Thank you for putting your finger on one of the most annoying things about the Brave New World.
It's not that it's supposed to provide security, but fails. We all know better than that. And it's not that it's merely security theater. Or that it's expensive.
The final insult is that it's terrible security theater. It's not entertaining at all. The affects are awful. The casting is awful. The plot goes no where. And I can't even boo, catcall, or leave the theater.
Totally - it sucks having to take my car to the dump every year so that I can buy the new model.
That's the problem with car analogies. They often don't prove the point you're trying to make.
A lot of people get a new car every year. It's called "lease". Alternately, a few people who got ahead once bought a new car fully paid for one year and then buy the next year's model the same way every year thereafter, only paying the difference between trade-in and sticker price as cash (which they can save for by not having a car payment). That's very similar to a lease, except for up-front rather than back-loaded and the driver holds the title.
As to the non-car-analogy point... some people gotta have the newest and shiniest. Whatever makes them happy, as long as something sensible and non-evil happens to their not-so-new and no-longer-shiny. Like trade-in and refurbishment, or maybe responsible recycling.
"Irony" is defined as "poignantly contrary to expectation". If you find the hacking of any "compusec" company ironic, the problem is in your unrealistic expectations.
And yet, the triviality of the court involved (in the cosmic sense) and the disproportionality of the action didn't actually prevent an internet site hosted outside the US and lawfully accessible to non-US-users from being blackholed for the whole world without meaningful recourse.
I do concur with you on one point: The US isn't taking over teh internets... it's owned the most sensitive parts of it since the beginning, and is just flexing its muscles over it for now.
I await some county attorney in Backwater, Kansas going to court to get international internet-based liquor sales stopped on the basis that their crack Internet Crimes investigator managed to catch the dastards shipping spiritous intoxicants to residents of their dry county... and Verisign herpity-derpity pulling the internationally-registered.com DNS entry for some poor Mexican microdistiller or something.
Not all numbers can be accurately converted to the form; +/- (1 [+ 1/2] [+ 1/4] [+ 1/8].... ) * 2^n
Not literally true. All you need is the ability for n to be infinite... in other words, arbitrary precision.
Of course, (A) the same can be said of decimal, since the decimal expansion of a lot (an infinite number) of rational numbers are also non-terminating; and (B) the idea of infinite precision is pretty much not subject to real-world (algorithmic) implementation.
Well, there's been a bit of naivete about ".com". Specifically, the idea that if you "buy" your ".com" from a non-US registrar, somehow that makes the ".com" immune to US interference. People haven't realized up until now that the US allows everyone else to play in their ".com" playground under US sufferance and by US rules, since the US registrar (Verisign) owns the whole megilla. So the shock of "I never had nuffin' to do wit' da US" is not really justified, but pretty shocking nonetheless, I guess.
That's the way it is. ".com" is not an international TLD. The non-US registrar has a de-facto agreement up the registrar chain to Verisign to agree with Verisign's actions regarding that.com domain name, no matter what they may tell you (or not).
the.com itself will only benefit as a legit business platform
For sufficiently restrictive values of "legit". As in, considered legitimate in the 100% intersection of all jurisdictions within the United States (demonstrably, State and Federal courts; via court action, possibly municipal and other bailiwicks).
So I suspect that.com will only be used for "mainstream" "wholesome" stuff that forms the lowest common consumer denominator, and anything with the faintest hint of controversy will vanish into clear air. Or other TLDs.
BTW, I don't think anyone has formally espoused any kind of legal formulation providing rationale to seizing a.com domain administered from a foreign registrar, so I wouldn't feel too safe that there's some kind of logical or procedural safety in avoiding "default" TLDs. The US government could theoretically alter lookups of any specific DNS entry it wished to blacklist via its control of the world DNS root zones, and Verisign (yeah, them again) as the controlling contracted agent holding the root zones would probably act on such an order.
Of course, when that happens, the rest of the world will form one or more alternate root zones and the US will have to live within its Great Firewall. Sad, but since the DNS system is driven by consensus, breaking consensus breaks DNS.
Oxygen can be a signature of life, because plants produce it.
Plants liberate oxygen, not produce it. As far as I know, only nucleosynthesis can actually produce oxygen.
And frankly, a lot of processes can liberate oxygen. As mentioned, water or other oxygen-bearing molecules disrupted by energetic particles or ionizing radiation.
Also I don't know the science behind it but just because all animals on earth need it is a bad reason to assume that all animal like life needs it (it is a common resource here so it is not a surprise that we use it).
Science fiction biochemistry seems to be in love with silicon as the base equivalent of carbon, and chlorine as the oxidizer, for instance But humans tend to look for what they already recognize. "It's life Jim, but not as we know it" is something between an epiphany and a punchline.
Did he just call me a fungible mass material, like pork bellies and orange juice? Am I going to be traded as futures at the Chicago Board of Trade?
My God. He just called us sheep. No, not even sheep. Less than sheep. Meat. Raw materials. Resources, in the most over-the-top insulting reading of "Human Resources" possible.
Wow. I guess some people have no subtlety. And no shame. And scum like this wants to turn the world into the largest episode of The Prisoner ever.
Let me reiterate. I am not a number. I am a free man.
I must respectfully decline your intriguing offer. I will not be subscribing to your newsletter.
In 1979, it was more than good; it was PURE AWESOME. Too many hours wasted playing that damn game.
What I don't like are the games that masquerade as goods, but want to suck you into services after you're hooked.
Games (even single-player ones) that are crippled "out of the box" after paying $50+ and make you buy DLC to get more than a couple hours of play are another example of this trend. They certainly fail on the "bang for the buck" criterion, and publishers who do this to me once never get my return business.
That caught my eye. I spent too much of my youth detasseling perfectly viable fertile domesticated maize fields to prevent them from reproducing by themselves to believe that statement in any literal fashion.
Maybe you're failed to proviso that statement with "GMO domesticated corn"? Because last I looked cleaning up volunteer corn in a field rotated to another crop (say, soybeans) is a significant issue.
It's also, strictly speaking, not really rice. Taxonomically, it's as closely related to rice as barley is to wheat, and barley doesn't get called "wild wheat".
So, yeah, ironically, Canada grows rice, but not real rice. This sounds like an Alanis Morissette comeback. Canadian irony, eh?
According to this, hand-written Arabic numerals from the 12th Century tended to be this way; "Titling figures" (numerals with consistent baseline and height) seems to have been an 18th Century "innovation".
Personal observation: The wiki page in question features an image of numeral glyphs from the Hoefler Text face, one of the most beautiful typefaces ever invented IMHO.
Yow! Are you really kdawson, or did Zippy the Pinhead steal your ID?
semi-offtopic editorial comic: The Zippy the Pinhead website may be the most hideous website I've seen since Geocities went dark. OTOH, I sense that it's intentional, which wasn't usually the case in Geocities.
The GIGO principle applies here. Simply running a loudness war victim 44/16 CD track through Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" tools will simply produce a normal AAC. The magic is in providing to Apple a high-quality 196/24 file, with targeted audience specific tweaks, to begin with.
Actually, the GIGO principle doesn't apply here. Garbage in, Garbage labeled with a shiny faux-significant marketing label "Mastered for iTunes" (and thus ennobled beyond its humble origins) Out.
Or, to put it more simply, it's less effective than Autotune.
If "Mastered for iTunes" is intended to be a mark of superior quality, it needs to actually start enforcing superior quality on some objective basis. Otherwise, it's just another worthless and misleading label.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for putting your finger on one of the most annoying things about the Brave New World.
It's not that it's supposed to provide security, but fails. We all know better than that. And it's not that it's merely security theater. Or that it's expensive.
The final insult is that it's terrible security theater. It's not entertaining at all. The affects are awful. The casting is awful. The plot goes no where. And I can't even boo, catcall, or leave the theater.
Totally - it sucks having to take my car to the dump every year so that I can buy the new model.
That's the problem with car analogies. They often don't prove the point you're trying to make.
A lot of people get a new car every year. It's called "lease". Alternately, a few people who got ahead once bought a new car fully paid for one year and then buy the next year's model the same way every year thereafter, only paying the difference between trade-in and sticker price as cash (which they can save for by not having a car payment). That's very similar to a lease, except for up-front rather than back-loaded and the driver holds the title.
As to the non-car-analogy point... some people gotta have the newest and shiniest. Whatever makes them happy, as long as something sensible and non-evil happens to their not-so-new and no-longer-shiny. Like trade-in and refurbishment, or maybe responsible recycling.
That's because the RIAA has mod points. And modding "Funny" is much more effective at neutralizing an idea than modding "Troll" or "Flamebait".
"Irony" is defined as "poignantly contrary to expectation". If you find the hacking of any "compusec" company ironic, the problem is in your unrealistic expectations.
And yet, the triviality of the court involved (in the cosmic sense) and the disproportionality of the action didn't actually prevent an internet site hosted outside the US and lawfully accessible to non-US-users from being blackholed for the whole world without meaningful recourse.
I do concur with you on one point: The US isn't taking over teh internets... it's owned the most sensitive parts of it since the beginning, and is just flexing its muscles over it for now.
I await some county attorney in Backwater, Kansas going to court to get international internet-based liquor sales stopped on the basis that their crack Internet Crimes investigator managed to catch the dastards shipping spiritous intoxicants to residents of their dry county... and Verisign herpity-derpity pulling the internationally-registered .com DNS entry for some poor Mexican microdistiller or something.
Not all numbers can be accurately converted to the form; +/- (1 [+ 1/2] [+ 1/4] [+ 1/8] .... ) * 2^n
Not literally true. All you need is the ability for n to be infinite... in other words, arbitrary precision.
Of course, (A) the same can be said of decimal, since the decimal expansion of a lot (an infinite number) of rational numbers are also non-terminating; and (B) the idea of infinite precision is pretty much not subject to real-world (algorithmic) implementation.
Good point. The Walled Garden certainly needs more fart apps.
Well, there's been a bit of naivete about ".com". Specifically, the idea that if you "buy" your ".com" from a non-US registrar, somehow that makes the ".com" immune to US interference. People haven't realized up until now that the US allows everyone else to play in their ".com" playground under US sufferance and by US rules, since the US registrar (Verisign) owns the whole megilla. So the shock of "I never had nuffin' to do wit' da US" is not really justified, but pretty shocking nonetheless, I guess.
That's the way it is. ".com" is not an international TLD. The non-US registrar has a de-facto agreement up the registrar chain to Verisign to agree with Verisign's actions regarding that .com domain name, no matter what they may tell you (or not).
the .com itself will only benefit as a legit business platform
For sufficiently restrictive values of "legit". As in, considered legitimate in the 100% intersection of all jurisdictions within the United States (demonstrably, State and Federal courts; via court action, possibly municipal and other bailiwicks).
So I suspect that .com will only be used for "mainstream" "wholesome" stuff that forms the lowest common consumer denominator, and anything with the faintest hint of controversy will vanish into clear air. Or other TLDs.
BTW, I don't think anyone has formally espoused any kind of legal formulation providing rationale to seizing a .com domain administered from a foreign registrar, so I wouldn't feel too safe that there's some kind of logical or procedural safety in avoiding "default" TLDs. The US government could theoretically alter lookups of any specific DNS entry it wished to blacklist via its control of the world DNS root zones, and Verisign (yeah, them again) as the controlling contracted agent holding the root zones would probably act on such an order.
Of course, when that happens, the rest of the world will form one or more alternate root zones and the US will have to live within its Great Firewall. Sad, but since the DNS system is driven by consensus, breaking consensus breaks DNS.
The Winter Market
It doesn't take much. Just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit. Diluted well. It's more effective that way.
So what we need is a game that pops up a bunch of buttons, links, ads, and challenges the user not to click on any of them.
Especially the beautiful shiny button. The jolly candy-like button. Will he hold out, folks? Can he hold out?
Oxygen can be a signature of life, because plants produce it.
Plants liberate oxygen, not produce it. As far as I know, only nucleosynthesis can actually produce oxygen.
And frankly, a lot of processes can liberate oxygen. As mentioned, water or other oxygen-bearing molecules disrupted by energetic particles or ionizing radiation.
Also I don't know the science behind it but just because all animals on earth need it is a bad reason to assume that all animal like life needs it (it is a common resource here so it is not a surprise that we use it).
Science fiction biochemistry seems to be in love with silicon as the base equivalent of carbon, and chlorine as the oxidizer, for instance But humans tend to look for what they already recognize. "It's life Jim, but not as we know it" is something between an epiphany and a punchline.
The self-hatred is strong in this one.
Did he really just say that?
Did he just call me a fungible mass material, like pork bellies and orange juice? Am I going to be traded as futures at the Chicago Board of Trade?
My God. He just called us sheep. No, not even sheep. Less than sheep. Meat. Raw materials. Resources, in the most over-the-top insulting reading of "Human Resources" possible.
Wow. I guess some people have no subtlety. And no shame. And scum like this wants to turn the world into the largest episode of The Prisoner ever.
Let me reiterate. I am not a number. I am a free man.
I must respectfully decline your intriguing offer. I will not be subscribing to your newsletter.
That has a striking resemblance to "I can quit any time I want" and "That only happens to other people."
Coleco 21 LED football handheld game: good.
In 1979, it was more than good; it was PURE AWESOME. Too many hours wasted playing that damn game.
What I don't like are the games that masquerade as goods, but want to suck you into services after you're hooked.
Games (even single-player ones) that are crippled "out of the box" after paying $50+ and make you buy DLC to get more than a couple hours of play are another example of this trend. They certainly fail on the "bang for the buck" criterion, and publishers who do this to me once never get my return business.
a good white noise generator that operates on the same frequency patterns as speech.
You'll know you're really in trouble when you start hearing whispering voices in the white noise.
domesticated corn can't even reproduce by itself.
That caught my eye. I spent too much of my youth detasseling perfectly viable fertile domesticated maize fields to prevent them from reproducing by themselves to believe that statement in any literal fashion.
Maybe you're failed to proviso that statement with "GMO domesticated corn"? Because last I looked cleaning up volunteer corn in a field rotated to another crop (say, soybeans) is a significant issue.
It's also, strictly speaking, not really rice. Taxonomically, it's as closely related to rice as barley is to wheat, and barley doesn't get called "wild wheat".
So, yeah, ironically, Canada grows rice, but not real rice. This sounds like an Alanis Morissette comeback. Canadian irony, eh?
Wiki page.
According to this, hand-written Arabic numerals from the 12th Century tended to be this way; "Titling figures" (numerals with consistent baseline and height) seems to have been an 18th Century "innovation".
Personal observation: The wiki page in question features an image of numeral glyphs from the Hoefler Text face, one of the most beautiful typefaces ever invented IMHO.
meta-x interrogate-pinhead
Yow! Are you really kdawson, or did Zippy the Pinhead steal your ID?
semi-offtopic editorial comic: The Zippy the Pinhead website may be the most hideous website I've seen since Geocities went dark. OTOH, I sense that it's intentional, which wasn't usually the case in Geocities.
The GIGO principle applies here. Simply running a loudness war victim 44/16 CD track through Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" tools will simply produce a normal AAC. The magic is in providing to Apple a high-quality 196/24 file, with targeted audience specific tweaks, to begin with.
Actually, the GIGO principle doesn't apply here. Garbage in, Garbage labeled with a shiny faux-significant marketing label "Mastered for iTunes" (and thus ennobled beyond its humble origins) Out.
Or, to put it more simply, it's less effective than Autotune.
If "Mastered for iTunes" is intended to be a mark of superior quality, it needs to actually start enforcing superior quality on some objective basis. Otherwise, it's just another worthless and misleading label.
-- Douglas Adams