and that's how i understand marx's "Opium for the people". religion fills a void. filling voids gives you tranquility. porn does kind of the same for a lot of people, it think - we're all supposed to be these over-sexed, drooling things, according to what you see in media. so porn fills that void for the people that, compared to what they are told, 'dont get enough' - like kids for example. they are told that "sex is, like, you know, the coolest thing, dude" and by correlation youhave to get some - at least via porn.
anyone know of an open-source face-rec package that is easyly integrated into other projects?
i was thinking about a program that takes images on STDIN (jpeg, mjpeg, whatever), and simply outputs matches (and the certainty of a match) on STDOUT. that would be trivial to incorportate into nearly any project.
it's actually really easy to do with google earth's 'overlays' - just find some IR map of the place you're interested in online, create a new 'overlay' in google earth, adjust the size a bit, and voila. looks very neat in 3D (when youtilt a landscape with an overlay).
in germany, 'hate inducing' speech is also prohibited,as are swastikas in nazi-promoting context, etc. we also outlaw certain political, anti-constitutional parties. And even though i am a big fan of protecting 'wrong' speech, i agree with this practice, since a state is usually defined by its constitution, and as long as there are 'clean' ways to change it (referendums, etc.) i think it's good to outlaw 'bad' ways to change it. additionaly, and i know that this is a dangerous argument, people as a whole are emotionaly stupid (as we learned at a high price over 60 years ago), so i'm all in favour of promoting more rational discussions by outlawing pure hate-based demagogy. noone would prohibit a calm discussion about abolishing the state, or even showing supposed virtues of a nazi-dictatorship, but when you start using emotional tricks, or outright lies (holocaust-denying is illegal in germany too, in part because so many people simply refused to accept the magnitude of the holocaust in the post-war years), it tends to be illegal - just like shouting 'fire!' for no real reason in a full cinema is in the states. and despite of all this, we never heard of stuff like Free speech zones and other related nonsense, so i'd say it works. obviously, it gets abit complicated enforcing this online, but i still think it's a good general policy.
Since stuff like this will sooner or later always affect projects like the Wikipedia, I wondered whether a possible solution to this would be to include 'meta-tags' in the Wikipedia, that re-format content according to local jurisdictions:
In Germany, we usually only mention the initial of the last name in legal matters, in order to protect the 'image' of the accused, and i think whis is actually a good idea.
If the source-markup of Wikipedia articles would include something like:
<name context='legal'>Max Mustermann</name>
e.g. the german Wikipedia could render it as 'Max M.'.
Obviously the real name is still available for anyone who cares to dig a bit deeper, but it might appease family members and the like.
This would also come in handy for units:
<unit>6 feet 8 inches</unit>
could be converted on-the-fly to metric units this way.
Could someone tell me why this is supposed to be such a break-through?
AFAIK, every GSM network provider has a database of what network-cell their users are in at a given time, and when they make a call, so all these guys did was to map that info onto a map of a city? Doesn't sound THAT innovative.
On a related note: does anybody know of a J2ME program that reads out where the cell-phone it's running on is located at the moment? i once heard something about a "locationAPI' or something like that, but couldn't find a demo program or more info on that.
"too high"??? "TOO high"??
geez! i really remember the big headlines when the first hardrives with a cost of less than 1$ per MB came out, and here we are complaining about costs of less than 1$ per GB!
I really think the poor hard-drive engineers need some more love, for having one of the most under appreciated jobs in IT, in spite of the incredible progress the hard drive sector has made! ages ago i read some coparison, that disk head's precisions are comparable to an airplane flying at mach 3 at about 7 meters of altitude, or something - and that was years ago.
thanks, anonymous hard drive people!
I have to admit that I just now got to know SOAP and its cousins, and am seeing applications for these generic-API-technologies everywhere - wouldn't wrapping a SOAP API (or its non-web-enabled-equivalent) around your libraries help you with this stuff, and make it way more versatile? Obviously some funcionalities (like embedding a media player control) wouldn't make sense doing this way, but almost everything that primarily deals with data manipulation should be wrapped up in a nice and shiny XML-talking bundle...that's what XML was for, initialy, IIRC.
BTW: anyone know of something like SOAP for local libraries? it would sure make my day if i could write:
use localSOAP;
my $ls = localSoap->new("some_module_written_in_some_other_ language");
my @available_funcions = $ls->available_functions();
$ls->import();
instead of going through Inline and other similar modules
I was always rather fond of Einstein's alleged quote:
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices
acquired by age eighteen"
...which is a nice way of basically saying "question everything", Decartes 'cogito ergo sum' style, which is the basis of scientific thinking, as far as i am concerned.
does anybody know whether there's a website where a comprehensive list of these 'free update' hacks is maintained?
there seem to be an awful lot of them (Sony Clie 710->740, Siemens A55->C55, 720kb-->1,44MB Floppies, etc.) but usually they pop up in rather dubious threads on some weird forum, and having them in one nice place would certainly be nice.
the fun thing is that it seems to have been generated with MS Word, and simply saved as HTML (take a look at the source). The feds (if they did that design) could at least have had the decency to use less screwed up HTML...
anybody care to explain what the "RTJKJAS" at the very end are supposed to mean?
I still consider remastering livecds a drag - but i've been playing around with emulators like qemu lately, and was wondering:
does anyone know of a distro i can boot e.g. using qemu (knoppix works fine), configure it inside the emulatorcontainer, and then simply burn the "image-file" to a cd? this would make remastering really easy and powerful, IMHO....
i'm a bit surprised nobody pointed it out yet, but the good people from the IETF aleady worked how to store and represent dates for the rest of the time our universe will exist (and beyond): http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2550.html
somebody else already mentioned using X with the Xinerana extension for this, but if you have any spare PCs lying around, you can throw Gstreamer into the mix, and build a gigantic video-wall, without the PCI-limitation. here's the howto
I love the idea of recycling the Progress crafts by sending them to the L1 point and docking them together there in order to form a supply-silo instead of letting them disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Which brings up a question that has been bugging me for ages: why isn't this done with other spacecraft?
e.g. I guess the spaceshuttle's main tank (the big brown thing) is designed to resist immense pressures, and is mainly hollow after the fuel as been burned. why not fill it up with air, water or whatever (after cleaning), and use it as some form of emergency spacestation? or at least as a scrapyard in space?
Of course there would be problems like the delta-v to escape velocity, etc. but with those immense costs of getting stuff into space, i'd suppose i'd still pay off, and it might spark of a "dirtier" kind of space-industry, (now that we are at the verge of being able to go to space completly privately), where companies recycle stuff in space for whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
and that's how i understand marx's "Opium for the people". religion fills a void. filling voids gives you tranquility. porn does kind of the same for a lot of people, it think - we're all supposed to be these over-sexed, drooling things, according to what you see in media. so porn fills that void for the people that, compared to what they are told, 'dont get enough' - like kids for example. they are told that "sex is, like, you know, the coolest thing, dude" and by correlation youhave to get some - at least via porn.
speaking of face recognition:
anyone know of an open-source face-rec package that is easyly integrated into other projects?
i was thinking about a program that takes images on STDIN (jpeg, mjpeg, whatever), and simply outputs matches (and the certainty of a match) on STDOUT. that would be trivial to incorportate into nearly any project.
i havent tried it, but imediaman says that it's like 'delicious library' (that everybody mentioned before) for windows.
it's actually really easy to do with google earth's 'overlays' - just find some IR map of the place you're interested in online, create a new 'overlay' in google earth, adjust the size a bit, and voila. looks very neat in 3D (when youtilt a landscape with an overlay).
in germany, 'hate inducing' speech is also prohibited,as are swastikas in nazi-promoting context, etc. we also outlaw certain political, anti-constitutional parties. And even though i am a big fan of protecting 'wrong' speech, i agree with this practice, since a state is usually defined by its constitution, and as long as there are 'clean' ways to change it (referendums, etc.) i think it's good to outlaw 'bad' ways to change it. additionaly, and i know that this is a dangerous argument, people as a whole are emotionaly stupid (as we learned at a high price over 60 years ago), so i'm all in favour of promoting more rational discussions by outlawing pure hate-based demagogy. noone would prohibit a calm discussion about abolishing the state, or even showing supposed virtues of a nazi-dictatorship, but when you start using emotional tricks, or outright lies (holocaust-denying is illegal in germany too, in part because so many people simply refused to accept the magnitude of the holocaust in the post-war years), it tends to be illegal - just like shouting 'fire!' for no real reason in a full cinema is in the states. and despite of all this, we never heard of stuff like Free speech zones and other related nonsense, so i'd say it works.
obviously, it gets abit complicated enforcing this online, but i still think it's a good general policy.
Since stuff like this will sooner or later always affect projects like the Wikipedia, I wondered whether a possible solution to this would be to include 'meta-tags' in the Wikipedia, that re-format content according to local jurisdictions:
In Germany, we usually only mention the initial of the last name in legal matters, in order to protect the 'image' of the accused, and i think whis is actually a good idea.
If the source-markup of Wikipedia articles would include something like:
<name context='legal'>Max Mustermann</name>
e.g. the german Wikipedia could render it as 'Max M.'.
Obviously the real name is still available for anyone who cares to dig a bit deeper, but it might appease family members and the like.
This would also come in handy for units:
<unit>6 feet 8 inches</unit>
could be converted on-the-fly to metric units this way.
I just wanted to point out that OSC was the guy that wrote the classic Monkey Island swordfighting insults. Gotta love him just for that!
Could someone tell me why this is supposed to be such a break-through?
AFAIK, every GSM network provider has a database of what network-cell their users are in at a given time, and when they make a call, so all these guys did was to map that info onto a map of a city? Doesn't sound THAT innovative.
On a related note: does anybody know of a J2ME program that reads out where the cell-phone it's running on is located at the moment? i once heard something about a "locationAPI' or something like that, but couldn't find a demo program or more info on that.
Correction: the site il inked to actually lets you choose which midi instruments to use (even though grand piano sounds the best, IMHO)
i find the results of Mozart's Musical Dice Game way more pleasant to the ear. It's limited to piano, but really sounds very nice.
"too high"??? "TOO high"??
geez! i really remember the big headlines when the first hardrives with a cost of less than 1$ per MB came out, and here we are complaining about costs of less than 1$ per GB!
I really think the poor hard-drive engineers need some more love, for having one of the most under appreciated jobs in IT, in spite of the incredible progress the hard drive sector has made! ages ago i read some coparison, that disk head's precisions are comparable to an airplane flying at mach 3 at about 7 meters of altitude, or something - and that was years ago.
thanks, anonymous hard drive people!
I have to admit that I just now got to know SOAP and its cousins, and am seeing applications for these generic-API-technologies everywhere - wouldn't wrapping a SOAP API (or its non-web-enabled-equivalent) around your libraries help you with this stuff, and make it way more versatile?_ language");
Obviously some funcionalities (like embedding a media player control) wouldn't make sense doing this way, but almost everything that primarily deals with data manipulation should be wrapped up in a nice and shiny XML-talking bundle...that's what XML was for, initialy, IIRC.
BTW: anyone know of something like SOAP for local libraries? it would sure make my day if i could write:
use localSOAP;
my $ls = localSoap->new("some_module_written_in_some_other
my @available_funcions = $ls->available_functions();
$ls->import();
instead of going through Inline and other similar modules
I was always rather fond of Einstein's alleged quote:
...which is a nice way of basically saying "question everything", Decartes 'cogito ergo sum' style, which is the basis of scientific thinking, as far as i am concerned.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
that sounds cool - do you know of any documentation on this feature? i couldn't find any quickly, but i could really use this...
does anybody know whether there's a website where a comprehensive list of these 'free update' hacks is maintained?
there seem to be an awful lot of them (Sony Clie 710->740, Siemens A55->C55, 720kb-->1,44MB Floppies, etc.) but usually they pop up in rather dubious threads on some weird forum, and having them in one nice place would certainly be nice.
the fun thing is that it seems to have been generated with MS Word, and simply saved as HTML (take a look at the source). The feds (if they did that design) could at least have had the decency to use less screwed up HTML...
anybody care to explain what the "RTJKJAS" at the very end are supposed to mean?
I still consider remastering livecds a drag - but i've been playing around with emulators like qemu lately, and was wondering:
does anyone know of a distro i can boot e.g. using qemu (knoppix works fine), configure it inside the emulatorcontainer, and then simply burn the "image-file" to a cd? this would make remastering really easy and powerful, IMHO....
i'm a bit surprised nobody pointed it out yet, but the good people from the IETF aleady worked how to store and represent dates for the rest of the time our universe will exist (and beyond):
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2550.html
somebody else already mentioned using X with the Xinerana extension for this, but if you have any spare PCs lying around, you can throw Gstreamer into the mix, and build a gigantic video-wall, without the PCI-limitation.
here's the howto
Darn. another platform to port linux to! Just when we thought we had most architectures covered :-)
But seriously: would it, theoretically (!), be possible to write a x86 emulator on something like that?
I love the idea of recycling the Progress crafts by sending them to the L1 point and docking them together there in order to form a supply-silo instead of letting them disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Which brings up a question that has been bugging me for ages: why isn't this done with other spacecraft?
e.g. I guess the spaceshuttle's main tank (the big brown thing) is designed to resist immense pressures, and is mainly hollow after the fuel as been burned. why not fill it up with air, water or whatever (after cleaning), and use it as some form of emergency spacestation? or at least as a scrapyard in space?
Of course there would be problems like the delta-v to escape velocity, etc. but with those immense costs of getting stuff into space, i'd suppose i'd still pay off, and it might spark of a "dirtier" kind of space-industry, (now that we are at the verge of being able to go to space completly privately), where companies recycle stuff in space for whatever...