Very true... I only know of two bands that have made it to the big-time thru myspace: the Arctic Monkeys and recently, Lily Allen. Are there more that you've heard of? It's always seemed odd to me that there hadn't been a more grass-roots phenomenon on the internet for popularizing music, then it happens on Myspace, of all places.
Still, these people that rely on a free service, without any uptime guarantees, to do real business transactions have no grounds for complaints. I'm actually surprised the social networking phenomenon didn't occur through distributed websites and a common standardized protocol. But I suppose IM services have barely scratched the surface in sharing their protocol information...
Xerox has been consistently improving their perfect-binding module for increasingly small printer/copiers models. This module will catch sheets coming off the printer, stack them up, fold them in half and put a binding on them. There's generally some overhead from the time between separate jobs, but, yeah, there's barely any price difference between 100 copies of the same thing or 100 different things.
Keep in mind that in Xerox's case, at least, these aren't exactly the binding quality of something you'd find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. This is more like Kinko's style binding. Not sure about the quality of this print-on-demand stuff, but you have to factor in the shipping & handling cost as well, which is a significant problem with the print-on-demand industry.
Well, then by your logic, Bush must be guilty of something. If he has nothing to hide, why not let the investigation proceed?
And again, you, like every other dimwitted Bush-supporter, completely miss the point: Bush is doing the spying without congressional or judicial oversight. That means, if he wanted to, he could spy on political enemies. Tell me, what's the difference between democracy and totalitarianism? Is it a choice in our leadership? We're not going to have that if incumbant parties have that kind of control over the system. Don't say its a far-fetched scenario; Nixon was caught doing the exact same thing, without the advantage of having an intelligence agency doing the dirty work for him.
I saw an interesting sig yesterday here on/. -- "You have the right not be harassed by police, I have the right not to get blown up." Fair enough. These sort of laws scare the hell out of me, but then again, we need assurance against criminals of all sorts. Most of these laws aren't abused. I'm not defending Bush's policies, but so far as we know, he hasn't abused his executive spying 'privileges' yet (although it appears our gitmo-style prisons *have* been abused). Congress, when enacting such measures, needs to put tough, and I mean *tough*, laws, as well as checks and balances, on enforcement for when they abuse such privileges, as well as strict guidelines for what constitutes abuse. That way, gitmo-style disasters won't happen again and law enforcement will be held responsible for their mistakes.
Not quite true.. while it was probable that many women did work 100-150 years ago, it wasn't necessary because the cost of living hadn't risen to the level that required it. One downside of women's liberation is that it created the conditions such that husband and wife both had to work to sustain the family. It's like colonialism, in that when one company goes overseas for cheaper labor, it forces competition to do the same.
Drivers' licenses are bullshit. If I had a license would it help me drive any better? I think not. You should only need to get a license once. Beyond that, its complete bureaucracy and a waste of time. Same with pet licenses. What the hell is a 'free' country where you have to register a dog or cat with the government? I could see a gorilla or alligator, but a cat? Come on.
That's a really arrogant response you made to an otherwise good point. He's right. It's the stupid people that can't get behind a wheel without being drunk or talking on a cellphone that are ruining it for everybody else. Now because some idiots get in an accident while talking on the phone, careful drivers will have to pull over to take a phone call or ask for directions? What if you're on the freeway?
I used to be able to try out music I found on the internet until some idiots starting building massive collections of every free album they found and burning them for their friends. Thanks, guys. And IIRC, I pretty much agree with the drunk driving laws..
The potential gains in knowledge of astronomy, astrophysics and even particle physics are vast. Not to mention the gains in laser technologies, control systems, material science and computational analysis that such a project brings.
It's important to invest in such technology for just this reason. The space shuttle, the moon landing, the Higgs-Boson experiments, etc are not just virtuosic feats or symbols of our technological growth, but they provide the means of refining the technology involved and solving smaller problems along the way. I can't think of any specific examples except for Tang, but I imagine the space shuttles have contributed far more to the average everyday experience of human life than just photographs of the earth from space. Sophisticated national defense is an enormous product of such otherwise useless experiments. Computers themselves were once mind-bogglingly expensive laboratory experiments with few practical applications, as were most of the high technology we see around us.
The early experiments in quantum mechanics eventually became applicable to very small-scale microprocessor technology. Einstein's theories-- well, umm, you know.. But you see my point-- the fact that light bends in space leading to the technology which clinched us the second world war? Pretty remarkable.
Not to mention that if the U.S. is in their country taking away their video games, there's going to be a lot of young 3rd-worlders upset with the U.S. Probably not the best way to help our foreign relations debacle.
The only example you gave was the RIAA, which is a monopolistic sort of union that by reason of its monopoly can get away with all kinds of shit that most companies can't. K-Mart has to be fairly courteous to their customers and not accuse them of terrorism, pat them down before leaving the store, etc. Microsoft can get away with some of the same shit, like putting spyware in their OWN operating system. All of that shows what kind of unreasonable power they have.
Most companies that are not monopolies are just trying to improve their marketing, which is mostly alright with me, considering that the alternative is blind mass mailing. The gov't is not trying to sell us anything. They want to maintain as much power as possible over the people. We don't know if they want to protect Americans or protect themselves, hence the checks and balances of the Constitution. That last point is what most Americans don't seem to get. Our 'freedom' relies entirely on that point.
In the technical sense, fundamentalism is in contrast to relativism. That is, a belief that one set of moral laws applies to everybody for all time and that the laws as opposed to individual interpretations. Another trait of fundamentalism is the belief that their laws ought to be enforced on all people. The reformation was an instance of Roman Catholic fundamentalism vs Lutheran relativism. Luther decried all religious heirachies, esp in state gov't, because they led to corruption of the belief system. e.g. the original Christians, before 300 AD, were extremely pacifist. Following the first Christian emporer of Rome, they necessarily became more and more warfaring. Luther believed this was a corruption of Christianity (along with 98 other things).
Because they believe moral laws should be all-encompassing and enforced, fundamentalism leads necessarily to totalitarianism; they need the gov't to enforce the moral code. Even though all mothers who have abortions are going to hell, should we allow mothers to make that choice themselves, or enforce the moral code upon them to save their soul? That's the basic problem between fundamentalist Christians and relativist Christians such as Lutherans (and most of the American non-Baptist or non-Mormon sects)
So, 'fundamental,' as you say, doesn't mean that your beliefs are fundamental to your being, but that they are fundamental in a more universal sense. Unfortunately, what is supposed to be fundamental in a universal sense in America also happens to be good for the mega-corporations and very bad if you happen to live near oil.
As far as the literal interpretation of the Bible, despite what this story says, even the Catholic Church's policy is that (following the embarassment with Galileo) science is always correct and that the Bible is a series of myths, i.e. the Bible *contains* the word of God, but is not itself the word of God.
That's a valid point, but its not like he said it in the New York Times. I'm curious why the school's authorities even bother reading some kid's blog. Unless they systematically google every kid in the school, I'm assuming someone sent them the URL, which is about the only way anybody's going to find the entry in the first place. I say, it's clearly outside the practical jurisdiction of the school. A lot of people don't like their school. They shouldn't be allowed to say it in public? It sounds like the kid's a trouble-maker anyway. They should be able to find a reason to discipline the kid without starting a nation-wide first amendment debate.
Good point, but what you suggest is still coercion from free speech. The social consequences are a reality we all have to face, but if the coercion is done by the gov't, that's not acceptable. However, I don't think this is a matter of 'free speech' so much as particular rights of the press in regards to classified information, a much foggier issue. At what point does the information become de-classified? Could ScuttleMonkey get arrested, since Slashdot might be the only source of information for some people? Or when it gets passed over to someone who does not have the security clearance? Do the papers have any obligation to honor the classification system?
I've heard a better 'crackerjack-box' quote: "Men learn to love what they're attracted to; women become attracted to whom they love." or something like that.. makes more sense than what the other guy said.
Hey, thanks! This has been a roadblock for so long, I'd almost given up on imagemagick.. ah, progress.. now I can write the script that will save me hours of headaches:)
Thanks, but I've had problems with 'crop' retaining the size of the original image, so that it's gray (or whatever) in all but the cropped area... been awhile since I've tried it, but believe me, I scoured every help file available.. yes, the book might be useful (but consider the scathing reviews on amazon..)
Well, you have to do the detail-work on your own, but ImageMagick has an option to add text to an image using the font of your choice. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't a drop-shadow option, and I'm not sure what you mean by blend.
Personally, I'm having a bitch of a time trying to extract a portion of an image into a separate file w/ ImageMagick (and have the target image actually cropped). At this point, I don't think it can be done. Which is why I wish Gimp had a client-server interface for perl/python-fu. (Maybe they do?) That would be sooo awesome..
"...users can sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant advertising." I think they forgot a very key word there.
To be more fair, I would hope it would mimic the personalized google page, with other useful features added. I can't imagine how they can actually place useful content on the 'virtual space' without scraping it from other websites, which is not going to fly very long in the internet community. FGoogle's already catching some heat for it with their news feature. I can also see it lean towards social networking or the delicious aggregator on another of/.'s posts today.
First of all, evolution is impossible to prove and is such a flawed theory I hardly know where to begin in denouncing it. Thus, you should just look at the evidence around you-- the roses, the bluebirds. What's that you say? The intestinal appendix is a vestigial structure from previous species? Posh! Its a disgusting little flap of skin, hardly enough evidence to say that we used to be fish. Come back when you have evidence.
Also, you darwinists (remember that Hitler was a Darwinist. I'm not implying anything, I'm just saying.), hold up your so-called saint on a pedastal, denying that Creationism is not only a provable theory, it is a FACT. You can find proof for it on page 1 of the Bible, which is the Word of the Lord, and everything written in it is true, because it says so, and because Pat Robertson says so. He is rich, therefore he has been chosen.
And this is not an expression of religious views, as all of the necessary literature can be found in the volumes of research written on intelligent design. Remember, *Science* should be taught in *science* class, and not the religions of athiesm and nihilism.
Variety is the spice of life. We don't want to do everything in PHP or whatever 'framework' you propose to be the great end-all. We'd be bored.
Besides, Rails is not only very young, but it works fine, performance-wise, for 75% of the business sites that need database support. You wouldn't use it for Amazon.com, but it might work fine for Gary's Auto Repair's business site, which is the sort of thing most free-lance developers are doing in their spare time.
Oh, and don't be "afraid to report" your perfectly unsubstantiated opinions! It's a free internet-- just come out and say it!
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but it was indeed a fantastic movie and, while I don't practice religion, the movie helped bring Christ into a more attractive light, for me, than the more outspoken of his followers do.
Another worthwhile fiction proposing an alternate view of Christ's life is the Nobel-prize recipient Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. (His novel 'Blindness' is most intriguing.. Stephen-King-ish plotline but with time and care put into it's writing).
Aha, very insightful and I'm well aware of the future of a tiered internet. I'm a little behind on my facts, but I'm not sure what apple has to do with iptv. Do they own XM or Sirius? or does Disney?
Regarding the tiered internet, I definitely think there's a cause for concern there, and mostly because the mass market wouldn't even see a cause for concern. All of the mainstream media sites will be on privileged tiers. The communications companies will spin it as a faster way to reach the more important sites and 'True Americans' know that organizations/websites with money behind them are, almost by definition, better than independents.
But as a believer in liberalism, I know that such paranoid-sounding scenarios can never happen because of the power of free speech and the willingness of the masses of noisy left-wingers to make use of it.
Good point.. and I agree that a company has a *right* to a monopoly but only so long as it doesn't hinder the market from catching up to it. As capitalism goes, Apple ought to be rewarded for their success in bringing the mp3 player to mass market. Call it a monopoly if you want, but by the laws of the market, it should only last so long. That's what makes the microsoft monopoly so disturbing.. it's been like a decade and a half now and the U.S. gov't refuses to do anything about it.
Now why the monopoly issue is arising as a result of a rumor of an alleged plan to buy Disney is a mystery to me, particularly with the conflict of interest surrounding the plan and their iTunes business. Disney and Pixar are good as long as they produce good material. ABC has a poor reputation and their programming usually sucks. ESPN is probably being hit really hard by Fox Sports. I don't see the potential for concern.
Unless you have to, stay away from Microsoft products. It sounds awefully narrow-minded, but why deal with a mega-corporation that doesn't give a &#$ about their 3rd-party developers when you have a world of less legally-entangled tools to work with? Patents or none, microsoft, unlike Sun, looks at 3rd-party developers like customers, not 'co-workers.' Having the apache project and IBM's support behind Java make it all the more attractive, even if its not the best language for many things (client-side apps especially). Microsoft is so haphazard about backwards-compatibility I always have to wonder if anything I wrote a year ago is still going to work under the latest upgrades and patches. It's the monopoly-tax. Don't pay it unless you're getting paid well to do so!!
Slashdot Mirror
/me beats head against wall
I repeat-- "dimwitted."
Very true... I only know of two bands that have made it to the big-time thru myspace: the Arctic Monkeys and recently, Lily Allen. Are there more that you've heard of? It's always seemed odd to me that there hadn't been a more grass-roots phenomenon on the internet for popularizing music, then it happens on Myspace, of all places.
Still, these people that rely on a free service, without any uptime guarantees, to do real business transactions have no grounds for complaints. I'm actually surprised the social networking phenomenon didn't occur through distributed websites and a common standardized protocol. But I suppose IM services have barely scratched the surface in sharing their protocol information...
Xerox has been consistently improving their perfect-binding module for increasingly small printer/copiers models. This module will catch sheets coming off the printer, stack them up, fold them in half and put a binding on them. There's generally some overhead from the time between separate jobs, but, yeah, there's barely any price difference between 100 copies of the same thing or 100 different things.
Keep in mind that in Xerox's case, at least, these aren't exactly the binding quality of something you'd find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. This is more like Kinko's style binding. Not sure about the quality of this print-on-demand stuff, but you have to factor in the shipping & handling cost as well, which is a significant problem with the print-on-demand industry.
Well, then by your logic, Bush must be guilty of something. If he has nothing to hide, why not let the investigation proceed?
And again, you, like every other dimwitted Bush-supporter, completely miss the point: Bush is doing the spying without congressional or judicial oversight. That means, if he wanted to, he could spy on political enemies. Tell me, what's the difference between democracy and totalitarianism? Is it a choice in our leadership? We're not going to have that if incumbant parties have that kind of control over the system. Don't say its a far-fetched scenario; Nixon was caught doing the exact same thing, without the advantage of having an intelligence agency doing the dirty work for him.
I saw an interesting sig yesterday here on /. -- "You have the right not be harassed by police, I have the right not to get blown up." Fair enough. These sort of laws scare the hell out of me, but then again, we need assurance against criminals of all sorts. Most of these laws aren't abused. I'm not defending Bush's policies, but so far as we know, he hasn't abused his executive spying 'privileges' yet (although it appears our gitmo-style prisons *have* been abused). Congress, when enacting such measures, needs to put tough, and I mean *tough*, laws, as well as checks and balances, on enforcement for when they abuse such privileges, as well as strict guidelines for what constitutes abuse. That way, gitmo-style disasters won't happen again and law enforcement will be held responsible for their mistakes.
Not quite true.. while it was probable that many women did work 100-150 years ago, it wasn't necessary because the cost of living hadn't risen to the level that required it. One downside of women's liberation is that it created the conditions such that husband and wife both had to work to sustain the family. It's like colonialism, in that when one company goes overseas for cheaper labor, it forces competition to do the same.
Drivers' licenses are bullshit. If I had a license would it help me drive any better? I think not. You should only need to get a license once. Beyond that, its complete bureaucracy and a waste of time. Same with pet licenses. What the hell is a 'free' country where you have to register a dog or cat with the government? I could see a gorilla or alligator, but a cat? Come on.
That's a really arrogant response you made to an otherwise good point. He's right. It's the stupid people that can't get behind a wheel without being drunk or talking on a cellphone that are ruining it for everybody else. Now because some idiots get in an accident while talking on the phone, careful drivers will have to pull over to take a phone call or ask for directions? What if you're on the freeway?
I used to be able to try out music I found on the internet until some idiots starting building massive collections of every free album they found and burning them for their friends. Thanks, guys. And IIRC, I pretty much agree with the drunk driving laws..
It's important to invest in such technology for just this reason. The space shuttle, the moon landing, the Higgs-Boson experiments, etc are not just virtuosic feats or symbols of our technological growth, but they provide the means of refining the technology involved and solving smaller problems along the way. I can't think of any specific examples except for Tang, but I imagine the space shuttles have contributed far more to the average everyday experience of human life than just photographs of the earth from space. Sophisticated national defense is an enormous product of such otherwise useless experiments. Computers themselves were once mind-bogglingly expensive laboratory experiments with few practical applications, as were most of the high technology we see around us.
The early experiments in quantum mechanics eventually became applicable to very small-scale microprocessor technology. Einstein's theories-- well, umm, you know.. But you see my point-- the fact that light bends in space leading to the technology which clinched us the second world war? Pretty remarkable.
Not to mention that if the U.S. is in their country taking away their video games, there's going to be a lot of young 3rd-worlders upset with the U.S. Probably not the best way to help our foreign relations debacle.
The only example you gave was the RIAA, which is a monopolistic sort of union that by reason of its monopoly can get away with all kinds of shit that most companies can't. K-Mart has to be fairly courteous to their customers and not accuse them of terrorism, pat them down before leaving the store, etc. Microsoft can get away with some of the same shit, like putting spyware in their OWN operating system. All of that shows what kind of unreasonable power they have. Most companies that are not monopolies are just trying to improve their marketing, which is mostly alright with me, considering that the alternative is blind mass mailing. The gov't is not trying to sell us anything. They want to maintain as much power as possible over the people. We don't know if they want to protect Americans or protect themselves, hence the checks and balances of the Constitution. That last point is what most Americans don't seem to get. Our 'freedom' relies entirely on that point.
Because they believe moral laws should be all-encompassing and enforced, fundamentalism leads necessarily to totalitarianism; they need the gov't to enforce the moral code. Even though all mothers who have abortions are going to hell, should we allow mothers to make that choice themselves, or enforce the moral code upon them to save their soul? That's the basic problem between fundamentalist Christians and relativist Christians such as Lutherans (and most of the American non-Baptist or non-Mormon sects)
So, 'fundamental,' as you say, doesn't mean that your beliefs are fundamental to your being, but that they are fundamental in a more universal sense. Unfortunately, what is supposed to be fundamental in a universal sense in America also happens to be good for the mega-corporations and very bad if you happen to live near oil.
As far as the literal interpretation of the Bible, despite what this story says, even the Catholic Church's policy is that (following the embarassment with Galileo) science is always correct and that the Bible is a series of myths, i.e. the Bible *contains* the word of God, but is not itself the word of God.
That's a valid point, but its not like he said it in the New York Times. I'm curious why the school's authorities even bother reading some kid's blog. Unless they systematically google every kid in the school, I'm assuming someone sent them the URL, which is about the only way anybody's going to find the entry in the first place. I say, it's clearly outside the practical jurisdiction of the school. A lot of people don't like their school. They shouldn't be allowed to say it in public? It sounds like the kid's a trouble-maker anyway. They should be able to find a reason to discipline the kid without starting a nation-wide first amendment debate.
Good point, but what you suggest is still coercion from free speech. The social consequences are a reality we all have to face, but if the coercion is done by the gov't, that's not acceptable. However, I don't think this is a matter of 'free speech' so much as particular rights of the press in regards to classified information, a much foggier issue. At what point does the information become de-classified? Could ScuttleMonkey get arrested, since Slashdot might be the only source of information for some people? Or when it gets passed over to someone who does not have the security clearance? Do the papers have any obligation to honor the classification system?
I've heard a better 'crackerjack-box' quote: "Men learn to love what they're attracted to; women become attracted to whom they love." or something like that.. makes more sense than what the other guy said.
Hey, thanks! This has been a roadblock for so long, I'd almost given up on imagemagick.. ah, progress.. now I can write the script that will save me hours of headaches :)
Thanks, but I've had problems with 'crop' retaining the size of the original image, so that it's gray (or whatever) in all but the cropped area... been awhile since I've tried it, but believe me, I scoured every help file available.. yes, the book might be useful (but consider the scathing reviews on amazon..)
Personally, I'm having a bitch of a time trying to extract a portion of an image into a separate file w/ ImageMagick (and have the target image actually cropped). At this point, I don't think it can be done. Which is why I wish Gimp had a client-server interface for perl/python-fu. (Maybe they do?) That would be sooo awesome..
To be more fair, I would hope it would mimic the personalized google page, with other useful features added. I can't imagine how they can actually place useful content on the 'virtual space' without scraping it from other websites, which is not going to fly very long in the internet community. FGoogle's already catching some heat for it with their news feature. I can also see it lean towards social networking or the delicious aggregator on another of /.'s posts today.
Also, you darwinists (remember that Hitler was a Darwinist. I'm not implying anything, I'm just saying.), hold up your so-called saint on a pedastal, denying that Creationism is not only a provable theory, it is a FACT. You can find proof for it on page 1 of the Bible, which is the Word of the Lord, and everything written in it is true, because it says so, and because Pat Robertson says so. He is rich, therefore he has been chosen.
And this is not an expression of religious views, as all of the necessary literature can be found in the volumes of research written on intelligent design. Remember, *Science* should be taught in *science* class, and not the religions of athiesm and nihilism.
Variety is the spice of life. We don't want to do everything in PHP or whatever 'framework' you propose to be the great end-all. We'd be bored.
Besides, Rails is not only very young, but it works fine, performance-wise, for 75% of the business sites that need database support. You wouldn't use it for Amazon.com, but it might work fine for Gary's Auto Repair's business site, which is the sort of thing most free-lance developers are doing in their spare time.
Oh, and don't be "afraid to report" your perfectly unsubstantiated opinions! It's a free internet-- just come out and say it!
Another worthwhile fiction proposing an alternate view of Christ's life is the Nobel-prize recipient Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. (His novel 'Blindness' is most intriguing.. Stephen-King-ish plotline but with time and care put into it's writing).
Regarding the tiered internet, I definitely think there's a cause for concern there, and mostly because the mass market wouldn't even see a cause for concern. All of the mainstream media sites will be on privileged tiers. The communications companies will spin it as a faster way to reach the more important sites and 'True Americans' know that organizations/websites with money behind them are, almost by definition, better than independents.
But as a believer in liberalism, I know that such paranoid-sounding scenarios can never happen because of the power of free speech and the willingness of the masses of noisy left-wingers to make use of it.
Now why the monopoly issue is arising as a result of a rumor of an alleged plan to buy Disney is a mystery to me, particularly with the conflict of interest surrounding the plan and their iTunes business. Disney and Pixar are good as long as they produce good material. ABC has a poor reputation and their programming usually sucks. ESPN is probably being hit really hard by Fox Sports. I don't see the potential for concern.
Unless you have to, stay away from Microsoft products. It sounds awefully narrow-minded, but why deal with a mega-corporation that doesn't give a &#$ about their 3rd-party developers when you have a world of less legally-entangled tools to work with? Patents or none, microsoft, unlike Sun, looks at 3rd-party developers like customers, not 'co-workers.' Having the apache project and IBM's support behind Java make it all the more attractive, even if its not the best language for many things (client-side apps especially). Microsoft is so haphazard about backwards-compatibility I always have to wonder if anything I wrote a year ago is still going to work under the latest upgrades and patches. It's the monopoly-tax. Don't pay it unless you're getting paid well to do so!!