This is really interesting, can you point to more information on this subject? When I lived in the UK I always assumed that copyright was a bargain between the public and creators, but maybe the UK is different in this regard from the US. I certainly think the US approach is far more sensible on this issue if what you say is correct.
Look, suppose we end up with an excess of males in some generation. Then in that generation women will be scarcer and in effect more valuable and it will then become more desirable to have female babies. If left to choose we people probably wouldn't end up at exactly a 50-50 split but within a generation or two it would probably equilibriate at something reasonable.
When I was a lad, we used to dream of a day when we could get stoned and not have to
get up
lift the needle from the turntable
lift the record
put it in the inner sleeve
put the inner sleeve in the outer sleeve
put the album back in the collection
choose another album (fuck! You don't even have to choose nowadays, it just shuffles for you, good thing because if you're that stoned everything is good),
pull it out of the collection,
take out the inner sleeve,
take out the record,
place it on the turntable,
start the turntable,
put the needle on it (motor control!)...
...and finally get back to the...shit...they've already finished the spliff you just rolled.
The iPod is the second greatest thing for potheads across the universe and yet you're still complaining about it! (The greatest thing was of course the Lego Mindstroms controlled rolling machine.)
Most of these methods are bogus. Researchers who present at SIGGRAPH have often worked with one dataset and publish results that have been finely tuned to work with it, and no other. Techniques from books quite simply don't work on real scenes. It's funny - academics talk as if computer vision works, but it mostly doesn't. However - the SIFT algorithm is pretty damn cool. I think it's the first feature matching algorithm I've come across that actually works (plus the one we have at work...but that's another story...). So this one might not actually be bogus. And that's why this system is newsworthy. (If there was any shred of truth to what is contained in the computer vision textbooks then this system would have existed at least a decade ago.)
Liberals in the US are socialists. It's that that 'socialist' in the US doesn't mean the same as 'socialist' in Europe!
I have a few spoof book...
on
Got Game
·
· Score: 1
...reviews along the lines of this one that I've written over the years that I've been meaning to collect together on a web site. (Inspired by Stanislaw Lem.) But this review shows that someone has beaten me to it!
Wow! You make my life seem so meaningless. I've been writing code for many years now but if you add up the total amount of code I've written in my lifetime it's probably only a couple of songs - if it's even that. Even the lamest of street musicians has an opus orders of magnitude larger than mine.
...unit of memory? I guess we can blame it on Apple. How long before we start seeing hard drives advertised as storing megasongs or gigasongs? My first computer didn't even hold a millisong!
Because then the person who contributed this story could see that 'cite' is a verb, not a noun. "Contribute a cite"! Ugh!
Never trust a scientist that tells you something..
on
Stars Have a Weight Limit
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...is impossible.
Never trust a reader to correctly interpret a story posted on/. that is a misunderstood link to a pop science report about a paper published by a scientist. I think the scientists themselves are doing fine without the/. commentary on how they could do their job better.
I can't say I disagree. Suicide can have an impact on many people and like any important decision you make in your life you need to weigh up those effects before acting.
As a side note: it'd be interesting to take some of the people who say suicide is wrong because it's selfish and see how they feel about a person with no attachments to anyone else committing suicide. I've a suspicion that they'd still say it was immoral showing that selfishness has nothing to do with it. But at the moment this is purely a thought experiment and so I might be wrong.
Businesses exist to make money. Therefore the companies with the most expensive products make the most money. Of course not. But that's where simplistic reasoning gets you.
What behaviors to religions discourage and encourage? Almost universal is the proscription of adultery. Unsurprising, a married couple has traditionally provided a better place for bringing up children. Almost universal also is the outlawing of homosexuality. Again, obviously connected to child production. Many religions outlaw masturbation and oral and other types of sex. Similarly some religions outlaw contraception but I know of none that actually encourage it. Again, these don't do much for child production. Very few religions have tried to outlaw sex between married people. In fact, many religions encourage it. (Go forth and multiply.) In the rare cases where sex is completely outlawed it's usually confined to a very small subsection of society, eg. priests.
Where is any of this inconsistent with what I say? There's only one place where I see contradition: in the Catholic bans on some types of sperm collection even when used in the service of childbirth. For example AFAIK Catholics can't strictly jerk off into a pot and then expect to use that for IV fertilization. (Though AFAIK you are allowed to use a collection device like a 'leaky' condom.) But this is easy to explain - IV is new technology and religions have always been conservative in the face of new technology.
Suicide bombers are doing a great job in the Middle East to help promote causes. That is their primary function. You might not be impressed but new suicide bomber recruits are made every day. And Jesus on a cross 2000 years ago (or at least the belief that he was nailed to a cross then) is still promoting the Christian cause.
Anyway, as I said earlier, many religions no longer actively promote martyrdom (that role has been taken over by the state and it's no longer called 'martyrdom' - rather 'sacrifice' or 'patriotism') and I'm not saying that it's important. What I'm saying is that almost all religions would rather have a martyr than an ordinary suicide and they certainly don't want to lose members from the flock unless they can profit by it.
Exactly. Governments have for a long time promoted population growth because then those at the top get to cream off more...well...cream. In these relatively resource scarce times some governments have realized that maximum population growth is suboptimal, e.g. China. But most countries still offer financial incentives for having children, usually in the form of tax benefits. (Also in other forms, eg. in the US childless people pay health insurance premiums that subsidise the cost other other people having children even though having a child is elective.)
martyrdom doesn't serve a purpose in religion nowadays
You don't watch the news much do you?
And I didn't say the religions encourage martyrdom - but that to most religions the only acceptable form of suicide is that which furthers the religious cause. Quite different statements.
Oh, by the way, if you think martyrdom isn't important in religion today you might want to take a look at the pictures of that Jesus guy nailed to a cross that seem to be ubiquitous in churches today.
view people as people rather than objects to be consumed
This is precisely the opposite of what religion does. This is why some religions would rather a child be born unwanted than allow the parents to terminate a pregnancy - because they value their numbers more than the happiness of that child. This is why religions from the dawn of time have asked followers to cast down their lives to further the cause of their religion. This is why some religions call for the death penalty for apostasy - because they would rather keep their numbers high than have their members see sense. Go to any art gallery and look at the religious art. 90% of it is pictures of people being 'consumed' for the sake of their religion.
And get your science straight. I have no idea what a 'neanderthal' urge is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really interesting, can you point to more information on this subject? When I lived in the UK I always assumed that copyright was a bargain between the public and creators, but maybe the UK is different in this regard from the US. I certainly think the US approach is far more sensible on this issue if what you say is correct.
Look, suppose we end up with an excess of males in some generation. Then in that generation women will be scarcer and in effect more valuable and it will then become more desirable to have female babies. If left to choose we people probably wouldn't end up at exactly a 50-50 split but within a generation or two it would probably equilibriate at something reasonable.
- get up
- lift the needle from the turntable
- lift the record
- put it in the inner sleeve
- put the inner sleeve in the outer sleeve
- put the album back in the collection
- choose another album (fuck! You don't even have to choose nowadays, it just shuffles for you, good thing because if you're that stoned everything is good),
- pull it out of the collection,
- take out the inner sleeve,
- take out the record,
- place it on the turntable,
- start the turntable,
- put the needle on it (motor control!)...
- ...and finally get back to the...shit...they've already finished the spliff you just rolled.
The iPod is the second greatest thing for potheads across the universe and yet you're still complaining about it! (The greatest thing was of course the Lego Mindstroms controlled rolling machine.)Most of these methods are bogus. Researchers who present at SIGGRAPH have often worked with one dataset and publish results that have been finely tuned to work with it, and no other. Techniques from books quite simply don't work on real scenes. It's funny - academics talk as if computer vision works, but it mostly doesn't. However - the SIFT algorithm is pretty damn cool. I think it's the first feature matching algorithm I've come across that actually works (plus the one we have at work...but that's another story...). So this one might not actually be bogus. And that's why this system is newsworthy. (If there was any shred of truth to what is contained in the computer vision textbooks then this system would have existed at least a decade ago.)
Illegal...you mean like copyright violations?
That way it won't be subject to a sub poena. You'll regret it one day if you don't. Do you realize how much incriminating stuff you have in there?
You must be one of those people who read Wired. The guy was karma whoring. He strung together a bunch of buzzwords and said absolutely nothing.
Even more exciting - it'll plug into your TV and use electricity.
Liberals in the US are socialists. It's that that 'socialist' in the US doesn't mean the same as 'socialist' in Europe!
...reviews along the lines of this one that I've written over the years that I've been meaning to collect together on a web site. (Inspired by Stanislaw Lem.) But this review shows that someone has beaten me to it!
Wow! You make my life seem so meaningless. I've been writing code for many years now but if you add up the total amount of code I've written in my lifetime it's probably only a couple of songs - if it's even that. Even the lamest of street musicians has an opus orders of magnitude larger than mine.
No way! It was a Sinclair ZX80 with 1K of RAM. (BTW That was 1K for use by the 'OS' and BASIC interpreter, your program, data, and the framebuffer.)
Hmmm...I remember when the unit was "complete copies of the works of Shakespeare". I think that was around when CD-ROMS first appeared.
...unit of memory? I guess we can blame it on Apple. How long before we start seeing hard drives advertised as storing megasongs or gigasongs? My first computer didn't even hold a millisong!
Immovable objects 'n' all that...
You're right. It seems dictionaries are letting in the word 'cite' as a clipped version of 'citation'. They'll let anything in these days :-)
Because then the person who contributed this story could see that 'cite' is a verb, not a noun. "Contribute a cite"! Ugh!
Never trust a reader to correctly interpret a story posted on /. that is a misunderstood link to a pop science report about a paper published by a scientist. I think the scientists themselves are doing fine without the /. commentary on how they could do their job better.
As a side note: it'd be interesting to take some of the people who say suicide is wrong because it's selfish and see how they feel about a person with no attachments to anyone else committing suicide. I've a suspicion that they'd still say it was immoral showing that selfishness has nothing to do with it. But at the moment this is purely a thought experiment and so I might be wrong.
What behaviors to religions discourage and encourage? Almost universal is the proscription of adultery. Unsurprising, a married couple has traditionally provided a better place for bringing up children. Almost universal also is the outlawing of homosexuality. Again, obviously connected to child production. Many religions outlaw masturbation and oral and other types of sex. Similarly some religions outlaw contraception but I know of none that actually encourage it. Again, these don't do much for child production. Very few religions have tried to outlaw sex between married people. In fact, many religions encourage it. (Go forth and multiply.) In the rare cases where sex is completely outlawed it's usually confined to a very small subsection of society, eg. priests.
Where is any of this inconsistent with what I say? There's only one place where I see contradition: in the Catholic bans on some types of sperm collection even when used in the service of childbirth. For example AFAIK Catholics can't strictly jerk off into a pot and then expect to use that for IV fertilization. (Though AFAIK you are allowed to use a collection device like a 'leaky' condom.) But this is easy to explain - IV is new technology and religions have always been conservative in the face of new technology.
Anyway, as I said earlier, many religions no longer actively promote martyrdom (that role has been taken over by the state and it's no longer called 'martyrdom' - rather 'sacrifice' or 'patriotism') and I'm not saying that it's important. What I'm saying is that almost all religions would rather have a martyr than an ordinary suicide and they certainly don't want to lose members from the flock unless they can profit by it.
Exactly. Governments have for a long time promoted population growth because then those at the top get to cream off more...well...cream. In these relatively resource scarce times some governments have realized that maximum population growth is suboptimal, e.g. China. But most countries still offer financial incentives for having children, usually in the form of tax benefits. (Also in other forms, eg. in the US childless people pay health insurance premiums that subsidise the cost other other people having children even though having a child is elective.)
And I didn't say the religions encourage martyrdom - but that to most religions the only acceptable form of suicide is that which furthers the religious cause. Quite different statements.
Oh, by the way, if you think martyrdom isn't important in religion today you might want to take a look at the pictures of that Jesus guy nailed to a cross that seem to be ubiquitous in churches today.
And get your science straight. I have no idea what a 'neanderthal' urge is.