For $700B we could have bought million-dollar houses for the first 700,000 SlashDot members. That would be a great investment! I dream of all the great code I could write, the philanthropy I could do, if only I had equity in a nice million-dollar house out here in Western Massachusetts.
With $700B you could give everyone in the world $100 and have a hell of a party.
I don't know... when you start trying to quantify the value of the currency in this game, it all just seems like stupid numbers. Frankly, the only thing preventing us from making the world a better place (if I may presume that is our collective aim) is will, not finances. Thanks to the structure of currency we live entirely by fiat. It may not seem like it benefits the economy to do more work for less money, but only when we put the bulk of our efforts into health, education, welfare, and taking care of those in need does it lead to anything we could call prosperity.
So I say, tighten the belt and do more in the trenches to make sure our descendants aren't as fucked up as this generation of idiot naked apes, playing nonsensical games with the currency.
Other theories might be better suited to this. We have hardly any experience of astronomical scales, and have only begun to observe the universe at these distances. Perhaps there is simply a "lensing" effect that spacetime produces over huge distances. Or perhaps red-shift is simply non-linear and this accounts for the appearance of expansive acceleration.
Any theory that doesn't require us to be in the center of anything, please!
CAPTCHA can be very annoying to people, and you can't just throw them in everyplace. But there are other solutions nearly as effective, and I'm surprised that more exploration isn't being done in alternatives to less and less legible CAPTCHAs.
On one site we had a simple form, a pair of fields for submitting URLs with a description. We started getting spammed through the form, so to reduce it I implemented a simpler option. When the form is submitted, it puts up a javascript prompt that asks the user to type in a pair of words. The words are combined together, a suffix is added, the whole thing is MD5'ed, and the MD% checksum is submitted with the form. This stopped all SPAM completely.
On another site I use PHPBB, and whatever CAPTCHA it is that PHPBB uses has been vulnerable for quite a while. So we were getting a half-dozen automated fake registrations every day. Rather than dump the CAPTCHA altogether I just changed the instructions and the logic for validation. The user is instructed to type "PRE-" followed by the CAPTCHA text. This eliminated almost all our fake registrations.
There must be a thousand other ideas. For example...
* You could use Javascript / AJAX to produce the CAPTCHA, or to open it up in a separate window.
* As browsers improve static images can be replaced by SVG.
* Why not Flash? A Flash solution would work for the majority of users, and could include special instructions in both text and audio. The letters could be animated and overlapping.
* Insisting on an email confirmation before accepting submitted data can also eliminate a huge amount of abuse.
* If you're really into static CAPTCHAs perhaps another layout can work better. For example, arrange the letters in a circle with some special indicator of which letter to start with and whether to proceed clockwise or counter-clockwise. "Start with the blue letter... Start with the letter at 7 o'clock... Begin with the numeric character and proceed clockwise... etc. etc."
Certainly the clever minds of Slashdot can come up with several more.
I love that quote. Of course, Buddhism strongly emphasizes constant deconstruction of the self, questioning what one is told, investigating and proving things to oneself through evidence. The New Testament also emphasizes critical examination in the accounts of Christ and the Pharisees, but most Christians seem content to take the criticism not intended for themselves... just other hypocrites.
One modern Jewish scholar has commented on a variation of this line of thought.
"Matthew's Gospel is particularly antagonistic to the Jewish establishment. But when Jesus refers to Pharisees as "hypocrites" (Matthew 23:13) and a "brood of vipers" (Matthew 23:33), he is berating fellow Jews. Jesus undoubtedly regards his violent language as following the tradition of the prophets when they castigated fellow Jews of their day. In other words, it is a family quarrel. Jesus looks upon himself as continuing the Jewish tradition of self-criticism."
Uh, sorry dude, gravity isn't a "theory". Gravity is a FACT
Well, if you're using formal scientific terms (which you should be in this discussion) the word "gravity" is a label for the theoretical force and/or bending of space and the mathematics that embody it. It's a theory because it is free to be revised as new experimental data becomes available.
When you describe the pen falling experiment, that's the way you gather the facts that inform the theory - how fast the pen fell and so forth.
So, I'm just picking on your semantics. When scientists speak in popular media they will sometimes use the word "fact" in the conventional sense, to be understood by ordinary folks. For example in one of the Cosmos segments Carl Sagan emphatically states: "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." We can be as certain of the process of evolution as we are that it rained last Thursday, because the data unambiguously supports it.
Okay. Behe, Michael. Darwin's Black Box. Look it up, smartass.
This is no Isaac Newton you're talking about. If he had good science, his ideas would be accepted. He simply points out holes in our understanding and tries to fill them in with "and then a miracle occurs."
Look, either the whole of existence is a miracle or none of it is. Actually, let me restate that. The whole of existence is a miracle and none of it is. If you know exactly what I mean, kudos to you! The gist of what I'm saying is that the universe is quite wonderful and it works just perfectly, without any conspicuous intervention. In theistic terms, any obvious evidence of divine intervention would imply that God is capricious or erred in the initial creation.
Frankly, the universe makes much more sense if you stop separating "god" and "creation" into separate entities. I think a close reading of the New Testament shows clearly that the Christ - like the Buddha - was doing his level best to get people to stop cherishing their stupid gray matter pinhole map of the universe and their silly laws of conduct, and realize the unity of the mundane and the divine through the practice of self-transcendence (through meditating and following precepts).
But, as I always say... the Bible confuses far more than it helps in this regard. Buddhism is a far more thorough accounting of the Dharma, and far better appeals to the modern rational mind. The way is the way is the way, after all...
Also, the connections between being more fearful, wanting a strong army, and wanting to be "tough on crime" seem pretty clear. You could have convinced me without research.... Even if they're more fearful, it's not clear that it means they're "too fearful."
The thing is, fear is not a proper response to hold onto. It apparently undermines good reasoning, as you can see by the way facts are treated by social conservatives. Even when you point out a practical solution: combat poverty to reduce crime and save on healthcare... increase education spending to improve overall health and prosperity... universal health care emphasizing prevention and healthy lifestyle reduces costs o everyone... pledges of abstinence are ineffective compared to good sexual education.... the list goes on! - social conservatives will still be against such policies out of misplaced fear.
The fearful never gets to the point of looking into root causes and rationally seeking practical and solutions to the problems we face. Instead they seek quick, easy solutions to remove the perceived problem - or symptom - as quickly as possible. They must destroy the evil stimulus - now!
Capitalist institutions have something to gain by human fears being channeled into economic and regulatory policies. Human fear can be harnessed to quickly erase things, whereas liberal, progressive solutions are hobbled by humane and environmental considerations. The conservative mindset sees such things as barriers to getting everything back to a quiet, controlled space. This triggers hate, because as we know hate is born of desire. You desire some object over there, but some barrier stands in between. You hate the barrier. So all this fear, meshed together with impatience and a simplistic mindset of "kill the bad guy" ends up creating an environment of hate, where conservatives hate anyone who proposes careful consideration.
That's what really gets me about - really anyone - who becomes ruthless, Right or Left. But frankly, the right wing media and increasingly the corporate-owned media in-general do their best to demonize and ridicule anything that slows down the machinery of capitalism. By actually lending credibility to troglodytes like Ann Coulter they effectively leverage the right-wing football game mindset to generate endless inane distraction, while each successive generation becomes dumber and dumber - human cattle.
The prophetic film "Idiocracy" illustrates perfectly what happens when we let fear become our cultural moniker. In fact, isn't that the definition of "idiot"? A person who can't let go of fear long enough to have a rational thought?
...if it were me doing the hacking I would only have posted it if it revealed some kind of malfeasance. Being no saint myself, I'm willing to give Anonymous the benefit of the doubt. Wish I had the skills and courage to do something like that if it seemed in the interest of full disclosure.
The only distinction between a "screenshot" and "buffering an image" is that in the case of a "screenshot" a file is produced on disk. In this case it's probably a.png file. Since the iPhone has plenty of resources to cache the image in RAM, it does seem weird that the image needs to be written to disk. The code that transitions to the Main Menu could be architected in many ways:
1. The code is in the Main Menu itself. It takes a screenshot as soon as it starts up, draws its own display in an offscreen buffer, and does a simple transition between the two images using the high-level animation methods.
2. A separate process takes the snapshot for the benefit of the Main Menu process, which then draws its own display in an offscreen buffer and does a simple transition between the two images using the high-level animation methods.
3. The Main Menu takes screen snapshots both before it exits and just as it starts up, and simply uses these two static images to accomplish the animation effect. This would be the simplest implementation.
4. The application launcher handles all the transitions, intercepting the first draw of the application interface within the application runtime, or as part of AppKit's implementation of mainNibDidLoad. The Main Menu process is the parent of all application processes. Animation between apps might be handled by an independent process or thread.
Perhaps some iPhone developer can shed light on which of these is most likely. The existence of a screenshot file only implies that data needs to be shared between processes, and that simple high-level API's are being used.
Applying my Slashdot headline filter, my sense of the original article - which I haven't read - is that, if you're looking to secure and encrypt everything on your phone (for safety!) this is one more thing you should remember to securely delete.
In terms of taking the customer's desires seriously, the main questions all this raises with me are: How soon can we get fully encrypted iPhones? And: can we get them without an NSA back-door? Or better yet: can we get an open source encryption plugin framework, and roll our own?
The companies who provide phones and data networks are only just beginning to get a working system together. They're just happy it works at all most of the time. Encrypting everything is going to require a lot more computational power throughout, which no one wants to sacrifice because it hurts performance. In order to get everything encrypted, companies would need to fight all the special interests that see advantage in removing the private citizen's expectation of privacy. They don't have any compelling interest in taking on that fight.
I would argue that there's a constitutional basis for demanding that universal encryption be a goal of all communication devices, and that it be considered in every new protocol. It should be as difficult as possible to install electronic eavesdropping, whether for your neighbor or for the FBI. That would be an exemplary bit of American justice, gaining us all more liberty, privacy, and security.
Long hours computing causes me to forget food... and sleep... and water... and stretching... but interestingly, not sex! Perhaps there's a study I could take part in?
On the other hand, I'm a vegan, so maybe I'm immune. I don't ever crave cheese or animal fats, having not eaten any of either for many years.
How so - you can observe the earth is not flat, you cannot "observe" a negative like "There is no god" or "God is not directing evolution".
I think it's demonstrable that belief in God is purely irrational, and born of wishful thinking. When you quiz people on why they believe in God they can't produce anything with real weight - they can provide absolutely no observation or experience that necessitates the existence or presence of that character. People may have really high experiences and feel the presence of immense power, pure love and benevolence, but we know that these are brain states that can be produced chemically - Yahweh is not the only possible explanation.
In a laboratory, and elsewhere, we see light propagating at 186,000 miles per second. It might be the scientist's belief that God is moving that photon, but such a thought has no use in the lab, and is antithetical to science. Whatever we may observe, we can only ever say - that is the nature of the thing. Some would say that's equivalent to God (or gods) but there will never be any scientific backing for that notion. Science - our senses - will always and ever see only natural phenomena, and that's it. The photon moves because that's what photons do.
Fact is, we can only understand the true nature of ourselves and reality by letting go of outmoded beliefs like, for example, that the Old Testament version of God is authentic and literally true. In fact, I would argue that the most insightful spiritual teachers - including Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha - have emphasized the virtue of skepticism and independent investigation, that in fact the highest kind of faith is that which doesn't need to cling to the old mythic tethers, but trusts that "the way has been prepared" for us, and exists in our nature, and our ability to observe the universe scientifically is the proper way to approach questions bearing on material reality, and will ultimately answer many spiritual questions as well.
When people say proudly that they believe in God, and that they believe mankind was created in three days just like the Bible says, they are trying to demonstrate that they have "faith" and believe this is a virtuous state. But I would argue that this kind of belief has nothing to do with "faith" at all. And in fact, a true mature Faith is willing to let go of these childish ideas and trust in the senses and reason (i.e., Science!) that we have in hand. In my view, it is those people who are courageous enough to accept "not knowing" that represent the true faithful.
It's when people separate the physical world - thinking of it as inert and dead - and the spiritual realm - considered immaterial and perfect - when they divide against themselves. We have a certain kind of brain, and it works best when we use it properly. Spiritual experiences are something that we have and we can bring about in various ways. When people get hung up on the irrational for the fabulous chemical rewards it provides, it's no different than being hung up on drugs, sex, or power - all of them are misuses our innate natural faculties. Likewise, we do ourselves a huge disservice by poisoning reason with literal interpretations of stories and myths which are rich in analogy. The bible has some literal truths in it, but the real wealth is veiled in poetry, in the analogies that illuminate aspects of our own psychology. When people treat it as literal they completely miss the real meaning, which is sad. It takes some real magic to get a person to rise out of their banal literalism and consider the possible interpretations - and it takes some real insight and life-experience to grasp what they mean with any depth.
Scientific study has now shown that people are likely gay from the time they're born due to differences in brain structure.
Science has discovered that Toxoplasmosis makes women more promiscuous and men more foolish.
Through statistical surveys we know that a vast number of people suffer from addiction, organic maladies, and depression.
Now through the science of genetics we are able to see a correlation suggesting why some humans may desire to be more liberal in the distribution of their DNA.
I find it amazing all the factors that go into making humans be who they are, to make and accept the choices they do, and how much of it is determined by prior conditions. As human nature is being illuminated by science, I find it deepens my appreciation of this human condition, to realize the aspects of our nature that we have to work with, and how one part of us can want to stay committed to one path but be struggling with other aspects of our nature that draw us elsewhere.
And so it also strikes me how much the imagination plays a part in outlining the whole human experience and determining whether we overcome our sometimes outmoded natural impulses.
They seized equipment which will now be checked for evidence of patent breaches. A spokesman for German Customs told us: 'We've raided 69 companies today. We have seized equipment including flat-screen TVs, CD players, set-top boxes and MP3 players.
They could have simply and politely bought these products (under the archaic theory that the makers are innocent until proven guilty) and tested them for patent breaches. If patent breaches are discovered then you wait for the next trade show and with your warrant or summons in hand you charge your perpetrator.
Seriously, what is with all this capitalist-driven use of armed policemen to enforce fucking intellectual property laws? This is all business stuff. You find someone breaks your patent you sue them and put them out of business.
And frankly, you have to be able to prove damages in an obvious manner. Demonstrate that you - or another legitimate competitor - would have been likely to obtain contracts and orders that were gained by unscrupulous infringers. And you must be able to demonstrate a conscientious intent to infringe. Perhaps it's not that easy for a Korean manufacturer to check the German patent records.
These kinds of draconian fishing expeditions by customs or other agents of commerce are patently stupid and should be illegal.
Man, I feel like watching Brazil again. It's such a prescient movie.
The FBI almost openly plants people in areas where activists congregate, and keep tabs on where and when groups will be staging events. Ordinarily they don't use the information gathered to disrupt the groups - though disruption is still performed in various ways. Planted people may be encouraged to sow seeds of discontent and disinformation, but of those I have heard reported, it's usually pure information gathering - dates and times.
The disruption of activists implies to me that ahead of the RNC some fairly high-up people decided to make use of the information the FBI and/or local enforcement regularly gathers through covert means... though it seems really odd that they impulsively arrested all these people then couldn't figure out how to make them disappear.
So maybe it's all some kind of PR stunt to throw some red meat to the ravenous right wingers who'll have a laugh to see some anarchist hippies get kicked in the nuts. "Ha! Ha!"
The media-for-idiots (i.e., news networks, talk radio) will smear the airwaves with the usual shitty lowbrow opinion theater, confabulating activists with terrorists. Despite the transparency of their game, they find lots of hapless people who will play along, who automatically join the apparent throngs sympathetic to the powerful... the soldiers of God.
We witness this the way these appalling scoundrels - our political class - pretend-o-cratizes its way to the bank in the classic style of corrupt servants of power. They stir the rest of us up such that we sycophants slaver and bicker over the falling scraps of our so-called "leaders."
Certainly we all strongly sense the corruption and pettiness that exists across the board in the halls of our government, and how cavalier they are becoming. It seems as though the ordinary men and women who hold offices of government - these supposed servants of the people - are more likely than ever to succumb to the inducements offered by large-scale capitalists, war profiteers, and disaster recovery specialists.
The audacious series of acts we have seen from the right wing especially in the last 8 years, the absolute disregard for the founding spirit that is this country's beating heart, the way that our airwaves have become vile with propaganda breeding cruelty, jingoism, and cynicism - these are the fruits of unbridled capitalism. Another seems to be a policy of undermining public education, presumably to create a larger pool of angry discontented mentally handicapped people who will be more likely to buy into their idiot brand of propaganda.
But that is a subject for another day.
Meanwhile, hey, what's to stop these people in the in-group who currently have power from using the FBI and law enforcement any way they want? To me this seems no less a crime than Watergate, except in this case the public can be fooled into thinking the break-ins were necessary to protect lives and property from domestic terrorists... well, anarchists... uh, whatever, same thing!...pass me another beer.
Haha! Evidently my half-brother was one of the original developers of Gopher. As I'm now learning how to write iPhone apps, perhaps this is one that could be developed relatively easily. The hard part might only then be finding active gopher:// servers with useful content.
Scene: cafeteria. A young man sits at a table pouring salt into a teaspoon and eating it. A young woman comes up and sits down across from him, then watches him fill his spoon for a moment before sliding over a can of V8 juice. The young man slaps his head and exclaims: "I could have had a V8!"
The third dimension is a cheat and is represented as 'stuff getting smaller'.
Not altogether. Much of it happens in the brain based on static visual cues - converging lines for example. And of course the brain uses the subtle differences in the images from each eye to project into 3D. Lots of optical illusions exist that fool the brain into misjudging relative size and position, even in perfectly still images.
reverse perspective
Well, there is lots of forced perspective stuff. Don't know about "reverse" perspective though.
Slashdot Mirror
...is they'll say "How the heck could there be 110 of these things and I never heard about it?"
You have to taylor the content to the audience.
This is so true! For example, one audience may respond well to Taylor Dayne, while another may respond better to James Taylor.
For $700B we could have bought million-dollar houses for the first 700,000 SlashDot members. That would be a great investment! I dream of all the great code I could write, the philanthropy I could do, if only I had equity in a nice million-dollar house out here in Western Massachusetts.
With $700B you could give everyone in the world $100 and have a hell of a party.
I don't know... when you start trying to quantify the value of the currency in this game, it all just seems like stupid numbers. Frankly, the only thing preventing us from making the world a better place (if I may presume that is our collective aim) is will, not finances. Thanks to the structure of currency we live entirely by fiat. It may not seem like it benefits the economy to do more work for less money, but only when we put the bulk of our efforts into health, education, welfare, and taking care of those in need does it lead to anything we could call prosperity.
So I say, tighten the belt and do more in the trenches to make sure our descendants aren't as fucked up as this generation of idiot naked apes, playing nonsensical games with the currency.
it's "lose" ... L-O-S-E Aggghhhh!
Sorry, it's like the 5th time today I've seen that bloody misspelling.
Other theories might be better suited to this. We have hardly any experience of astronomical scales, and have only begun to observe the universe at these distances. Perhaps there is simply a "lensing" effect that spacetime produces over huge distances. Or perhaps red-shift is simply non-linear and this accounts for the appearance of expansive acceleration.
Any theory that doesn't require us to be in the center of anything, please!
CAPTCHA can be very annoying to people, and you can't just throw them in everyplace. But there are other solutions nearly as effective, and I'm surprised that more exploration isn't being done in alternatives to less and less legible CAPTCHAs.
On one site we had a simple form, a pair of fields for submitting URLs with a description. We started getting spammed through the form, so to reduce it I implemented a simpler option. When the form is submitted, it puts up a javascript prompt that asks the user to type in a pair of words. The words are combined together, a suffix is added, the whole thing is MD5'ed, and the MD% checksum is submitted with the form. This stopped all SPAM completely.
On another site I use PHPBB, and whatever CAPTCHA it is that PHPBB uses has been vulnerable for quite a while. So we were getting a half-dozen automated fake registrations every day. Rather than dump the CAPTCHA altogether I just changed the instructions and the logic for validation. The user is instructed to type "PRE-" followed by the CAPTCHA text. This eliminated almost all our fake registrations.
There must be a thousand other ideas. For example...
* You could use Javascript / AJAX to produce the CAPTCHA, or to open it up in a separate window.
* As browsers improve static images can be replaced by SVG.
* Why not Flash? A Flash solution would work for the majority of users, and could include special instructions in both text and audio. The letters could be animated and overlapping.
* Insisting on an email confirmation before accepting submitted data can also eliminate a huge amount of abuse.
* If you're really into static CAPTCHAs perhaps another layout can work better. For example, arrange the letters in a circle with some special indicator of which letter to start with and whether to proceed clockwise or counter-clockwise. "Start with the blue letter... Start with the letter at 7 o'clock... Begin with the numeric character and proceed clockwise... etc. etc."
Certainly the clever minds of Slashdot can come up with several more.
I love that quote. Of course, Buddhism strongly emphasizes constant deconstruction of the self, questioning what one is told, investigating and proving things to oneself through evidence. The New Testament also emphasizes critical examination in the accounts of Christ and the Pharisees, but most Christians seem content to take the criticism not intended for themselves... just other hypocrites.
From http://www.pfo.org/pharisee.htm ...
One modern Jewish scholar has commented on a variation of this line of thought.
"Matthew's Gospel is particularly antagonistic to the Jewish establishment. But when Jesus refers to Pharisees as "hypocrites" (Matthew 23:13) and a "brood of vipers" (Matthew 23:33), he is berating fellow Jews. Jesus undoubtedly regards his violent language as following the tradition of the prophets when they castigated fellow Jews of their day. In other words, it is a family quarrel. Jesus looks upon himself as continuing the Jewish tradition of self-criticism."
Uh, sorry dude, gravity isn't a "theory". Gravity is a FACT
Well, if you're using formal scientific terms (which you should be in this discussion) the word "gravity" is a label for the theoretical force and/or bending of space and the mathematics that embody it. It's a theory because it is free to be revised as new experimental data becomes available.
When you describe the pen falling experiment, that's the way you gather the facts that inform the theory - how fast the pen fell and so forth.
So, I'm just picking on your semantics. When scientists speak in popular media they will sometimes use the word "fact" in the conventional sense, to be understood by ordinary folks. For example in one of the Cosmos segments Carl Sagan emphatically states: "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." We can be as certain of the process of evolution as we are that it rained last Thursday, because the data unambiguously supports it.
Okay. Behe, Michael. Darwin's Black Box. Look it up, smartass.
This is no Isaac Newton you're talking about. If he had good science, his ideas would be accepted. He simply points out holes in our understanding and tries to fill them in with "and then a miracle occurs."
Look, either the whole of existence is a miracle or none of it is. Actually, let me restate that. The whole of existence is a miracle and none of it is. If you know exactly what I mean, kudos to you! The gist of what I'm saying is that the universe is quite wonderful and it works just perfectly, without any conspicuous intervention. In theistic terms, any obvious evidence of divine intervention would imply that God is capricious or erred in the initial creation.
Frankly, the universe makes much more sense if you stop separating "god" and "creation" into separate entities. I think a close reading of the New Testament shows clearly that the Christ - like the Buddha - was doing his level best to get people to stop cherishing their stupid gray matter pinhole map of the universe and their silly laws of conduct, and realize the unity of the mundane and the divine through the practice of self-transcendence (through meditating and following precepts).
But, as I always say... the Bible confuses far more than it helps in this regard. Buddhism is a far more thorough accounting of the Dharma, and far better appeals to the modern rational mind. The way is the way is the way, after all...
You've been modded "funny" but frankly I know you're not kidding.
Deceived monkeys can be dumb. dumb. dumb.
Any time you have evidence that the Earth is older, all they need to say is that God created it to look older.
And here's an equivalent:
God created the universe just a few minutes ago, with all this stuff in it, to appear as though we've all been here for thousands of years.
In fact, he didn't bother to create a whole universe. Just the parts anyone happens to be looking at right now.
God sure is one clever creator!
Also, the connections between being more fearful, wanting a strong army, and wanting to be "tough on crime" seem pretty clear. You could have convinced me without research. ...
Even if they're more fearful, it's not clear that it means they're "too fearful."
The thing is, fear is not a proper response to hold onto. It apparently undermines good reasoning, as you can see by the way facts are treated by social conservatives. Even when you point out a practical solution: combat poverty to reduce crime and save on healthcare ... increase education spending to improve overall health and prosperity ... universal health care emphasizing prevention and healthy lifestyle reduces costs o everyone ... pledges of abstinence are ineffective compared to good sexual education .... the list goes on! - social conservatives will still be against such policies out of misplaced fear.
The fearful never gets to the point of looking into root causes and rationally seeking practical and solutions to the problems we face. Instead they seek quick, easy solutions to remove the perceived problem - or symptom - as quickly as possible. They must destroy the evil stimulus - now!
Capitalist institutions have something to gain by human fears being channeled into economic and regulatory policies. Human fear can be harnessed to quickly erase things, whereas liberal, progressive solutions are hobbled by humane and environmental considerations. The conservative mindset sees such things as barriers to getting everything back to a quiet, controlled space. This triggers hate, because as we know hate is born of desire. You desire some object over there, but some barrier stands in between. You hate the barrier. So all this fear, meshed together with impatience and a simplistic mindset of "kill the bad guy" ends up creating an environment of hate, where conservatives hate anyone who proposes careful consideration.
That's what really gets me about - really anyone - who becomes ruthless, Right or Left. But frankly, the right wing media and increasingly the corporate-owned media in-general do their best to demonize and ridicule anything that slows down the machinery of capitalism. By actually lending credibility to troglodytes like Ann Coulter they effectively leverage the right-wing football game mindset to generate endless inane distraction, while each successive generation becomes dumber and dumber - human cattle.
The prophetic film "Idiocracy" illustrates perfectly what happens when we let fear become our cultural moniker. In fact, isn't that the definition of "idiot"? A person who can't let go of fear long enough to have a rational thought?
...if it were me doing the hacking I would only have posted it if it revealed some kind of malfeasance. Being no saint myself, I'm willing to give Anonymous the benefit of the doubt. Wish I had the skills and courage to do something like that if it seemed in the interest of full disclosure.
The only distinction between a "screenshot" and "buffering an image" is that in the case of a "screenshot" a file is produced on disk. In this case it's probably a .png file. Since the iPhone has plenty of resources to cache the image in RAM, it does seem weird that the image needs to be written to disk. The code that transitions to the Main Menu could be architected in many ways:
1. The code is in the Main Menu itself. It takes a screenshot as soon as it starts up, draws its own display in an offscreen buffer, and does a simple transition between the two images using the high-level animation methods.
2. A separate process takes the snapshot for the benefit of the Main Menu process, which then draws its own display in an offscreen buffer and does a simple transition between the two images using the high-level animation methods.
3. The Main Menu takes screen snapshots both before it exits and just as it starts up, and simply uses these two static images to accomplish the animation effect. This would be the simplest implementation.
4. The application launcher handles all the transitions, intercepting the first draw of the application interface within the application runtime, or as part of AppKit's implementation of mainNibDidLoad. The Main Menu process is the parent of all application processes. Animation between apps might be handled by an independent process or thread.
Perhaps some iPhone developer can shed light on which of these is most likely. The existence of a screenshot file only implies that data needs to be shared between processes, and that simple high-level API's are being used.
Applying my Slashdot headline filter, my sense of the original article - which I haven't read - is that, if you're looking to secure and encrypt everything on your phone (for safety!) this is one more thing you should remember to securely delete.
In terms of taking the customer's desires seriously, the main questions all this raises with me are: How soon can we get fully encrypted iPhones? And: can we get them without an NSA back-door? Or better yet: can we get an open source encryption plugin framework, and roll our own?
The companies who provide phones and data networks are only just beginning to get a working system together. They're just happy it works at all most of the time. Encrypting everything is going to require a lot more computational power throughout, which no one wants to sacrifice because it hurts performance. In order to get everything encrypted, companies would need to fight all the special interests that see advantage in removing the private citizen's expectation of privacy. They don't have any compelling interest in taking on that fight.
I would argue that there's a constitutional basis for demanding that universal encryption be a goal of all communication devices, and that it be considered in every new protocol. It should be as difficult as possible to install electronic eavesdropping, whether for your neighbor or for the FBI. That would be an exemplary bit of American justice, gaining us all more liberty, privacy, and security.
Long hours computing causes me to forget food... and sleep... and water... and stretching... but interestingly, not sex! Perhaps there's a study I could take part in?
On the other hand, I'm a vegan, so maybe I'm immune. I don't ever crave cheese or animal fats, having not eaten any of either for many years.
The highly-regimented stop-on-a-dime applause creeped me out more. Oh, and the chanting "drill, baby, drill! ... drill, baby, drill!"
(I'm not joking, they really did chant that. Maybe it was a prank by The Yes Men?)
How so - you can observe the earth is not flat, you cannot "observe" a negative like "There is no god" or "God is not directing evolution".
I think it's demonstrable that belief in God is purely irrational, and born of wishful thinking. When you quiz people on why they believe in God they can't produce anything with real weight - they can provide absolutely no observation or experience that necessitates the existence or presence of that character. People may have really high experiences and feel the presence of immense power, pure love and benevolence, but we know that these are brain states that can be produced chemically - Yahweh is not the only possible explanation.
In a laboratory, and elsewhere, we see light propagating at 186,000 miles per second. It might be the scientist's belief that God is moving that photon, but such a thought has no use in the lab, and is antithetical to science. Whatever we may observe, we can only ever say - that is the nature of the thing. Some would say that's equivalent to God (or gods) but there will never be any scientific backing for that notion. Science - our senses - will always and ever see only natural phenomena, and that's it. The photon moves because that's what photons do.
Fact is, we can only understand the true nature of ourselves and reality by letting go of outmoded beliefs like, for example, that the Old Testament version of God is authentic and literally true. In fact, I would argue that the most insightful spiritual teachers - including Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha - have emphasized the virtue of skepticism and independent investigation, that in fact the highest kind of faith is that which doesn't need to cling to the old mythic tethers, but trusts that "the way has been prepared" for us, and exists in our nature, and our ability to observe the universe scientifically is the proper way to approach questions bearing on material reality, and will ultimately answer many spiritual questions as well.
When people say proudly that they believe in God, and that they believe mankind was created in three days just like the Bible says, they are trying to demonstrate that they have "faith" and believe this is a virtuous state. But I would argue that this kind of belief has nothing to do with "faith" at all. And in fact, a true mature Faith is willing to let go of these childish ideas and trust in the senses and reason (i.e., Science!) that we have in hand. In my view, it is those people who are courageous enough to accept "not knowing" that represent the true faithful.
It's when people separate the physical world - thinking of it as inert and dead - and the spiritual realm - considered immaterial and perfect - when they divide against themselves. We have a certain kind of brain, and it works best when we use it properly. Spiritual experiences are something that we have and we can bring about in various ways. When people get hung up on the irrational for the fabulous chemical rewards it provides, it's no different than being hung up on drugs, sex, or power - all of them are misuses our innate natural faculties. Likewise, we do ourselves a huge disservice by poisoning reason with literal interpretations of stories and myths which are rich in analogy. The bible has some literal truths in it, but the real wealth is veiled in poetry, in the analogies that illuminate aspects of our own psychology. When people treat it as literal they completely miss the real meaning, which is sad. It takes some real magic to get a person to rise out of their banal literalism and consider the possible interpretations - and it takes some real insight and life-experience to grasp what they mean with any depth.
Gosh, this coffee works!
Scientific study has now shown that people are likely gay from the time they're born due to differences in brain structure.
Science has discovered that Toxoplasmosis makes women more promiscuous and men more foolish.
Through statistical surveys we know that a vast number of people suffer from addiction, organic maladies, and depression.
Now through the science of genetics we are able to see a correlation suggesting why some humans may desire to be more liberal in the distribution of their DNA.
I find it amazing all the factors that go into making humans be who they are, to make and accept the choices they do, and how much of it is determined by prior conditions. As human nature is being illuminated by science, I find it deepens my appreciation of this human condition, to realize the aspects of our nature that we have to work with, and how one part of us can want to stay committed to one path but be struggling with other aspects of our nature that draw us elsewhere.
And so it also strikes me how much the imagination plays a part in outlining the whole human experience and determining whether we overcome our sometimes outmoded natural impulses.
Which leads me to wonder... Can you still get the McCain schwag if you post anonymously?
They seized equipment which will now be checked for evidence of patent breaches. A spokesman for German Customs told us: 'We've raided 69 companies today. We have seized equipment including flat-screen TVs, CD players, set-top boxes and MP3 players.
They could have simply and politely bought these products (under the archaic theory that the makers are innocent until proven guilty) and tested them for patent breaches. If patent breaches are discovered then you wait for the next trade show and with your warrant or summons in hand you charge your perpetrator.
Seriously, what is with all this capitalist-driven use of armed policemen to enforce fucking intellectual property laws? This is all business stuff. You find someone breaks your patent you sue them and put them out of business.
And frankly, you have to be able to prove damages in an obvious manner. Demonstrate that you - or another legitimate competitor - would have been likely to obtain contracts and orders that were gained by unscrupulous infringers. And you must be able to demonstrate a conscientious intent to infringe. Perhaps it's not that easy for a Korean manufacturer to check the German patent records.
These kinds of draconian fishing expeditions by customs or other agents of commerce are patently stupid and should be illegal.
Man, I feel like watching Brazil again. It's such a prescient movie.
The FBI almost openly plants people in areas where activists congregate, and keep tabs on where and when groups will be staging events. Ordinarily they don't use the information gathered to disrupt the groups - though disruption is still performed in various ways. Planted people may be encouraged to sow seeds of discontent and disinformation, but of those I have heard reported, it's usually pure information gathering - dates and times.
The disruption of activists implies to me that ahead of the RNC some fairly high-up people decided to make use of the information the FBI and/or local enforcement regularly gathers through covert means... though it seems really odd that they impulsively arrested all these people then couldn't figure out how to make them disappear.
So maybe it's all some kind of PR stunt to throw some red meat to the ravenous right wingers who'll have a laugh to see some anarchist hippies get kicked in the nuts. "Ha! Ha!"
The media-for-idiots (i.e., news networks, talk radio) will smear the airwaves with the usual shitty lowbrow opinion theater, confabulating activists with terrorists. Despite the transparency of their game, they find lots of hapless people who will play along, who automatically join the apparent throngs sympathetic to the powerful... the soldiers of God.
We witness this the way these appalling scoundrels - our political class - pretend-o-cratizes its way to the bank in the classic style of corrupt servants of power. They stir the rest of us up such that we sycophants slaver and bicker over the falling scraps of our so-called "leaders."
Certainly we all strongly sense the corruption and pettiness that exists across the board in the halls of our government, and how cavalier they are becoming. It seems as though the ordinary men and women who hold offices of government - these supposed servants of the people - are more likely than ever to succumb to the inducements offered by large-scale capitalists, war profiteers, and disaster recovery specialists.
The audacious series of acts we have seen from the right wing especially in the last 8 years, the absolute disregard for the founding spirit that is this country's beating heart, the way that our airwaves have become vile with propaganda breeding cruelty, jingoism, and cynicism - these are the fruits of unbridled capitalism. Another seems to be a policy of undermining public education, presumably to create a larger pool of angry discontented mentally handicapped people who will be more likely to buy into their idiot brand of propaganda.
But that is a subject for another day.
Meanwhile, hey, what's to stop these people in the in-group who currently have power from using the FBI and law enforcement any way they want? To me this seems no less a crime than Watergate, except in this case the public can be fooled into thinking the break-ins were necessary to protect lives and property from domestic terrorists... well, anarchists... uh, whatever, same thing! ...pass me another beer.
When the police stops working as law enforcment and starts working for a political party how far is that from a banana republic?
And when they work for corporations as well, how far is that from a fascist oligarchy?
Haha! Evidently my half-brother was one of the original developers of Gopher. As I'm now learning how to write iPhone apps, perhaps this is one that could be developed relatively easily. The hard part might only then be finding active gopher:// servers with useful content.
Scene: cafeteria. A young man sits at a table pouring salt into a teaspoon and eating it. A young woman comes up and sits down across from him, then watches him fill his spoon for a moment before sliding over a can of V8 juice. The young man slaps his head and exclaims: "I could have had a V8!"
The third dimension is a cheat and is represented as 'stuff getting smaller'.
Not altogether. Much of it happens in the brain based on static visual cues - converging lines for example. And of course the brain uses the subtle differences in the images from each eye to project into 3D. Lots of optical illusions exist that fool the brain into misjudging relative size and position, even in perfectly still images.
reverse perspective
Well, there is lots of forced perspective stuff. Don't know about "reverse" perspective though.
...but Burning Man never showed up to play. What a gyp!