Forget signing up on/. to get your news early. Just read my posts and you can read your stories *years* before they're posted on/.
For example, here's a news story:
Toshiba are developing disk drives with a capacity greater than 100Gb whose size is under 1cm.
It's not true yet but it soon will be. And remember, you read it here first folks.
BTW I can generate these stories on demand. Just choose a manufacturer, disk capacity and physical size and I'll write up the story for you. Just think: endless stories about new hard drives before they've been reported anywhere in the regular news sources. Before the companies themselves have even made the press releases.
PS I can do the same for CPU speeds too. I'm working on stories about RAM too but that's a bit harder.
Re:my opinion of 'Oryx and Crake'
on
Oryx and Crake
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· Score: 1
Inflection and tone can be used to convey a richer set of meanings than the bare text
None of which is in the original text. What you're getting is a filtered version of the book with some stuff taken away and other stuff added. For many types of book this isn't a big deal but for books that use wordplay you are essentially enjoying a completely different art form from readers.
Does having a book read to you destroy your ability to imagine the people and places being described?
When text is used in a purely representative mode then switching do a slightly different representation isn't necessarily a problem. But text can do much more than merely represent and translation to a different medium can lose this. Again, wordplay is a prime example. Wordplay isn't about representing anything, it's about doing stuff with the words on the page. It can be as important to a text as the stuff you visualize while reading it.
Re:my opinion of 'Oryx and Crake'
on
Oryx and Crake
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· Score: 1
you get the reader's inflection and tone which can contribute quite a bit to the meaning
Not the meaning, merely some meaning, someone else's meaning. If you've only listened to the audiobook you haven't read the book.
most gravitational physicists today interpret black hole singularities to mean that general relativity simply doesn't work on very small scales, and needs to be replaced by quantum gravity
Yup. And Susskind et al. argue that those quantum effects become important at the event horizon, well before any singularity. In the absence of a good quantum theory of gravity it's hard to figure out where the quantum effects come in but the so-called black hole information paradox suggests that we are entering weird territory if we don't have quantum effects becoming important at the event horizon.
Incidentally, it has been argued that singularities might be a desirable feature of gravitational theories
I don't get the argument. I guess the crucial point is that any quantum theory needs to have a lowest energy vacuum state otherwise it would just keep decaying, unstably, to lower energy states. If we can smooth over the Schwarzschild metric singularity then we would be able to produce regular everywhere negative mass Schwarzschild-like solutions with arbitrarily negative energy and hence we would have no vacuum state.
But I don't get that. If we accept that we need theories with singularities then we can produce arbitrarily negative energy states with singularities. So the set of states with singularities has no lower bound on the enrgy either. I'm missing some crucial point. Maybe you could explain.
The competing theories aren't necessarily 30 times more complex than GR. And there's an oft accepted rule in physics that if your differential equations have singularities then they can't be valid solutions and the simplest alternative, no matter how much more complex than the theory giving the singular solution, is that one that should be accepted by Occam's razor.
What's more, some of these alternative theories are in fact motivated by GR itself rather than anything new fangled. For example check out the work of Susskind on the "Holographic Hypothesis" which is strongly suggested by results from black hole thermodynamics and gravitational lensing theory. This stuff is suggestive of black holes actually containing their information in a thin layer around the even horizon rather than simply disappearing nto a void within, like gravastars.
That's a rip off of the claims of Archimedes Plutonium. As usual, people in real life, like Archimedes Plutonium, are a lot funnier than satire.
You read those science fiction stories...
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...set in some post-apocalyptic world, or whatever, in the far future, where technology has degenerated and people talk of a past age when things like space travel were possible. (Eg. I'm reading Wolfe's Book of the New Sun at the moment.) It always seemed implausible - just another variation on the old myth of the Golden Age that never actually really existed anywhere but in someone's imagination.
But when I read about manned journeys to the moon I feel like those people.
Since when has being stupid prevented you obtaining money? Bush never had any problems.
Maybe you could help
on
Systemantics
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· Score: -1, Troll
Before I read this book I need one more bit of info from someone who has read it. On a scale of bullshittiness from 1 to 10 with astrology and homeopathy at 10, catastrophe theory at 5, chaos theory at 3 and neural networks at 2, where does 'Systemantics' fit?
You idiot! The first idiotic thing you say is that I need to have the literary talents of a Tolkien to point out when he's made a mistake. I don't. The problem of generating quality literature is completely different from the problem of recognizing quality literature (the latter can sometimes help with the former though it's not clear at all to me that the former confers anything towards the latter skill). Secondly: you're an idiot for being so blinded by the excellent quality of much of Tolkien's work to realise that he has written bad stuff. The hordes of hobbits beating up humans towards the end of ROTK is truly awful writing, like something from a Saturday morning cartoon, and it's no surprise that Jackson and other, lovers of Tolkien's writing BTW, chose to remove these scenes. Thirdly: I've never read a Spiderman book in my life and have only read a handful of graphic novels. I prefer real literature and I think I've read enough of it to know when I've just read some writing that stinks.
I wish Hollywood would learn that CGI is good for dinosaurs and monsters, but not to render humans
Yes and no. There are many scenes in Hollywood movies that use CG humans that most viewers haven't noticed. The problem is that these scenes were far too complex to do as CG. There are some great shots in Spiderman that have a CG Spiderman that are 100% convincing. Unfortunately most of the CG Spidermen suck. Basically there's only a handful of people in the world who can animate humans realistically and there's not enough of them to go around. Some of the Matrix CG humans were good too - you probably didn't notice them.
They removed the scenes with Saruman in the Shire because it was a mistake by Tolkien to write them in the first place. The last third of Return of the King (the book) is truly awful. It reminded me of a movie like A.I. that might have been good had it ended earlier. There were many points when it could have ended but it jest kept going on and on and on...
I enjoyed the Tom Bombadil scenes in the book but Jackson was right to cut them from the movie. They don't really provide much for the main narrative. They were more interesting from the point of view of readers wanting to read hints of some of the background materual behind the main story.
This shortlist is decided by a committee. That committee is drawn from the visual effects industry and of course that includes people from Lucasfilm. In fact, as the largest employer in the visual effects business is Lucasfilm (more specifically ILM) this committee was dominated by people from that company.
Note some facts: (1) no visual effects work on Matrix II & III was given to ILM (2) John Gaeta, overall effects supervisor for Matrix II & III made this statement: I've heard the 'Star Wars' people boast about shooting frames that are 97 percent digital, and lo and behold, the movies are soulless...They traded the whole idea of depth in filmmaking for this supertechnological hype. It helped us focus our own philosophy: the story drives everything. as well as other public attacks on George Lucas. (3) John Gaeta surprisingly won the Oscar, instead of ILM, in 1999 and (4) 5 out of the 7 movies that were 'longlisted' were ILM productions.
It should now be clear exactly what happened.
As a result the academy, as a whole (or even the visual effects chapter), don't even get a chance to consider Revolutions.
Of course this scheming is all to no avail as ILM won't be taking home an Oscar this year either...
You can't spend your whole life on the bandwagon because if you do that everyone else will be jumping on with you and it'll get overcrowded. Put a bit of thought into your career and think about acquiring a skill that's at least slightly different from those of everyone else around you.
Oh...you actually played it. Though I was...er...an avid D&D player in my youth (it was D&D, not AD&D in my day) I never did get around to playing Traveller in my life. I had more fun designing worlds and world generation systems.
...community giving back after it has learned by copying software (Office clones, desktops and window managers, file explorers et.c. et.c.) from Microsoft and Apple.
Speaking as someone who spends more time trying to track down obscurities from his old vinyl collection on CDs rather than checking out the latest thing, I'm with you! But I'm sure that DRM will be important to the record companies as their income must mostly be from new material.
But since n has no bounds you can never really prove that a number is a sierpinsky number.
If that were a valid form of argument then you'd never really know if 2n>n for all integers n>0 because n is unbounded. The fact that a value in a proposition is unbounded doesn't prevent something being proved for all such values.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, here's a news story:
Toshiba are developing disk drives with a capacity greater than 100Gb whose size is under 1cm.
It's not true yet but it soon will be. And remember, you read it here first folks.
BTW I can generate these stories on demand. Just choose a manufacturer, disk capacity and physical size and I'll write up the story for you. Just think: endless stories about new hard drives before they've been reported anywhere in the regular news sources. Before the companies themselves have even made the press releases.
PS I can do the same for CPU speeds too. I'm working on stories about RAM too but that's a bit harder.
But I don't get that. If we accept that we need theories with singularities then we can produce arbitrarily negative energy states with singularities. So the set of states with singularities has no lower bound on the enrgy either. I'm missing some crucial point. Maybe you could explain.
Yes, yes. I confess. I'm a complete moron. Just get on with your day and ignore me. How's the weather over there?
Aisle 3. An isle is a body of land surrounded by water.
What's more, some of these alternative theories are in fact motivated by GR itself rather than anything new fangled. For example check out the work of Susskind on the "Holographic Hypothesis" which is strongly suggested by results from black hole thermodynamics and gravitational lensing theory. This stuff is suggestive of black holes actually containing their information in a thin layer around the even horizon rather than simply disappearing nto a void within, like gravastars.
That's a rip off of the claims of Archimedes Plutonium. As usual, people in real life, like Archimedes Plutonium, are a lot funnier than satire.
But when I read about manned journeys to the moon I feel like those people.
If you read a news story about people too dumb to be real...it's probably true!
Since when has being stupid prevented you obtaining money? Bush never had any problems.
Before I read this book I need one more bit of info from someone who has read it. On a scale of bullshittiness from 1 to 10 with astrology and homeopathy at 10, catastrophe theory at 5, chaos theory at 3 and neural networks at 2, where does 'Systemantics' fit?
I've had excellent experience with my InCase. They're stylish enough that at one point you could buy them at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
You idiot! The first idiotic thing you say is that I need to have the literary talents of a Tolkien to point out when he's made a mistake. I don't. The problem of generating quality literature is completely different from the problem of recognizing quality literature (the latter can sometimes help with the former though it's not clear at all to me that the former confers anything towards the latter skill). Secondly: you're an idiot for being so blinded by the excellent quality of much of Tolkien's work to realise that he has written bad stuff. The hordes of hobbits beating up humans towards the end of ROTK is truly awful writing, like something from a Saturday morning cartoon, and it's no surprise that Jackson and other, lovers of Tolkien's writing BTW, chose to remove these scenes. Thirdly: I've never read a Spiderman book in my life and have only read a handful of graphic novels. I prefer real literature and I think I've read enough of it to know when I've just read some writing that stinks.
I enjoyed the Tom Bombadil scenes in the book but Jackson was right to cut them from the movie. They don't really provide much for the main narrative. They were more interesting from the point of view of readers wanting to read hints of some of the background materual behind the main story.
Note some facts: (1) no visual effects work on Matrix II & III was given to ILM (2) John Gaeta, overall effects supervisor for Matrix II & III made this statement: I've heard the 'Star Wars' people boast about shooting frames that are 97 percent digital, and lo and behold, the movies are soulless...They traded the whole idea of depth in filmmaking for this supertechnological hype. It helped us focus our own philosophy: the story drives everything. as well as other public attacks on George Lucas. (3) John Gaeta surprisingly won the Oscar, instead of ILM, in 1999 and (4) 5 out of the 7 movies that were 'longlisted' were ILM productions.
It should now be clear exactly what happened.
As a result the academy, as a whole (or even the visual effects chapter), don't even get a chance to consider Revolutions.
Of course this scheming is all to no avail as ILM won't be taking home an Oscar this year either...
You can't spend your whole life on the bandwagon because if you do that everyone else will be jumping on with you and it'll get overcrowded. Put a bit of thought into your career and think about acquiring a skill that's at least slightly different from those of everyone else around you.
Oh...you actually played it. Though I was...er...an avid D&D player in my youth (it was D&D, not AD&D in my day) I never did get around to playing Traveller in my life. I had more fun designing worlds and world generation systems.
...community giving back after it has learned by copying software (Office clones, desktops and window managers, file explorers et.c. et.c.) from Microsoft and Apple.
...the RPG Traveler as a kid. I've a hunch that my simulations were as accurate at these.
Speaking as someone who spends more time trying to track down obscurities from his old vinyl collection on CDs rather than checking out the latest thing, I'm with you! But I'm sure that DRM will be important to the record companies as their income must mostly be from new material.
Simple. Because new music will be released with it and on old player would people people can listen only to old music.