Couldn't that be the solution? (no, not the part about winged monkeys). Why can't we simply send the damn crap into the sun? Isn't the sun a huge nuclear reactor already anyway?
Because orbital mechanics mean that it's harder to send stuff into the sun than it is to send it into interstellar space. Plus, the heavy-lift rockets you'd need to get it into orbit (let alone to cancel Earth's orbital velocity) are not designed to be reliable, which means they blow up now and again. Uh... no.
(Yes, you can build boxes designed to remain intact while rockets blow up around them; they're used for RTGs. There was an RTG that was in an exploding rocket. Once they found it, it got dusted off and used again for another satellite. I believe it's still out there somewhere... But they're bloody expensive and very heavy, and there's an awful lot of stuff to get rid of.)
Better, cheaper, simpler solutions:
Vitrify it in glass to make it biologically inert. Pile it in a big heap in the middle of some desert somewhere. Post guards to make sure nobody walks off with it.
Bore some very deep holes somewhere in a subduction zone. Put the stuff at the bottom. Forget about it. Over geological time it'll get sucked into the mantle and disperse.
Basically, radioactive waste is not a problem. It's just the politics around the waste that's the problem. Yucca Mountain is a really, really bad solution and everybody knew that from the start, but the project has now entered that strange, necromantic state where it'll suck up money until someone finally cuts its heart out and it will never, ever achieve anything worthwhile. Except lining someone's pockets.
This is obviously some strange new meaning of the word 'good' that I wasn't previously aware of...
Re:Knoppix is easy entry linux
on
Knoppix Hacks
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· Score: 1
I think I should also add that an all girls private college is not what it's cracked up to be.
I went to St.Andrews University, which had a number of single-sex halls of residence. One of them was all-female, but was thinking about becoming mixed. In my first year, I think there were two males there and about a hundred and fifty females.
From all accounts, the guys had a hellish time, for all the reasons you describe.
Any single-sex environment tends to go rather weird. You can explain a lot about upper-class British culture when you realise that most members were educating at single-sex boarding schools. Armed forces get a lot of this, too. Exaggerated peer group pressure, distorted social expectations, and a whole set of cultural norms that bear very little resemblance to the outside world. Not healthy.
I started out at a male-only school. Half-way through my time there it suddenly became mixed-sex, and almost overnight it become so much more civilised...
if an increasing number of people (many in educated and financially stable demographics) have the capability to avoid ever seeing any advertising, what, exactly, makes it worthwhile for advertisers to continue paying for it, at least at the same levels?
Obviously, nothing. This is a classic example of technological developments making a business model obsolete. Advertisements only had value because people were forced to watch them. Now they're not, and so they don't have value any more.
This is a good time to haul out that hoary (but accurate) Heinlein quotation about profits.
This technology is not going to go away. Legislating against it is just stupid, and will be just about as effective as Prohibition. The only winners are going to be the ones who come up with a workable alternate business model.
How about actually paying for the content? That's how the BBC is funded here in the UK, and it works pretty well. Or you could pay on a more direct basis, although that lends itself rather less well to a broadcast medium: I would love to be able to pay a subscription and have an episode of, say Stargate arrive every week. Preferably on DVD, through the mail. That way I can watch it when I want to watch it.
sc takes a bit of getting used to, but it's incredibly small and startlingly powerful. I don't believe it's programmable, but it's got a batch mode so that it's trivial to call it from shell scripts and the like. It's definitely spreadsheeting done The Unix Way. I used it years ago to calculate X modelines, and it was great. (I could use it when X wouldn't start!)
OTOH, it's not entirely user friendly to someone who isn't used to vi-like keybindings.
Just wait outside the theatre for 20 min and talk with your friends. Or better yet, go grab a beer at a nearby bar. That's what I used to do before I stopped going to see movies.
It's based off of a British novel; it's all right to call it by its English name.
Is this Howl's Moving Castle? In which case it's not just based on a British novel, it's based on a really good British novel by Diana Wynne Jones, one of the top rank of children's fantasists around.
If you liked Harry Potter, pick up her books. Hell, if you didn't, still pick them up. They're literate, intelligent, and don't talk down to their audience.
(Some of her books are really weird. Hexwood has the scenes arranged in thematic order, not in chronological sense... and it makes total sense. If you think about it. She says the children have no trouble, but their parents find it tough going.)
Is it just me or are any of you sick of advertising too?
I use Adblock religiously. I hardly ever watch TV that's not prerecorded, and the stuff I do watch tends to come off the BBC (which is commercial-free).
It's incredible how much cleaner my life is.
Every so often I have to use IE or watch some commercial TV channel and I'm always horrified by how much flickering, jittering, attention-grabbing crap there is, always trying to distract me from what I want to read or watch or whatever, metaphorically screaming LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! all the time.
I don't mind advertising, in principle. What I do mind is being advertised at. I don't like spending money so that I can be brainwashed into spending more money. I particularly hate advertisements in the cinema --- I pay seven pounds for a two-hour film, plus 30 minutes of advertising, which means I'm paying over a pound just so I can sit there and watch the bloody things. And I don't even have a choice in the matter.
I just wonder, how much better the world would be if all that money got spent on something worthwhile...
Keep business and software patents, but put the burden on the patent holder to prove it's valid (i.e., useful, novel and not obvious) in any subsequent trial or hearing. And if the patent holder loses, it has to pay all of the challenger's legal costs.
This doesn't work because it's overwhelmingly in the favour of the side with the most money. Imagine A. Individual vs. HugeCorp. Andy Individual has a valid patent. HugeCorp wants to control it and challenges it. Andy is going to have to concede, simply because he can't risk having to pay HugeCorp's multimillion dollar legal fees if he loses --- which he could well do in the American legal system, simply because HugeCorp can afford bigger lawyers than he can.
This is the problem with a nearly all of these proposals. The rules of the game are so different between the big players and the small players that one set of rules is going to be horribly discriminatory --- and trying to produce two sets of rules will introduce a discontinuity that's going to encourage gaming the system.
There's really a ton of stuff out there . . . it just (like almost all free/OSS) doesn't get as much exposure as commercial work.
Everything you've said here is true. Unfortunately, while all the tools are available, working with music is one place where the tradition Unix mindset of have-lots-of-little-components-that-do-one-job-wel l doesn't fit.
So, Hydrogen is a pretty decent pattern based drum sequencer. Rosegarden is an adequate score-based MIDI sequencer. What if I want to add ddrums to my MIDI file? Well, the only real way I've found is to do them seperately and merge them together. And that causes incredible grief later when you want to change something. And you can't edit the drums and the music at the same time.
This sucks. Really. To me it makes it pretty much unusable. Instead of concentrating on the music I'm trying to write --- and trust me, I really need to concentrate --- I spend all my time trying just trying to make the tools do what I want.
So far, the best program for what I want is FruityLoops, a pattern-based sequencer for Windows. I find it really easy to use and it fits my needs perfectly. Unfortunately, it's also Windows only and expensive.
On Linux, the closest would seem to be the various Tracker descendents: Soundtracker and Cheesetracker, mainly. Unfortunately, the interface is almost wilfully cryptic, and not only do they require you to do voice management manually, but they'll only play one pattern at a time, which is a bit awkward...
...except it doesn't require any new infrastructure.
Greylisting is when you configure your mail server to reply, the first time a message is sent to it from a particular originator, with a SMTP try-again-later message. This requires the upstream server to hold the message in their spool for a certain amount of time. The next time they try, it'll be accepted.
I use it. It works, brilliantly; it's reduced the flood of incoming spam from several hundred messages a day to about 5. And it means that the spam gets blocked before it gets transferred, which means it doesn't use up my (or anyone else's) bandwidth.
Get more information here. My favourite greylisting SMTP proxy is Spey, but then, it would be: I wrote it...
GPL like: You cannot use this software except with other open source software.
NO! NO! WRONG!
I'm sorry, but you're not doing anybody any favours here. You're making a huge, fundamental mistake that's just going to mislead people. This mistake is made over and over again and is the OSS community's biggest problem...
You see, none of these license say anything about how you can use the software. The GPL even explicitly states this. They are concerned solely with how you may redistribute changed copies of the software.
Here's the corrected version, to the best of my knowledge:
GPL like: you may only distribute a changed copy of the software if your changes are licensed under the GPL. Copyright on the unchanged portions is retained.
BSD like: you may distribute changed copies of the software however you like. Copyright on the unchanged portions is retained.
Public domain: the original copyright holder relinquishes all rights to the software.
The corrolory to the above is: if you don't distribute your changes, the licenses are irrelevant, because their redistribution licenses, not user licenses. (This is why it's incorrect to use the GPL as an EULA.)
I don't know enough about the LGPL to comment; I believe that it's similar to the GPL, but has a much laxer definition of what constitutes a changed copy of the software.
Please, this is important. It's worth your while to try and get it right!
My advice to everyone who goes to see the Polar Express would be to watch it with open eyes, so to speak. Enjoy the story that is being told, enjoy the images that you see, and don't turn your nose away because this film is not something else. Don't ruin your viewing with preconceptions and luddite attitude.
All I know about it is from the trailer. I didn't even know it was a book until you told me. I came into it with about as open eyes as you can get, and I sat there and watched it for about fifteen seconds, realising there was something really, really unpleasant about these people, until I finally worked out why.
I'm not turning my nose away because of any 'luddite attitude', or any preconceptions, because I don't have any. I'm turning my nose away because just watching it made me feel uncomfortable.
As for the director's vision --- the scenes they showed in the trailer were, basically, a bunch of people standing talking to each other and some dance routines. I didn't see anything that couldn't have been done with real actors. So, why didn't they? Possibly it's because there were a lot of scenes they didn't show in the trailer that couldn't have been done with live actors, but the usual reason for this kind of thing is because live actors are expensive. To me, it looked very much like someone trying to do a big-budget film on the cheap. I'm very likely wrong; trailers are not representative of the films they're trailing; but I've seen enough bad films to recognise the symptoms.
By the way, 'presenting a sufficiently compelling story' has nothing to do with the technology, or the effects. It's got to do with a good script and good acting. The effects help, but no more than that. Good effects can't rescue a bad film; bad effects can't ruin a good film. If the director's not up to telling a good story, then no technology will make it a good film. If the director can do it, then the story will shine despite the creepy-looking people. But the creepy-looking people won't help.
Look, this has been rediscovered again and again, every time someone's tried to do photorealistic CGI. It's hard. Producing humans that look and move correctly is really, really difficult, and unless it's spot on it just looks really dreadful.
Polar Express probably does it as well as I've ever seen it done; the result is that it;s just good enough to make it blindingly obvious how bad it is. There are figures on the screen that look at first glance like humans, but my hindbrain just screams when it sees them. They don't move right. Their expressions don't work right. They look creepy.
Pixar and Dreamworks got this right; the state of the art is just not up to this. Notice that all their characters are cartoonish? By deliberately not trying to make their characters realistic, they managed to avoid the entire problem, because my hindbrain doesn't expect them to look like real people. But Warner Bros. for Polar Express have jumped in with both feet...
...is pretty much the standard decompiler where I work. Alas, it's no longer free, as I've just found out when I searched for it's home page, but it works really well. I have, on occasion, used it as a pretty-printer for other people's code. It undoes obfuscation with ease.
I have yet to try it on byte-code produced by non-Java languages, but I'd be interested to see the results...
(It sucks that it's no longer free. The version I've got I installed through Debian, for goodness sake, years ago. Does anyone know any free alternatives that work as well?)
Note that thing differentiating a random person that walked up to the machine and a registered, approved voter is posession of the blue card.
The blue cards are smart cards, right? Don't the machines mark them as being used once you've voted, and so they become unusable until they're reset by the voting officials?
That's the way any sensible person would design the system; OTOH, this is Diebold...
Can it be the "New" Beetle? Those are liquid-cooled and have radiators.
They're not Beetles. They're bastardised abominations from the land of marketing. They're just VW Golfs with a funky shell on top --- decent enough cars in their own way, but if you want a Golf, just buy one.
It ain't a Beetle if it ain't rear-engine air-cooled.
Here is a short javascript bookmarklet that fixes table rendering.
See this kudos? This is for you. Thanks very much; that's much improved my Firefox experience.
All I need now is to fix the problem where trying to type into this text field is actually causing the auto-find thing to pop up. As a result, I'm having to type this comment in the 'Find' box, and then cut-and-paste it into the text area!
Explain what principle might be used which would restrict kids from unsupervised internet access but would allow for unsupervised playing of bloodbath FPSes like HL2 or its mods?
Because single-player FPS games are about as violent as a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It's completely fake. The images on the screen have no relation to reality at all. Children are really good at distinguishing fantasy from reality; don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and they know that this isn't real.
But once you've connected the computer to the 'net, you suddenly have access to real human beings. This adds a whole new level to things. Those figures on the screen stop being cardboard shadows and start becoming avatars of real people that you establish relationships with, talk to, and learn from. They affect your behaviour. The game becomes real.
If I were a parent --- which I'm not --- that's what I'd be concerned with, not what colour the pixellated polygons on the screen that look a little like blood if you squint hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha. Well, thanks again...
Ta; fixed.
(I never even considered that & was invalid inside quoted strings as attribute arguments...)
Incidentally, not that I'm complaining, but do you usually go around verifying random strangers' home pages?
Because orbital mechanics mean that it's harder to send stuff into the sun than it is to send it into interstellar space. Plus, the heavy-lift rockets you'd need to get it into orbit (let alone to cancel Earth's orbital velocity) are not designed to be reliable, which means they blow up now and again. Uh... no.
(Yes, you can build boxes designed to remain intact while rockets blow up around them; they're used for RTGs. There was an RTG that was in an exploding rocket. Once they found it, it got dusted off and used again for another satellite. I believe it's still out there somewhere... But they're bloody expensive and very heavy, and there's an awful lot of stuff to get rid of.)
Better, cheaper, simpler solutions:
Basically, radioactive waste is not a problem. It's just the politics around the waste that's the problem. Yucca Mountain is a really, really bad solution and everybody knew that from the start, but the project has now entered that strange, necromantic state where it'll suck up money until someone finally cuts its heart out and it will never, ever achieve anything worthwhile. Except lining someone's pockets.
This is obviously some strange new meaning of the word 'good' that I wasn't previously aware of...
I went to St.Andrews University, which had a number of single-sex halls of residence. One of them was all-female, but was thinking about becoming mixed. In my first year, I think there were two males there and about a hundred and fifty females.
From all accounts, the guys had a hellish time, for all the reasons you describe.
Any single-sex environment tends to go rather weird. You can explain a lot about upper-class British culture when you realise that most members were educating at single-sex boarding schools. Armed forces get a lot of this, too. Exaggerated peer group pressure, distorted social expectations, and a whole set of cultural norms that bear very little resemblance to the outside world. Not healthy.
I started out at a male-only school. Half-way through my time there it suddenly became mixed-sex, and almost overnight it become so much more civilised...
Obviously, nothing. This is a classic example of technological developments making a business model obsolete. Advertisements only had value because people were forced to watch them. Now they're not, and so they don't have value any more.
This is a good time to haul out that hoary (but accurate) Heinlein quotation about profits.
This technology is not going to go away. Legislating against it is just stupid, and will be just about as effective as Prohibition. The only winners are going to be the ones who come up with a workable alternate business model.
How about actually paying for the content? That's how the BBC is funded here in the UK, and it works pretty well. Or you could pay on a more direct basis, although that lends itself rather less well to a broadcast medium: I would love to be able to pay a subscription and have an episode of, say Stargate arrive every week. Preferably on DVD, through the mail. That way I can watch it when I want to watch it.
Don't forget the sizeable number of people, myself included, who read the headline and said: "Who?"
sc takes a bit of getting used to, but it's incredibly small and startlingly powerful. I don't believe it's programmable, but it's got a batch mode so that it's trivial to call it from shell scripts and the like. It's definitely spreadsheeting done The Unix Way. I used it years ago to calculate X modelines, and it was great. (I could use it when X wouldn't start!)
OTOH, it's not entirely user friendly to someone who isn't used to vi-like keybindings.
There's a sequel; Castle In The Air. Admittedly, Howl and Sophie aren't the main characters, but it's damned good regardless...
Then I get a lousy seat.
Is this Howl's Moving Castle? In which case it's not just based on a British novel, it's based on a really good British novel by Diana Wynne Jones, one of the top rank of children's fantasists around.
If you liked Harry Potter, pick up her books. Hell, if you didn't, still pick them up. They're literate, intelligent, and don't talk down to their audience.
(Some of her books are really weird. Hexwood has the scenes arranged in thematic order, not in chronological sense... and it makes total sense. If you think about it. She says the children have no trouble, but their parents find it tough going.)
I use Adblock religiously. I hardly ever watch TV that's not prerecorded, and the stuff I do watch tends to come off the BBC (which is commercial-free).
It's incredible how much cleaner my life is.
Every so often I have to use IE or watch some commercial TV channel and I'm always horrified by how much flickering, jittering, attention-grabbing crap there is, always trying to distract me from what I want to read or watch or whatever, metaphorically screaming LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! all the time.
I don't mind advertising, in principle. What I do mind is being advertised at. I don't like spending money so that I can be brainwashed into spending more money. I particularly hate advertisements in the cinema --- I pay seven pounds for a two-hour film, plus 30 minutes of advertising, which means I'm paying over a pound just so I can sit there and watch the bloody things. And I don't even have a choice in the matter.
I just wonder, how much better the world would be if all that money got spent on something worthwhile...
This doesn't work because it's overwhelmingly in the favour of the side with the most money. Imagine A. Individual vs. HugeCorp. Andy Individual has a valid patent. HugeCorp wants to control it and challenges it. Andy is going to have to concede, simply because he can't risk having to pay HugeCorp's multimillion dollar legal fees if he loses --- which he could well do in the American legal system, simply because HugeCorp can afford bigger lawyers than he can.
This is the problem with a nearly all of these proposals. The rules of the game are so different between the big players and the small players that one set of rules is going to be horribly discriminatory --- and trying to produce two sets of rules will introduce a discontinuity that's going to encourage gaming the system.
*shrug*
Everything you've said here is true. Unfortunately, while all the tools are available, working with music is one place where the tradition Unix mindset of have-lots-of-little-components-that-do-one-job-wel l doesn't fit.
So, Hydrogen is a pretty decent pattern based drum sequencer. Rosegarden is an adequate score-based MIDI sequencer. What if I want to add ddrums to my MIDI file? Well, the only real way I've found is to do them seperately and merge them together. And that causes incredible grief later when you want to change something. And you can't edit the drums and the music at the same time.
This sucks. Really. To me it makes it pretty much unusable. Instead of concentrating on the music I'm trying to write --- and trust me, I really need to concentrate --- I spend all my time trying just trying to make the tools do what I want.
So far, the best program for what I want is FruityLoops, a pattern-based sequencer for Windows. I find it really easy to use and it fits my needs perfectly. Unfortunately, it's also Windows only and expensive.
On Linux, the closest would seem to be the various Tracker descendents: Soundtracker and Cheesetracker, mainly. Unfortunately, the interface is almost wilfully cryptic, and not only do they require you to do voice management manually, but they'll only play one pattern at a time, which is a bit awkward...
Greylisting is when you configure your mail server to reply, the first time a message is sent to it from a particular originator, with a SMTP try-again-later message. This requires the upstream server to hold the message in their spool for a certain amount of time. The next time they try, it'll be accepted.
I use it. It works, brilliantly; it's reduced the flood of incoming spam from several hundred messages a day to about 5. And it means that the spam gets blocked before it gets transferred, which means it doesn't use up my (or anyone else's) bandwidth.
Get more information here. My favourite greylisting SMTP proxy is Spey, but then, it would be: I wrote it...
NO! NO! WRONG!
I'm sorry, but you're not doing anybody any favours here. You're making a huge, fundamental mistake that's just going to mislead people. This mistake is made over and over again and is the OSS community's biggest problem...
You see, none of these license say anything about how you can use the software. The GPL even explicitly states this. They are concerned solely with how you may redistribute changed copies of the software.
Here's the corrected version, to the best of my knowledge:
The corrolory to the above is: if you don't distribute your changes, the licenses are irrelevant, because their redistribution licenses, not user licenses. (This is why it's incorrect to use the GPL as an EULA.)
I don't know enough about the LGPL to comment; I believe that it's similar to the GPL, but has a much laxer definition of what constitutes a changed copy of the software.
Please, this is important. It's worth your while to try and get it right!
All I know about it is from the trailer. I didn't even know it was a book until you told me. I came into it with about as open eyes as you can get, and I sat there and watched it for about fifteen seconds, realising there was something really, really unpleasant about these people, until I finally worked out why.
I'm not turning my nose away because of any 'luddite attitude', or any preconceptions, because I don't have any. I'm turning my nose away because just watching it made me feel uncomfortable.
As for the director's vision --- the scenes they showed in the trailer were, basically, a bunch of people standing talking to each other and some dance routines. I didn't see anything that couldn't have been done with real actors. So, why didn't they? Possibly it's because there were a lot of scenes they didn't show in the trailer that couldn't have been done with live actors, but the usual reason for this kind of thing is because live actors are expensive. To me, it looked very much like someone trying to do a big-budget film on the cheap. I'm very likely wrong; trailers are not representative of the films they're trailing; but I've seen enough bad films to recognise the symptoms.
By the way, 'presenting a sufficiently compelling story' has nothing to do with the technology, or the effects. It's got to do with a good script and good acting. The effects help, but no more than that. Good effects can't rescue a bad film; bad effects can't ruin a good film. If the director's not up to telling a good story, then no technology will make it a good film. If the director can do it, then the story will shine despite the creepy-looking people. But the creepy-looking people won't help.
Look, this has been rediscovered again and again, every time someone's tried to do photorealistic CGI. It's hard. Producing humans that look and move correctly is really, really difficult, and unless it's spot on it just looks really dreadful.
Polar Express probably does it as well as I've ever seen it done; the result is that it;s just good enough to make it blindingly obvious how bad it is. There are figures on the screen that look at first glance like humans, but my hindbrain just screams when it sees them. They don't move right. Their expressions don't work right. They look creepy.
Pixar and Dreamworks got this right; the state of the art is just not up to this. Notice that all their characters are cartoonish? By deliberately not trying to make their characters realistic, they managed to avoid the entire problem, because my hindbrain doesn't expect them to look like real people. But Warner Bros. for Polar Express have jumped in with both feet...
I have yet to try it on byte-code produced by non-Java languages, but I'd be interested to see the results...
(It sucks that it's no longer free. The version I've got I installed through Debian, for goodness sake, years ago. Does anyone know any free alternatives that work as well?)
The blue cards are smart cards, right? Don't the machines mark them as being used once you've voted, and so they become unusable until they're reset by the voting officials?
That's the way any sensible person would design the system; OTOH, this is Diebold...
They're not Beetles. They're bastardised abominations from the land of marketing. They're just VW Golfs with a funky shell on top --- decent enough cars in their own way, but if you want a Golf, just buy one.
It ain't a Beetle if it ain't rear-engine air-cooled.
British arms dealing --- making the world a safer place through incompetence!
See this kudos? This is for you. Thanks very much; that's much improved my Firefox experience.
All I need now is to fix the problem where trying to type into this text field is actually causing the auto-find thing to pop up. As a result, I'm having to type this comment in the 'Find' box, and then cut-and-paste it into the text area!
That's from 0114 to 0223 UTC, if I've worked out correctly.
Because single-player FPS games are about as violent as a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It's completely fake. The images on the screen have no relation to reality at all. Children are really good at distinguishing fantasy from reality; don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and they know that this isn't real.
But once you've connected the computer to the 'net, you suddenly have access to real human beings. This adds a whole new level to things. Those figures on the screen stop being cardboard shadows and start becoming avatars of real people that you establish relationships with, talk to, and learn from. They affect your behaviour. The game becomes real.
If I were a parent --- which I'm not --- that's what I'd be concerned with, not what colour the pixellated polygons on the screen that look a little like blood if you squint hard.