Here is how so-called photon "teleportation" works. This should explain why nothing happens faster than light, and why otherwise this isn't causality-destroying voodoo.
You have a source that spits out pairs of polarization-entangled photons. Each particular photon is random -- it'll either be "horizontal" or "vertical" with 50% probability each. But, entanglement means that when one member of each pair is vertical, the opposite member of that pair is horizontal, and vice-versa.
Because of the way QM works, we can't know the polarization of any particular photon pair in advance -- we only know when we pass the photon through a filter and then try to detect it. Both the filter and the detector change the photon, though, so any photon that we measure becomes completely worthless to us thereafter.
So, we know that our photon pairs always have opposite polarization, but we don't know the exact state for each pair in advance. Now, let's cheat a bit and peek behind the veil, pretending we know the state of each photon in a sample stream. I'll use a 0 to encode one polarization state and 1 to encode its opposite:
Stream 1: 0010110101
Stream 2: 1101001010
Now, right off the bat, suppose we read Stream 1 here and send Stream 2 to Mars. By looking at the values we read locally, and flipping each bit, we know what data Mars will receive. But, there's no way we can inform Mars of the contents of the bitstream ahead of time, because nothing travels faster than light.
So, what's all this quantum teleportation stuff about? Well, it's like this. Our Stream 1 and Stream 2 above are random, so they're useless to us for transmitting anything but white noise. But, we can do a cool trick and transmit information in that white noise. We can't exceed lightspeed with it, but we can guarantee that the information can't be undetectably intercepted.
Let's add in Stream 3, which contains data we want to transmit. I pick an arbitrary message -- suppose I want to send alternating bits, like so:
Stream 3: 101010101010
Now, I want to send Stream 3 to Mars, but I want it encrypted in the randomness of Streams 1 and 2. To do this, I read in Stream 1 and perform an operation on each result based on the contents of the corresponding bit in Stream 3: whenever a bit in Stream 3 is a 1, then I flip the result that I read in from Stream 1. Otherwise, I keep the Stream 1 bit unmodified:
So, Stream 4 now contains the data I want to send, mixed with the randomness in one of the two entangled streams. By itself, Stream 4 is meaningless. Also, Stream 1 has been destroyed by reading it. So, I can only decrypt Stream 4 using the data I have from reading Stream 1 -- or by using Stream 2.
Now, I send Stream 2 to Mars unmodified. Anyone reading that stream destroys it and gets random data out of it. Using a separate beam, I send Stream 4 to Mars. Anyone can intercept this and get the data out of it, but it's useless without Stream 2. At the receiving station, they can combine Stream 2 and Stream 4 using a variation on the rule used to encrypt the data, to learn the contents of Stream 3, and they can be guaranteed that the data wasn't intercepted without them knowing about it:
If someone intercepts Stream 2, reads it, and substitutes in another random photon stream, then the decryption on Mars will fail, and so the interception will be detected. If someone intercepts Stream 2, reads it, and manages to make a passable copy to beam to Mars, the time delay will be detected. (Not only that, but QM "no cloning" says you can't make a good enough copy anyway.).
In all of this, nothing at all is happening faster than light. The veil of QM simply says that we can't know the contents of Stream 1 and Stream 2 until we measure them. When we do our encryption operation, we are putting useful data behind that veil, and when we "teleport" the data to the destination, we are getting it back out from behind that veil. But we still have to send everything at light speed.
or was I being too literal in following the instruction manual?
The entire game trained you to interact with the world in a specific way, then required you to completely break with the convention, end your suspension of disbelief, and "think outside the box" in order to beat it.
I think it's just as bad as a prose author lying to the reader. What if you got to the end of a mystery novel and then found out on the very last page that something given to you as fact earlier on was in fact a complete lie, meaning you had no chance to figure it out before the reveal?
For what it's worth, I guess I now know why I could never beat those goddamn Vic-20 adventure game cartridges but I could always get to the end. Those bastards tricked me!
MOOs were like chat rooms, except the members of the community could create new objects by programming them into the virtual world in a dedicated programming language, shaping the game as it went along.
MOO is interesting for a lot of reasons. It merges the concept of an object in the programming sense with the concept of an object in the game world sense, and it merges the concept of a method call with a game action.
For example, you might instantiate a class, and the object created then becomes an in-game object that you can manipulate like any other. It inherits its data and behaviors from its parent. But, that object is also a class that you can extend, and others can be instantiated from it.
In MOO, when you type a command, the game engine matches your command against "verbs" (methods ) found on the object representing you in the game world. The first word of the line you typed becomes the command to match, with the rest of the words being parameters. (You can also specify that verbs not be matchable, only allowing them to be called from within code). It's possible to have verbs that work either as commands or are callable from within other verbs.
If you want to add a new command to yourself, you just add the verb and program it. If it's something to be shared, you copy it to an appropriate ancestor, then delete your own copy; you and everyone else inheriting from that ancestor gains the command. (There's security in place; if you're an administrator you can do anything but if not then you need the cooperation of the owner of that ancestor object or an administrator.)
Ultimately, a MOO is just a scripting language and virtual machine, with a network interface and some security features to allow collaboration without granting all programmers full read or write access to each others' code and data. Implementation of the player / room / carryable object paradigm is done in the scripting language, not the engine itself. It's flexible enough to write Web servers in, and pretty damn fast for a language where everything is late-bound and weakly typed.
Interestingly, while most MOOs used internal mail and public forums, and would send email for various purposes (coded right in the scripting language), and many of them listened for HTTP connections and translated part (or all) of the game world into HTML, none of the efforts to create large MOO networks (a la IRC) ever got very far.
The BET Awards aren't all about music. Their music awards cover more genres than just rap. Rappers aren't all black, and neither are all rap listeners. BET, on the other hand, is all about everything black, from the name itself, to the content it provides, to the way it is marketed.
So, the analogy is broken. It's saying that rap stars are not apropos to video game awards, and star game designers are not apropos to black entertainment awards. Each statement may individaully be true, but together they do not a good analogy make. A better way to complete the analogy is to substitute in the MTV Video Music Awards instead of the BET Awards. Referencing BET instead just seems to be done just for the racial element.
A quick glance at their news archive shows they have already banned many accounts farming gold for selling, and accounts that have purchased gold.
Yeah, it's goddamn sad, isn't it? People are being people, trading things of value between themselves, and Blizzard is punishing them for it.
Funny how so many of the gold farmers are in "Communist" China. And it's the Western capitalist corporate entity telling them they're wrong for playing the ol' Supply and Demand game.
It's neither. It's just simple economics. The MMO world currency has real value to the players. So it is exchanged for real money. That's the whole idea behind currency, after all.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it's fair. A M:TG player can build a deck by buying each card individually -- nobody says they should be forced to buy booster packs until they uncover all the individual cards they want.
It doesn't matter if you think that the MMO gold is just pixels and a record in a database somewhere. Trading cards are just ink and paper, but some of them have ridiculously high value to collectors.
The only stupid thing here is the MMO publisher trying to stand in the way of the law of supply and demand. It's like trying to overcome gravity by force of will. Or, more like pissing into the wind.
Lucky you. I came up in the era of the coin-op arcade machine.
Because of Pengo, I crushed a dude with a block of ice? Because of Kangaroo I punched a monkey? (Any reference to a stupid animated banner is pure coincidence). Because of Dig Dug I exploded my pets with a bicycle pump?
Say whatever you want about the U.S. and Bush, but we don't have any desire to commit genocide or set a world-destroying nuclear exchange in motion. We aren't insane. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, folks. If history repeats itself again, we might not survive WW III.
Sharon: Should we blame the government?
Liane: Or blame society?
Dads: Or should we blame the images on TV?
Sheila: No, blame Canada!
Everyone: Blame Canada!
Sheila: With all their beady little eyes And flappin' heads so full of lies
Everyone: Blame Canada!
1> Religion creates the concept of vice
2> Guilt and fear in the populace create a need to criminalize and/or tax vice
3> Criminalized vice gives rise to organized crime and makes criminals of ordinary people
4> Legitimite business buys off legislators
5> Organized crime buys off judges and prosecutors
6> Law enforcement gets more tax money to handle the growing criminal populace
7> The offering plate at church gets more donations from laymen assuaging their guilt
8> Everybody profits but the average Joe, who gets completely screwed
Of course, it could be that #2 is the cause of #1 instead; I don't know. Chicken and egg? I say roast the chicken and stuff it with an omelette, that would be yummy.
It is unfortunate. If society were more open about sexual exploration and the recreational use of pharmaceuticals, and thought that responsible gambling was just fine, and provided socially acceptable outlets for aggressive tendencies, things would be just fine. The government could go about its real duty of providing security (at the national level) and infrastructure (at the local level), and leave all the law-abiding folk to their business.
Writes? Wouldn't a high school English teacher send this back with a little markup and a big fat red "F" on it?
"This is a first: the Internet Storm Center is recommending trustworthy computing.
I think this is the one valid sentence in this whole summary!
They want you to trust that the unofficial patch for the Windows Metafile Volunerability that is currently being exploited by an IM worm.
Obviously one instance of "that" is an extra. But which? Remove one, it means one thing; remove the other, it means something different.
No patch from Microsoft at this time,
Fragment (consider revising).
and the exploit is arranged in such a manner that it cannot be detected by most intrusion detection systems
Flowers and furniture are arranged. Music is arranged. Why the hell is the bolded phrase even in there? Try "the exploit cannot be detected by most modern intrusion detection systems" on for size. That edit gets rid of the passive voice and that meaningless phrase all at once!
(the snort rule will peg the CPU on your router)
I guess somebody's snorting something. What the hell does this mean?
nor filtered by packet-inspecting firewalls (it spans two or more ethernet frames).
Ooh, somebody just loves the parentheses! Why not kill them and insert ", since" after "firewalls"?
Not really a whole lot of choice about this one.
Fragment (consider revising).
I don't know who's more of an idiot -- the submitter or the "editor" who accepted this turd of an article summary.
The bigger worry is for the TV channels who stand to lose the most from advertising revenues
You know what?
Fuck television stations. Fuck advertising revenues. Fuck people in general, because they've allowed marketing in general, including advertising, to completely brainwash them.
In the U.S., most over-the-air broadcast channels and all of the non-premium cable/satellite channels fill up every hour of airtime with 20 minutes of advertising. And most idiot Americans who watch four hours of TV a day put up with it, getting fatter on their lazy asses, letting those precious minutes of their lives melt away into oblivion, passively taking in messages about products they don't want and don't need and probably will buy anyway and then let go to waste.
Suppose you watch just two hours of TV a day, five days a week, for your entire life. If you live 70 years, that means you will have wasted away four years of your life passively putting up with marketing people's pandering to your baser instincts and treating you like a sheep to be shorn of a little wool every now and then.
Just think! You're eighty years old on your deathbed, senile, drooling, with a nurse to put a bedpan under you every now and then and to sponge the stink off your decaying body. In a rare moment of lucidity, those four years hit you like a ton of bricks and the shock of all that time simply wasted causes your weakened heart to burst, hastening your demise.
Time is the one thing we can't get back. Now, I firmly believe that television entertainment is an enriching way to spend some time. At the very least, if I choose to watch a couple hours of it, that's what I've chosen to do with some of my time. Giving up a third of it to stupid advertising is simply horrid; time is more valuable than money. You can always work to get more money, but there's no putting more sand into the top of the hourglass of your life.
Ever since the invention PVR, I absolutely refuse to watch TV that isn't prerecorded, and I skip commercials religiously. I recover 20 minutes per hour of TV watching time. If I choose to waste those 20 minutes, then at least it's my choice, and it's not time given up to some faceless machine who thinks I need a new deodorant.
Why the hell do people like spam filters, popup blockers, and commercial-skipping time-shifted television? Because somewhere deep down inside those coagulated lumps of protein people call brains, they realize that their time is the most precious thing they have; and that anything that diverts their attention from what they really want or forces them to waste their time doing something they didn't sign up for is a soul-sucking parasite threatening to drag them down further towards the bottom of the cesspit that is the human condition.
I'm glad that the big entertainment companies are finally starting to get with modern technology. Nowadays you can buy an entire season of a show on DVD, not long after it finishes airing. If you're patient, you can get the whole thing commercial-free (you don't even have to be alert with your remote to skip the evil time sink commericals!) at a really cheap price per episode. Now you can get individual shows on your video iPod. How I look forward to the day when I can just order the programming I want, watch it when I want, and not have to put up with all the insipid adverts.
To think! I pay the satellite company a fee so they can have the priveledge of delivering me advertisement-ridden content. I'm taking it in both ends!
Dammit, I'm going to start metamoderating based on a rule: If a post that is two lines or shorter gets a negative moderation, metamoderating is automatically "fair". If such a short post gets a positive moderation, the metamod is automatically "unfair". Because of idiot moderation, the above one-line comment containing a thought so obvious that it should occur to your average ten-year-old ends up +5 insightful and at the top of the comments, keeping other posts that have content and are actually insightful from floating up. I already burn mod points making things like this "overrated" so that the good stuff reaches the top. If only I had mod points every day...
Eureka! This explains everything that is wrong with humanity.
How egregiously ironic that the saying "monkey see, monkey do" is actually just us projecting our own nature onto that of the ape. And it's sad that we would seem to owe our superiority over them to the same behavior that gives us stupid fads, the whole concept of marketing, religions big and small, and a populace that likes to have its opinions spoonfed by pop culture icons, politicians, and religious leaders.
Human see, human do. Human no think-ee, just bang the keys, maybe you'll write Shakespeare but probably you'll just spout regurgitated drivel.
And, it is rather obvious that they are just catering to men by doing this.
No, we're not. Generally speaking, women in the business, wives of men in the business, and women we survey all prefer to have the more shapely and well-endowed female avatar in the game. We are creating escapist entertainment, and when it comes to the female form we do nothing different than movies, TV, and comic books have been doing since long before video games came around. Our heroes and heroines are physically ideal people -- it's as simple as that. The ladies are stacked, the dudes are hot, and doing it any other way would reduce the demand for our product.
Go have a look at Second Life (I don't work on it but I do play it off and on), a 3D massively multiplayer virtual reality where you have complete control over the appearance of your avatar. There're sliders on avatar customization for everything from chest size and "junk in the trunk" and love handles all the way down to the length and width of its nose. Thre are many, many player-created female avatars in that game. Even if a huge chunk of them were actually played by men, that still means that there are large numbers of female avatars being created and played by women. I defy you to find a female avatar in the game (who is intended to look human), who is overweight, does not have an hourglass figure, or in any other way isn't up to the ideals of beauty according to the standards of Western culture. You'll be very hard-pressed to. And, for what it's worth, I've never seen a male avatar in that game with a pot belly or a flabby chest, even though both are doable with the customization sliders.
If by "Insightful" you mean "Hopeful", then the parent post moderation is correct.
Ten years ago, I downloaded Slackware for the first time, made a towering stack of 3.5" floppies out of the downloaded files, and installed it. I couldn't believe it -- not only did I get the OS, but I got compilers, utilities, games, all for just the cost of Internet access and time spent siphoning bits down the phone line.
Since then, the price of Windows has just gone up. When, exactly (or even generally!), is Microsoft supposed to buckle under the pressure?
Take two coins. Orient them so both are heads up. Tape them together. Flip the combined coins onto a table and cover them with your hand without looking. Now, separate them, still without looking and without turning either coin over. Move the coins to separate locations. Now, uncover one. It will either be heads or tails with 50% probability. Now, what about the other coin? Yes, when you uncover it and look at it, its heads/tails state will be the same as the other coin with 100% certainty.
The only confusing thing here is the rule where when you check to see if a coin is heads or tails, you have to immediately flip and cover it again.
What connects entangled properties between two quantum objects? The same thing that connects the coins. "Spooky action at a distance" isn't so spooky when you know that quantum things can't become entangled unless they interact with each other at some point.
It's a distributed database replication application, not entirely unlike, say, Access, except a dead dog is a better database than Access.
The last time I did any work with Notes, it was not a relational database. I assume that is still the case. Access is relational. Also admittedly, I've never used any of the replication features of Access. But, I find Access to be the most underrated, useful, and highest quality Microsoft product ever.
Don't get me wrong. I am filled with contempt for Outlook and Exchange server, and Windows XP is to me a necessary evil. Microsoft Word needs to be dragged out back, shot, and left for the vultures. But Excel is a good product, and Access kicks ass when used to fill its niche -- as a database frontend, for data querying and reporting, and as a platform for quickly creating and deploying data entry and data management tools/utilities. It's also a badass tool for rapidly prototyping database applications.
(I've recently started using OpenOffice.org Base and I find it to be a great product as well, but I don't know yet where it falls short of or overcomes Access.)
The Barenaked ladies have always been at the forefront of using tech to get their music out there.
Yeah, but you have to give credit to Dial-A-Song too, you know. Even though I just linked to a Web site, Dial-A-Song predates the Web. It had its beginnings in the Eighties as a cheap consumer answering machine connected to a phone line in a New York City apartment...
Slashdot Mirror
Here is how so-called photon "teleportation" works. This should explain why nothing happens faster than light, and why otherwise this isn't causality-destroying voodoo.
You have a source that spits out pairs of polarization-entangled photons. Each particular photon is random -- it'll either be "horizontal" or "vertical" with 50% probability each. But, entanglement means that when one member of each pair is vertical, the opposite member of that pair is horizontal, and vice-versa.
Because of the way QM works, we can't know the polarization of any particular photon pair in advance -- we only know when we pass the photon through a filter and then try to detect it. Both the filter and the detector change the photon, though, so any photon that we measure becomes completely worthless to us thereafter.
So, we know that our photon pairs always have opposite polarization, but we don't know the exact state for each pair in advance. Now, let's cheat a bit and peek behind the veil, pretending we know the state of each photon in a sample stream. I'll use a 0 to encode one polarization state and 1 to encode its opposite:
Stream 1: 0010110101
Stream 2: 1101001010
Now, right off the bat, suppose we read Stream 1 here and send Stream 2 to Mars. By looking at the values we read locally, and flipping each bit, we know what data Mars will receive. But, there's no way we can inform Mars of the contents of the bitstream ahead of time, because nothing travels faster than light.
So, what's all this quantum teleportation stuff about? Well, it's like this. Our Stream 1 and Stream 2 above are random, so they're useless to us for transmitting anything but white noise. But, we can do a cool trick and transmit information in that white noise. We can't exceed lightspeed with it, but we can guarantee that the information can't be undetectably intercepted.
Let's add in Stream 3, which contains data we want to transmit. I pick an arbitrary message -- suppose I want to send alternating bits, like so:
Stream 3: 101010101010
Now, I want to send Stream 3 to Mars, but I want it encrypted in the randomness of Streams 1 and 2. To do this, I read in Stream 1 and perform an operation on each result based on the contents of the corresponding bit in Stream 3: whenever a bit in Stream 3 is a 1, then I flip the result that I read in from Stream 1. Otherwise, I keep the Stream 1 bit unmodified:
Stream 1: 0010110101
Stream 3: 1010101010
Stream 4: 1000011111
So, Stream 4 now contains the data I want to send, mixed with the randomness in one of the two entangled streams. By itself, Stream 4 is meaningless. Also, Stream 1 has been destroyed by reading it. So, I can only decrypt Stream 4 using the data I have from reading Stream 1 -- or by using Stream 2.
Now, I send Stream 2 to Mars unmodified. Anyone reading that stream destroys it and gets random data out of it. Using a separate beam, I send Stream 4 to Mars. Anyone can intercept this and get the data out of it, but it's useless without Stream 2. At the receiving station, they can combine Stream 2 and Stream 4 using a variation on the rule used to encrypt the data, to learn the contents of Stream 3, and they can be guaranteed that the data wasn't intercepted without them knowing about it:
If someone intercepts Stream 2, reads it, and substitutes in another random photon stream, then the decryption on Mars will fail, and so the interception will be detected. If someone intercepts Stream 2, reads it, and manages to make a passable copy to beam to Mars, the time delay will be detected. (Not only that, but QM "no cloning" says you can't make a good enough copy anyway.).
In all of this, nothing at all is happening faster than light. The veil of QM simply says that we can't know the contents of Stream 1 and Stream 2 until we measure them. When we do our encryption operation, we are putting useful data behind that veil, and when we "teleport" the data to the destination, we are getting it back out from behind that veil. But we still have to send everything at light speed.
The entire game trained you to interact with the world in a specific way, then required you to completely break with the convention, end your suspension of disbelief, and "think outside the box" in order to beat it.
I think it's just as bad as a prose author lying to the reader. What if you got to the end of a mystery novel and then found out on the very last page that something given to you as fact earlier on was in fact a complete lie, meaning you had no chance to figure it out before the reveal?
For what it's worth, I guess I now know why I could never beat those goddamn Vic-20 adventure game cartridges but I could always get to the end. Those bastards tricked me!
For example, you might instantiate a class, and the object created then becomes an in-game object that you can manipulate like any other. It inherits its data and behaviors from its parent. But, that object is also a class that you can extend, and others can be instantiated from it.
In MOO, when you type a command, the game engine matches your command against "verbs" (methods ) found on the object representing you in the game world. The first word of the line you typed becomes the command to match, with the rest of the words being parameters. (You can also specify that verbs not be matchable, only allowing them to be called from within code). It's possible to have verbs that work either as commands or are callable from within other verbs.
If you want to add a new command to yourself, you just add the verb and program it. If it's something to be shared, you copy it to an appropriate ancestor, then delete your own copy; you and everyone else inheriting from that ancestor gains the command. (There's security in place; if you're an administrator you can do anything but if not then you need the cooperation of the owner of that ancestor object or an administrator.)
Ultimately, a MOO is just a scripting language and virtual machine, with a network interface and some security features to allow collaboration without granting all programmers full read or write access to each others' code and data. Implementation of the player / room / carryable object paradigm is done in the scripting language, not the engine itself. It's flexible enough to write Web servers in, and pretty damn fast for a language where everything is late-bound and weakly typed.
Interestingly, while most MOOs used internal mail and public forums, and would send email for various purposes (coded right in the scripting language), and many of them listened for HTTP connections and translated part (or all) of the game world into HTML, none of the efforts to create large MOO networks (a la IRC) ever got very far.
So, the analogy is broken. It's saying that rap stars are not apropos to video game awards, and star game designers are not apropos to black entertainment awards. Each statement may individaully be true, but together they do not a good analogy make. A better way to complete the analogy is to substitute in the MTV Video Music Awards instead of the BET Awards. Referencing BET instead just seems to be done just for the racial element.
I'd like my afternoon shot of Slashdot with a splash of Racism, please.
Come on, it's not that hard to build a good analogy here instead of tossing out a complete non sequitur about BET.
Funny how so many of the gold farmers are in "Communist" China. And it's the Western capitalist corporate entity telling them they're wrong for playing the ol' Supply and Demand game.
Welcome to the new Millenium.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it's fair. A M:TG player can build a deck by buying each card individually -- nobody says they should be forced to buy booster packs until they uncover all the individual cards they want.
It doesn't matter if you think that the MMO gold is just pixels and a record in a database somewhere. Trading cards are just ink and paper, but some of them have ridiculously high value to collectors.
The only stupid thing here is the MMO publisher trying to stand in the way of the law of supply and demand. It's like trying to overcome gravity by force of will. Or, more like pissing into the wind.
Lucky you. I came up in the era of the coin-op arcade machine.
Because of Pengo, I crushed a dude with a block of ice? Because of Kangaroo I punched a monkey? (Any reference to a stupid animated banner is pure coincidence). Because of Dig Dug I exploded my pets with a bicycle pump?
Doesn't work.
Say whatever you want about the U.S. and Bush, but we don't have any desire to commit genocide or set a world-destroying nuclear exchange in motion. We aren't insane. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, folks. If history repeats itself again, we might not survive WW III.
Sharon: Should we blame the government?
Liane: Or blame society?
Dads: Or should we blame the images on TV?
Sheila: No, blame Canada!
Everyone: Blame Canada!
Sheila: With all their beady little eyes And flappin' heads so full of lies
Everyone: Blame Canada!
It goes like this:
1> Religion creates the concept of vice
2> Guilt and fear in the populace create a need to criminalize and/or tax vice
3> Criminalized vice gives rise to organized crime and makes criminals of ordinary people
4> Legitimite business buys off legislators
5> Organized crime buys off judges and prosecutors
6> Law enforcement gets more tax money to handle the growing criminal populace
7> The offering plate at church gets more donations from laymen assuaging their guilt
8> Everybody profits but the average Joe, who gets completely screwed
Of course, it could be that #2 is the cause of #1 instead; I don't know. Chicken and egg? I say roast the chicken and stuff it with an omelette, that would be yummy.
It is unfortunate. If society were more open about sexual exploration and the recreational use of pharmaceuticals, and thought that responsible gambling was just fine, and provided socially acceptable outlets for aggressive tendencies, things would be just fine. The government could go about its real duty of providing security (at the national level) and infrastructure (at the local level), and leave all the law-abiding folk to their business.
Because Zephram Cochrane is a red-blooded American from Montana?
I don't know who's more of an idiot -- the submitter or the "editor" who accepted this turd of an article summary.
Fuck television stations. Fuck advertising revenues. Fuck people in general, because they've allowed marketing in general, including advertising, to completely brainwash them.
In the U.S., most over-the-air broadcast channels and all of the non-premium cable/satellite channels fill up every hour of airtime with 20 minutes of advertising. And most idiot Americans who watch four hours of TV a day put up with it, getting fatter on their lazy asses, letting those precious minutes of their lives melt away into oblivion, passively taking in messages about products they don't want and don't need and probably will buy anyway and then let go to waste.
Suppose you watch just two hours of TV a day, five days a week, for your entire life. If you live 70 years, that means you will have wasted away four years of your life passively putting up with marketing people's pandering to your baser instincts and treating you like a sheep to be shorn of a little wool every now and then.
Just think! You're eighty years old on your deathbed, senile, drooling, with a nurse to put a bedpan under you every now and then and to sponge the stink off your decaying body. In a rare moment of lucidity, those four years hit you like a ton of bricks and the shock of all that time simply wasted causes your weakened heart to burst, hastening your demise.
Time is the one thing we can't get back. Now, I firmly believe that television entertainment is an enriching way to spend some time. At the very least, if I choose to watch a couple hours of it, that's what I've chosen to do with some of my time. Giving up a third of it to stupid advertising is simply horrid; time is more valuable than money. You can always work to get more money, but there's no putting more sand into the top of the hourglass of your life.
Ever since the invention PVR, I absolutely refuse to watch TV that isn't prerecorded, and I skip commercials religiously. I recover 20 minutes per hour of TV watching time. If I choose to waste those 20 minutes, then at least it's my choice, and it's not time given up to some faceless machine who thinks I need a new deodorant.
Why the hell do people like spam filters, popup blockers, and commercial-skipping time-shifted television? Because somewhere deep down inside those coagulated lumps of protein people call brains, they realize that their time is the most precious thing they have; and that anything that diverts their attention from what they really want or forces them to waste their time doing something they didn't sign up for is a soul-sucking parasite threatening to drag them down further towards the bottom of the cesspit that is the human condition.
I'm glad that the big entertainment companies are finally starting to get with modern technology. Nowadays you can buy an entire season of a show on DVD, not long after it finishes airing. If you're patient, you can get the whole thing commercial-free (you don't even have to be alert with your remote to skip the evil time sink commericals!) at a really cheap price per episode. Now you can get individual shows on your video iPod. How I look forward to the day when I can just order the programming I want, watch it when I want, and not have to put up with all the insipid adverts.
To think! I pay the satellite company a fee so they can have the priveledge of delivering me advertisement-ridden content. I'm taking it in both ends!
No, it's the smoke ring!
Dammit, I'm going to start metamoderating based on a rule: If a post that is two lines or shorter gets a negative moderation, metamoderating is automatically "fair". If such a short post gets a positive moderation, the metamod is automatically "unfair". Because of idiot moderation, the above one-line comment containing a thought so obvious that it should occur to your average ten-year-old ends up +5 insightful and at the top of the comments, keeping other posts that have content and are actually insightful from floating up. I already burn mod points making things like this "overrated" so that the good stuff reaches the top. If only I had mod points every day...
Eureka! This explains everything that is wrong with humanity.
How egregiously ironic that the saying "monkey see, monkey do" is actually just us projecting our own nature onto that of the ape. And it's sad that we would seem to owe our superiority over them to the same behavior that gives us stupid fads, the whole concept of marketing, religions big and small, and a populace that likes to have its opinions spoonfed by pop culture icons, politicians, and religious leaders.
Human see, human do. Human no think-ee, just bang the keys, maybe you'll write Shakespeare but probably you'll just spout regurgitated drivel.
Go have a look at Second Life (I don't work on it but I do play it off and on), a 3D massively multiplayer virtual reality where you have complete control over the appearance of your avatar. There're sliders on avatar customization for everything from chest size and "junk in the trunk" and love handles all the way down to the length and width of its nose. Thre are many, many player-created female avatars in that game. Even if a huge chunk of them were actually played by men, that still means that there are large numbers of female avatars being created and played by women. I defy you to find a female avatar in the game (who is intended to look human), who is overweight, does not have an hourglass figure, or in any other way isn't up to the ideals of beauty according to the standards of Western culture. You'll be very hard-pressed to. And, for what it's worth, I've never seen a male avatar in that game with a pot belly or a flabby chest, even though both are doable with the customization sliders.
If by "Insightful" you mean "Hopeful", then the parent post moderation is correct.
Ten years ago, I downloaded Slackware for the first time, made a towering stack of 3.5" floppies out of the downloaded files, and installed it. I couldn't believe it -- not only did I get the OS, but I got compilers, utilities, games, all for just the cost of Internet access and time spent siphoning bits down the phone line.
Since then, the price of Windows has just gone up. When, exactly (or even generally!), is Microsoft supposed to buckle under the pressure?
Take two coins. Orient them so both are heads up. Tape them together. Flip the combined coins onto a table and cover them with your hand without looking. Now, separate them, still without looking and without turning either coin over. Move the coins to separate locations. Now, uncover one. It will either be heads or tails with 50% probability. Now, what about the other coin? Yes, when you uncover it and look at it, its heads/tails state will be the same as the other coin with 100% certainty.
The only confusing thing here is the rule where when you check to see if a coin is heads or tails, you have to immediately flip and cover it again.
What connects entangled properties between two quantum objects? The same thing that connects the coins. "Spooky action at a distance" isn't so spooky when you know that quantum things can't become entangled unless they interact with each other at some point.
Don't get me wrong. I am filled with contempt for Outlook and Exchange server, and Windows XP is to me a necessary evil. Microsoft Word needs to be dragged out back, shot, and left for the vultures. But Excel is a good product, and Access kicks ass when used to fill its niche -- as a database frontend, for data querying and reporting, and as a platform for quickly creating and deploying data entry and data management tools/utilities. It's also a badass tool for rapidly prototyping database applications.
(I've recently started using OpenOffice.org Base and I find it to be a great product as well, but I don't know yet where it falls short of or overcomes Access.)