No seriously, if you have a laptop there, you can easily control itunes remotely. Heck, you could do it from a web page, if you wanted to.
There are a lot of wireless devices that work with OS X. Remote controls for presentations, PDAs, and Bluetooth Phones. With Applescript, and possibly without, depending, these could be adapted to control your music without a computer nearby. You wouldn't even need to have your laptop handy.
Plus, I suspect it's only a matter of time before several companies release controllers that work with this. It's an obvious soltuion, so I'm sure they'll be there.
You should look past the specs of the initial object and see what happens when you combine it with existing technologies, plus imagine the possibilities it opens up. I mean, I know it's great to have all the functionality out of the box, but we're geeks here, and it shouldn't take much tinkering to get it to work in any way you really want.
It's been mentioned before, but the reason that Google went public is because they grew large enough to have to do SEC filings, so they figured why not just go public at the same time to take the good that goes with the bad.
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution. Do we want to be strictly responsible for our own genetics? How do we identify practical genetic defects if we never die? Our existence as a species will then be dependent on the survival of a highly technological civilization which is far from guaranteed.
If you think we're evolving, I fear you are mistaken. Civilization halts or at least slows evolution significantly. Sure, we still have Natural Selection, but that is modified by factors that change on a generational basis. We are virtually done with Survival of the Fit, because we do everything in our power to extend our lives by means that are non-evolutionary.
Every time you take a pill to relieve youself of some sort of ailment, every trip to the doctor, every time you give someone a fine for driving a motorcycle without a helmet, you are slowing evolution.
If you really want to evolve into a species that can survive the new situations that world brings, eliminate all medical care and all programs, legislative and educational, that will prevent you from doing something that will get yourself killed before reaching childbearing age. Otherwise, we've stopped ourselves right where we are, evolutionarily-speaking.
As I mentioned above, we do still have natural selection, but it's not an evolutionary force that would be eliminated by longevity, it just modifies the criteria.
The general idea of your post, that we don't know what happens once we extend out lifespan, is certainly valid, but you know, there's really only one way to find out. If we all go crazy after the age of 235 years of age, well, so be it. That's not a reason not to give it a try, though.
And although some people are trying to find a fountain of youth as an "egotistical obsession stemming from the fear of death," other people are doing the searching because that's what we do. We find boundaries, and we try to stop them. That's the motivation we have to learn and acocmplish things, not only because one day we're going to die. We try because we can, and we'll stop only when there are no boundaries left to pass.
=Brian
Re:Electrons are not "produced" by solar cells
on
Solar Cells Get Boost
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I have to say, this is a little picky. First of all, the article description states that the new substance "...can produce 2 electrons where 1 was produced before", so it does not imply a change in the fundamental mechanism so much as the yield. Anyone who knew how solar cells worked before reading this description would be able to make the leap that no laws of physics were being violated to produce this electron.
Second, the description does not say that the electrons are being created at all. The dictionary definition of the word produce indicates, in the first entry, that produce means "To bring forth; yield", which is good enough, but skim the third entry and its example, "To bring forth; exhibit: reached into a pocket and produced a packet of matches". I think the first is more accurate, but the second indicates just how far the definition of produce does not imply creation.
I'm not entirely sure why game studios don't just provide this as a service themselves. It's an instant revenue stream, and you'll have much more control over the process, as well as being able to track the value of items from an in-game perspective as well as real world.
The only real niggle is putting safeguards in place that prevent employees from making unique or rare items and selling them, but really that's no different than if they made the items and sold them on eBay.
Ah, but do you allow tinyURLs? 'Cause that's what the grandparent post is suggesting. However, that particular exploit won't work, because it's neither formed properly, nor is it calling a script. However, there are other ways of running the exploit, and even linking it on slashdot, whether in a comment or otherwise.
Actually, you can't interchange single- and double-quotes in Applescript like you can in perl. Applescript only accepts double-quotes as a signifier of a string. If you tried my first script, it would give an error that there was an unknown token when it was expecting one of a number of other things.
The reason is because Microsoft has shown time and time again that they are not opposed to leveraging their power for the forces of Evil. Microsoft, you may recall, is a convicted monopolist, and if they have control over your music, it's entirely possible that they will force you to upgrade to each new version of Windows, just because they can.
Apple's DRM is considered a 'necessary evil', because people on Slashdot, on average, don't think that Apple is going to abuse the power that the DRM has over them any more than they need to in order to keep the Record Label executives happy. Cause, you know what, there is no likely scenario in the near future which includes having RIAA music available for electronic purchase but does not include any DRM at all.
For any one given mail spool, it's trivial to search the messages for a keyword, but that's not the practical problem. The practical problem for somebody wanting to search every user's email together is to perform all the trivial searches over all the servers over all the operating systems over all the storage formats used by all the organizations being investigated. With Gmail, all this is moot if, as everyone claims, they have one single huge distributed storage system for everyone's mail.
See, you've needlessly complicated things to try to make your point. The simple way to say it is to substitute gmail with Yahoo mail (using the search and replace engine of your choice). Or Hotmail. Yes, if everyone in the whole world started using gmail, it would be really simple to search everyone's email. However, just because gmail is indexed and made for searching doesn't mean that all of the other major webmail providers don't have a similar weakness.
The grandparent's post stated Just because other email service providers are not specifically optimising their email service for search, doesn't mean they can't simply issue something similar to.... Meaning that for any one given email provider, it would be simple to do a search, if a bit slower than with gmail (though that wouldn't matter so much from a law enforcement perspective).
So it's really irrelevant that different corporations and service providers use different mail systems, because that's not going to change with the advent of gmail. The only reason it would be relevant is because perhaps geeks are more likely to use gmail than hotmail or yahoo, so you're saying that it would be easier to get the data on geeks and other readers of slashdot.
Plus, even if any one given provider has mail stored across several databases, the database administrators are going to know how to get that info just as easily as they are going to be able to get your password (or access into an account that they aren't cleared for), if they're worth their salt. Yes, it'll require some cooperation from the admins, but how do you think law enforcement is going to get the information otherwise?
Gasp! Scientists have found that plastics that live in warm, wet environments contain Bacteria! Oh...my...god!
Seriously, this is about as non-newsy as you can get. Next we're going to find out that there's bacteria of the wound-infecting type just hanging around on people's skin. And telephones! Don't get me started on telephones. We might have to create an army of Telephone Sanitizers to save us from being wiped out by some manner of virulent disease contracted through the receiver of a telephone.
My favorite is the Criterion Edition of The Fisher King. It starts out with Gilliam telling us about how he made the walls in the room to be slanted to make it look larger, and the shadows across the protagonist are bars to represent the jail that his life has become...and it goes from there.
That's what I want from my director commentaries: why they did what they did. I don't really care that the sandwiches on that day of filming were particularly tasty (unless they're important to the plot of the film or something).
In fact, you aren't the first person to think of this. I present to you: GE's Advantium oven.
The people who claim Microwave Ovens are the successors are Fools! Fools! The reason being that the EZ Bake works off of light bulbs. (Incidentally, you would have wanted to rig a better lightbulb into the EZ Bake Oven to make it more powerful - I suggest Halogen.) The Advantium cooks with, you guessed it, Light.
But, sadly, your joke has, in fact, been brought to, um, light. Sorry.
Almost forgot about Frigga. Nice girl, I spent a whole day teling her what her name means.
Yeah, it'd be a pain to be named after the Norse Goddess of Love and Fertility. But you'd think she'd be able to understand that a little easier. Maybe you might want to pick up some mythology books next time, for help.
The idea is an existential view of Artificial Intelligence. The idea was first proposed (or at least made famous) by Alan Turing, and it's known as the Turing Test. I mention to be complete, as you probably already know about the Turing Test. Even so, the Turing Test says, in short, that a computer could be considered to have artificial intelligence if it could successfully hold a conversation with human beings without being detected as a computer.
In any case, it's a pragmatic view. The idea being that philosophers can't even find a way to determine whether humans really think. Proving that the rest of the world is more than an illusion is technically impossible without making unprovable assumptions.
So, if you can make a computer that, from a conversational standpoint, appears completely human, why is it not intelligent?
By and large, this is what we call a "Powerbook." Okay, it does some stuff like translating URLs to arbitrary local pages, but that is of limited use. At least for OS X users.
To understand what I mean, go to a Macworld Expo Keynote with your Airport card. You'll see dozens of different Airport networks pop up. Because everyone has Rendezvous, you can use iChat to chat with any of them, and you can use Rendezvous to share your locally available web pages automatically. They'll even show up in Safari's bookmarks. The best part is, you could see what pages you're going to, rather than being redirected at random.
When I go to the AdHoc Conference this year (used to be MacHack), I'm going to have my powerbook set up with a Wiki so that, if I collaborate on my Hack again, it'll be an easy way to share the information. Also, during the Hack contest, anyone who wanted to could open a copy of SubEthaEdit and record their notes from the show. It allowed a quick collaboration between several to dozens of people on covering the show.
So, in general, it just doesn't seem to do much for you, aside from pranks. I suppose it's good for people who don't have Rendezvous enabled throughout their operating system.
For 'slow' time, the effect is confined to a bubble, so you can have bullet time fights without affecting the whole world. As different characters are differently able to distort time, control speed and physics are changed by different amounts depending on your abilities; but all characters 'see' the bubble as if they were the fastest character (ie you see it the way the movie did).
So, let me try to understand your vision: Players are running around shooting each other in real time, but someone is engaged in a bullet-time battle, they are shown as being very slow. However, this won't affect the rest of the world? What happens if someone shoots towards them? They bullet will go normal speed, until it hits the bubble, at which point it will slow down?
Also, what if you're in a team? You have five characters (Team A) who encounter 5 other characters (Team B). Two opposing characters, one from each team, go into bullet-time. The other four players from Team A proceed to wipe out the 4 players from Team B, then, after a while, the bullet-time member of Team B emerges from the Bubble and is trounced by the 4 surviving members of Team A. I suspect that would be a very common occurrence in that sort of scenario, and thus it would be unlikely that anyone would want to enter bullet time.
Alternatively, while the two players are in bullet time, you take your four team members and spray as much machine-gun fire into the bubble as possible. If you are a good team, you coordinate the fire so that it follows a pattern that can't be easily dodged, even in bullet-time. I predict it would take about 3 hours into Beta, tops, before someone perfected that technique. Then it would be less likely that people would enter Bullet Time, at least on purpose. If they're forced into it, then it'll be a major bug that kills enjoyment of the game.
On the other hand, if players out of Bullet Time can't interact with players in Bullet Time, then you've gained a tremendous advantage by being in bullet time, which will likely be exploited to a player's greatest ability.
Affecting the control speed is another danger. If you are near a bullet-time battle, and your control is stopped immediately when someone pops into bullet time, then you've just given controllable lag to upper-level characters. The first technique I predict you'd see in that circumstance is someone randomly popping into and out of bullet time, which will greatly interfere with someone's ability to accurately fire on a character, even if the target is not the one currently in bullet time. Then you have to determine what the affected radius of bullet time exposure is, whether it works through walls and windows, etc.
There are intrinsic problems with having multiple time scales in a multiplayer game, and those are a few of them. If they can pull it off, I will be very, very impressed.
Yeah, cause the last thing the Guinness people want to do is go around finding new things to put in their book. That interrupts the beer-drinking time!
I read it as 'we were forced to upgrade our software at a co$t or the vendor will sick the lawyers onto us.. but it's a good thing... really... really it is..'
You should probably re-read it as, "We were using illegal copies of Word, and we were going to be caught for it. However, now we don't have to go to the Finance department every time we want to put Office on a new computer, and it looks like our annual costs to Microsoft are lower using the site license rather than buying all of those individual copies."
Don't you think that such concerns are more warranted when someone builds a new kind of bomb than when they build a new kind of fork? This is a great little device that obviously has abuse written all over it. Even the good guys look at this and cringe.
I think the difference is because you use the fork every day, so you have a lot stronger connections in your mind with the okay uses of a fork. Whereas the idea for the chip comes out, and you can see the good and the bad, but the bad seems a bit easier to come up with exciting and abusive possibilities.
If you were locked up in a room with a crazy person who slowly killed and tortured everyone you love in various and increasingly creative methods with a fork, you might not feel so great about forks. Then, if you saw a commercial for a fork with, say, a serrated edge, you would probably consider that to be a worse thing than any hypothetical chip.
It's an extreme example, to be sure, but you've probably been using a fork for most of your life, so it would take something extreme to offset all of the years of mundane usage.
Frankly, it would be a lot more difficult to abuse the chip than the fork, because any fool could use the fork, whereas it would take a very skilled and knowledgeable person to successfully wield the chip. And it would be a lot more expensive.
Orrrr...You have about 30 feeds that you update each every half an hour or so, and it doesn't make that much sense (or the RSS reader doesn't support) configuring each site differently. Besides, the new RSS standards can find check to see if anything has changed, then only download if there's new content.
For myself, I don't use Slashdot's RSS feed because it can't match my preferences for which stories to show. I want to see the apple.slashdot.org feeds, I want to skip all the SCO stories. That sort of thing. All it seems to do is the base front page.
Slashdot Mirror
Applescript.
No seriously, if you have a laptop there, you can easily control itunes remotely. Heck, you could do it from a web page, if you wanted to.
There are a lot of wireless devices that work with OS X. Remote controls for presentations, PDAs, and Bluetooth Phones. With Applescript, and possibly without, depending, these could be adapted to control your music without a computer nearby. You wouldn't even need to have your laptop handy.
Plus, I suspect it's only a matter of time before several companies release controllers that work with this. It's an obvious soltuion, so I'm sure they'll be there.
You should look past the specs of the initial object and see what happens when you combine it with existing technologies, plus imagine the possibilities it opens up. I mean, I know it's great to have all the functionality out of the box, but we're geeks here, and it shouldn't take much tinkering to get it to work in any way you really want.
=Brian
It's been mentioned before, but the reason that Google went public is because they grew large enough to have to do SEC filings, so they figured why not just go public at the same time to take the good that goes with the bad.
=Brian
>Google is proof that using a smarter aproach is often the best way to solve a problem.
Vs. the "dumber was is often the best way to solve bleeding-edge technical problems" the rest of the world has been doing?
Actually, vs. "Throwing more money and people at the problem" that the rest of the world has been doing.
=Brian
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution. Do we want to be strictly responsible for our own genetics? How do we identify practical genetic defects if we never die? Our existence as a species will then be dependent on the survival of a highly technological civilization which is far from guaranteed.
If you think we're evolving, I fear you are mistaken. Civilization halts or at least slows evolution significantly. Sure, we still have Natural Selection, but that is modified by factors that change on a generational basis. We are virtually done with Survival of the Fit, because we do everything in our power to extend our lives by means that are non-evolutionary.
Every time you take a pill to relieve youself of some sort of ailment, every trip to the doctor, every time you give someone a fine for driving a motorcycle without a helmet, you are slowing evolution.
If you really want to evolve into a species that can survive the new situations that world brings, eliminate all medical care and all programs, legislative and educational, that will prevent you from doing something that will get yourself killed before reaching childbearing age. Otherwise, we've stopped ourselves right where we are, evolutionarily-speaking.
As I mentioned above, we do still have natural selection, but it's not an evolutionary force that would be eliminated by longevity, it just modifies the criteria.
The general idea of your post, that we don't know what happens once we extend out lifespan, is certainly valid, but you know, there's really only one way to find out. If we all go crazy after the age of 235 years of age, well, so be it. That's not a reason not to give it a try, though.
And although some people are trying to find a fountain of youth as an "egotistical obsession stemming from the fear of death," other people are doing the searching because that's what we do. We find boundaries, and we try to stop them. That's the motivation we have to learn and acocmplish things, not only because one day we're going to die. We try because we can, and we'll stop only when there are no boundaries left to pass.
=Brian
I have to say, this is a little picky. First of all, the article description states that the new substance "...can produce 2 electrons where 1 was produced before", so it does not imply a change in the fundamental mechanism so much as the yield. Anyone who knew how solar cells worked before reading this description would be able to make the leap that no laws of physics were being violated to produce this electron.
Second, the description does not say that the electrons are being created at all. The dictionary definition of the word produce indicates, in the first entry, that produce means "To bring forth; yield", which is good enough, but skim the third entry and its example, "To bring forth; exhibit: reached into a pocket and produced a packet of matches". I think the first is more accurate, but the second indicates just how far the definition of produce does not imply creation.
=Brian
I'm not entirely sure why game studios don't just provide this as a service themselves. It's an instant revenue stream, and you'll have much more control over the process, as well as being able to track the value of items from an in-game perspective as well as real world.
The only real niggle is putting safeguards in place that prevent employees from making unique or rare items and selling them, but really that's no different than if they made the items and sold them on eBay.
=Brian
Ah, but do you allow tinyURLs? 'Cause that's what the grandparent post is suggesting. However, that particular exploit won't work, because it's neither formed properly, nor is it calling a script. However, there are other ways of running the exploit, and even linking it on slashdot, whether in a comment or otherwise.
=Brian
Actually, you can't interchange single- and double-quotes in Applescript like you can in perl. Applescript only accepts double-quotes as a signifier of a string. If you tried my first script, it would give an error that there was an unknown token when it was expecting one of a number of other things.
=Brian
The reason is because Microsoft has shown time and time again that they are not opposed to leveraging their power for the forces of Evil. Microsoft, you may recall, is a convicted monopolist, and if they have control over your music, it's entirely possible that they will force you to upgrade to each new version of Windows, just because they can.
Apple's DRM is considered a 'necessary evil', because people on Slashdot, on average, don't think that Apple is going to abuse the power that the DRM has over them any more than they need to in order to keep the Record Label executives happy. Cause, you know what, there is no likely scenario in the near future which includes having RIAA music available for electronic purchase but does not include any DRM at all.
=Brian
See, you've needlessly complicated things to try to make your point. The simple way to say it is to substitute gmail with Yahoo mail (using the search and replace engine of your choice). Or Hotmail. Yes, if everyone in the whole world started using gmail, it would be really simple to search everyone's email. However, just because gmail is indexed and made for searching doesn't mean that all of the other major webmail providers don't have a similar weakness.
The grandparent's post stated Just because other email service providers are not specifically optimising their email service for search, doesn't mean they can't simply issue something similar to.... Meaning that for any one given email provider, it would be simple to do a search, if a bit slower than with gmail (though that wouldn't matter so much from a law enforcement perspective).
So it's really irrelevant that different corporations and service providers use different mail systems, because that's not going to change with the advent of gmail. The only reason it would be relevant is because perhaps geeks are more likely to use gmail than hotmail or yahoo, so you're saying that it would be easier to get the data on geeks and other readers of slashdot.
Plus, even if any one given provider has mail stored across several databases, the database administrators are going to know how to get that info just as easily as they are going to be able to get your password (or access into an account that they aren't cleared for), if they're worth their salt. Yes, it'll require some cooperation from the admins, but how do you think law enforcement is going to get the information otherwise?
=Brian
Gasp! Scientists have found that plastics that live in warm, wet environments contain Bacteria! Oh...my...god!
Seriously, this is about as non-newsy as you can get. Next we're going to find out that there's bacteria of the wound-infecting type just hanging around on people's skin. And telephones! Don't get me started on telephones. We might have to create an army of Telephone Sanitizers to save us from being wiped out by some manner of virulent disease contracted through the receiver of a telephone.
=Brian
Do not expose Apple Laserwriter to open flame.
=Brian
Well, then I take it back about the books. It's good to see that people pay attention to mythology these days.
=Brian
My favorite is the Criterion Edition of The Fisher King. It starts out with Gilliam telling us about how he made the walls in the room to be slanted to make it look larger, and the shadows across the protagonist are bars to represent the jail that his life has become...and it goes from there.
That's what I want from my director commentaries: why they did what they did. I don't really care that the sandwiches on that day of filming were particularly tasty (unless they're important to the plot of the film or something).
=Brian
In fact, you aren't the first person to think of this. I present to you: GE's Advantium oven.
The people who claim Microwave Ovens are the successors are Fools! Fools! The reason being that the EZ Bake works off of light bulbs. (Incidentally, you would have wanted to rig a better lightbulb into the EZ Bake Oven to make it more powerful - I suggest Halogen.) The Advantium cooks with, you guessed it, Light.
But, sadly, your joke has, in fact, been brought to, um, light. Sorry.
=Brian
Almost forgot about Frigga. Nice girl, I spent a whole day teling her what her name means.
Yeah, it'd be a pain to be named after the Norse Goddess of Love and Fertility. But you'd think she'd be able to understand that a little easier. Maybe you might want to pick up some mythology books next time, for help.
=Brian
The idea is an existential view of Artificial Intelligence. The idea was first proposed (or at least made famous) by Alan Turing, and it's known as the Turing Test. I mention to be complete, as you probably already know about the Turing Test. Even so, the Turing Test says, in short, that a computer could be considered to have artificial intelligence if it could successfully hold a conversation with human beings without being detected as a computer.
In any case, it's a pragmatic view. The idea being that philosophers can't even find a way to determine whether humans really think. Proving that the rest of the world is more than an illusion is technically impossible without making unprovable assumptions.
So, if you can make a computer that, from a conversational standpoint, appears completely human, why is it not intelligent?
=Brian
By and large, this is what we call a "Powerbook." Okay, it does some stuff like translating URLs to arbitrary local pages, but that is of limited use. At least for OS X users.
To understand what I mean, go to a Macworld Expo Keynote with your Airport card. You'll see dozens of different Airport networks pop up. Because everyone has Rendezvous, you can use iChat to chat with any of them, and you can use Rendezvous to share your locally available web pages automatically. They'll even show up in Safari's bookmarks. The best part is, you could see what pages you're going to, rather than being redirected at random.
When I go to the AdHoc Conference this year (used to be MacHack), I'm going to have my powerbook set up with a Wiki so that, if I collaborate on my Hack again, it'll be an easy way to share the information. Also, during the Hack contest, anyone who wanted to could open a copy of SubEthaEdit and record their notes from the show. It allowed a quick collaboration between several to dozens of people on covering the show.
So, in general, it just doesn't seem to do much for you, aside from pranks. I suppose it's good for people who don't have Rendezvous enabled throughout their operating system.
For 'slow' time, the effect is confined to a bubble, so you can have bullet time fights without affecting the whole world. As different characters are differently able to distort time, control speed and physics are changed by different amounts depending on your abilities; but all characters 'see' the bubble as if they were the fastest character (ie you see it the way the movie did).
So, let me try to understand your vision: Players are running around shooting each other in real time, but someone is engaged in a bullet-time battle, they are shown as being very slow. However, this won't affect the rest of the world? What happens if someone shoots towards them? They bullet will go normal speed, until it hits the bubble, at which point it will slow down?
Also, what if you're in a team? You have five characters (Team A) who encounter 5 other characters (Team B). Two opposing characters, one from each team, go into bullet-time. The other four players from Team A proceed to wipe out the 4 players from Team B, then, after a while, the bullet-time member of Team B emerges from the Bubble and is trounced by the 4 surviving members of Team A. I suspect that would be a very common occurrence in that sort of scenario, and thus it would be unlikely that anyone would want to enter bullet time.
Alternatively, while the two players are in bullet time, you take your four team members and spray as much machine-gun fire into the bubble as possible. If you are a good team, you coordinate the fire so that it follows a pattern that can't be easily dodged, even in bullet-time. I predict it would take about 3 hours into Beta, tops, before someone perfected that technique. Then it would be less likely that people would enter Bullet Time, at least on purpose. If they're forced into it, then it'll be a major bug that kills enjoyment of the game.
On the other hand, if players out of Bullet Time can't interact with players in Bullet Time, then you've gained a tremendous advantage by being in bullet time, which will likely be exploited to a player's greatest ability.
Affecting the control speed is another danger. If you are near a bullet-time battle, and your control is stopped immediately when someone pops into bullet time, then you've just given controllable lag to upper-level characters. The first technique I predict you'd see in that circumstance is someone randomly popping into and out of bullet time, which will greatly interfere with someone's ability to accurately fire on a character, even if the target is not the one currently in bullet time. Then you have to determine what the affected radius of bullet time exposure is, whether it works through walls and windows, etc.
There are intrinsic problems with having multiple time scales in a multiplayer game, and those are a few of them. If they can pull it off, I will be very, very impressed.
=Brian
Yeah, cause the last thing the Guinness people want to do is go around finding new things to put in their book. That interrupts the beer-drinking time!
=Brian
I read it as 'we were forced to upgrade our software at a co$t or the vendor will sick the lawyers onto us.. but it's a good thing... really... really it is..'
You should probably re-read it as, "We were using illegal copies of Word, and we were going to be caught for it. However, now we don't have to go to the Finance department every time we want to put Office on a new computer, and it looks like our annual costs to Microsoft are lower using the site license rather than buying all of those individual copies."
Something like that.
=Brian
Don't you think that such concerns are more warranted when someone builds a new kind of bomb than when they build a new kind of fork? This is a great little device that obviously has abuse written all over it. Even the good guys look at this and cringe.
I think the difference is because you use the fork every day, so you have a lot stronger connections in your mind with the okay uses of a fork. Whereas the idea for the chip comes out, and you can see the good and the bad, but the bad seems a bit easier to come up with exciting and abusive possibilities.
If you were locked up in a room with a crazy person who slowly killed and tortured everyone you love in various and increasingly creative methods with a fork, you might not feel so great about forks. Then, if you saw a commercial for a fork with, say, a serrated edge, you would probably consider that to be a worse thing than any hypothetical chip.
It's an extreme example, to be sure, but you've probably been using a fork for most of your life, so it would take something extreme to offset all of the years of mundane usage.
Frankly, it would be a lot more difficult to abuse the chip than the fork, because any fool could use the fork, whereas it would take a very skilled and knowledgeable person to successfully wield the chip. And it would be a lot more expensive.
=Brian
Orrrr...You have about 30 feeds that you update each every half an hour or so, and it doesn't make that much sense (or the RSS reader doesn't support) configuring each site differently. Besides, the new RSS standards can find check to see if anything has changed, then only download if there's new content.
For myself, I don't use Slashdot's RSS feed because it can't match my preferences for which stories to show. I want to see the apple.slashdot.org feeds, I want to skip all the SCO stories. That sort of thing. All it seems to do is the base front page.
=Brian