Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions.
While I agree with your final point, I disagree with your reasoning. Take your example spam. While spam has yet to be defined clearly, it is not indefinable. One could, for example, say spam is any unsolicited email meant to profit the sender. This may not be the best possible definition, but once it is adopted by the law, precedence will alter the meaning into one that will hopefully make it more useful. But a base definition, like the above, is neither fundamentally perceptual nor difficult to come by.
Definitions are not so much factual things as they are agreed upon things. You can define cheese as milk and it will be true, that is the nature of language. The goal of a definition should be to have one that is useful, consistent, and fits current (local) public use as best as possible.
Music can also be defined, and that is exactly what this question asks. Not so much what a good human definition of music is, but what a good legal definition of music is. Obviously music is not yet rigidly defined and so it was a mistake to use it in compulsory licensing schemes, which is why your final point hits correct.
If I had to define music legally (which is not nearly as easy as spam), I would define it as any sound structured to be music purposefully. So yeah, by my definition it's a loophole to burn porn images into sound as long as the encryption algorithm has some kind of purposeful musical content to it. I guess they should change the system.
I can't see anything in the article specifically saying that the PS3 will support PS1 games, just a claim for backwards compatability for PS2 games.
I can't see why they wouldn't support it. The IOP of the PS2 is a ps1. So if they do full PS2 emulation, they'll have a ps1 available. In fact, for it to be full emulation it will have to play PS1 games, because the PS2 can. Emulation means it does the same exact thing, including play PS1 games.
In general there is reasonably good agreement. In a recent test the QuesTec system judged that 32.1 percent of pitches were within the "strike zone", while the umpire called 31.4 percent as strikes.
Now there's some stupid science. Hey, I bet I'd call 32% of pitches strikes too, too bad they wouldn't be the right damn 32%. We need to know what % they agreed, not what % they called. For all we know the umpires are constantly making bad calls that cancel each other out. Anyway, it's the close calls that matter more then anything, how many of those calls were totally obvious? I think we need a lot more info before this study means anything.
And yes, I am assuming that the umpires are worse then the machines. That's because machines are better at judging the exact spacial positioning of fast moving things then people-even trained people.
I'd like to sue Sony's Playstation 2 DVD REMOTE for not having a properly working fast forward. I've spoken to at least half a dozen other PS2 owners (with varying brands of remotes) and all of them have the same problem (if you hold fast forward it only goes for about a second and then you have to press it again).
I really was going to rely on my PS2 as my primary DVD player, but this caused me to have to get a different one (an X-box).
I can say that with every part of my body that this whole point of view is bullsh-- what's that? My ass has something to say.
My Ass: Actually, I'm not convinced that this kind of thinking is totally without merrit.
Me: Explain
My Ass: Well, the way I see it, part of what makes SciFi films so enjoyable is emersing yourself in their world. By discussing possible parallels with reality, religion, philosophy, and other like issues, you create a greater mood and level of enjoyment.
Me: Yeah, but what about the extemist jerks, like the guy who wrote the article?
My Ass: Well, it's hard to judge someone who writes for a living. He has to be constantly filling up pages with ideas-- I'm sure a lot of them come out as more meaningful sounding then his own opinion of the matter, he can't exactly say "isn't it cool to think about it this way, even though it's kind of silly". Anyway, a lot of these people don't really think through what they're writing, they just put it on paper.
Me: You make a good point. I still don't condone serious debate without satire on issues like this, but I at least understand it better. I can understand where these ideas come from, but the jerks who peddle them as intellectual debate instead of just having fun are ass-- I mean dickheads.
The problem with the "Buddhist Science Monitor" is that whenever someone gets a really good idea and starts to write an article, they ascend to a better plane. Earth gets all the crappy beginer Buddhists. I bet in blisstopia they have tons of great insites about the Matrix.
this is a movie that... captures people's intellectual imagination.
With dialog like "Noone can be told what the Matrix is", "Woah", and "I know Kung Fu" it's no wonder everyone's in an intellectual tiffy over it. And let us not forget that whole brilliant monologue on weather chicken tastes like chicken.
The Matrix rocks, but it's a silly sci fi super action movie-not some kind of brilliantly thought out metaphor for reality. I'm reminded of my English teach in HS telling me how every noun in every book is a symbol for humanity and her struggles. Come on people, the people who wrote that script were just making a good movie, not sending us a message. That said, I still have opening day tickets.
Of course, half the fun of DoA is getting my ass kicked by my Lei Fang wielding wife, but I guess then, she could kick my ass when I'm out of town on business too.
Sorry man, when you're out of town on business your wife is too ummm... busy to play DoA.
...is that many large proprietary businesses make their money through both sales AND support- and purposely make the product confusing and hard to develop for so that you would have to use their "gurus". Remedy ARS for example, purposely (I think) created a totally archaic reports generating system that you either work around (by using perl-- where they also throw a few obstacles in your path in ARSperl) or hire someone to do it for you... it makes almost no sense and the docs are really bad.
I'm not aware of any kind of unification of RDBMS and file system; do you have a reference or a link or a product name or anything?
I'm sorry, I looked into that and it turns out the guy who told me about that was talking about reiserfs, and I just misunderstood him. It might have some DB like features, but it doesn't look like the same thing at all. Still, a step towards that maybe.
Yeah haha, but read the article:
In order to allow both men and women to participate in the demonstration, we created a customized game controller, consisting of a nylon belt, a formedacrylic pelvic plate, water bottles, tubing, and a flexible garden hose nozzle. The controller is worn around the waist and the bottles are gripped and squeezed to pressurize astream of water. To use the You're In Control system in standard restrooms, women would need to take advantageof a device such as Whizzy [4] or P-Mate [5] that allowed them to urinate while standing up.
A big change in Longhorn will be the new Windows Future Storage (WinFS) file system, based on SQL Server database technology and designed to give users a direct route to data, making the physical location of a file irrelevant. WinFS replaces the NTFS and FAT32 file systems used in current Windows versions.
Ok, so I know they've developed this for Unix already, but making this the standard is actually a pretty big improvement. Blah blah Microsoft sucks blah blah, but maybe we do have some things to look forward to in the next release. I wonder how many other actual improvements they'll lay down on us. Though the name is totally bullshit (the FS stands for Future Storage??? idiots...).
That sucks. When I first heard of the humanoid cases, I thought they'd be more then a plastic person with wires all coming out of the crotch (and they didn't even show us how the Mech one connected fully built). I was hoping for a disk drive mouth, maybe a bunch of wires that could be pulled out of the hand and retract back into it, LED load lights in the eyes, mouth speakers, ear mic... that kind of stuff. It looks really cool, but there is little or no combination of art and utility in this-- they're just unrelated.
It's their damn fault. When I decide to accept the stupid auto-update "critical" patches to Windows, it's usually less then 10 days before I have to do it again. Maybe if they didn't release software a year before it's ready it wouldn't be so bad.
What about the new Zeldas? Hell, Mario too. Just because you can stab things, jump, and roll around doesn't make it not an adventure game. The new ones play just like old adventure game in how you have to think and solve problems (even if the solution is often to shoot it with an arrow).
I like the old adventure games (Space Quest era) more then almost any games, but now you can combine adventure and real time action, and it works pretty damn well.
Exactly -- given that the RAIDb itself sits elsewhere, I can't imagine it would be that hard to take the source itself and make a Perl DBD::Module out of it.
Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.
Of course it will! The only reason I (and many like me) hang around on Windows is because we want to run things-- and the main thing that isn't replicated just fine (or 10 times better) in some open source format on Linux is games. When WinX becomes reliable at running most popular games, I will make the switch over and never look back. I already have a Linux box, but it's for coding/serving, Windows is for using things (it has to be the better machine because games require the good hardware).
Just because you don't respect Windows, doesn't mean that all the high budget (and is most cases, best) games aren't made for it and only it. And those of us who do play games need a system that can run them. I hate x-box, but when Perfect Dark Zero comes out for it, I will buy it. You need the medium to use the app.
I used to have a friend who did work for bank ATMs. He told me a significant number of people pick 1234 or 6969 as their security code.
It's not comforting to know bank workers can see our pin numbers. I guess I should have known this from last time I called my former bank's customer service line and the recording asked me to type in my pin number (I didn't). Stupid banks aren't helping.
The most common password was "password" (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent).
Ok, so that's 47% of the company had a password that anyone could guess in 10 seconds! WHAT?? OK, I believe people are stupid, even REALLY stupid. But this I'm not sure I can believe. This study has to be tainted or something-- did they test all these passwords to make sure people weren't making them up? Seems to me that 90% of the people I know would lie about their password for a free pen.
This is of course assuming that nobody's name was password, or their birthdate was 4/9/ers or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions.
While I agree with your final point, I disagree with your reasoning. Take your example spam. While spam has yet to be defined clearly, it is not indefinable. One could, for example, say spam is any unsolicited email meant to profit the sender. This may not be the best possible definition, but once it is adopted by the law, precedence will alter the meaning into one that will hopefully make it more useful. But a base definition, like the above, is neither fundamentally perceptual nor difficult to come by.
Definitions are not so much factual things as they are agreed upon things. You can define cheese as milk and it will be true, that is the nature of language. The goal of a definition should be to have one that is useful, consistent, and fits current (local) public use as best as possible.
Music can also be defined, and that is exactly what this question asks. Not so much what a good human definition of music is, but what a good legal definition of music is. Obviously music is not yet rigidly defined and so it was a mistake to use it in compulsory licensing schemes, which is why your final point hits correct.
If I had to define music legally (which is not nearly as easy as spam), I would define it as any sound structured to be music purposefully. So yeah, by my definition it's a loophole to burn porn images into sound as long as the encryption algorithm has some kind of purposeful musical content to it. I guess they should change the system.
Not that the article is very long, but it's also pretty uninteresting. So if you're wondering what those lost titles are:
Terminator 3 and Driver 3
I can't see anything in the article specifically saying that the PS3 will support PS1 games, just a claim for backwards compatability for PS2 games.
I can't see why they wouldn't support it. The IOP of the PS2 is a ps1. So if they do full PS2 emulation, they'll have a ps1 available. In fact, for it to be full emulation it will have to play PS1 games, because the PS2 can. Emulation means it does the same exact thing, including play PS1 games.
Does anyone read...
No.
In general there is reasonably good agreement. In a recent test the QuesTec system judged that 32.1 percent of pitches were within the "strike zone", while the umpire called 31.4 percent as strikes.
Now there's some stupid science. Hey, I bet I'd call 32% of pitches strikes too, too bad they wouldn't be the right damn 32%. We need to know what % they agreed, not what % they called. For all we know the umpires are constantly making bad calls that cancel each other out. Anyway, it's the close calls that matter more then anything, how many of those calls were totally obvious? I think we need a lot more info before this study means anything.
And yes, I am assuming that the umpires are worse then the machines. That's because machines are better at judging the exact spacial positioning of fast moving things then people-even trained people.
we achieved what many call the greatest achievement of mankind, we landed on the moon.
I dunno man, have you ever seen Shaolin Soccer?
I'd like to sue Sony's Playstation 2 DVD REMOTE for not having a properly working fast forward. I've spoken to at least half a dozen other PS2 owners (with varying brands of remotes) and all of them have the same problem (if you hold fast forward it only goes for about a second and then you have to press it again).
I really was going to rely on my PS2 as my primary DVD player, but this caused me to have to get a different one (an X-box).
What!? # is so cool looking though.
As a perl programmer I just read that as "What!? "
...we should all use Scheme.
What I think you meant to say was:
(define language? (lambda (x) 'scheme'))
I can say that with every part of my body that this whole point of view is bullsh-- what's that? My ass has something to say.
My Ass: Actually, I'm not convinced that this kind of thinking is totally without merrit.
Me: Explain
My Ass: Well, the way I see it, part of what makes SciFi films so enjoyable is emersing yourself in their world. By discussing possible parallels with reality, religion, philosophy, and other like issues, you create a greater mood and level of enjoyment.
Me: Yeah, but what about the extemist jerks, like the guy who wrote the article?
My Ass: Well, it's hard to judge someone who writes for a living. He has to be constantly filling up pages with ideas-- I'm sure a lot of them come out as more meaningful sounding then his own opinion of the matter, he can't exactly say "isn't it cool to think about it this way, even though it's kind of silly". Anyway, a lot of these people don't really think through what they're writing, they just put it on paper.
Me: You make a good point. I still don't condone serious debate without satire on issues like this, but I at least understand it better. I can understand where these ideas come from, but the jerks who peddle them as intellectual debate instead of just having fun are ass-- I mean dickheads.
My Ass: Yeah, that's what your mom said.
Me: Look, that doesn't even make any sense.
. . .
The problem with the "Buddhist Science Monitor" is that whenever someone gets a really good idea and starts to write an article, they ascend to a better plane. Earth gets all the crappy beginer Buddhists. I bet in blisstopia they have tons of great insites about the Matrix.
this is a movie that ... captures people's intellectual imagination.
With dialog like "Noone can be told what the Matrix is", "Woah", and "I know Kung Fu" it's no wonder everyone's in an intellectual tiffy over it. And let us not forget that whole brilliant monologue on weather chicken tastes like chicken.
The Matrix rocks, but it's a silly sci fi super action movie-not some kind of brilliantly thought out metaphor for reality. I'm reminded of my English teach in HS telling me how every noun in every book is a symbol for humanity and her struggles. Come on people, the people who wrote that script were just making a good movie, not sending us a message. That said, I still have opening day tickets.
Of course, half the fun of DoA is getting my ass kicked by my Lei Fang wielding wife, but I guess then, she could kick my ass when I'm out of town on business too.
Sorry man, when you're out of town on business your wife is too ummm... busy to play DoA.
...is that many large proprietary businesses make their money through both sales AND support- and purposely make the product confusing and hard to develop for so that you would have to use their "gurus". Remedy ARS for example, purposely (I think) created a totally archaic reports generating system that you either work around (by using perl-- where they also throw a few obstacles in your path in ARSperl) or hire someone to do it for you... it makes almost no sense and the docs are really bad.
I'm not aware of any kind of unification of RDBMS and file system; do you have a reference or a link or a product name or anything?
I'm sorry, I looked into that and it turns out the guy who told me about that was talking about reiserfs, and I just misunderstood him. It might have some DB like features, but it doesn't look like the same thing at all. Still, a step towards that maybe.
Yeah haha, but read the article: In order to allow both men and women to participate in the demonstration, we created a customized game controller, consisting of a nylon belt, a formedacrylic pelvic plate, water bottles, tubing, and a flexible garden hose nozzle. The controller is worn around the waist and the bottles are gripped and squeezed to pressurize astream of water. To use the You're In Control system in standard restrooms, women would need to take advantageof a device such as Whizzy [4] or P-Mate [5] that allowed them to urinate while standing up.
A big change in Longhorn will be the new Windows Future Storage (WinFS) file system, based on SQL Server database technology and designed to give users a direct route to data, making the physical location of a file irrelevant. WinFS replaces the NTFS and FAT32 file systems used in current Windows versions.
Ok, so I know they've developed this for Unix already, but making this the standard is actually a pretty big improvement. Blah blah Microsoft sucks blah blah, but maybe we do have some things to look forward to in the next release. I wonder how many other actual improvements they'll lay down on us. Though the name is totally bullshit (the FS stands for Future Storage??? idiots...).
That sucks. When I first heard of the humanoid cases, I thought they'd be more then a plastic person with wires all coming out of the crotch (and they didn't even show us how the Mech one connected fully built). I was hoping for a disk drive mouth, maybe a bunch of wires that could be pulled out of the hand and retract back into it, LED load lights in the eyes, mouth speakers, ear mic... that kind of stuff. It looks really cool, but there is little or no combination of art and utility in this-- they're just unrelated.
[I nominate] Al Gore. He's so lifelike he's fooled millions of people.
I really don't think he fooled anyone. But he's still a good robot.
It's their damn fault. When I decide to accept the stupid auto-update "critical" patches to Windows, it's usually less then 10 days before I have to do it again. Maybe if they didn't release software a year before it's ready it wouldn't be so bad.
What about the new Zeldas? Hell, Mario too. Just because you can stab things, jump, and roll around doesn't make it not an adventure game. The new ones play just like old adventure game in how you have to think and solve problems (even if the solution is often to shoot it with an arrow).
I like the old adventure games (Space Quest era) more then almost any games, but now you can combine adventure and real time action, and it works pretty damn well.
Exactly -- given that the RAIDb itself sits elsewhere, I can't imagine it would be that hard to take the source itself and make a Perl DBD::Module out of it.
You don't have a very good imagination.
Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.
Of course it will! The only reason I (and many like me) hang around on Windows is because we want to run things-- and the main thing that isn't replicated just fine (or 10 times better) in some open source format on Linux is games. When WinX becomes reliable at running most popular games, I will make the switch over and never look back. I already have a Linux box, but it's for coding/serving, Windows is for using things (it has to be the better machine because games require the good hardware).
Just because you don't respect Windows, doesn't mean that all the high budget (and is most cases, best) games aren't made for it and only it. And those of us who do play games need a system that can run them. I hate x-box, but when Perfect Dark Zero comes out for it, I will buy it. You need the medium to use the app.
I used to have a friend who did work for bank ATMs. He told me a significant number of people pick 1234 or 6969 as their security code.
It's not comforting to know bank workers can see our pin numbers. I guess I should have known this from last time I called my former bank's customer service line and the recording asked me to type in my pin number (I didn't). Stupid banks aren't helping.
The most common password was "password" (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent).
Ok, so that's 47% of the company had a password that anyone could guess in 10 seconds! WHAT?? OK, I believe people are stupid, even REALLY stupid. But this I'm not sure I can believe. This study has to be tainted or something-- did they test all these passwords to make sure people weren't making them up? Seems to me that 90% of the people I know would lie about their password for a free pen.
This is of course assuming that nobody's name was password, or their birthdate was 4/9/ers or anything.