What they're really worried about is that people will publish in other media, especially where they don't have to pay (or not as much).
Aside from the fact that most journals don't charge you to publish, but do charge you to buy/download articles, the reason is control.
Look at their current situation: The researchers around the world do the writing for them, and send the articles to them (simple web form), they dole out the articles for peer review by researchers around the world (three clicks in a database), repeat this process twice, and then run LaTeX (prop. version) to generate their issue. This is then sold (PDF, 35 fricking dollars for an article, simple web form, sometimes paper).
They still charge the same amounts of money for an article, even though the amount of work they need to do has become very much smaller in the last decade or so. And now for the whopper: governments base their funding to universities largely on the amount of articles (quality is not an issue: it's counting * impact factor) published in these established journals, thus making sure that universities will prefer publishing in the establishment's journals to publishing in the many current e-journals. They have a pretty good deal going there! And oh yeah: If you want to publish, you transfer your copyright to them. What a bloody joke.
Now, as more e-journals pop up, and more free exchange of information takes place, it becomes apparent what these guys are really afraid of: they are afraid to lose control. They are afraid that the scientific community (especially the not-so-well funded universities) will not buy their journals anymore, but rely on the cheaper or free alternatives. What this will do, is increase the impact factor of the free and cheap alternatives, thereby making these journals more attractive for publishing to the scientific community. Once that happens, their bubble collapses. That's what they are afraid of.
Now, something about the so-called honest peer-review. Don't get me started: the editors will choose their friends (professors usually) to do the reviewing. These in turn will burden their Ph.D. students with it, but not without first giving said Ph.D. student specific instructions as to what the outcome of the review should be. This outcome is mostly based on political issues, and hardly on quality (prof. hasn't read the article, so how could it be). So, open your eyes: your papers are getting reviewed by students, who don't get any initiative in the review outcome, and based on political issues. That's what the established journals do for you.
A completely different matter is that articles can be found with any search engine: usually researchers put there published articles on their website, even though they are forced to sign a copyright transfer. If that fails, there's always Tor and friends to get to articles.
In a DRM system, the consumer's machine needs to get both the encrypted content, and the key to decrypt this content. Otherwise, the consumer cannot listen to the audio he just purchased. As long as we listen to music with our analog ears, and watch video with our analog eyes, this will be the case.
As any cryptographer will tell you: if you have the cyphertext and the correct key, you can decrypt the content. Therefore, DRM systems are, by their very definition, nothing more than security by obscurity. It is a cryptographical pipe dream.
The upper end of your scale, 5 kg, amounts to
E = m * c^2 = 5 * 9e+16 = 4e+17 Joules.
The Russian Tsar Bomba ---the World's largest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth--- yielded 50 Megatons of energy, or about 50e6 * 4e9 = 2e+17 Joules.
That bomb didn't kill us, so 5 kg of antimatter won't kill us all.
To put things in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb (15 kton) destroyed about 1.5 grams of matter. The Tsuami quake on the Pacific, last year, yielded about 30 Gigaton, or 6.4e+19 Joules. That amounts to about 600 to 700 kg of destroyed matter.
Please refrain from mentioning I2P on/. until such time that the UDP transport is fully implemented. Now, with the TCP transport in place, I2P is essentially thread-limited (2 threads per connection) to about 250-300 nodes. Once UDP is in place, the threading issue goes away, and the network will support more users (2 threads for N nodes).
Luring people to I2P now is not useful for development, and not useful for the new people joining: there's hardly anything to be found there yet.
When I2P is ready, the creator will probably arrange a/. announcement. But for now, don't join it yet, and don't announce it here. Thanks.
If you're performing large (block-)matrix operations, you might want to take a look at ATLAS; ATLAS basically is an automatically tuned version of LAPACK and BLAS. Not only does it use vectorization on CPUs that support it, it also takes the sizes of your L1 and L2 caches into account, by reordering the matrix operations such that the cache hit rate is highest.
ATLAS doesn't depend much on the compiler's optimization abilities; most of it is generated as assembly. And it's a _very_ realiable thing: big commercial tools such as MATLAB are built on top of (slightly modified versions of) ATLAS.
As for you; the ATLAS build system definitately supports AltiVec things.
I work in the analysis of fMRI data, so it might be good to disspell some myth and provide some key info.
fMRI is derived from "normal" MRI, and in fact, any fMRI scanner can also make a normal MRI. MRI, or actually, NMRI, stands for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The "N" for Nuclear is usually not included in the abbreviation because it seems to make the public nervous. An MRI makes an image by using a radio-frequency magnetic field to excite a magnetic spin-state in the nuclei of hydrogen atoms (i.e., in single protons); the more an area resonates, the more the measured signal is modulated, and the higher the hydrogen concentration assumed to be (typically that means: the higher the water-concentration is). Imaging can be done on a three dimensional grid, because the exact frequency at which the spin-state is excited can be modulated by static (compared to the RF field) magnetic fields. To this end, a large static field (1-7 Tesla) and 2 auxiliary fields are used to determine at which point in the grid the resonance takes place. This, then, is done for each point in the grid. The result is a 3D proton (or water) density map of the brain (usually refered to as the "anatomy (map)" by people working in the field).
In functional MRI (fMRI), one takes the MRI process one step further by exploting the paramagnetic properties of oxygen; the amount of oxygen (in the blood, attached to hemoglobine) present in a certain area will modulate the proton spin resonance frequency as well, and this extra modulation can be measured. In this way, one can also make an oxygen-density map (one has to correct and compensate for a lot of things here, but that's a long story).
The oxygen density map can be used, because areas in the brain that are active "draw blood" towards themselves. This is called the BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) response. Typically, this response lags one to a couple of seconds behind the actual activation of the brain area; in the fMRI data, one sees the signal in that area become higher. One can thus detect which areas of the brain are active.
The trick that the article describes is sometimes called brain state prediction, and that's a more difficult problem. Typically, one measures the fMRI signal while first supplying stimulus "1" N times, and them stimulus "2" N times. Determining which areas are active for stimulus "1" OR "2" (or both), usually has a reasonable SNR; based on the measured example, something simple like an F-test will suffice. However, given which part of the brain is active for either, the task of determining which of these active areas correspond more to simimulus "1" or "2", is more diffucult: usually the entire active area responds to both responses, and the difference is in the magnitude (or delay, or width) of the BOLD response in that area w.r.t. stimulus "1" or "2". These difference (sometimes expressed in a Contrast-to-Noise Ratio), is much smaller than the SNR for the activation. Consequently, this is an active research area.
To disspell some myths: the fMRI data can only be obtained using a HUGE scanner, and your head has to be completely inside. Furthermore, the sampling frequency is rather low (1.5 seconds between scans, usually), and the spatial resolution isn't that high either (64x64x64 voxels, in that order of magnitude).
When posting stories that link to small(ish) sites, please append nyud.net:8090 to the hostname: It makes the Coral cache system cache the data. They have some tens of server worldwide to alleviate the load on the original site.
Also please load the site through Coral first before you submit the story. That way, Coral's caches are already filled, and the load on the main server can be even lighter.
Algorithmical optimization makes the most difference.
Amen. The higher the level of abstraction at which you optimise the algorithm, the better. I will always remember a difficult algebra-related problem I was working on for my research. For the record, that was a weighting problem of some kind.
Given the problem at hand, the most accurate way to do this would be to use a QR factorization, which is about O(n^3). In fact, the QR is suggested in all textbooks, because of its excellent error-propagation and numerical condition properties.
However, given the particular type of data for the particular problem at hand, it turned out that a Cholesky factorization ---even though it's normally discouraged because of its numerical properties--- was more than accurate enough. And a Cholesky is O(n^2) rather than O(n^3).
Previously, I had thrown all kinds of optimization at the problem (using the ATLAS libraries, all kinds of other stuff), which did cut calculation time by a factor of 5. However, the high-level realization that for the particular problem at hand, accuracy wasn't much of an issue, cut the time for big problems by a factor of 100 or more.
So indeed. Optimize your algorithm, as high up in the conceptual framework as possible.
Yes. Apparently. If you decide to use a Coralized link, it's best to get the Coralized page yourself first, so that the "inner ring" of Coral servers (see the Coral homepage) have the content already.
half-Asian guy who for some reason was incapable of accepting his natural feminine beauty and kept trying to be masculine. It was kind of sad, really, but I still thought he was damn sexy. (emphasis mine)
look how far we've come by legislating that women are equal to men:
We have an unprecedented number of single-parent families and all of the dysfunctional children that accompany those numbers. We have an unprecedented divorce rate that never stops climbing. (Studies have shown that 80% of all marriages start where men ask the women, but it is in the 90% range where women initiate divorce.)
Yes, and there you haven't even touched the subject of what happens after that divorce; the woman gets away with the kids and your money. Hell, I know men where the woman, right after they decided to divorce, robbed the entire house clean of all their mutual belongings (with the help of friends), in addition to taking a way too large lump of his future income, and taking all his rights away to see his kids. Judges won't punish this sort of outright criminal behaviour and the woman's part, undoubtedly for a variety of reasons, but justice is not one of them. Feminism is, I suspect.
There's a reason for the fact that organisations like Fathers for Justice exist.
This happens in Europe, mind you!
Feminism destroyed America, the whole western world for that matter. And still there are people (the variery that needs to sit down to pee, that is) claiming that feminism hasn't come far enough yet. Excuse me?! What do they want men to be? Men are more than a monthly income, and a means for women to be able to shit out these godawful screaming shitting smelling monsters they call babies!
On the other hand, there is a difference between what women say (or think) they want, and what they actually want; they claim that they want men and women to be equal, and that they want a man with feminine qualities. Bullshit! What they want, is a man; someone who has the traditional male qualities like confidence, and not being afraid to set limits, etc. Until women see the flaw in their own logic here, the divorce rate will not get better. On the other hand, once you understand this as a man, it's time to get a woman that doesn't think in such a feministic way. Really, they exist:)
...Being Dutch, I know that this is a very difficult one to pronounce; it has two phonemes right next to each other that are very difficult for English natives: the "uy" (an old-fashioned way of writing the vowel "ui") and the hard guttoral g.
The "ui" has no real corresponding sound in English. Something that seems to come reasonably close (and that's actually pronounceable by English natives;) is "o-e-i" (see http://www.ultrasw.com/pawlowski/brendan/Dutch.htm l)
The "g": Most of the speakers in the mp3 are "from above the big rivers", as we say in The Netherlands; roughly, in the North of the Netherlands, the "g" is pronouced something like the "ch" in the Schottisch "loch", or like the Arab gutteral g (some say that the gutteral g is an influence from Yiddish; there were (and are) lots of Jews in the trade-rich western part of the People from "below the big rivers" (actually the Rhine-Schelde-Meusse delta) have a much softer "g" (which we actually call a "soft g" in Dutch).
Now, when you're done pronouncing "Huygens", try "Koeieuier" sometimes (or "Angstschreeuw" for that matter;)
... cubic inches (of centimeters), as they say in the automobile industry. Well, in terms of showing photos to family and friends, there's no substitute for resolution.
Not until we have a standard 13x18 cm (European size, don't know what the US equivalent is) picture frame that's capable of displaying 3 or 4 megapixels (i.e. the entire photo without downsizing), that isn't too heavy or power-consumption happy and that accepts standard memory cards, this market will bloom.
Come to think of it; where are our 4 megapixel monitors? Why do we still have only 75 or 100 DPI effectively on our current monitors?
The whole essence of onion-routing networks, is that you do not have the key for most of the communications you do. In fact, you do not even know the original source or final destination, or indeed anything at all about what you're transfering.
(Except for what the next hop's IP address is)
In The Netherlands (and also the UK), a person can be forced to assist the authorities to decrypt information (i.e. supplying them with the key). If you refuse to cooperate, you could face a hefty fine, or be put in prison (depending on whether the police, or the intelligence services give the order).
The only alternative seems to be anonymous multi-hop networks that use onion routing; in those cases, you cannot cooperate (when it's not your own communication), since you don't have the key. And on top: purely from network traffic, eavesdroppers cannot determine whether a given packet is yours or (more likely) someone elses. These networks exist, but are still in their infancy; they don't support a full/. crowd yet. So I won't mention the name here; if you're savvy enough, you'll find its name on Google (maybe) or Freenet (certainly).
The whole terrorism witchhunt has seen 1984 approach rapidly. This must be fought. If it happens anyway, at least I can sleep with a clear conscience, since I fought in the war...
Somehow the camera is supposed to respond to this. My knee jerk reaction was that all you needed to do was put tape over the remote control sensor and you would be good to go.
Apparently, the system strobes the theater with a low-intensity light (visible wavelength, it says on their page (strange)), and records images of the public in the IR range.
It seems that camera-lenses reflect that light, and that these reflections can be recorded.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you would still like to record your movie in the cinema, even though getting it through suprnova is much easier. Then the only thing you need to make sure is that your camera doesn't reflect light in the IR spectrum. A good lens-coating (having a broad stopband in IR) could do that. Using a very small lens (pin-hole camera) could do it.
Beware: They list that the system can't be fooled by, say, pin-hole cameras for two reasons: Marketing, and FUD. I don't believe, not for a moment, that one can detect a pin-hole camera like this.
Once the DVD's hit the shelves in any country, the stuff will be on the net anyway.
Sharing it could become easier and safer also: I2P --- an anonymous onion-routing network --- now has a functional BitTorrent client that functions completely within I2P (tracker, peer-to-peer traffic, everything).
For those on I2P, get it here: http://duck.i2p/i2p-bt/files/i2p-bt-0.1.0.tgz (this URL only works when you're running I2P).
Apologies accepted. Remember, this is not a contest; it's not US against the rest of the world. Indeed, many nations of the world (including the EU, that is) like to work together with the US, even if that may be a little bit more difficult under Bush.
Wealth through cooperation is not a zero-sum game; when two nations or unions cooperate, both can get wealthier.
I sincerely hope, for both of our continents, that the Dollar won't sink any further. Even though that would be good for our imports, it won't do much good for our exports, and the resulting economic friction is good for neither of us.
I might come on holiday to the US though; it's rather cheap at the moment. Politics be damned;)
I don't care what Bin Laden's cause is. The fact that his people have killed a few thousand americans in the US makes all his reasoning invalid to me.
While I completely agree with you that nothing in the world is ever reason enough to commit a 9/11-style crime, it's crucial to realize that there, in fact, always is a reason.
It's dangerous to assume that there is no reason, or to close your eyes to that reason: The complete American reaction to 9/11 has done nothing to alleviate the tension that lead to 9/11, and nothing that prevents some people from launching another attack against the US. And why? Because the Americans wouldn't open their eyes to the reason why the things happened in the first place.
Now do understand that acting upon the understanding of something like this is not the same as "bending over the the terrorists" or "losing", as the popular idea seems to be. A one-sided close-minded war on terror will not solve terrorism. Not without understanding the position of the other side. Likewise, terrorism will not help those that commit it, because it lacks understanding for the other party's position.
Not being willing to understand (not the same as: agree!) the other side is a very dangerous thing!
Obviously the world believes that Kerry will result in a weaker America and will benefit them.
The world votes Kerry to ensure that mr. Bush doesn't do more irrepairable damage to the world than he has already done. What do you think will happen to the respect that other nations have for the US, when Bush is re-elected.
How do you think groups like Al Qaeda will react when Bush is re-elected. Do you realize what happened on 9/11, and why it happened?
Slashdot Mirror
What they're really worried about is that people will publish in other media, especially where they don't have to pay (or not as much).
Aside from the fact that most journals don't charge you to publish, but do charge you to buy/download articles, the reason is control.
Look at their current situation: The researchers around the world do the writing for them, and send the articles to them (simple web form), they dole out the articles for peer review by researchers around the world (three clicks in a database), repeat this process twice, and then run LaTeX (prop. version) to generate their issue. This is then sold (PDF, 35 fricking dollars for an article, simple web form, sometimes paper). They still charge the same amounts of money for an article, even though the amount of work they need to do has become very much smaller in the last decade or so. And now for the whopper: governments base their funding to universities largely on the amount of articles (quality is not an issue: it's counting * impact factor) published in these established journals, thus making sure that universities will prefer publishing in the establishment's journals to publishing in the many current e-journals. They have a pretty good deal going there! And oh yeah: If you want to publish, you transfer your copyright to them. What a bloody joke.
Now, as more e-journals pop up, and more free exchange of information takes place, it becomes apparent what these guys are really afraid of: they are afraid to lose control. They are afraid that the scientific community (especially the not-so-well funded universities) will not buy their journals anymore, but rely on the cheaper or free alternatives. What this will do, is increase the impact factor of the free and cheap alternatives, thereby making these journals more attractive for publishing to the scientific community. Once that happens, their bubble collapses. That's what they are afraid of.
Now, something about the so-called honest peer-review. Don't get me started: the editors will choose their friends (professors usually) to do the reviewing. These in turn will burden their Ph.D. students with it, but not without first giving said Ph.D. student specific instructions as to what the outcome of the review should be. This outcome is mostly based on political issues, and hardly on quality (prof. hasn't read the article, so how could it be). So, open your eyes: your papers are getting reviewed by students, who don't get any initiative in the review outcome, and based on political issues. That's what the established journals do for you.
A completely different matter is that articles can be found with any search engine: usually researchers put there published articles on their website, even though they are forced to sign a copyright transfer. If that fails, there's always Tor and friends to get to articles.
In a DRM system, the consumer's machine needs to get both the encrypted content, and the key to decrypt this content. Otherwise, the consumer cannot listen to the audio he just purchased. As long as we listen to music with our analog ears, and watch video with our analog eyes, this will be the case.
As any cryptographer will tell you: if you have the cyphertext and the correct key, you can decrypt the content. Therefore, DRM systems are, by their very definition, nothing more than security by obscurity. It is a cryptographical pipe dream.
That is not true. I tried some video clips from ezdrm.com, and I could strip the DRM without any problems.
The upper end of your scale, 5 kg, amounts to E = m * c^2 = 5 * 9e+16 = 4e+17 Joules.
The Russian Tsar Bomba ---the World's largest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth--- yielded 50 Megatons of energy, or about 50e6 * 4e9 = 2e+17 Joules.
That bomb didn't kill us, so 5 kg of antimatter won't kill us all.
To put things in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb (15 kton) destroyed about 1.5 grams of matter. The Tsuami quake on the Pacific, last year, yielded about 30 Gigaton, or 6.4e+19 Joules. That amounts to about 600 to 700 kg of destroyed matter.
Please refrain from mentioning I2P on /. until such time that the UDP transport is fully implemented. Now, with the TCP transport in place, I2P is essentially thread-limited (2 threads per connection) to about 250-300 nodes. Once UDP is in place, the threading issue goes away, and the network will support more users (2 threads for N nodes).
Luring people to I2P now is not useful for development, and not useful for the new people joining: there's hardly anything to be found there yet.
When I2P is ready, the creator will probably arrange a /. announcement. But for now, don't join it yet, and don't announce it here. Thanks.
If you're performing large (block-)matrix operations, you might want to take a look at ATLAS; ATLAS basically is an automatically tuned version of LAPACK and BLAS. Not only does it use vectorization on CPUs that support it, it also takes the sizes of your L1 and L2 caches into account, by reordering the matrix operations such that the cache hit rate is highest.
ATLAS doesn't depend much on the compiler's optimization abilities; most of it is generated as assembly. And it's a _very_ realiable thing: big commercial tools such as MATLAB are built on top of (slightly modified versions of) ATLAS.
As for you; the ATLAS build system definitately supports AltiVec things.
I work in the analysis of fMRI data, so it might be good to disspell some myth and provide some key info.
fMRI is derived from "normal" MRI, and in fact, any fMRI scanner can also make a normal MRI. MRI, or actually, NMRI, stands for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The "N" for Nuclear is usually not included in the abbreviation because it seems to make the public nervous. An MRI makes an image by using a radio-frequency magnetic field to excite a magnetic spin-state in the nuclei of hydrogen atoms (i.e., in single protons); the more an area resonates, the more the measured signal is modulated, and the higher the hydrogen concentration assumed to be (typically that means: the higher the water-concentration is). Imaging can be done on a three dimensional grid, because the exact frequency at which the spin-state is excited can be modulated by static (compared to the RF field) magnetic fields. To this end, a large static field (1-7 Tesla) and 2 auxiliary fields are used to determine at which point in the grid the resonance takes place. This, then, is done for each point in the grid. The result is a 3D proton (or water) density map of the brain (usually refered to as the "anatomy (map)" by people working in the field).
In functional MRI (fMRI), one takes the MRI process one step further by exploting the paramagnetic properties of oxygen; the amount of oxygen (in the blood, attached to hemoglobine) present in a certain area will modulate the proton spin resonance frequency as well, and this extra modulation can be measured. In this way, one can also make an oxygen-density map (one has to correct and compensate for a lot of things here, but that's a long story).
The oxygen density map can be used, because areas in the brain that are active "draw blood" towards themselves. This is called the BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) response. Typically, this response lags one to a couple of seconds behind the actual activation of the brain area; in the fMRI data, one sees the signal in that area become higher. One can thus detect which areas of the brain are active.
The trick that the article describes is sometimes called brain state prediction, and that's a more difficult problem. Typically, one measures the fMRI signal while first supplying stimulus "1" N times, and them stimulus "2" N times. Determining which areas are active for stimulus "1" OR "2" (or both), usually has a reasonable SNR; based on the measured example, something simple like an F-test will suffice. However, given which part of the brain is active for either, the task of determining which of these active areas correspond more to simimulus "1" or "2", is more diffucult: usually the entire active area responds to both responses, and the difference is in the magnitude (or delay, or width) of the BOLD response in that area w.r.t. stimulus "1" or "2". These difference (sometimes expressed in a Contrast-to-Noise Ratio), is much smaller than the SNR for the activation. Consequently, this is an active research area.
To disspell some myths: the fMRI data can only be obtained using a HUGE scanner, and your head has to be completely inside. Furthermore, the sampling frequency is rather low (1.5 seconds between scans, usually), and the spatial resolution isn't that high either (64x64x64 voxels, in that order of magnitude).
Coral link here.
When posting stories that link to small(ish) sites, please append nyud.net:8090 to the hostname: It makes the Coral cache system cache the data. They have some tens of server worldwide to alleviate the load on the original site.
Also please load the site through Coral first before you submit the story. That way, Coral's caches are already filled, and the load on the main server can be even lighter.
Algorithmical optimization makes the most difference.
Amen. The higher the level of abstraction at which you optimise the algorithm, the better. I will always remember a difficult algebra-related problem I was working on for my research. For the record, that was a weighting problem of some kind.
Given the problem at hand, the most accurate way to do this would be to use a QR factorization, which is about O(n^3). In fact, the QR is suggested in all textbooks, because of its excellent error-propagation and numerical condition properties.
However, given the particular type of data for the particular problem at hand, it turned out that a Cholesky factorization ---even though it's normally discouraged because of its numerical properties--- was more than accurate enough. And a Cholesky is O(n^2) rather than O(n^3).
Previously, I had thrown all kinds of optimization at the problem (using the ATLAS libraries, all kinds of other stuff), which did cut calculation time by a factor of 5. However, the high-level realization that for the particular problem at hand, accuracy wasn't much of an issue, cut the time for big problems by a factor of 100 or more.
So indeed. Optimize your algorithm, as high up in the conceptual framework as possible.
His name is Eric van der Werf
That would be Erik van der Werf, but ok ;)
It's amazing how our puny Windows department webserver stood up to the slashdotting...
Yes. Apparently. If you decide to use a Coralized link, it's best to get the Coralized page yourself first, so that the "inner ring" of Coral servers (see the Coral homepage) have the content already.
When linking to a site like this, consider adding .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname; that creates a cached Coral link. This prevents slashdotting.
So here.
half-Asian guy who for some reason was incapable of accepting his natural feminine beauty and kept trying to be masculine. It was kind of sad, really, but I still thought he was damn sexy. (emphasis mine)
I rest my case... ;)
look how far we've come by legislating that women are equal to men: We have an unprecedented number of single-parent families and all of the dysfunctional children that accompany those numbers. We have an unprecedented divorce rate that never stops climbing. (Studies have shown that 80% of all marriages start where men ask the women, but it is in the 90% range where women initiate divorce.)
Yes, and there you haven't even touched the subject of what happens after that divorce; the woman gets away with the kids and your money. Hell, I know men where the woman, right after they decided to divorce, robbed the entire house clean of all their mutual belongings (with the help of friends), in addition to taking a way too large lump of his future income, and taking all his rights away to see his kids. Judges won't punish this sort of outright criminal behaviour and the woman's part, undoubtedly for a variety of reasons, but justice is not one of them. Feminism is, I suspect. There's a reason for the fact that organisations like Fathers for Justice exist. This happens in Europe, mind you!Feminism destroyed America, the whole western world for that matter. And still there are people (the variery that needs to sit down to pee, that is) claiming that feminism hasn't come far enough yet. Excuse me?! What do they want men to be? Men are more than a monthly income, and a means for women to be able to shit out these godawful screaming shitting smelling monsters they call babies!
On the other hand, there is a difference between what women say (or think) they want, and what they actually want; they claim that they want men and women to be equal, and that they want a man with feminine qualities. Bullshit! What they want, is a man; someone who has the traditional male qualities like confidence, and not being afraid to set limits, etc. Until women see the flaw in their own logic here, the divorce rate will not get better. On the other hand, once you understand this as a man, it's time to get a woman that doesn't think in such a feministic way. Really, they exist :)
...Being Dutch, I know that this is a very difficult one to pronounce; it has two phonemes right next to each other that are very difficult for English natives: the "uy" (an old-fashioned way of writing the vowel "ui") and the hard guttoral g.
The "ui" has no real corresponding sound in English. Something that seems to come reasonably close (and that's actually pronounceable by English natives ;) is "o-e-i" (see http://www.ultrasw.com/pawlowski/brendan/Dutch.htm l)
The "g": Most of the speakers in the mp3 are "from above the big rivers", as we say in The Netherlands; roughly, in the North of the Netherlands, the "g" is pronouced something like the "ch" in the Schottisch "loch", or like the Arab gutteral g (some say that the gutteral g is an influence from Yiddish; there were (and are) lots of Jews in the trade-rich western part of the People from "below the big rivers" (actually the Rhine-Schelde-Meusse delta) have a much softer "g" (which we actually call a "soft g" in Dutch).
Now, when you're done pronouncing "Huygens", try "Koeieuier" sometimes (or "Angstschreeuw" for that matter ;)
... cubic inches (of centimeters), as they say in the automobile industry. Well, in terms of showing photos to family and friends, there's no substitute for resolution.
Not until we have a standard 13x18 cm (European size, don't know what the US equivalent is) picture frame that's capable of displaying 3 or 4 megapixels (i.e. the entire photo without downsizing), that isn't too heavy or power-consumption happy and that accepts standard memory cards, this market will bloom.
Come to think of it; where are our 4 megapixel monitors? Why do we still have only 75 or 100 DPI effectively on our current monitors?
The whole essence of onion-routing networks, is that you do not have the key for most of the communications you do. In fact, you do not even know the original source or final destination, or indeed anything at all about what you're transfering. (Except for what the next hop's IP address is)
In The Netherlands (and also the UK), a person can be forced to assist the authorities to decrypt information (i.e. supplying them with the key). If you refuse to cooperate, you could face a hefty fine, or be put in prison (depending on whether the police, or the intelligence services give the order).
The only alternative seems to be anonymous multi-hop networks that use onion routing; in those cases, you cannot cooperate (when it's not your own communication), since you don't have the key. And on top: purely from network traffic, eavesdroppers cannot determine whether a given packet is yours or (more likely) someone elses. These networks exist, but are still in their infancy; they don't support a full /. crowd yet. So I won't mention the name here; if you're savvy enough, you'll find its name on Google (maybe) or Freenet (certainly).
The whole terrorism witchhunt has seen 1984 approach rapidly. This must be fought. If it happens anyway, at least I can sleep with a clear conscience, since I fought in the war...
Somehow the camera is supposed to respond to this. My knee jerk reaction was that all you needed to do was put tape over the remote control sensor and you would be good to go.
Apparently, the system strobes the theater with a low-intensity light (visible wavelength, it says on their page (strange)), and records images of the public in the IR range.
It seems that camera-lenses reflect that light, and that these reflections can be recorded.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you would still like to record your movie in the cinema, even though getting it through suprnova is much easier. Then the only thing you need to make sure is that your camera doesn't reflect light in the IR spectrum. A good lens-coating (having a broad stopband in IR) could do that. Using a very small lens (pin-hole camera) could do it.
Beware: They list that the system can't be fooled by, say, pin-hole cameras for two reasons: Marketing, and FUD. I don't believe, not for a moment, that one can detect a pin-hole camera like this.
Once the DVD's hit the shelves in any country, the stuff will be on the net anyway.
Sharing it could become easier and safer also: I2P --- an anonymous onion-routing network --- now has a functional BitTorrent client that functions completely within I2P (tracker, peer-to-peer traffic, everything).
For those on I2P, get it here: http://duck.i2p/i2p-bt/files/i2p-bt-0.1.0.tgz (this URL only works when you're running I2P).
From Europe:
Apologies accepted. Remember, this is not a contest; it's not US against the rest of the world. Indeed, many nations of the world (including the EU, that is) like to work together with the US, even if that may be a little bit more difficult under Bush.
Wealth through cooperation is not a zero-sum game; when two nations or unions cooperate, both can get wealthier.
I sincerely hope, for both of our continents, that the Dollar won't sink any further. Even though that would be good for our imports, it won't do much good for our exports, and the resulting economic friction is good for neither of us.
I might come on holiday to the US though; it's rather cheap at the moment. Politics be damned ;)
I don't care what Bin Laden's cause is. The fact that his people have killed a few thousand americans in the US makes all his reasoning invalid to me.
While I completely agree with you that nothing in the world is ever reason enough to commit a 9/11-style crime, it's crucial to realize that there, in fact, always is a reason.
It's dangerous to assume that there is no reason, or to close your eyes to that reason: The complete American reaction to 9/11 has done nothing to alleviate the tension that lead to 9/11, and nothing that prevents some people from launching another attack against the US. And why? Because the Americans wouldn't open their eyes to the reason why the things happened in the first place.
Now do understand that acting upon the understanding of something like this is not the same as "bending over the the terrorists" or "losing", as the popular idea seems to be. A one-sided close-minded war on terror will not solve terrorism. Not without understanding the position of the other side. Likewise, terrorism will not help those that commit it, because it lacks understanding for the other party's position.
Not being willing to understand (not the same as: agree!) the other side is a very dangerous thing!
Another initiative (about 20,000 people) is here. Results will be published later today.
Results are in. A 81.6% virtual victory for Kerry. See here.
The rest of you arent worth a hill of beans..
(Feeding the troll, oh well...)
You do realize that the anti-US position of the rest of the world is caused by these kinds of postures, don't you?
Obviously the world believes that Kerry will result in a weaker America and will benefit them.
The world votes Kerry to ensure that mr. Bush doesn't do more irrepairable damage to the world than he has already done. What do you think will happen to the respect that other nations have for the US, when Bush is re-elected.
How do you think groups like Al Qaeda will react when Bush is re-elected. Do you realize what happened on 9/11, and why it happened?