"In soviet union, monitor shoots crossbow". I loved how bent-over the bolt-tips were afterward. Next, there'll be a video of someone using one of those monitors to bash open a Master lock or something.
I don't really consider them "laws". They're the reliable tendencies of the universe. It's like the conversations I have with people who try to convert me to their religion.
Them: You say you don't believe in god because you haven't seen him... but you believe in electrons, don't you, and you've never seen them?
Me: No. I don't believe in them.
Them: You don't believe in electrons?
Me: Like I said... I've never seen one. All I know is that, if I pretend that electrons exist, then I'm able to make all kinds of predictions that I can see. It might turn out that there aren't electrons at all. The universe might be set up completely another way... and our current set of "laws" manage to give us the same set of predictions. So, I only believe in electrons long enough to build a television set, so to speak.
As a scientist, I should be ready to abandon any of these laws when they start failing to predict what I'm seeing... no matter how well it worked up to that point (see "Ultraviolet Catastrophe").
It's like we've been invited to play a board game. We haven't been told the rules... but, by trial and error, we've managed to deduce enough about the gameplay that we're able to get along in the game fairly well. However, I doubt that the rules that we've deduced actually match the ones printed in the book that came with the game.
So, the argument is that the alien race would pre-emptively attack us because we were on a course to develop the capability to do serious harm to them? "Do unto others before they get a chance to do it unto you"? That's completely preposterous. Now, if you said that the aliens would nuke us because we were living on top of some fuel that their entire economy depends upon... and the "pre-emptive defense" was merely the story they spouted at the United Galaxies summits... well, Christ... that happens all the time.
We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem. Have a nice gander people, the solution to this seemingly intractible problem is staring us in the face.
I thought this too. However, in "Crude Awakening", there's a CalTech prof who asserts that, in order to provide all of the world's energy through nuclear, we'd have to build *TEN THOUSAND* of today's highest-capacity operating nuclear plant. Oh.. but that's not the real punchline. The great bit is that, if we actually did that, we'd run out of nuclear fuel in a couple of decades.
Now, I'll grant that I haven't actually checked those numbers... but hearing a CalTech physics prof say them certainly gets me to go so far as to stop asserting that nuclear is the perfect answer to these problems.
Although it would require crunching a *lot* more data (which he probably can't get his hands on), I think it would be more instructive to look at the distribution of numbers chosen by players?
Since you have to share the pot with all other winners, choosing common numbers (like the date, say), can increase your odds of having to share... which probably affects the expected value of your ticket *vastly* more than any statistical anomalies in the distribution of winning numbers.
If the RIAA's main complaint is that Usenet.com is offering access to alt.binaries.*, that's a little pointless. Now that NZB files are all the rage, the various pieces of each posting don't even have to be in one newsgroup, because the reference them by message-id. So, I could chop "Stairway to Heaven" into 20 pieces, post one piece to soc.singles, another piece to alt.flame, etc. etc... and then post the NZB somewhere and any NZB-aware program will be able to go get them. So... trying to shut off alt.binaries isn't going to stop anything.
By your logic, if a person at a DMV "wastes" people's time for long enough, then killing him is okay.
They're not wasting your time if they're providing a service and 50 people are in line to get serviced. They go as fast as they go. If I want to be serviced faster, I'll vote for someone who promises to increase staffing at the DMV. The plebes behind the desk aren't deliberately trying to convert my time into money in their pocket. I've never seen, at the DMV, the stereotypical bimbo filing her nails and chewing gum with her mouth open. Every time, I walk up, show them what I need, I cut a check, they punch the computer a bit, wait a few seconds for the printer to spit out my docs, and I'm done. It's all the *other* people on *my* side of the counter that ruin things. But they're all in line for the same stuff I am... so I don't consider them to be wasting my time any more than I'm wasting theirs.
Traffic lights waste our time, and thus should be removed.
Wrong again. Traffic lights actually increase throughput through busy intersections. If they weren't there, we'd all have to slow way down and cross each intersection with much more care... or we could *not* slow down and cope with a vastly higher accident rate. Both alternatives would increase the amount of time we'd lose.
Your post, which doesn't actually justify killing well, has wasted 30 seconds of my time, and 30 seconds of anyone who reads it.
With Slashdot, you're opting in.... and most people here understand that there's a certain amount of noise that you have to suffer through. Of course, you could counter that, by having an email address, you're opting in for spam... knowing that it "goes with the territory". The difference is that, if I ever get sick of Slashdot, I can just stop going with a minimum of effort yet keep going to other sites that I like. Slashdot isn't going to come after me, following me around all day, filling my head with useless junk.
I know that nobody likes spammers, but why does that make this murder justified?
Well, let's not even look at the monetary cost that it imposes on servers handling the spam mails. Let's just look at the amount of actual *life* consumed. Let's say that it takes you 2 seconds to flag a spam as such and drop it in your spam box. That's 2 man-seconds. The numbers I see thrown around are that these spammers can send out upwards of 100 million spams per day. 2 man-seconds multiplied by 100 million per day comes to 2 million man-seconds a spammer potentially costs the world each day. That's around 1.5 man-years each day. So, if he's in operation for just 50 days, he's already cost the world 75 man-years.... that's 1 man-life.
Now, the first counter-argument to this is probably "Aw... c'mon... but it's spread out over millions of people so it's no big impact on any one person!". To that, I refer back to the mid 80's. Remember when there were a few years of some clever programmer hacking a bank's computer to transfer 1 penny from a million accounts into his own? Or to move fractions of cents so that the bank statements still rounded to the same numbers? We treated them like they had stolen the net sum a single person, didn't we?
Granted, spam filters catch a lot of the spam. But even if they catch 90%, that leaves us to deal with the remaining 10%... which only means that the guy would have to be in business for 500 days (fewer than two years) to cost a man-life.
Frankly, what *I* am rooting for is for them to capture a spammer, torture him mercilessly and get it all on tape and put it up on YouTube. I doubt that public executions would deter most murders, but I think that seeing and hearing one of their bretheren scream for mercy as each foot is sawn off would give many spammers pause.
Agreed. The Transperformance just takes the cake. I could watch those little bridge tuners adjust all day. You see that once and realize that there's not much more room for improvement.
In case you don't want to read the article, here's the synopsis:
"So, I had this idea for an internet start-up. And it looked good on paper (to me, anyway), and so we went forward with it. Problem was, our suppliers were skittish about how we planned to distribute their goods (I mean, who'd have thought that the record companies would be hesitant to change their business model? That's so out-of-character for them...). Then, a huge competitor to us started offering a product more like what we were offering.
So, now, we're going out of business, but I didn't get filthy rich, yet... and I'm going to have to go back to a regular job and still didn't get a pony!"
Well, cry me a river.
Let me 'splain you something: Any business model that includes "and then, we get the [Record and/or Movie] companies to slightly change their business model", just close up shop now (unless your name is Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or you're the head of some other corporation with so much weight that the RIAA or MPAA have to take you seriously). Second, it might have seemed like a great idea to *you*, but that doesn't count for much. In fact, the simple fact that nobody has tried it *before* you probably means that nobody else thought it could fly.
I agree. This whole scene is one where everyone was erring on the side of idiocy. For starters, the student was being a moron by soapboxing instead of asking a question and going over his time. Okay, so the cops have to haul him out. If he had gone peacefully, then would have ushered him out and told him to stay out and there would have been no arrest. But the kid decides to make even more of a scene. Okay... well, that ups the ante, and the cops are going to really arrest you. Dork!
While this was going on, I think Kerry had a golden opportunity to stick up for freedom of speech (even when it devolves from lip service to, [gasp!], heated political dialogue) by shouting "Unhand that man!" and telling the dork that "I'll answer your question, but only if you can calm down". Instead, you can hear him blabbing about how it's a "good question", and carrying on as if there isn't a takedown happening 50 feet away.
Lastly, the police were idiotic by not carrying him out. They had him pinned, and they could have cuffed and/or zip-tied him and just carried him out the door... but they wanted the people to see the complete subduing process. You can see the female officer bend over to him and command him to calm down before they have to use further measures. Now, I should add that, for MOST of this altercation, there was an officer all set to taze him, but didn't. They wrestled him toward the back. Pinned him. Told him to calm down. They even WARNED him that, if he didn't calm down, they'd taze him (which is why you hear him yelling "Please don't taze me"). And he wouldn't shut up.... so they tazed him. But they should have just dragged his ass out the door like sack of potatoes.
Here where I work, we had a laptop stolen and we sought some kind of tracking solution.
Like some others here, I used ddns. The nice thing about it is that there are already a bunch of free clients for Linux and Windows that integrate nicely with the IP stack and update the dns whenever they see the net.
I actually went a little further and ran my own DDNS server here at work so that a daemon could watch the logs and notify me immediately whenever there was any activity from "laptop28" or whatever. This requires that you generate a ddns key and configure BIND to allow updates, etc. So, it's a bit of a pain... but manageable. Otherwise, your alternative is to use a free service and then poll the external dns server for changes.
Or to put it in terms that are more mathematical, we have a twelve-tone system because of the value of the number 2^(7/12).
Put that expression into your calculator and evaluate it, and you'll get 1.498307. Notice that this is very close to being equal to 1.5? That's important.
Yup. I'd say that the important part is the "very close" part... as in "not exactly". It turns out that there's nothing magic or pre-ordained about the 12-tone scale. It just has the good fortune of coming very close to getting some nice ratios in note frequencies.
7 half-steps 2^(7/12) ("perfect" fifth) gives you frequencies that are pretty close to a 3:2 ratio.
5 half-steps 2^(5/12) ("perfect" fourth) gets you very close to a 4:3
4 half-steps 2^(4/12) (major third) gets you very close to a 5:4
3 half-steps 2^(3/12) (minor third) gets you very close to a 6:5
Now, the 12-tone scale doesn't have a monopoly on these ratios. A 17-tone scale can get within about.2% of the 3:2 and 4:3 ratios (while the 12-tone is within.1%). The 17-tone scale equals the 12-tone's accuracy on the 5:4 ratio (about.8%) but the 18-tone scale beats them both with.4%. And a 19-tone scale gets within 0.01% of the 6:5 ratio (compare to the 12-tone's.9% error).
So, the 12-tone scale doesn't "magically fit", and it doesn't get any of the ratios exactly. It doesn't even get some of them as well as some of the other scales. What it does have going for it, is it seems to be the one that gets listenably close to all of them.
Most of the comments, so far, seem to have been "Of course! If I'm fit, I don't want to pay for someone who's fat and lazy". And it's a valid point, and I agree with it, with two caveats:
If the insurance companies charge the fat people more, that doesn't necessarily mean that your premiums will go down. A few years ago, Bush signed legislation making it harder to declare bankruptcy, claiming that it would keep the credit companies for being forced to pass their losses onto real Americans like you. Well, how much did those interest rates and fees go down since then? None? Uh huh. And what happened to the credit companies' profits? Almost doubled? Uh huh. As another example, if your car payments suddenly dropped in half, would you walk into your employer's office and tell them that they could keep some of your salary because your costs have decreased? Heck, no. So, don't expect the insurance companies to "pass the savings on to you" unless your state has laws that limit the profits that insurance companies can keep.
Second, we have to decide what else falls into the "fat and lazy" category. Frankly, I don't have any problem with charging more to someone who's obese or who smokes or whatever. But I don't think it's right to charge someone if they've got some illness that they cannot control. For example, I know someone who got run over by a tractor when she was 5 or 6 and, now, she can't walk more than about 5 minutes before she's in great pain. It makes it hard for her to get on the treadmill and get in shape. Should she have to pay extra? Or what about someone with some genetic pre-disposition to some disease like cancer or diabetes? They're certainly an increased risk, so do we charge them extra for something that wasn't the result of a choice they made?
Lastly, shouldn't we give discounts or incentives to individuals who get regular checkups or screenings or other things that could decrease the treatment cost of a disease if it's caught earlier?
Data aggregation
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Near the end of his presentation, the guy sums up the technology as taking all of these separate images from various sources on the net and figuring out how they all interlink to present a larger, more coherent picture. He got applause.
My first thought was about the U.S. government's "total information awareness" project, where they're trying to take lots of separate pieces of info (which are already available to law enforcement) and interlinking them all together to provide a more coherent picture... but most people consider that to be evil.
Granted, the government isn't doing it with vacation photos, but the idea, of finding pieces of data that are related and finding out *how* they're related, is the same. The difference in people's reaction to it, I can only attribute to the fact that people see the photosynth guy as good, and the government as evil. But I don't agree that the goodness or evilness of an action is solely determined by the goodness or evilness of who's doing it. The U.S. gov't tries this and fails. It expects that it can invade foreign countries and install friendly governments and torture people because it's "the good guys", yet the soviet union did those same things during the cold war and we admonished them for it because they were "the bad guys".
So, where am I going with this rant? My point is this: You can't blame somebody for connecting the dots. In fact, that seems to be one of the things that we, as humans, are particularly good at. So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine. Now, you could argue that some particular bits of information shouldn't be available, but the piecing it together to form a more coherent picture... I can't come up with an argument against it that I consider defensible. Sure, it makes me uncomfortable, but that's not an "argument".
The president's motorcade will be shadowed by a helicopter equipped with signal-jamming equipment. Terrorists have used mobile phones to detonate remote-controlled bombs in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
No problemo. Just make a device that detonates when the cell phone loses reception. Saves you the cell minutes from having to call and detonate (although I guess you could demand a refund from the cell provider for the dropped call).
Google lost the ability to "do no evil" the minute they became a publicly traded company.
Exactly. Even Michael Moore said (in "The Corporation") that he doesn't blame corporations for acting the way they do. The shareholders insist on it.
Here's a little thought experiment that I do with people to open their eyes. To each question, answer whether "all" (>90%) of shareholders want the company to do this, "none" (<10%), or "some" (>10% and <90%) want the company to do this:
- Switch entirely to hybrid vehicles for the corporate fleet
- Stop using foreign labor
- Stop giving money to Republicans
- Stop giving money to Democrats
- Stop dealing with countries with questionable human-rights policies.
- Make the stock price go up.
I expect that the only thing you answered "all" to is "Make the stock price go up". The fact that the shareholders have all put their money into your company usually means that they each are looking to make their money grow. So, the one thing that they can all agree on (and, hence, what usually trumps everything else) is that they want to see the money coming in.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe the voting needs to be extended not just to shareholders, but to stakeholders... like residents of the areas where the company operates. Dunno. But, if you keep the voting exclusively to the people who have bet on that horse, I think you're going to get a predictable result every time.
I'd be interested in seeing how they react if you told them that, prior to your installing the software, you need to get something in writing from the boss stating that: A) They're instructing you to install the software, and B) that they know you're out of licenses and that installing the software would violate the law.
This would put them in a weird spot because there's no way in hell that they're going to give you that, yet I don't see how they could blame you for realizing that you need to cover your ass.
They could have one of three responses:
1 - They don't give it to you in writing and they pause long enough to consider trying OpenOffice,
2 - They don't give it to you in writing and they conclude that you're not a team player and that you're just looking for something to blackmail the bosses with.
3 - The DO give it to you in writing (in which case, your ass may or may not be covered, so you might or might not want to go ahead and install it). Either way, as long as you have the paper, your employment there is assured. However, I'm not sure you'd want to keep working at a place where the bosses are so dumb as to ask you to break the law in writing.
From what I saw in the video, there's not enough of a match between the Chladni patterns and the designs on the cubes to convince me that this is what the sculptors intended. If that's considered a match, then I'm seeing Chladni patterns burned into 1/3 of the pancakes that I make (with the other 2/3's being Elvis and the virgin Mary).
However... I do find the concept very intriguing. I'm sure that the patterns are produced by pitches that are of fixed ratios to each other. This means that you could reproduce the melody without knowing anything about the musical system that the authors used (the only requirement being that they came from the same universe as you... or, at least, one with the same physical laws governing wave reflection and interference). This aspect (ie, zero cultural knowledge) of it reminds me of the part in Contact, where the aliens send us prime numbers.
I also find it slightly plausible that the people would have known about this 600 years ago. If it's true that gregorian chants arose out of a desire to capitalize on resonances in houses of worship, then they would have had many opportunities to observe the effects of loud mono-tonal sounds upon visible things like, say, the bowl of holy water.
So... it's remotely plausible. But I think it's bullshit, anyway.:)
Begin with the fact that he didn't look like John Wayne. He wore a sweater, had a meek way about him, and generally looked like he got stuffed in his locker a lot when he was in high-school. In the U.S., this is a big problem. We'd rather see our collective fate in the hands of who's gung-ho and rugged than someone who's pensive and intelligent. After Carter, the nation was so starved for a cowboy that they elected.... surprise... a guy who used to make a living looking like a cowboy.
Once you factor that into the scenario, you can start arguing that, had he looked/acted like a badass, he'd be getting more slack for what happened when he was in office.
Carter was more in the "Religious Right's" pocket than Bush ever will be. Were visiting dignitaries allowed a glass of wine with dinner while visiting the White House in 1978? Nope! Alcohol was banned in the White House by Carter.
... in the White House, not in the nation. As the head of that household, he's free to have whatever rules he wishes when entertaining dinner guests. Wow... news flash, a president who kept his personal beliefs separate from his policy decisions.
Inflation was through the roof (12%).
Unemployment was high (7%).
Deficit spending....
Devaluation of the dollar.
Gas shortages.
These are all results of the oil shortages which occurred when OPEC decided to start flexing its muscle. (by the way, go ask someone who lived in Germany in the 1920's if they consider 12% inflation to be "through the roof". They're likely to respond "Do you mean 12% per year or 12% per day?". Outrageousness all depends on how good you've had it up until now.). Anyway, up until this point, economists had largely subscribed to the Keyesean theory that unemployment and inflation were inversely related. They were sent scrambling back to their chalkboards when "stag-flation" caused both inflation and unemployment to go up together. The increased price of oil drove the costs of product delivery up (and, hence, all products' overall costs/prices), this drove sales down, hence production levels waned and people got laid off. The explanation of what happened birthed the philosophy of supply-side economics (which Reagan tried to use to the opposite effect trying to hold inflation while decreasing unemployment). But my point is that the stag-flation thing that popped up during Carter's term was something that most economists didn't even realize could happen.
As for the energy crisis overall, at the root, it was the newly-formed OPEC trying to see what power they had. Carter's response? Creation of the Dept. of Energy and symbolically installing solar panels on the White House roof (which Reagan then had removed) and turning the thermostat down. However, most importantly, Carter's presidency was the only presidential term when U.S. imports of oil went down.
Iranian hostage crisis.
Failure to rescue Iranian hostages.
The initial taking of the hostages was done by college students, (legitimately) furious over decades of western meddling and CIA manipulation of Iranian politics (including organizing a coup to oust democratically-elected "Mossadegh" and replace him with the shah. Google for "Kermit Roosevelt" or read Wikipedia's Iran page for more). The wheels were set in motion 2 decades before Carter took the oath of office.
As for what he did to rescue them. He did exactly what I would hope any of our leaders would. He tried diplomacy FIRST, and then, after the diplomacy failed, resorted to military intervention.
The first problem with the diplomacy was that the U.S. wasn't sure who they needed to negotiate with. The Iranian government had nothing to do with the hostages; it was done by student demonstrators. So, the first step was to convince the Irani
A friend recently got a laptop from BestBuy and they asked me to set it up for them. As I removed all of the 30-day trials for anti-virus, Office, DVD player, photo editors, video editors, AOL, music stores, various online services, etc.... it became a running joke. I kept saying "No wonder the laptop was so cheap, it's just a marketing platform!".
Seems that this is pretty obvious to someone if you sit and really think about the piracy problem for a moment. If you're not going to get *money* for your software, you might as well get mind-share.
The original post only gives you half of the picture, however. True, if a user is going to pirate a piece of software, then you want them pirating *your* software. However, even more, you'd prefer that someone pirate your software over *buying* your competitors product, because it gets you mind-share, like in the original case, but it also denies funds to your competitor. And you can bet your buns that Microsoft understands this aspect of the puzzle as well.
- Joe
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that they included Doom, yet didn't mention Wolf3D. Like you said, Doom is just the game where the graphics and sound got really slick, but that's more a result of them putting more money into it.
On the other hand, when I played Wolf3D for the first time, it was one of those "Holy mother of god!" moments, when you realize that gaming would never be the same. Where historians sometimes look at the discovery of the Americas or the end of World War I or II as "turning points", where they can look at the way the world was before and after and notice distinct changes that occured, I think Wolf3D was one of those turning points for gaming.
Before then, you had games like Wizardry or Ulitma, which sometimes did some 3D rendering, but it was turn-based, instead of real-time, and you could only turn in 90-degree increments, and there was little, if any, texture mapping on the surfaces. In a stroke, the arrival of Wolf3D suddenly created a world in which that just wouldn't suffice anymore. Granted, Wolf3D wasn't necessarily the first... but I think it was the first that almost everybody got to see.
Slashdot Mirror
"In soviet union, monitor shoots crossbow". I loved how bent-over the bolt-tips were afterward. Next, there'll be a video of someone using one of those monitors to bash open a Master lock or something.
I don't really consider them "laws". They're the reliable tendencies of the universe. It's like the conversations I have with people who try to convert me to their religion.
Them: You say you don't believe in god because you haven't seen him... but you believe in electrons, don't you, and you've never seen them?
Me: No. I don't believe in them.
Them: You don't believe in electrons?
Me: Like I said... I've never seen one. All I know is that, if I pretend that electrons exist, then I'm able to make all kinds of predictions that I can see. It might turn out that there aren't electrons at all. The universe might be set up completely another way... and our current set of "laws" manage to give us the same set of predictions. So, I only believe in electrons long enough to build a television set, so to speak.
As a scientist, I should be ready to abandon any of these laws when they start failing to predict what I'm seeing... no matter how well it worked up to that point (see "Ultraviolet Catastrophe").
It's like we've been invited to play a board game. We haven't been told the rules... but, by trial and error, we've managed to deduce enough about the gameplay that we're able to get along in the game fairly well. However, I doubt that the rules that we've deduced actually match the ones printed in the book that came with the game.
So, the argument is that the alien race would pre-emptively attack us because we were on a course to develop the capability to do serious harm to them? "Do unto others before they get a chance to do it unto you"? That's completely preposterous. Now, if you said that the aliens would nuke us because we were living on top of some fuel that their entire economy depends upon... and the "pre-emptive defense" was merely the story they spouted at the United Galaxies summits... well, Christ... that happens all the time.
Now, I'll grant that I haven't actually checked those numbers... but hearing a CalTech physics prof say them certainly gets me to go so far as to stop asserting that nuclear is the perfect answer to these problems.
Although it would require crunching a *lot* more data (which he probably can't get his hands on), I think it would be more instructive to look at the distribution of numbers chosen by players?
Since you have to share the pot with all other winners, choosing common numbers (like the date, say), can increase your odds of having to share... which probably affects the expected value of your ticket *vastly* more than any statistical anomalies in the distribution of winning numbers.
___stroke=true;
if(stroke)
___minAge=60;
if( ! face.movementDetected())
___minAge=90;
minAge += 32 - teeth.count();
See? It ain't so tough.
If the RIAA's main complaint is that Usenet.com is offering access to alt.binaries.*, that's a little pointless. Now that NZB files are all the rage, the various pieces of each posting don't even have to be in one newsgroup, because the reference them by message-id. So, I could chop "Stairway to Heaven" into 20 pieces, post one piece to soc.singles, another piece to alt.flame, etc. etc... and then post the NZB somewhere and any NZB-aware program will be able to go get them. So... trying to shut off alt.binaries isn't going to stop anything.
Now, the first counter-argument to this is probably "Aw... c'mon... but it's spread out over millions of people so it's no big impact on any one person!". To that, I refer back to the mid 80's. Remember when there were a few years of some clever programmer hacking a bank's computer to transfer 1 penny from a million accounts into his own? Or to move fractions of cents so that the bank statements still rounded to the same numbers? We treated them like they had stolen the net sum a single person, didn't we?
Granted, spam filters catch a lot of the spam. But even if they catch 90%, that leaves us to deal with the remaining 10%... which only means that the guy would have to be in business for 500 days (fewer than two years) to cost a man-life.
Frankly, what *I* am rooting for is for them to capture a spammer, torture him mercilessly and get it all on tape and put it up on YouTube. I doubt that public executions would deter most murders, but I think that seeing and hearing one of their bretheren scream for mercy as each foot is sawn off would give many spammers pause.
Agreed. The Transperformance just takes the cake. I could watch those little bridge tuners adjust all day. You see that once and realize that there's not much more room for improvement.
Let me 'splain you something: Any business model that includes "and then, we get the [Record and/or Movie] companies to slightly change their business model", just close up shop now (unless your name is Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or you're the head of some other corporation with so much weight that the RIAA or MPAA have to take you seriously). Second, it might have seemed like a great idea to *you*, but that doesn't count for much. In fact, the simple fact that nobody has tried it *before* you probably means that nobody else thought it could fly.
So, your start-up flopped. Get over it.
While this was going on, I think Kerry had a golden opportunity to stick up for freedom of speech (even when it devolves from lip service to, [gasp!], heated political dialogue) by shouting "Unhand that man!" and telling the dork that "I'll answer your question, but only if you can calm down". Instead, you can hear him blabbing about how it's a "good question", and carrying on as if there isn't a takedown happening 50 feet away.
Lastly, the police were idiotic by not carrying him out. They had him pinned, and they could have cuffed and/or zip-tied him and just carried him out the door... but they wanted the people to see the complete subduing process. You can see the female officer bend over to him and command him to calm down before they have to use further measures. Now, I should add that, for MOST of this altercation, there was an officer all set to taze him, but didn't. They wrestled him toward the back. Pinned him. Told him to calm down. They even WARNED him that, if he didn't calm down, they'd taze him (which is why you hear him yelling "Please don't taze me"). And he wouldn't shut up.... so they tazed him. But they should have just dragged his ass out the door like sack of potatoes.
Idiots all around.
Here where I work, we had a laptop stolen and we sought some kind of tracking solution.
Like some others here, I used ddns. The nice thing about it is that there are already a bunch of free clients for Linux and Windows that integrate nicely with the IP stack and update the dns whenever they see the net.
I actually went a little further and ran my own DDNS server here at work so that a daemon could watch the logs and notify me immediately whenever there was any activity from "laptop28" or whatever. This requires that you generate a ddns key and configure BIND to allow updates, etc. So, it's a bit of a pain... but manageable. Otherwise, your alternative is to use a free service and then poll the external dns server for changes.
7 half-steps 2^(7/12) ("perfect" fifth) gives you frequencies that are pretty close to a 3:2 ratio.
5 half-steps 2^(5/12) ("perfect" fourth) gets you very close to a 4:3
4 half-steps 2^(4/12) (major third) gets you very close to a 5:4
3 half-steps 2^(3/12) (minor third) gets you very close to a 6:5
Now, the 12-tone scale doesn't have a monopoly on these ratios. A 17-tone scale can get within about
So, the 12-tone scale doesn't "magically fit", and it doesn't get any of the ratios exactly. It doesn't even get some of them as well as some of the other scales. What it does have going for it, is it seems to be the one that gets listenably close to all of them.
Near the end of his presentation, the guy sums up the technology as taking all of these separate images from various sources on the net and figuring out how they all interlink to present a larger, more coherent picture. He got applause.
My first thought was about the U.S. government's "total information awareness" project, where they're trying to take lots of separate pieces of info (which are already available to law enforcement) and interlinking them all together to provide a more coherent picture... but most people consider that to be evil.
Granted, the government isn't doing it with vacation photos, but the idea, of finding pieces of data that are related and finding out *how* they're related, is the same. The difference in people's reaction to it, I can only attribute to the fact that people see the photosynth guy as good, and the government as evil. But I don't agree that the goodness or evilness of an action is solely determined by the goodness or evilness of who's doing it. The U.S. gov't tries this and fails. It expects that it can invade foreign countries and install friendly governments and torture people because it's "the good guys", yet the soviet union did those same things during the cold war and we admonished them for it because they were "the bad guys".
So, where am I going with this rant? My point is this: You can't blame somebody for connecting the dots. In fact, that seems to be one of the things that we, as humans, are particularly good at. So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine. Now, you could argue that some particular bits of information shouldn't be available, but the piecing it together to form a more coherent picture... I can't come up with an argument against it that I consider defensible. Sure, it makes me uncomfortable, but that's not an "argument".
Here's a little thought experiment that I do with people to open their eyes. To each question, answer whether "all" (>90%) of shareholders want the company to do this, "none" (<10%), or "some" (>10% and <90%) want the company to do this:
- Switch entirely to hybrid vehicles for the corporate fleet
- Stop using foreign labor
- Stop giving money to Republicans
- Stop giving money to Democrats
- Stop dealing with countries with questionable human-rights policies.
- Make the stock price go up.
I expect that the only thing you answered "all" to is "Make the stock price go up". The fact that the shareholders have all put their money into your company usually means that they each are looking to make their money grow. So, the one thing that they can all agree on (and, hence, what usually trumps everything else) is that they want to see the money coming in.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe the voting needs to be extended not just to shareholders, but to stakeholders... like residents of the areas where the company operates. Dunno. But, if you keep the voting exclusively to the people who have bet on that horse, I think you're going to get a predictable result every time.
I'd be interested in seeing how they react if you told them that, prior to your installing the software, you need to get something in writing from the boss stating that: A) They're instructing you to install the software, and B) that they know you're out of licenses and that installing the software would violate the law.
This would put them in a weird spot because there's no way in hell that they're going to give you that, yet I don't see how they could blame you for realizing that you need to cover your ass.
They could have one of three responses:
1 - They don't give it to you in writing and they pause long enough to consider trying OpenOffice,
2 - They don't give it to you in writing and they conclude that you're not a team player and that you're just looking for something to blackmail the bosses with.
3 - The DO give it to you in writing (in which case, your ass may or may not be covered, so you might or might not want to go ahead and install it). Either way, as long as you have the paper, your employment there is assured. However, I'm not sure you'd want to keep working at a place where the bosses are so dumb as to ask you to break the law in writing.
From what I saw in the video, there's not enough of a match between the Chladni patterns and the designs on the cubes to convince me that this is what the sculptors intended. If that's considered a match, then I'm seeing Chladni patterns burned into 1/3 of the pancakes that I make (with the other 2/3's being Elvis and the virgin Mary).
:)
However... I do find the concept very intriguing. I'm sure that the patterns are produced by pitches that are of fixed ratios to each other. This means that you could reproduce the melody without knowing anything about the musical system that the authors used (the only requirement being that they came from the same universe as you... or, at least, one with the same physical laws governing wave reflection and interference). This aspect (ie, zero cultural knowledge) of it reminds me of the part in Contact, where the aliens send us prime numbers.
I also find it slightly plausible that the people would have known about this 600 years ago. If it's true that gregorian chants arose out of a desire to capitalize on resonances in houses of worship, then they would have had many opportunities to observe the effects of loud mono-tonal sounds upon visible things like, say, the bowl of holy water.
So... it's remotely plausible. But I think it's bullshit, anyway.
Begin with the fact that he didn't look like John Wayne. He wore a sweater, had a meek way about him, and generally looked like he got stuffed in his locker a lot when he was in high-school. In the U.S., this is a big problem. We'd rather see our collective fate in the hands of who's gung-ho and rugged than someone who's pensive and intelligent. After Carter, the nation was so starved for a cowboy that they elected.... surprise... a guy who used to make a living looking like a cowboy.
Once you factor that into the scenario, you can start arguing that, had he looked/acted like a badass, he'd be getting more slack for what happened when he was in office.
These are all results of the oil shortages which occurred when OPEC decided to start flexing its muscle. (by the way, go ask someone who lived in Germany in the 1920's if they consider 12% inflation to be "through the roof". They're likely to respond "Do you mean 12% per year or 12% per day?". Outrageousness all depends on how good you've had it up until now.). Anyway, up until this point, economists had largely subscribed to the Keyesean theory that unemployment and inflation were inversely related. They were sent scrambling back to their chalkboards when "stag-flation" caused both inflation and unemployment to go up together. The increased price of oil drove the costs of product delivery up (and, hence, all products' overall costs/prices), this drove sales down, hence production levels waned and people got laid off. The explanation of what happened birthed the philosophy of supply-side economics (which Reagan tried to use to the opposite effect trying to hold inflation while decreasing unemployment). But my point is that the stag-flation thing that popped up during Carter's term was something that most economists didn't even realize could happen.
As for the energy crisis overall, at the root, it was the newly-formed OPEC trying to see what power they had. Carter's response? Creation of the Dept. of Energy and symbolically installing solar panels on the White House roof (which Reagan then had removed) and turning the thermostat down. However, most importantly, Carter's presidency was the only presidential term when U.S. imports of oil went down.
The initial taking of the hostages was done by college students, (legitimately) furious over decades of western meddling and CIA manipulation of Iranian politics (including organizing a coup to oust democratically-elected "Mossadegh" and replace him with the shah. Google for "Kermit Roosevelt" or read Wikipedia's Iran page for more). The wheels were set in motion 2 decades before Carter took the oath of office.
As for what he did to rescue them. He did exactly what I would hope any of our leaders would. He tried diplomacy FIRST, and then, after the diplomacy failed, resorted to military intervention.
The first problem with the diplomacy was that the U.S. wasn't sure who they needed to negotiate with. The Iranian government had nothing to do with the hostages; it was done by student demonstrators. So, the first step was to convince the Irani
A friend recently got a laptop from BestBuy and they asked me to set it up for them. As I removed all of the 30-day trials for anti-virus, Office, DVD player, photo editors, video editors, AOL, music stores, various online services, etc.... it became a running joke. I kept saying "No wonder the laptop was so cheap, it's just a marketing platform!".
Seems that this is pretty obvious to someone if you sit and really think about the piracy problem for a moment. If you're not going to get *money* for your software, you might as well get mind-share.
The original post only gives you half of the picture, however. True, if a user is going to pirate a piece of software, then you want them pirating *your* software. However, even more, you'd prefer that someone pirate your software over *buying* your competitors product, because it gets you mind-share, like in the original case, but it also denies funds to your competitor. And you can bet your buns that Microsoft understands this aspect of the puzzle as well. - Joe
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that they included Doom, yet didn't mention Wolf3D. Like you said, Doom is just the game where the graphics and sound got really slick, but that's more a result of them putting more money into it.
On the other hand, when I played Wolf3D for the first time, it was one of those "Holy mother of god!" moments, when you realize that gaming would never be the same. Where historians sometimes look at the discovery of the Americas or the end of World War I or II as "turning points", where they can look at the way the world was before and after and notice distinct changes that occured, I think Wolf3D was one of those turning points for gaming.
Before then, you had games like Wizardry or Ulitma, which sometimes did some 3D rendering, but it was turn-based, instead of real-time, and you could only turn in 90-degree increments, and there was little, if any, texture mapping on the surfaces. In a stroke, the arrival of Wolf3D suddenly created a world in which that just wouldn't suffice anymore. Granted, Wolf3D wasn't necessarily the first... but I think it was the first that almost everybody got to see.