Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair."
A more interesting experiment would have been to morph Marilyn Monroe into Pierce Brosnan, and Margaret Thatcher into Tony Blair. Or Marilyn to Tony and Pierce to Maggie. Or for that matter, Marilyn Monroe to Marilyn Manson to Charles Manson...
Don't know that you would have gotten much useful research done, though.
And enough with HotSynch already - now that these toys are wifi enabled, let's use regular file transfer methods and regular mail protocols to transfer this information - as if it were a hand sized laptop...
I think HotSync is arguably the killer app of the palmtop. I program for a living, but do I back up my data properly? Are you kidding? (Um, is my boss reading? n/p, she doesn't back up either)
But my Palm Pilot gets backed up daily, sometimes several times a day, because all I have to do is set it in its cradle and push the button. Poof, instant backup! And it's easy enough for non-techies to do.
Plus, it makes buying a new Palm a snap... sync new unit and it has (pretty much) everything the old one did. Full Reset on old unit and it's ready for eBay (or handmedown to the kids).
But I'm with a previous poster... if I need to get online, I'll use a computer with a screen that's larger than a notecard, thanks.
It also suggests "loose weight". I can't believe how many web sites there are devoted to loosing weight. I guess that's the origin of the term, "to throw your weight around" -- so many people loosing it, and throwing weight will certainly loose it. What a bunch of loosers.
(and looking at that paragraph long enough makes me wonder if I've loosed it, myself)
The original movie is the only movie credit listed for The Quaker Oats Company. It's surprisingly tripadelic for a product tie-in movie, though perhaps that's because Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers hadn't redefined the concept of TV/Movies as long-format commercial.
Can the new version top the original, and capture more of the book's dark side? I suspect so... the picture on the Yahoo! site looks more like A Clockwork Orange than Benji, and the trailer looks deliciously dangerous.
We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes. They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.
But we're not talking about the Presidential election, not in this state at least. Washington state's gov race could go on for years, AFAIK.
Ohio, on the other hand, is another story entirely. And even if the electors pick Massa Dubya on Monday, the results must still be certified by Congress on January 6, 2005. If the Green/Libertarian recount push discovers that Ohio could have swung the other way, Congress will be forced to intervene -- and if they choose to go with the tainted results, Bush will have the distinction of having both his terms clouded by disputed election results.
I've contributed to the recount fund. I hope everyone here does as well.
As I recall, Disney was a big supporter of the dead-on-arrival Divx format. We know how well that went. Disney may be able to throw its weight around, but if the format doesn't have consumer acceptance, even Mickey's clout won't help.
If whales etc have to go extinct then it better be a well thought out choice, rather than "oops". [...] Sure, I'm cold and heartless, but if a species has to go extinct or suffer for the greater good of humankind, so be it.
But it better be for the greater good!
Whales are very large. Why, they're heavy enough to crush a child! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
Ok, that takes care of the whale problem... next species?
This isn't just a dupe of a previous story... it's not just a dupe of the top story... it's a dup of an incredibly outrageous story that makes the radical right's Clinton Suicide scandals look almost sane.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the right-wingers are astroturfing the 'net with outrageous vote-rigging stories. This helps ensure that the real story of the Green/Libertarian recount in Ohio won't be taken seriously. Karl Rove is probably laughing his butt off.
Later on July 1, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Moultrie informed the Valdosta Police that based on the "suicide" details, no autopsy would be performed on Lemme. Unlike Florida, Georgia does not perform mandatory autopsies. A doctor, with 25 years' clinical experience, who was interviewed for this story claimed that the circumstances of Lemme's death appeared to him to be a classic "mob hit."
Once I saw that the article contained the word "suicide" in scare quotes, I realized that further skimming would be utterly useless. Sure, there are bungled investigations, but the rest of the premise seems to be based on some unnamed doctor's memory of a bad mafia movie.
Oh, well, I guess the radical left needs to invent a scandal that can match the stupidity concocted by the radical right.
At least the guy I voted for has never been accused of having anyone axed. But then, you never know what might happ$%## NO CARRIER
Since you're going to receive more than your fair share of personal anecdotes, I'll throw my own story into the mix.
Short version: I've got an A.S. in Computer-Aided Drafting from the local community college, but due to luck for sure, skill I hope, and good management, I'm a senior systems analyst for a company that writes tax software -- the most steady programming gig possible. Go figure.
I was planning for an Electrical Engineering degree, but I had near-zero study skills. I spent a semester at Okla State and quite utterly failed to distinguish myself.
After a summer delivering pizza, I got a job through Manpower -- proofreading phone books. But instead of just marking errors, I figured out the patterns, and got hired.
Next was the big lucky break: Texas Instruments, flush with Cold War defense contracts, had a program where they put folks through school to become CAD draftsmen. I applied and got in. Got paid to go to school for a semester, then worked full time with a full-time school schedule. By the time I got my A.S. in Computer-Aided Drafting, I was the software support person for the drafting group, writing Lisp extensions for AutoCAD.
Cold war ends. Layoffs begin. I bail out for American Airlines... start out as 2nd level support, taking calls from Australia and Japan in the evenings, the Middle East at midnight, and Europe in the wee hours. Transferred around, picked up VB, ended up leading a small project. Bailed out in the mid-90s and just missed the downturns.
Got the current job when it was a family-owned company with a tradition of "get it done" over "show me your diploma". The owner also didn't like to lose talent, so they kept up with the dot-com boom wages. Owner sold to a conglomerate, but clueful management remained in place.
So here I am, a high-level programmer, with an A.S. in Drafting from a community college. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.
If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.
Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.
"Standard mischief won't get you around it," Crean adds.
"About" 20 billionths of a second from printing, a chip "right near" the laser. Yeah, I don't suppose "standard mischief" will get you around it.
Does a soldering iron and de-soldering wick now count as non-standard mischief?
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
"The FAA could not administer safety regulations unless someone is killed on one of these flights, until 2012. A provision like that in itself, we believe, requires a more serious explanation than what we've received so far," [congressional panel mouthpiece Steve] Hansen said.
What more of an explanation do they need than this: Space is hard. People will die exploring and exploiting space. They'll know what they're getting into before they close the hatch, and will agree to take that chance.
That pretty much takes care of it to my satisfaction. What more does Congress want?
You know, the ones that would have voted Democrat/Republican even if "Yog-Sothoth for prez, Cthulhu for VP" had been the democrat/republican ticket.
That sounds like a Democratic ticket to me. They always put the wrong candidate on the top of the ticket (ref: Dukakis/Bentsen, Mondale/Ferraro, Kerry/Edwards...).
Finally, all those work PC's...
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The final chapter includes seven hacks that help the reader create their own customized Knoppix CD. Knoppix Remastered walks the reader through the steps of customizing and personalizing a live CD.
Aha! Finally, I'll be able to create a bootable BZFlag CD-ROM, and I won't have to ask permission before bringing my friends to the office on the weekend for a fragging session. Power goes out here regularly, so as long as everyone has to power up in the morning, nobody will be the wiser. Heh.
Now, where's that "Post Anonymously" check bo
Re:Rice nominated. US now officially extremist
on
Colin Powell Resigns
·
· Score: 1
I moderated the parent comment +1, but I have since received word that this is likely a cut-and-paste of one or more uncredited sources, most notably this one, dated 11/11/04. My posting will undo my postive moderation of the parent. I encourage future moderators to take this situation into account when evaluating the parent post.
Gone it seems are the days of making holograms in a basment with a water bed frame filled with sand and a Helium Neon laser scrounged from an old Safeway UPC code reader.
You jest, or perhaps you don't? I remember trying to figure out how to set up exactly such an arrangement after visiting one of the first hologram stores in the early '80s. It was in Dallas, in the Quadrangle, I think... I was an early teen, so it wasn't like I drove there myself. It was the coolest freakin' things I'd ever seen -- better than Pac Man.
Years later, there was an outfit selling holograms at Dallas' West End Marketplace -- and I was able to take my kids to check it out. They thought it was cool, but I don't think they were nearly as bowled over as I was.
That's why I'm not sure I'll shell out the $99 for this kit for Christmas. I just don't think they'll like it as much as the [Select Kid, Present from WishList where Price < 100] they've been asking for. OTOH, I may send the URL to my wife in case she can't figure out what to get me...
[T]hey calculated from the movement of the seven stars that they must be orbiting an intermediate-mass black hole, called IRS 13E, which spirals around Sagittarius A* at about 280 kilometres per second.
Is it just serendipity that this object, into which everything goes and never comes back, is named after an Earthly agency to which similar attributes are often ascribed?
In a previous Slashdot article (a few months ago, I can't seem to find it at the moment), a Microsoftie was quoted as saying he had installed Firefox (among other browsers). Of course, we Slashdotters razzed him for it.
Today, we have someone from Microsoft who says they haven't installed Firefox. This is decried as shameful -- how dare he criticize the application if he hasn't tried it?
Poor Microsoft. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Damned if I care, though; I use Opera, myself.
The whole premise of this article is silly. They're assuming that A - those markings are the only signals and B - that they can reproduce them well enough to fool the other wasps.
Also the article inadvertenty noted another problem:
Assuming the honest wasps weren't just reacting to the odor of Testor's, there must be some way they sleuthed out the imposters.
They were joking, but think about it -- we know that insects see a very different range of colors than we do. Did they make sure that the paints they used were exact mimics of the natural colors in *all* wavelengths? Or do both colors look like the wasp equivalent of this or this in the infrared?
Sometimes,.sigs mesh with comments in particularly interesting ways:
I'm just about to finish a world wide, 3-tier, trouble ticketing system in the shape of a Maze. Don't write code, generate it using XML and XSLT with Visual Studio XGen
I just hope the XGen development team has a good sense of humor...
Slashdot Mirror
Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair."
A more interesting experiment would have been to morph Marilyn Monroe into Pierce Brosnan, and Margaret Thatcher into Tony Blair. Or Marilyn to Tony and Pierce to Maggie. Or for that matter, Marilyn Monroe to Marilyn Manson to Charles Manson...
Don't know that you would have gotten much useful research done, though.
And enough with HotSynch already - now that these toys are wifi enabled, let's use regular file transfer methods and regular mail protocols to transfer this information - as if it were a hand sized laptop...
I think HotSync is arguably the killer app of the palmtop. I program for a living, but do I back up my data properly? Are you kidding? (Um, is my boss reading? n/p, she doesn't back up either)
But my Palm Pilot gets backed up daily, sometimes several times a day, because all I have to do is set it in its cradle and push the button. Poof, instant backup! And it's easy enough for non-techies to do.
Plus, it makes buying a new Palm a snap... sync new unit and it has (pretty much) everything the old one did. Full Reset on old unit and it's ready for eBay (or handmedown to the kids).
But I'm with a previous poster... if I need to get online, I'll use a computer with a screen that's larger than a notecard, thanks.
When I type "loose" it doesn't suggest "lose".
It does suggest "loose women".
It also suggests "loose weight". I can't believe how many web sites there are devoted to loosing weight. I guess that's the origin of the term, "to throw your weight around" -- so many people loosing it, and throwing weight will certainly loose it. What a bunch of loosers.
(and looking at that paragraph long enough makes me wonder if I've loosed it, myself)
The original movie is the only movie credit listed for The Quaker Oats Company. It's surprisingly tripadelic for a product tie-in movie, though perhaps that's because Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers hadn't redefined the concept of TV/Movies as long-format commercial.
Can the new version top the original, and capture more of the book's dark side? I suspect so... the picture on the Yahoo! site looks more like A Clockwork Orange than Benji, and the trailer looks deliciously dangerous.
We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.
But we're not talking about the Presidential election, not in this state at least. Washington state's gov race could go on for years, AFAIK.
Ohio, on the other hand, is another story entirely. And even if the electors pick Massa Dubya on Monday, the results must still be certified by Congress on January 6, 2005. If the Green/Libertarian recount push discovers that Ohio could have swung the other way, Congress will be forced to intervene -- and if they choose to go with the tainted results, Bush will have the distinction of having both his terms clouded by disputed election results.
I've contributed to the recount fund. I hope everyone here does as well.
As I recall, Disney was a big supporter of the dead-on-arrival Divx format. We know how well that went. Disney may be able to throw its weight around, but if the format doesn't have consumer acceptance, even Mickey's clout won't help.
t ml
h tml
A couple of quick Google results:
+5, Informative: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/editorial/bz21998.h
+5, Funny: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/divxpress.
If whales etc have to go extinct then it better be a well thought out choice, rather than "oops". [...] Sure, I'm cold and heartless, but if a species has to go extinct or suffer for the greater good of humankind, so be it.
But it better be for the greater good!
Whales are very large. Why, they're heavy enough to crush a child! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
Ok, that takes care of the whale problem... next species?
Saw the headline and thought "Non-Invasive Brain Control Through Computers". I need a new tinfoil hat.
This isn't just a dupe of a previous story... it's not just a dupe of the top story... it's a dup of an incredibly outrageous story that makes the radical right's Clinton Suicide scandals look almost sane.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the right-wingers are astroturfing the 'net with outrageous vote-rigging stories. This helps ensure that the real story of the Green/Libertarian recount in Ohio won't be taken seriously. Karl Rove is probably laughing his butt off.
Later on July 1, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Moultrie informed the Valdosta Police that based on the "suicide" details, no autopsy would be performed on Lemme. Unlike Florida, Georgia does not perform mandatory autopsies. A doctor, with 25 years' clinical experience, who was interviewed for this story claimed that the circumstances of Lemme's death appeared to him to be a classic "mob hit."
Once I saw that the article contained the word "suicide" in scare quotes, I realized that further skimming would be utterly useless. Sure, there are bungled investigations, but the rest of the premise seems to be based on some unnamed doctor's memory of a bad mafia movie.
Oh, well, I guess the radical left needs to invent a scandal that can match the stupidity concocted by the radical right.
At least the guy I voted for has never been accused of having anyone axed. But then, you never know what might happ$%## NO CARRIER
Since you're going to receive more than your fair share of personal anecdotes, I'll throw my own story into the mix.
Short version: I've got an A.S. in Computer-Aided Drafting from the local community college, but due to luck for sure, skill I hope, and good management, I'm a senior systems analyst for a company that writes tax software -- the most steady programming gig possible. Go figure.
I was planning for an Electrical Engineering degree, but I had near-zero study skills. I spent a semester at Okla State and quite utterly failed to distinguish myself.
After a summer delivering pizza, I got a job through Manpower -- proofreading phone books. But instead of just marking errors, I figured out the patterns, and got hired.
Next was the big lucky break: Texas Instruments, flush with Cold War defense contracts, had a program where they put folks through school to become CAD draftsmen. I applied and got in. Got paid to go to school for a semester, then worked full time with a full-time school schedule. By the time I got my A.S. in Computer-Aided Drafting, I was the software support person for the drafting group, writing Lisp extensions for AutoCAD.
Cold war ends. Layoffs begin. I bail out for American Airlines... start out as 2nd level support, taking calls from Australia and Japan in the evenings, the Middle East at midnight, and Europe in the wee hours. Transferred around, picked up VB, ended up leading a small project. Bailed out in the mid-90s and just missed the downturns.
Got the current job when it was a family-owned company with a tradition of "get it done" over "show me your diploma". The owner also didn't like to lose talent, so they kept up with the dot-com boom wages. Owner sold to a conglomerate, but clueful management remained in place.
So here I am, a high-level programmer, with an A.S. in Drafting from a community college. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.
Will you guys stop so I can close my browser and get some work done?
Gotta love those homophones!
I thought Bush was pushing a Constitutional amendment against them?
[rimshot] Thanks, I'm here all week, enjoy the buffet!
If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.
Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.
"Standard mischief won't get you around it," Crean adds.
"About" 20 billionths of a second from printing, a chip "right near" the laser. Yeah, I don't suppose "standard mischief" will get you around it.
Does a soldering iron and de-soldering wick now count as non-standard mischief?
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
"The FAA could not administer safety regulations unless someone is killed on one of these flights, until 2012. A provision like that in itself, we believe, requires a more serious explanation than what we've received so far," [congressional panel mouthpiece Steve] Hansen said.
What more of an explanation do they need than this: Space is hard. People will die exploring and exploiting space. They'll know what they're getting into before they close the hatch, and will agree to take that chance.
That pretty much takes care of it to my satisfaction. What more does Congress want?
You know, the ones that would have voted Democrat/Republican even if "Yog-Sothoth for prez, Cthulhu for VP" had been the democrat/republican ticket.
That sounds like a Democratic ticket to me. They always put the wrong candidate on the top of the ticket (ref: Dukakis/Bentsen, Mondale/Ferraro, Kerry/Edwards...).
The final chapter includes seven hacks that help the reader create their own customized Knoppix CD. Knoppix Remastered walks the reader through the steps of customizing and personalizing a live CD.
Aha! Finally, I'll be able to create a bootable BZFlag CD-ROM, and I won't have to ask permission before bringing my friends to the office on the weekend for a fragging session. Power goes out here regularly, so as long as everyone has to power up in the morning, nobody will be the wiser. Heh.
Now, where's that "Post Anonymously" check bo
I moderated the parent comment +1, but I have since received word that this is likely a cut-and-paste of one or more uncredited sources, most notably this one, dated 11/11/04. My posting will undo my postive moderation of the parent. I encourage future moderators to take this situation into account when evaluating the parent post.
Gone it seems are the days of making holograms in a basment with a water bed frame filled with sand and a Helium Neon laser scrounged from an old Safeway UPC code reader.
You jest, or perhaps you don't? I remember trying to figure out how to set up exactly such an arrangement after visiting one of the first hologram stores in the early '80s. It was in Dallas, in the Quadrangle, I think... I was an early teen, so it wasn't like I drove there myself. It was the coolest freakin' things I'd ever seen -- better than Pac Man.
Years later, there was an outfit selling holograms at Dallas' West End Marketplace -- and I was able to take my kids to check it out. They thought it was cool, but I don't think they were nearly as bowled over as I was.
That's why I'm not sure I'll shell out the $99 for this kit for Christmas. I just don't think they'll like it as much as the [Select Kid, Present from WishList where Price < 100] they've been asking for. OTOH, I may send the URL to my wife in case she can't figure out what to get me...
[T]hey calculated from the movement of the seven stars that they must be orbiting an intermediate-mass black hole, called IRS 13E, which spirals around Sagittarius A* at about 280 kilometres per second.
Is it just serendipity that this object, into which everything goes and never comes back, is named after an Earthly agency to which similar attributes are often ascribed?
In a previous Slashdot article (a few months ago, I can't seem to find it at the moment), a Microsoftie was quoted as saying he had installed Firefox (among other browsers). Of course, we Slashdotters razzed him for it.
Today, we have someone from Microsoft who says they haven't installed Firefox. This is decried as shameful -- how dare he criticize the application if he hasn't tried it?
Poor Microsoft. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Damned if I care, though; I use Opera, myself.
Such trouble. Just buy the damned company.
Come on, be serious. Google doesn't plan to buy Microsoft until *after* they reach the one-year post-IPO mark, silly.
The whole premise of this article is silly. They're assuming that A - those markings are the only signals and B - that they can reproduce them well enough to fool the other wasps.
Also the article inadvertenty noted another problem:
Assuming the honest wasps weren't just reacting to the odor of Testor's, there must be some way they sleuthed out the imposters.
They were joking, but think about it -- we know that insects see a very different range of colors than we do. Did they make sure that the paints they used were exact mimics of the natural colors in *all* wavelengths? Or do both colors look like the wasp equivalent of this or this in the infrared?
Sometimes, .sigs mesh with comments in particularly interesting ways:
I'm just about to finish a world wide, 3-tier, trouble ticketing system in the shape of a Maze.
Don't write code, generate it using XML and XSLT with Visual Studio XGen
I just hope the XGen development team has a good sense of humor...