I would think that a secure processor with a compiler in the hands of the people is FAR more slippery a fish than underground radio, press, or uncensored internet. I really have nothing to support my stance other than some educated guesses about totalitarian governments, but I would be shocked if there are no backdoors in what the Chinese government gives its people.
This reply is pretty much directed at any post telling me to be more optimistic about the future.
Yeah, I know there are lots of great things to look forward to. In the meantime, I'm in debt, I've been through 4 years of college and am now fighting my way through grad school, I have less than $1000 to my name, and don't know how I'm going to pay rent in May. It's just not practical to be optimistic about this.
I can really see myself 18 months from now hopping trains with my diploma taped to by chest in a plastic bag for protection, hoping and praying that one day it's worth something. I'll try to keep it in mind that new technologies will intersect with computer technology. In the meantime, I had goals such as
Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Something beyond state-minimum car insurance
A car that isn't a piece of crap, even if it's just a better used car
Saving up to put a down payment on a house
Putting some money away for retirement
But none of that is happening. I scored 2210 on the GREs and I'm a computer science graduate living about six inches from poverty. I'm glad the economy is getting stronger, blah blah etc. I'm seriously considering moving to Asia so that my English skills are a greater asset than my education and I can possibly do things like "not worry how I'll buy food next month".
Those are the little luxuries I'm looking for, and in this economy/atmosphere/country, it's a little too much to ask sometimes. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I had majored in business. I have to laugh out loud whenever I read someone's advice to "Go to school for what you love!" Damnit, people, you CAN get yourself $100k+ in debt learning what you love and end up broke and jobless. Go to school for something that WILL get you a job.
First of all, a 4 year degree in Comp Sci is basically worthless in the USA right now. If you go for CS, understand that you will have to get a graduate degree unless you think PC Repair or telephone tech support is a great career for a college grad.
Secondly, it's sort of an empty discipline. By that I mean that at the end of a very successful day, all you really achieve is a contribution to somebody else's geekiness; now they can make misogynist jokes and jerk off to internet porn. In rare circumstances, you really do make a substantial positive difference in someone else's life, but let's be serious. The world would be just fine without Mozilla, Winamp, Apache, Linux, Unix, IBM, Sun, and last but not least Microsoft. I'm not saying these are modern demons, but compare CS to disciplines like political science, diplomacy, theology, ethics, etc. where you are seriously working at improving someone's life, not their leisure. Even if you prove that NP = P, get over yourself. That's about the most goddamn geeky thing you could do with your life except maybe being the Magic: The Gathering grand champion.
A computer science degree isn't the most portable thing in the world. Yes, you become an expert at algorithms and problem solving (IF you get a graduate degree) but other than that, you're pretty much an expert at reading technical documents and making instructions. That's not exactly the type of guy who gets hired for interdisciplinary management positions. Even if you do become an expert at problem solving, I haven't yet heard anyone say, "This is a serious [logistics/management/organizational/opportunity] problem, get me a COMPSCI GRAD!"
I went into CS in 1998 and got my BS in 2002. Note the years: I chose CS 2 years before the.com bust and graduated 2 years later, give or take a few months. I didn't choose CS for the money but rather because I love the study and the process. It's like in the movie Good Will Hunting (not that I'm a super genius or anything) - I look at the stuff and it just makes sense to me in a way that no other subject ever has. Plus, it was a good career at the time.
Now I'm basically a master of the Rubix cube and I'll have to move to a 3rd world country that may or may not have hostility toward my citizenship if I want to one day purchase a new economy car. I can't tell you whether or not EE is a better field, but for God's sake man, do not enter computer science at this time. If a genie gave me 1 wish in this life, I would go back to my freshman year of undergrad and choose a different field. I'd still be a computer geek, but you don't have to spend $150,000 on education to program, you go to Barnes & Noble and spend a couple hundred on books. It's far better to be an amateur hacker with a degree in business, in my humble but definitely qualified opinion.
Even better - install Firebird on a USB Flash drive. I have a 64M USB2.0 drive that devotes 17M to a complete Firebird install. It takes a little longer to start up initially, but anywhere I go I can plug this in and use Firebird.
It's an interesting question. I'd put my dollah on the hypothesis that the clique gravitates toward a more mainstream population as time goes on. I mean, everytime someone invites somebody that isn't 100% part of the clique, he probably starts a pyramid scheme of inviting people who are more general public and less elite.
But hey, I could be wrong. That's where my money is, though. Anyway, somebody invite me. I want to share my bad ass music interests and engage in enlightened conversations with.. uh.. internet people. *smacks irc* DOWN BOY!
The best use of Pause/Break on a Windows machine is that WindowsKey+Pause/Break will bring up the System program/menu thing from the control panel. When I worked as a PC tech, it was my most frequently used shortcut.
I also use ScrollLock in MIDI/Digital recording software. In default mode, the screen will follow the musical playback and scroll through the piece. If I want to make a quick change to a small section, though, I don't want a constantly moving screen. Pressing ScrollLock detaches my screen from the playback and lets me make that change without stopping the music. It's probably not a vital key, but hey it has a purpose.
Re:I don't find the fast reactions unbelievable...
on
More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Or some tiny cog in the beaucracy with an old copy of the mailing list ran the attachment. It's probably very difficult to say at this point. I know that I should be on the financial aid listserv that has apparently been comprimised, but only since last fall, and I've only been sent the virus about 30 times. Most of those were from individual's email accounts (which could have been spoofed) but still it sounds to me like some luser had a copy of an old mailing list otherwise I would have received many more emails.
Some VT students who have been here longer said they've received the virus on average twice per minute for the last 36 hours. Ouch? Dumb user, no doubt, but I wouldn't yet conclude that it was some mission critical machine that was comprimised.
when I was an undergrad, a fun way for my friends and myself to amuse ourselves was to get really drunk (this makes it more amusing) and then cruise the schools intranet for dopes who had shared their entire hard drives on the network. We would do all sorts of bad things, but the best was defacing a person's Internet Explorer wallpaper.
In Win98, I believe the wallpaper filename was stored in win.ini (it doesn't appear to be so in Win2k and this seriously isn't interesting enough for me to look it up at the moment.) We would grab that file and take a peek. If they had an image suitable to be defaced, we would draw mustaches on everyone and draw little cartoon baloons saying stuff like, "UR COMPUTAR HAS EBOLA!!11" and then overwrite their copy of the file. If they had a stupid background, we'd find something funny to give them.
Between the sorely juvenile humor and the liquor, it was completely hilarious to us at the time. I was even called by the school's Computer Support Desk at one time to see if I knew anything about the rare computer virus the student computers had. And before anybody points out how childish and potentially criminal this was, let me say that it was childish and potentially criminal. We just screwed with people's wallpapers but we could have remotely deleted their entire hard drives. Educating the masses about computer security is a difficult task, but goddamn if drawing mustaches on people isn't funny.
To add to this, I realized today that I can install a full copy of Mozilla Firebird onto my 64MB USB 2.0 Flash drive. I can plug that thing into any USB port on any Windows box with ME or later, and then run Firebird almost as well as if it were installed to the system's hard drive.
Even if your company won't let you install Mozilla, even if you need IE for some portion of your work assignments, there is really no reason why you can't do all of your normal web surfing with a web browser that functions properly.
Yeah. Profit. In the case of eBay, you are employing yourself as a reseller for a poorly marketed one-shot product. I really can't find anything wrong with this - someone is selling something and you could do a better job of selling it. Poof - instant open market.
If some sap is going to all the trouble to sell something on eBay and can't be bothered to spell it right, you've got to agree that the responsibility for a poor sale lies with him.
Sure, you could email him with a list of fixes to improve his sale, but you could also donate free source code to Microsoft to make Notepad a more flexible lightweight text editor or free blueprints to General Motors for an improved fuel injection system. You're giving away work for free, in this case to people who can't even spell their own products correctly. It is not like picking up money after you watched someone drop it, it's like picking up money that somebody dropped but were too lazy to pick up themselves.
Problem is that the general public will equate this attack to 'those weird Linux people' and it may have severe consequences if that attitude filters up towards congress in the process..
You're absolutely right that this will happen. My best suggestions are to point out stuff like:
Public opinion is that linux people are computer experts.
It's hard to be an expert and simultaneously stupid
Linux fans have absolutely nothing to gain by this! It's ABSURD to even suggest it. The SCO case is a textbook scam!
Was it Stalin who said that to solve any crime, look first to the people who benefit the most? Well for crying out loud, SCO is one scam after another. They have nothing to lose and can only GAIN sympathy from this. It's not like they were selling linux licenses like hotcakes over at caldera.com. They sacrificed their cesspool of a website for sympathy and ammunition. You'd seriously have to be a complete and total tool to believe that SCO/Microsoft isn't behind this in some way.
Yeah, people on Slashdot joke about cheering for the virus. People also joke about dead babies and being addicted to pr0n. WTF does a joke mean? (Seriously - that's a homework assignment for whomever quotes/. as evidence that linux supporters are behind this virus.)
In all fairness, it might turn out that some complete moron linux zealot did this, but to make that "conclusion" at this stage only proves that you're wholly unqualified to read a Nancy Drew mystery novel. For God's sake, any idiot could see that SCO has nothing to lose and can only gain from this.
(I'm not referring to the original poster with any pronouns, but rather to the cheerful tools who think they've got this thing all figured out but never heard of such things as "lying" or "tricks".)
Well, I think that what you say will be true for a great number of people. I'm probably an elitist snob about these things, though, and it's always going to make a difference to me that a song was created by arbitrary guesses that were edited to make some sense.
I guess my biggest complaint is that I find it a bit backwards to have a computer make attempts at creating the music and having a person accept/decline those attempts. In order to have anything good come from that, the person would need to be at least an expert listener and very likely an expert in music theory else the product will sound either basic or very awkward. At that point, why wouldn't the guy just write the music himself?
I guess I really don't see the need to speed up or ease the process of creating music. It seems pretty speedy and easy to me, and the things that I can't do easily are hard because I don't yet know the underlying theory. If I try to use some compositional device that I don't fully understand, it just sounds like I'm swiping somebody else's work. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to write music but don't know anything about it and they would like something like a faster and easier way to compose, but I think the results would probably reflect the person's level of skill as much as the computer's breadth of style.
Yes, that's all true, but recreating or adapting the highly analyzed works of other people doesn't add up to anything I'd call a creative musical statement.
It's really nothing to have a computer compose a MIDI lick that's LIKE somebody else; all it takes is a set of rules and a set of melodic tendancies. Even if you can do this for 100 musicians and can combine them at will, all you can create are derivations of the original works.
It's the human emotion or intuition that makes a creative statement valid rather than a regurgitation of previously gathered facts, and that's always going to be absent from synthetically composed music. It makes great elevator music, but it won't hold a candle to real expressions of the human condition.
There are some problems that are simply not suited for computation. The Traveling Salesperson is an NP-Complete problem and every known solution simply involves too many computations for any existing processor to handle it efficiently. The same can be said for playing the next note - there are really infinite nuances that will express your statement and no amount of math is going to transcend that decision with a new, creative solution without being basically arbitrary. That it would be at best arbitrary is what really invalidates the creative statement, in my opinion.
(As an aside - I'm not a big fan of the human-computer chess matches. It is inevitable that a computer with enough power (and even a poor algorithm) will defeat the best chess master. The contests really only determine if we've arrived at that state with an algorithm that doesn't require maxing out the computational side of things. Even the latest chess supercomputer fails, wait a few years and try it again. The human will ultimately fail because there are a huge - yet finite - number of decisions to make and a computer with enough power will make the most optimal. The computer might not always force a checkmate, but there would be no excuse for letting the human win - every possible tactic the human may have tried to employ would have been discovered by the computer ahead of time.
If we attached some poetic implication or metaphor to the execution of that game of chess, though, there's no point in holding the contest. The computer will always fail to live up to the creative power of any human. Imagine, for example, that this particular chess match is intended to metaphorically represent the tale of Achilles, including whatever statements about humankind's isolation in the universe and rage against fate are applicable. The winner is decided by which player, through the established metaphorical devices, best represents Achilles' life. In order to win this game, it's probably necessary to actually lose the game of chess, but you can't -just lose-, you have to do something like use your bishop to capture nearly every single of your opponent's pieces, and then when your bishop is finally captured, you will be in checkmate. Maybe a bishop is a poor choice for the metaphor, there are arguments to suggest a pawn or a night would be more expressive. (The bishop could represent Achilles' immortal ancestry, but the pawn is disposable like humanity before the gods. Winning isn't a matter of how many facts you could attach to back up your strategy, but to what degree a spectator feels the tale of Achilles through the execution of your strategy.) Anyhow, winning that game requires an emotional investment as well as a truly creative act, both of which can be arbitrarily approximated by a computer but can't actually be done.)
As an at-home MIDI and digital recording enthusiast, I know quite well what can be done with synthesizers. That has absolutely nothing to do with my statement.
A computer is never going to make a legitimate creative work.
A piano is a very, very easy instrument to synthesize. The relationship between the musician and the instrument is nothing more than which keys, how hard, and which pedals. It isn't so with a voice.
As a graduate student taking computation and algorithms, I know I'm not yet an expert but I have a pretty decent grasp on what cannot be accomplished via computation. Among those is a legitimate creative work. If you think a synthesized piano debunks that, why not mention.wav files or mp3s?
Of course real drummers are the best at programing drum machines - but any drummer will tell you that there's probably 50 different sounds they can make with a snare drum and at least as many with a hi-hat. I've never heard a synth drum that recreated the sounds of the spring on a bass drum pedal or the mechanics in the hi-hat. Sampling works better, but it takes a ton of samples to even attempt to recreate what a real drumset can do.
And then it takes a human to make it sound even remotely non-mechanical. Why? Because computation is never going to produce a legitimate creative work. Reproducing an inanimate instrument is possible, though not always easy. Reproducing the act of playing that instrument (with perfect fidelity) will always be beyond the scope of computation because it necessarily involves the human characteristic of intuition.
It sounds like they've made generic, bland singing their highest goal. I'm sure there's probably money in that, since most people can really get into elevator music, but it strikes me as a complete waste.
I can't think of any legendary singer who had a generic color to his or her voice. Janis Joplin certainly wasn't famous for the nondescript tone of her voice, neither Dylan, Robert Plant, Bob Marley, Bono, or any other singer that (in my opinion) deserves a penny for his or her work.
I'm sure it has some application, but a computer is never going to perform/create a legitimate creative work and anybody with any background in both computation and the performing arts must agree.
Ah - thank you for the reply. I had wondered if they were just using wireless at truck stops or not but I didn't have any idea where to begin researching.
The professionally pointed thing interests me as well. I admit I don't know a thing about satellites and/or dishes, but it seems to me that it would not be impossibly hard to have a self-aiming dish that could find the satellite in a matter of minutes - probably less if you had a GPS unit. This probably wouldn't allow you to swerve between lanes while playing Quake online, but I'd think you could park your rig for the night, push the "Locate Satellite" button, wait half an hour give or take, and be online.
This is exactly what the insurance assessor was looking for. He goes into the field, parks his car for an hour at least, and takes a bunch of digital photos of a wrecked car. He wants to then return to his car and upload his report to the office, then move on to the next claim. Instead, he has to go from claim to claim and keep everything organized, then return to a hotel with internet access (common in big cities, but not so much in rural areas) and file all his reports in one shot. He also said there is some financial incentive for filing on the spot - something about making corrections, getting more information, or the turnover time between filing and getting paid.
Is this the same type of setup used in tricked out semi tractors? I've had a few people (automobile accident assessors, etc.) ask me what they should get so that they may have internet access that's truly mobile. Satellite is the easy answer, but beyond that all I could say was, "Uh, figure out what truck drivers use."
Blues, jazz, hip hop, rap. Independent Film. Western genre of the lone hero. The Boeing 747. The stealth bomber and both stealth fighters. Californian wine. Disney World. Hundreds of world class universities that educate huge numbers of foreign students. IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, Microsoft (for better or for worse, but hey world domination is world domination), Google, eBay, Amazon. Horse breeding. Harley-Davidson. Fender, Gibson, and Marshall. Customized automobiles of Southern California. Baseball. Players from the Russian Super League typically come to the NHL, not the other way around. No shortage of Olympic gold. Saved France's ass in WW2. Gave huge assistance to England during the same. Played a major role in saving Berlin from starvation post-WW2. Bled in Serbia and Somalia trying to end violence in civil wars. Space exploration experience, space telescope, Mars rover, lunar landings, every Voyager, every Viking, every Pioneer. Palo Alto Research Center.
And really, that took about 5 minutes. What bothers the rest of the world is that there has never been a super power in history with more independence than America. We've had a relatively isolated cultural experience over the last 400 years and we've done a hell of a lot of "impossible" tasks while the rest of the world ranted about how important it is. If it's so important, why are American people more and more ignorant about it while our country grows more and more influential? America started out as colonies meant for exploitation and now the Old World is increasingly frightened of being exploited at the hands of the United States.
The United States is one of the youngest countries on the face of the planet. If we're so second rate, what the HELL has the rest of the world been doing for the last 400-4000 years? North Korea can barely feed its own people, China is struggling to avoid ending up like the Soviet Union, and all I hear from Europe is how America is a bad influence. I can't even fathom how that makes sense to the speaker - America is the epitome of a success story.
And we're not popular because nobody likes a show off. It's like that, ya'll.
Well, fact or not, they're making a claim that it's true. It may very well be true, but when it comes to religions with which I'm unfamiliar, I like to start with the things that the critics and the proponents agree about.
Thus far, I've read the Bahai sites say that it is the second most prevalent religion, but I haven't seen any numbers or any documentation from an impartial or even adverse group to back that up. I'm very interested the evidence they use to support that claim. To be perfectly honest, I find it very unlikely that a faith I've never heard of is more numerous than either Muslims or Protestant Christians, so perhaps they're using convenient definitions of religions (ie splitting Muslims between Sunni and Shiite and Protestants into the hundreds of different churches.)
But I could be wrong - I'm just saying that I'm curious to see how they break down the sizes of different religions in a way that places them as the 2nd largest. I'm not an expert but I'm fairly well read on world religions for a layman and so I'm naturally suspicious about the claim that Bahai is the 2nd largest in the world.
I'm not arguing with any of the great points about excellent goods and culture coming from outside the states - to do so would be absurd.
But to the vast, vast majority of Americans, it IS irrelevant. They aren't interested and they don't regret missing out on those things. Then when one of us does say, "WTF is a tatra?" (complete with implied arrogance/apathy toward the rest of the world) people act like you have to be a really dumb American to not know. No, you have to be a really interested American to know.
I happened to discover that my favorite food in the entire world is Shanghai dumplings, and my first experience with that style was in Shanghai. I'm always an advocate of exploring the world, but the fact remains that for most Americans, the rest of the world couldn't have a smaller direct impact on their lives.
I'm not trying to be arrogant, but I honestly can't understand why people think that the rest of the world is so damn relevant to Americans. It's thousands of miles away, it has no industry that we don't do ourselves in some fashion, and for the last 50 years we've been exporting our culture, not importing theirs. I'm not trying to be arrogant, but the simple fact is that aside from personal curiosity, there isn't much reason for the typical American to have any idea what a Tatra is or keep up to date with the current events on the other side of the planet. I don't think it's a great situation, but there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post.
I would think that a secure processor with a compiler in the hands of the people is FAR more slippery a fish than underground radio, press, or uncensored internet. I really have nothing to support my stance other than some educated guesses about totalitarian governments, but I would be shocked if there are no backdoors in what the Chinese government gives its people.
This reply is pretty much directed at any post telling me to be more optimistic about the future.
Yeah, I know there are lots of great things to look forward to. In the meantime, I'm in debt, I've been through 4 years of college and am now fighting my way through grad school, I have less than $1000 to my name, and don't know how I'm going to pay rent in May. It's just not practical to be optimistic about this.
I can really see myself 18 months from now hopping trains with my diploma taped to by chest in a plastic bag for protection, hoping and praying that one day it's worth something. I'll try to keep it in mind that new technologies will intersect with computer technology. In the meantime, I had goals such as
But none of that is happening. I scored 2210 on the GREs and I'm a computer science graduate living about six inches from poverty. I'm glad the economy is getting stronger, blah blah etc. I'm seriously considering moving to Asia so that my English skills are a greater asset than my education and I can possibly do things like "not worry how I'll buy food next month".
Those are the little luxuries I'm looking for, and in this economy/atmosphere/country, it's a little too much to ask sometimes. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I had majored in business. I have to laugh out loud whenever I read someone's advice to "Go to school for what you love!" Damnit, people, you CAN get yourself $100k+ in debt learning what you love and end up broke and jobless. Go to school for something that WILL get you a job.
First of all, a 4 year degree in Comp Sci is basically worthless in the USA right now. If you go for CS, understand that you will have to get a graduate degree unless you think PC Repair or telephone tech support is a great career for a college grad.
Secondly, it's sort of an empty discipline. By that I mean that at the end of a very successful day, all you really achieve is a contribution to somebody else's geekiness; now they can make misogynist jokes and jerk off to internet porn. In rare circumstances, you really do make a substantial positive difference in someone else's life, but let's be serious. The world would be just fine without Mozilla, Winamp, Apache, Linux, Unix, IBM, Sun, and last but not least Microsoft. I'm not saying these are modern demons, but compare CS to disciplines like political science, diplomacy, theology, ethics, etc. where you are seriously working at improving someone's life, not their leisure. Even if you prove that NP = P, get over yourself. That's about the most goddamn geeky thing you could do with your life except maybe being the Magic: The Gathering grand champion.
A computer science degree isn't the most portable thing in the world. Yes, you become an expert at algorithms and problem solving (IF you get a graduate degree) but other than that, you're pretty much an expert at reading technical documents and making instructions. That's not exactly the type of guy who gets hired for interdisciplinary management positions. Even if you do become an expert at problem solving, I haven't yet heard anyone say, "This is a serious [logistics/management/organizational/opportunity] problem, get me a COMPSCI GRAD!"
I went into CS in 1998 and got my BS in 2002. Note the years: I chose CS 2 years before the .com bust and graduated 2 years later, give or take a few months. I didn't choose CS for the money but rather because I love the study and the process. It's like in the movie Good Will Hunting (not that I'm a super genius or anything) - I look at the stuff and it just makes sense to me in a way that no other subject ever has. Plus, it was a good career at the time.
Now I'm basically a master of the Rubix cube and I'll have to move to a 3rd world country that may or may not have hostility toward my citizenship if I want to one day purchase a new economy car. I can't tell you whether or not EE is a better field, but for God's sake man, do not enter computer science at this time. If a genie gave me 1 wish in this life, I would go back to my freshman year of undergrad and choose a different field. I'd still be a computer geek, but you don't have to spend $150,000 on education to program, you go to Barnes & Noble and spend a couple hundred on books. It's far better to be an amateur hacker with a degree in business, in my humble but definitely qualified opinion.
Even better - install Firebird on a USB Flash drive. I have a 64M USB2.0 drive that devotes 17M to a complete Firebird install. It takes a little longer to start up initially, but anywhere I go I can plug this in and use Firebird.
But hey, I could be wrong. That's where my money is, though. Anyway, somebody invite me. I want to share my bad ass music interests and engage in enlightened conversations with.. uh.. internet people. *smacks irc* DOWN BOY!
That's interesting. I have Adelphia and can confirm the OP's claim that inbound port 80 is blocked. It may be a regional thing maybe?
I also use ScrollLock in MIDI/Digital recording software. In default mode, the screen will follow the musical playback and scroll through the piece. If I want to make a quick change to a small section, though, I don't want a constantly moving screen. Pressing ScrollLock detaches my screen from the playback and lets me make that change without stopping the music. It's probably not a vital key, but hey it has a purpose.
Some VT students who have been here longer said they've received the virus on average twice per minute for the last 36 hours. Ouch? Dumb user, no doubt, but I wouldn't yet conclude that it was some mission critical machine that was comprimised.
In Win98, I believe the wallpaper filename was stored in win.ini (it doesn't appear to be so in Win2k and this seriously isn't interesting enough for me to look it up at the moment.) We would grab that file and take a peek. If they had an image suitable to be defaced, we would draw mustaches on everyone and draw little cartoon baloons saying stuff like, "UR COMPUTAR HAS EBOLA!!11" and then overwrite their copy of the file. If they had a stupid background, we'd find something funny to give them.
Between the sorely juvenile humor and the liquor, it was completely hilarious to us at the time. I was even called by the school's Computer Support Desk at one time to see if I knew anything about the rare computer virus the student computers had. And before anybody points out how childish and potentially criminal this was, let me say that it was childish and potentially criminal. We just screwed with people's wallpapers but we could have remotely deleted their entire hard drives. Educating the masses about computer security is a difficult task, but goddamn if drawing mustaches on people isn't funny.
Even if your company won't let you install Mozilla, even if you need IE for some portion of your work assignments, there is really no reason why you can't do all of your normal web surfing with a web browser that functions properly.
If some sap is going to all the trouble to sell something on eBay and can't be bothered to spell it right, you've got to agree that the responsibility for a poor sale lies with him.
Sure, you could email him with a list of fixes to improve his sale, but you could also donate free source code to Microsoft to make Notepad a more flexible lightweight text editor or free blueprints to General Motors for an improved fuel injection system. You're giving away work for free, in this case to people who can't even spell their own products correctly. It is not like picking up money after you watched someone drop it, it's like picking up money that somebody dropped but were too lazy to pick up themselves.
Here's my grass roots +1 Insightful mod.
You're absolutely right that this will happen. My best suggestions are to point out stuff like:
In all fairness, it might turn out that some complete moron linux zealot did this, but to make that "conclusion" at this stage only proves that you're wholly unqualified to read a Nancy Drew mystery novel. For God's sake, any idiot could see that SCO has nothing to lose and can only gain from this.
(I'm not referring to the original poster with any pronouns, but rather to the cheerful tools who think they've got this thing all figured out but never heard of such things as "lying" or "tricks".)
I guess my biggest complaint is that I find it a bit backwards to have a computer make attempts at creating the music and having a person accept/decline those attempts. In order to have anything good come from that, the person would need to be at least an expert listener and very likely an expert in music theory else the product will sound either basic or very awkward. At that point, why wouldn't the guy just write the music himself?
I guess I really don't see the need to speed up or ease the process of creating music. It seems pretty speedy and easy to me, and the things that I can't do easily are hard because I don't yet know the underlying theory. If I try to use some compositional device that I don't fully understand, it just sounds like I'm swiping somebody else's work. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to write music but don't know anything about it and they would like something like a faster and easier way to compose, but I think the results would probably reflect the person's level of skill as much as the computer's breadth of style.
It's really nothing to have a computer compose a MIDI lick that's LIKE somebody else; all it takes is a set of rules and a set of melodic tendancies. Even if you can do this for 100 musicians and can combine them at will, all you can create are derivations of the original works.
It's the human emotion or intuition that makes a creative statement valid rather than a regurgitation of previously gathered facts, and that's always going to be absent from synthetically composed music. It makes great elevator music, but it won't hold a candle to real expressions of the human condition.
There are some problems that are simply not suited for computation. The Traveling Salesperson is an NP-Complete problem and every known solution simply involves too many computations for any existing processor to handle it efficiently. The same can be said for playing the next note - there are really infinite nuances that will express your statement and no amount of math is going to transcend that decision with a new, creative solution without being basically arbitrary. That it would be at best arbitrary is what really invalidates the creative statement, in my opinion.
(As an aside - I'm not a big fan of the human-computer chess matches. It is inevitable that a computer with enough power (and even a poor algorithm) will defeat the best chess master. The contests really only determine if we've arrived at that state with an algorithm that doesn't require maxing out the computational side of things. Even the latest chess supercomputer fails, wait a few years and try it again. The human will ultimately fail because there are a huge - yet finite - number of decisions to make and a computer with enough power will make the most optimal. The computer might not always force a checkmate, but there would be no excuse for letting the human win - every possible tactic the human may have tried to employ would have been discovered by the computer ahead of time.
If we attached some poetic implication or metaphor to the execution of that game of chess, though, there's no point in holding the contest. The computer will always fail to live up to the creative power of any human. Imagine, for example, that this particular chess match is intended to metaphorically represent the tale of Achilles, including whatever statements about humankind's isolation in the universe and rage against fate are applicable. The winner is decided by which player, through the established metaphorical devices, best represents Achilles' life. In order to win this game, it's probably necessary to actually lose the game of chess, but you can't -just lose-, you have to do something like use your bishop to capture nearly every single of your opponent's pieces, and then when your bishop is finally captured, you will be in checkmate. Maybe a bishop is a poor choice for the metaphor, there are arguments to suggest a pawn or a night would be more expressive. (The bishop could represent Achilles' immortal ancestry, but the pawn is disposable like humanity before the gods. Winning isn't a matter of how many facts you could attach to back up your strategy, but to what degree a spectator feels the tale of Achilles through the execution of your strategy.) Anyhow, winning that game requires an emotional investment as well as a truly creative act, both of which can be arbitrarily approximated by a computer but can't actually be done.)
As an at-home MIDI and digital recording enthusiast, I know quite well what can be done with synthesizers. That has absolutely nothing to do with my statement.
A computer is never going to make a legitimate creative work.
A piano is a very, very easy instrument to synthesize. The relationship between the musician and the instrument is nothing more than which keys, how hard, and which pedals. It isn't so with a voice.
As a graduate student taking computation and algorithms, I know I'm not yet an expert but I have a pretty decent grasp on what cannot be accomplished via computation. Among those is a legitimate creative work. If you think a synthesized piano debunks that, why not mention .wav files or mp3s?
Of course real drummers are the best at programing drum machines - but any drummer will tell you that there's probably 50 different sounds they can make with a snare drum and at least as many with a hi-hat. I've never heard a synth drum that recreated the sounds of the spring on a bass drum pedal or the mechanics in the hi-hat. Sampling works better, but it takes a ton of samples to even attempt to recreate what a real drumset can do.
And then it takes a human to make it sound even remotely non-mechanical. Why? Because computation is never going to produce a legitimate creative work. Reproducing an inanimate instrument is possible, though not always easy. Reproducing the act of playing that instrument (with perfect fidelity) will always be beyond the scope of computation because it necessarily involves the human characteristic of intuition.
I can't think of any legendary singer who had a generic color to his or her voice. Janis Joplin certainly wasn't famous for the nondescript tone of her voice, neither Dylan, Robert Plant, Bob Marley, Bono, or any other singer that (in my opinion) deserves a penny for his or her work.
I'm sure it has some application, but a computer is never going to perform/create a legitimate creative work and anybody with any background in both computation and the performing arts must agree.
The professionally pointed thing interests me as well. I admit I don't know a thing about satellites and/or dishes, but it seems to me that it would not be impossibly hard to have a self-aiming dish that could find the satellite in a matter of minutes - probably less if you had a GPS unit. This probably wouldn't allow you to swerve between lanes while playing Quake online, but I'd think you could park your rig for the night, push the "Locate Satellite" button, wait half an hour give or take, and be online.
This is exactly what the insurance assessor was looking for. He goes into the field, parks his car for an hour at least, and takes a bunch of digital photos of a wrecked car. He wants to then return to his car and upload his report to the office, then move on to the next claim. Instead, he has to go from claim to claim and keep everything organized, then return to a hotel with internet access (common in big cities, but not so much in rural areas) and file all his reports in one shot. He also said there is some financial incentive for filing on the spot - something about making corrections, getting more information, or the turnover time between filing and getting paid.
Is this the same type of setup used in tricked out semi tractors? I've had a few people (automobile accident assessors, etc.) ask me what they should get so that they may have internet access that's truly mobile. Satellite is the easy answer, but beyond that all I could say was, "Uh, figure out what truck drivers use."
I believe that rendering html removes anything more than one space after a period. In fact, I put seven spaces after the previous period.
And really, that took about 5 minutes. What bothers the rest of the world is that there has never been a super power in history with more independence than America. We've had a relatively isolated cultural experience over the last 400 years and we've done a hell of a lot of "impossible" tasks while the rest of the world ranted about how important it is. If it's so important, why are American people more and more ignorant about it while our country grows more and more influential? America started out as colonies meant for exploitation and now the Old World is increasingly frightened of being exploited at the hands of the United States.
The United States is one of the youngest countries on the face of the planet. If we're so second rate, what the HELL has the rest of the world been doing for the last 400-4000 years? North Korea can barely feed its own people, China is struggling to avoid ending up like the Soviet Union, and all I hear from Europe is how America is a bad influence. I can't even fathom how that makes sense to the speaker - America is the epitome of a success story.
And we're not popular because nobody likes a show off. It's like that, ya'll.
Well, fact or not, they're making a claim that it's true. It may very well be true, but when it comes to religions with which I'm unfamiliar, I like to start with the things that the critics and the proponents agree about.
Thus far, I've read the Bahai sites say that it is the second most prevalent religion, but I haven't seen any numbers or any documentation from an impartial or even adverse group to back that up. I'm very interested the evidence they use to support that claim. To be perfectly honest, I find it very unlikely that a faith I've never heard of is more numerous than either Muslims or Protestant Christians, so perhaps they're using convenient definitions of religions (ie splitting Muslims between Sunni and Shiite and Protestants into the hundreds of different churches.)
But I could be wrong - I'm just saying that I'm curious to see how they break down the sizes of different religions in a way that places them as the 2nd largest. I'm not an expert but I'm fairly well read on world religions for a layman and so I'm naturally suspicious about the claim that Bahai is the 2nd largest in the world.
But to the vast, vast majority of Americans, it IS irrelevant. They aren't interested and they don't regret missing out on those things. Then when one of us does say, "WTF is a tatra?" (complete with implied arrogance/apathy toward the rest of the world) people act like you have to be a really dumb American to not know. No, you have to be a really interested American to know.
I happened to discover that my favorite food in the entire world is Shanghai dumplings, and my first experience with that style was in Shanghai. I'm always an advocate of exploring the world, but the fact remains that for most Americans, the rest of the world couldn't have a smaller direct impact on their lives.
Or simply North America.
I'm not trying to be arrogant, but I honestly can't understand why people think that the rest of the world is so damn relevant to Americans. It's thousands of miles away, it has no industry that we don't do ourselves in some fashion, and for the last 50 years we've been exporting our culture, not importing theirs. I'm not trying to be arrogant, but the simple fact is that aside from personal curiosity, there isn't much reason for the typical American to have any idea what a Tatra is or keep up to date with the current events on the other side of the planet. I don't think it's a great situation, but there it is.