion-energized patch cables to justify the expenditure. I'm not one of those people. I just play and record music.
It seems like you think human ears and minds are created from a single, non-variable spec sheet. Some people just have an ability to better resolve differences in audio signals than others. Of course, source material with a wider frequency range reveals the defects in compressed audio more. So, could you fool me on some samples? Perhaps! But most of the time I can certainly tell.
Well, be surprised then, because I can definitely tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a CD on a good stereo system. And I can definitely tell the difference between a lossless master file and a CD pressing. That 16 bit quantization and the frequency range clamping of CDs certainly cause degradation of the transients that give our brain more information about the sound we're hearing. I think the problem is, most people are listening with shitty systems or audio delivery devices (earbuds) that to most people the 192kbps mp3s sound just fine (and then wonder why their ears get "tired" so fast).
Not to say that vinyl mastering doesn't have its own problems, but a good mastering and vinyl presser can minimize that. And even with pristine digital audio we still have problems with bad DACs (or ADCs in the case of vinyl and most digital-based consumer amps), but the converters are at least a fixable problem from the consumer end. With vinyl, at least we can find a solution to preserve the extra frequency range as it comes out of whatever speakers we employ. The CD, and mp3s for that matter, well there's just no way to get those lost frequencies back, no matter how good our stereo is.
This exhibition is probably indeed naff, to use the artist's local parlance, but it is a truth that most of the early web material is basically gone. archive.org started archiving web material in 1996, but there was a good three to four years of content prior to that, as the first web browser NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was publicly released in 1993.
Prior to that there was a proto-web available through the gopher protocol and WAIS database interface. I doubt most any of that has been preserved.
There were some interesting MUDs, but they were like text-based MMORPGs. The real zietgiest of text-based role-playing was centered on MUSHes and MOOs. There was a Star Trek:TNG MOO which had a full ship combat system. There were no graphics, only coordinate locations of ships and damage assessments. The rest was up to you. I got to the point where my brain could instantaneously figure out what angle to turn my ship to fire on an enemy ship, or what angle to turn my ship to present my enemy with my strongest shields. I once (with the help of my engineer) took out 13 player-controlled capital ships with one Klingon heavy cruiser. I still remember one battle where I had entered a nebula and two Romulan cruisers surrounded me. If you got off your photon torpedoes as they were in the process of decloaking, you could do some significant damage. Through some skill and luck, I managed to keep them wounded and at bay until the server went down. Afterwards, the commander of the heavy cruiser complimented me on my skill (though with a requisite amount of Romulan snarkiness ). These interactions were much more compelling than any commercial MMORPG I've played, and sadly it seems these games are meant for the digital dustbin.
Ironically, Adobe used LLVM for their ill-fated Flash -> iPhone project to take Actionscript bytecode and cross-compile it to ARM. "Do what I say, not what I do."
Well, for starters, you can't play more than one sound at a time with HTML5. So either you'll have to lose the music or the sound effects. Second, I highly doubt you could produce something that smooth and responsive with Canvas and Javascript. Flash's pixel-level bitmap control make blitting operations much faster than pasting objects onto a Canvas. And AS3 is just a lot faster than Javascript due to the strict typing. Also, while you could probably build this game engine in JS, it wouldn't be pretty, as JS doesn't have real classes and OOP is a joke. So while the JS developer would be working on 1.0, the Flash developer would already be done and onto the next project, with a reusable game engine framework.
Now, take it to the mobile space. Have you seen Canvas demos on the iPhone? Slow as molasses. I reckon this game on Android running Flash Player 10.1 (whenever they actually release the damn thing) will be a bit more usable.
It seems like your reading is probably right, but I would hope they would at least anonymize the data. It seems like quite the invasion. Right now, one can only find tweets from a few weeks prior in Twitter's public search. Now anyone can request any prior tweet.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidence yes. But what he kurzweilfreak was on about is repeatable evidence. You might get a lot of random shit happen, but it's a bit harder to get the same thing to happen more than once. And that's the problem with trying to investigate these phenomenon scientifically.
Well, hopefully you'll have your own "anecdote" as you put it someday.
Repeatable evidence is a bit hard when we don't know the forces at work here. Doesn't mean that it's not worth investigating.
Heh. Unfortunately I was completely sober at the time, as was the person I was with.
There is a lot of video and audio "evidence" out there, done during independent investigations. The problem is figuring out what's real and what's explainable or fraudulent. The other problem is figuring out, aside from video/audio evidence, what kind of other measurements can be done to become more comprehensive in this study. Which I think was the story's question.
Really. And you know that how exactly? From your own scientific investigations? It's amazing to me that geeks and scientists equate "ghosts" with deception, fraud, and religious hocus-pocus.
Which is fair I guess. We've all had issues we've been immovable rocks on, our feet firmly planted in ideological surety. And there's certainly been more than a bit of dubious evidence presented. But that's as fair to the subject at hand as saying cold fusion is a fraudulent idea because two guys claimed they could do it in their kitchen sink.
Once you're sitting in your apartment with someone, and suddenly a candle flies several feet off a shelf as you're looking at it, then you might begin to realize there's some truth to the idea that there are unseen forces operating in our environment. (happened to me) What these forces are requires investigation that "professional" scientists don't seem to have the balls to take on, so we have a lot of amateur investigators. If amateur astronomers can find exoplanets and supernovas, then I say more power to these paranormal investigators, as long as they approach it from a skeptical, scientific POV. We need some answers to what's going on. There is physical evidence to be found; it's not just delusion at work. Hell, there's a lot more evidence to be found than dark matter! And yet that's already accepted readily as near fact. Keep your minds cautious, but open and curious.
I'm not sure why your comment is modded funny. I thought the extreme ageism in the tech industry had died out, but perhaps the Zuckerberg factor has brought it back. Frankly, most of the successful startups I've met with were not founded by 19 year-olds, but 29 year-olds.
So let's get pragmatic here. While a pain, especially when handling e-bills, closing one's account is relatively easy. But finding a bank that would denounce what Bank of America has done will be a whole lot tougher. In fact, I'd say the best we can do is move funds to a new bank and hope they don't do evil. Perhaps a credit union?
I deleted all my bookmarks and closed my account. Yahoo is trying to sell delicious. Most of the money they expect to receive is not from the delicious codebase, but from all the user accounts and bookmark data. If you want to help them make money with your data after being such asshats about the service, go ahead. But I say, fuck 'em.
I wouldn't deny that some people enjoyed it. I was speaking from the perspective of someone who feels the first UT defined the blueprint for the series. Adding vehicles and open levels was a pretty severe departure from that gameplay formula. I like donuts, but that doesn't mean I want donuts in my cereal. YMMV.
I played the hell out of the first Unreal Tournament. The combination of interesting weapons, good level design, the teleport disk ("translocator"), and a great modding engine just made it an awesome package, and the community was quite vibrant. I was involved in one of the better clans at the time. Unfortunately they listened too much to whiney fans and nerfed the teleport disk, whom users were using...ahem... to its full potential (telefrags ahoy!). Nerfing the disk changed CTF game pace from basketball to football. Still a fun game, but that was the start of a slow decent.
The second iteration (UT 2003) in the series added some goofy combo system, and the feel of character movement was a bit more Quake-like. Level design wasn't as good as the first installment. Weapons didn't feel as impactful. A lot of UT players I talked to at the time felt similarly, but we played it because it was still basically UT. I got bored of it eventually.
The third iteration (UT 2004) jumped the shark, adding vehicles to the gameplay with huge outdoor levels. I guess they were feeling Halo-envy. It was a piece of shit. My memory is a bit hazy, because I played it only briefly, but the character movement and weapons felt even more Quake-like. And I didn't even bother trying UT3.
This is what happens when a company doesn't protect a game's "secret sauce" -- what makes it unique. Or perhaps Epic never knew why the first UT was so special. But more likely, they didn't care about UT and merely used it as a vehicle to showcase new Unreal Engine features. Sort of how advertising and reporting is kept separate at newspapers, so too should engine sales and creative development be kept apart.
Nope. Fortunately it was one of my lowest-tier passwords I used on sites where I was less concerned about hackery.
I agree that they get some bonus points for an export option (although it is not easily discoverable). But they easily could have not. They easily could have turned off the service tomorrow with a "thank you" e-mail. This is why I'm excited about the kind of paradigm that Diaspora suggests; a kind of distributed network of services where every user handles their own data.
The idea that any cloud-based service is free is a bit of a misnomer I think. Any time you post data to one, you trade the use of the service for insight and/or facts about your life.
Yup, paste fail. Sadly slashdot still doesn't allow post-submission editing.
If this is not a tailor-made argument for not trusting cloud-based services, I don't know what is. I don't care how "do no evil" your corporation-of-choice is; you're in their playground. They make the rules and break the rules at their whim (or the government's whim).
Export your bookmarks while you still can: curl --user petsounds:sebad0h -o delicious_bookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'
Assange was originally a programmer; overinflated ego comes with the territory.
It's easy to armchair quarterback Wikileaks from your computer, isn't it? Assange is taking a very real stand with very real consequences against some very nasty people working in very compromised governments. You need to be a bit insane, a bit self-important, and more than a bit strong on your convictions and courage to have a mindset that enables to think this is a logical idea. You may not like the way Assange operates, but did you see anyone else do it? No? Exactly.
I read the linked Phrack file (brought me back to my BBS days), interesting read. Here's the relevant passage. Note the bolded text:
Not all magstripe cards operate on a digital encoding method. SOME cards .5 the freq of
encode AUDIO TONES, as opposed to digital data. These cards are usually
used with old, outdated, industrial-strength equipment where security is not an
issue and not a great deal of data need be encoded on the card. Some subway
passes are like this. They require only expiration data on the magstripe, and
a short series of varying frequencies and durations are enough. Frequencies
will vary with the speed of swiping, but RELATIVE frequencies will remain the
same (for instance, tone 1 is twice the freq. of tone 2, and
tone 3, regardless of the original frequencies!). Grab an oscilloscope to
visualize the tones, and listen to them on your stereo. I haven't experimented
with these types of cards at all.
Only being used with outdated equipment where security isn't an issue? This was written in 1992! Assuming the format hasn't changed much on these new systems, why the hell are ATMs now(still?) using this format?
Trust me, I know all about the audiophiles who swear by their snake-oil germanium-forged vacuum-levitated ion-energized patch cables to justify the expenditure. I'm not one of those people. I just play and record music.
It seems like you think human ears and minds are created from a single, non-variable spec sheet. Some people just have an ability to better resolve differences in audio signals than others. Of course, source material with a wider frequency range reveals the defects in compressed audio more. So, could you fool me on some samples? Perhaps! But most of the time I can certainly tell.
Well, be surprised then, because I can definitely tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a CD on a good stereo system. And I can definitely tell the difference between a lossless master file and a CD pressing. That 16 bit quantization and the frequency range clamping of CDs certainly cause degradation of the transients that give our brain more information about the sound we're hearing. I think the problem is, most people are listening with shitty systems or audio delivery devices (earbuds) that to most people the 192kbps mp3s sound just fine (and then wonder why their ears get "tired" so fast).
Not to say that vinyl mastering doesn't have its own problems, but a good mastering and vinyl presser can minimize that. And even with pristine digital audio we still have problems with bad DACs (or ADCs in the case of vinyl and most digital-based consumer amps), but the converters are at least a fixable problem from the consumer end. With vinyl, at least we can find a solution to preserve the extra frequency range as it comes out of whatever speakers we employ. The CD, and mp3s for that matter, well there's just no way to get those lost frequencies back, no matter how good our stereo is.
This exhibition is probably indeed naff, to use the artist's local parlance, but it is a truth that most of the early web material is basically gone. archive.org started archiving web material in 1996, but there was a good three to four years of content prior to that, as the first web browser NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was publicly released in 1993.
Prior to that there was a proto-web available through the gopher protocol and WAIS database interface. I doubt most any of that has been preserved.
There were some interesting MUDs, but they were like text-based MMORPGs. The real zietgiest of text-based role-playing was centered on MUSHes and MOOs. There was a Star Trek:TNG MOO which had a full ship combat system. There were no graphics, only coordinate locations of ships and damage assessments. The rest was up to you. I got to the point where my brain could instantaneously figure out what angle to turn my ship to fire on an enemy ship, or what angle to turn my ship to present my enemy with my strongest shields. I once (with the help of my engineer) took out 13 player-controlled capital ships with one Klingon heavy cruiser. I still remember one battle where I had entered a nebula and two Romulan cruisers surrounded me. If you got off your photon torpedoes as they were in the process of decloaking, you could do some significant damage. Through some skill and luck, I managed to keep them wounded and at bay until the server went down. Afterwards, the commander of the heavy cruiser complimented me on my skill (though with a requisite amount of Romulan snarkiness ). These interactions were much more compelling than any commercial MMORPG I've played, and sadly it seems these games are meant for the digital dustbin.
And 10,000 years from now, your Perl script has become the complete works of Shakespeare...
Ironically, Adobe used LLVM for their ill-fated Flash -> iPhone project to take Actionscript bytecode and cross-compile it to ARM. "Do what I say, not what I do."
Well, for starters, you can't play more than one sound at a time with HTML5. So either you'll have to lose the music or the sound effects. Second, I highly doubt you could produce something that smooth and responsive with Canvas and Javascript. Flash's pixel-level bitmap control make blitting operations much faster than pasting objects onto a Canvas. And AS3 is just a lot faster than Javascript due to the strict typing. Also, while you could probably build this game engine in JS, it wouldn't be pretty, as JS doesn't have real classes and OOP is a joke. So while the JS developer would be working on 1.0, the Flash developer would already be done and onto the next project, with a reusable game engine framework.
Now, take it to the mobile space. Have you seen Canvas demos on the iPhone? Slow as molasses. I reckon this game on Android running Flash Player 10.1 (whenever they actually release the damn thing) will be a bit more usable.
It seems like your reading is probably right, but I would hope they would at least anonymize the data. It seems like quite the invasion. Right now, one can only find tweets from a few weeks prior in Twitter's public search. Now anyone can request any prior tweet.
Ah, sorry I misunderstood. That's interesting; you might have a good business opportunity there.