I have this jewish friend, Nogga. She's pretty fluent in hebrew, and a damned good writer in english. Also, she's a F to M in progress. I'll bet if I got her to paraphrase the catholic bible in modern english, as a novel, it would be controversial enough to make her millions of dollars. Or at least get billions of hate-emails. Should be fun either way.
When she's done, we can collaborate on merging source trees from Islam, and taking a few libs from the Tao and the Vishnu, mix up a little Dianetics, and toss in whatever those crazy mormons read (hey, there's nothing wrong with being a bit loony if your super nice all the time). Bring in the greek and norse stories, filling in all the gaps in between with the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It'll be the most interesting mythological mashup of all time, not to mention that it would be SO sacrelicious!
It was named 'Linux' when it was still entirely his own code. Only after several hundred programmers added their work did it become only fractionally his code. Even so, he still operates as the project manager.
As for 'self-righteous' - what?? I don't even know where you're getting this article being self-righteous; he's basically saying 'Practicality is more important than principles, here guys. We kinda NEED the binary-only modules.'
Well, you're right in the purely intellectual sense of evolution, that is, adapting to changes in our surrounding environment quickly enough to avoid being killed. However, we fail in the by-and-large expression of new and exciting genes (ie: if a mutation doesn't kill us, if ends up buried in the genetic soup of the human race at-large). We, as a species, probably have more slight variation due to mutation than most other species, but mostly because I believe we've probably not had any of them become prevalent - none of them pose an advantage one way or another towards survival.
Though, I'm noticing a propensity for the cute-but-stupid to breed a lot faster than anyone else. I'm not saying that's bad or anything, but it's likely it's not good.
Heh. More people like myself should breed - cute-but-brainy.
Seriously. Isn't it shocking how some people see evolutionary processes? Like it's some great beast pushing things along?
To them, picture it like this: There's this game, with this system of rules. There are players in this game. They have different attributes, chosen initially at random, but every 'generation', each player mates with another to generate offspring. Those players who die before the generation, get to control one of the offspring in the next generation (the number of offspring is always equal to the number of players, the 'twinned' offspring are chosen at random). The offspring have a combination of their parent's attributes, plus variation at 1%.
After a few generations, you'll find, the players all have characters that were far better suited to the game than their 'ancestors'. Of course, the rules can change; it is a game after all. When the rules change, the characters now have attributes that are suited to a world very different to the new one. Sure, after a few generations, they'll be back in place, but chances are a few key things will stay the same. Say they developed ultra-hard skin in the first world; they may just keep it, despite, say, the speed disadvantage, because it still keeps them from dying (even if it make them look like idiots).
I think somehow, this is sarcastic. I'm no expert, though.
Anyways, a mutation to generate an enzyme to breakdown a common compound that is chemically similar to another compound we produce ourselves (ie: glucose), is a far smaller jump in the genetic map than, say, a mutation that would generate a chelation molecule specifically designed to capture lead, while simultaneously producing exotic polymers that weave themselves throughout your skin.
Not to say it couldn't happen, but mutation A is far more likely than mutation B.
Though, at least half of mutation B would very likely exist if, say, all of humanity were exposed to levels of lead sufficient to kill off the population after 15 years of exposure. That is to say, higher than was consumed by the Romans (in the form of Lead (II) Acetate from wine served from lead casks); they regularly lived 30 years or more.
Thing is, we're well aware of the dangers of Lead; even if it somehow found its way into all our water, we'd pretty quickly notice and take action to filter it out. The same applies to a lot of dangers. Human evolution, if not stopped, slowed dramatically when we were able to clear out most macro and microscopic dangers.
Given the trend, the chances of a REAL filesharer, one who takes precautions (ie: using something like PeerGuardian, and remaining conncted only as long as it takes to 'give what you get' - or less) getting caught and sued are about the same as the 90 year old granny who thinks a computer takes up a whole room and is 'nifty'.
That is to say, next to nil. The only people the RIAA are scaring are those who are too stupid to share in the first place. I mean, seriously, working out that the personal benefits of filesharing (given that you have ethical standards that allow it) far outweigh the risk-cost of getting sued is a no-brainer. The RIAA's desperate, gambling, and is going to need a rality check very, very soon.
Um. RTFS. it's not even an organism. It's a protein. Unless, of course, you're sardonically being the "oh noes! the world's gonna end soon!" guy. If that's the case, carry on.
Are you kidding? That was rather surprisingly sane and reasonable, considering it's Dvorak we're talking about.
He's actually exactly right for once; mass upgrades don't really occur in business until sp1. At home, not until sp2 or later. It won't flop, but it won't do spectacularly better or worse than any other MS product.
Instead, we'll all fail to notice that we're still giving the longest mass blowjob in history to the singular inept geek in the universe with enough balls to try out being a corporate slavemaster. Oh, and his football-necked pit bull.
40 minutes, huh? That's weird. I have a nice little mplayer script that will rip movie->iPod (or any other format you'd care for) in under 20 minutes. At that resolution, the ultra-high-quality settings have little effect, so you can get by with just trellis quantization.
Yeah. They do everywhere else too. The idea that the US is the only country in the world with scofflaws is... hilarious.
Almost everyone, whether they realize it or not, apply rational anarchy - the concept that breaking a law is OK if it's more convenient to do so and hurts no one - to their daily lives.
I'm sure the response is something like 'pirating music hurts the artists!'. You're not exactly correct. It hurts independent artists that are pirated. Labeled artists are nicely shielded, in that the larger amount of their income comes from concerts and shows. When it comes to recorded music, the labels hurt the artists, and they do so legally, with the excuse that marketing is *hard*. Never mind the excess to which the marketing is done; the Recording Industry has so many useless mouths to feed.
So, by and large, 'pirating music hurts the record industry' - except not even that's exactly true. Generally, piracy has increased music sales since the advent of peer to peer. Why? Cover art and literature. Extras. Stuff you can't fit into an audio file. Sure, there's scans floating around, but they're almost always of questionable quality and there's no standard for organization and formatting. It's the value-added stuff that keeps fans buying. And it's likely that most people wouldn't have bought the CD anyways. You develop a much larger collection of 'what the hell is this?' music when you're not paying for it.
So, 'pirating music hurts... ' what? Not society; the result of infinitely copyable music is that anyone who wants music has it, and the value of it. Since the harm to the music industry is largely fabricated, the costs are low. Meanwhile, most listeners to independent music are conscientious about what they buy v. what they copy - so the harm to them is relatively low. Mathematically, the social cost-benefit analysis is very highly weighted on the 'benefit' side.
How about the economy? That's hurt, right? I would doubt it. With very little harm in the two major industry domains (label and independent), the economic impact is scarce. Remember, filesharing has done little to affect buying habits; fans still purchase their fandom, and non-fans still don't buy CDs. On the other hand, filesharing has had a radio effect: people who weren't buying CDs before have become fans, and are now buying.
So why is the Industry going buck-nutty? Simple. They're led by old-school (ie: Machiavellian) businessmen. They see piracy - whether a sale was going to be made or not - as lost sales. It's part of the mindset, you see. 'They have the essence of my product and have not paid me for it, therefore they are in the wrong.' These people don't seem to understand that their sales of CDs, T-Shirts, concert tickets, posters, music video DVDs and other non- or poorly-reproducable goods benefit from the wide and free distribution of the non-value-added content (ie: sound only). It's not greed, mind you, or at least not greed that's out of line. It's a self-interest that is unfortunately reasonable in context of an older, less technology-aware business model.
So, when will things change? Well, taking 1998 as the advent of P2P, and assuming those entering college at that point will be the first business people to be, en masse, sympathetic to filesharing, and assuming that, being an old-school group of companies, the youngest executive leaders they will allow in the company would be 30, we can expect the RIAA to stop making asses out of themselves between 2010 and 2020.
It maxes out at about 27% efficiency, according to their own website. According to wikipedia, vapor-compression 'fridge cycle systems and turbines, which max out at 60% carnot under optimal conditions, and generally hang out in the neighborhood of 40% under working conditions. Meanwhile peltiers run around 15% carnot.
Since I can only assume that this thing's efficiency is carnot based (power-efficiency would give lower numbers, and thus lower investments), 27% doesn't seem like a huge leap in tech. Near doubling peltier does wonders for keeping a CPU cool, but utilizing waste heat? You're better off running water through the hot side of your air conditioner / fridge and into your water heater to save yourself a few joules.
My home keyboard shorted out, and I'm stuck with this wireless garbage-board with laptop-style keys and a space-bar that isn't quite as responsive as the rest of the keys.
Meanwhile, I've switched offices at work and the keyboard there has this weird setup for the home-end block of six, they're all vertical, and I keep accidentally pressing shift-delete when I mean shift-home. Makes coding a hell of a chore.
*hates it*
Meanwhile, I'm getting an optimus - just after christmas; I hope to reap a post-christmas price reduction. If I like it, I'll get another one for work, just for consistency. Like I do with my mouse.
You're assumingIneed to scrape hordes of sites. You're wrong. I generally only need one. The NS gets cached and the conny stays open.
Still, they do take a while to run. 8 hours for the basketball box score scraper, and that's with cheater threading (using start/b/low to fork off a process for each year of scores). Not that I'm using that computer when it runs.
I know. Also, I'm not exactly certain why they used Ruby.
My favorite method is to use PHP as a backend for mshta; you can be guaranteed it'll run on any Windows machine, and you have the benefit that a linux machine will at least be able to run the back-end.
So that's what they're called. I've been building them for years, both for personal data collection and for research for professors I work for (I have a couple of acknowledgements to this effect). I've been calling them 'site scrapers' and 'data reapers'.
And I generally write 'em in PHP. Makes 'em nice and lightweight to redistribute (php.exe and php5ts.dll are usually all that's needed. Sometimes php_http.dll as well.)
Slashdot Mirror
It'll never happen. Respectable intellectuals hate to hear things that aren't politically correct, and as such tend not to test them.
Hm.
I have this jewish friend, Nogga. She's pretty fluent in hebrew, and a damned good writer in english. Also, she's a F to M in progress. I'll bet if I got her to paraphrase the catholic bible in modern english, as a novel, it would be controversial enough to make her millions of dollars. Or at least get billions of hate-emails. Should be fun either way.
When she's done, we can collaborate on merging source trees from Islam, and taking a few libs from the Tao and the Vishnu, mix up a little Dianetics, and toss in whatever those crazy mormons read (hey, there's nothing wrong with being a bit loony if your super nice all the time). Bring in the greek and norse stories, filling in all the gaps in between with the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It'll be the most interesting mythological mashup of all time, not to mention that it would be SO sacrelicious!
</hyper>
Trying again...
[Alt]+0162 ==
[Alt]+0163 == £
[Alt]+0165 == ¥
[Alt]+0128 ==
Hm. Looks like the smileys don't stay. Oh well.
[Alt]+0163 == £
[Alt]+1 == ☺
[Alt]+2 == ☻
Here, trollie, trollie. I have a nice cookie for you! Good troll.
*yells over shoulder* Allright, now boys, get 'im!
*watches the troll sizzle in the arcs from a group of amped-up cattle prods*
Ahh, but that was satisfying.
*blink*
Astroturf much?
It was named 'Linux' when it was still entirely his own code. Only after several hundred programmers added their work did it become only fractionally his code. Even so, he still operates as the project manager.
As for 'self-righteous' - what?? I don't even know where you're getting this article being self-righteous; he's basically saying 'Practicality is more important than principles, here guys. We kinda NEED the binary-only modules.'
Self-publicist? Gimme an example.
No, seriously. You work for SCO?
The producer of this information has been dead for centuries.
Well, you're right in the purely intellectual sense of evolution, that is, adapting to changes in our surrounding environment quickly enough to avoid being killed. However, we fail in the by-and-large expression of new and exciting genes (ie: if a mutation doesn't kill us, if ends up buried in the genetic soup of the human race at-large). We, as a species, probably have more slight variation due to mutation than most other species, but mostly because I believe we've probably not had any of them become prevalent - none of them pose an advantage one way or another towards survival.
Though, I'm noticing a propensity for the cute-but-stupid to breed a lot faster than anyone else. I'm not saying that's bad or anything, but it's likely it's not good.
Heh. More people like myself should breed - cute-but-brainy.
Seriously. Isn't it shocking how some people see evolutionary processes? Like it's some great beast pushing things along?
To them, picture it like this:
There's this game, with this system of rules. There are players in this game. They have different attributes, chosen initially at random, but every 'generation', each player mates with another to generate offspring. Those players who die before the generation, get to control one of the offspring in the next generation (the number of offspring is always equal to the number of players, the 'twinned' offspring are chosen at random). The offspring have a combination of their parent's attributes, plus variation at 1%.
After a few generations, you'll find, the players all have characters that were far better suited to the game than their 'ancestors'. Of course, the rules can change; it is a game after all. When the rules change, the characters now have attributes that are suited to a world very different to the new one. Sure, after a few generations, they'll be back in place, but chances are a few key things will stay the same. Say they developed ultra-hard skin in the first world; they may just keep it, despite, say, the speed disadvantage, because it still keeps them from dying (even if it make them look like idiots).
Hm.
I think somehow, this is sarcastic. I'm no expert, though.
Anyways, a mutation to generate an enzyme to breakdown a common compound that is chemically similar to another compound we produce ourselves (ie: glucose), is a far smaller jump in the genetic map than, say, a mutation that would generate a chelation molecule specifically designed to capture lead, while simultaneously producing exotic polymers that weave themselves throughout your skin.
Not to say it couldn't happen, but mutation A is far more likely than mutation B.
Though, at least half of mutation B would very likely exist if, say, all of humanity were exposed to levels of lead sufficient to kill off the population after 15 years of exposure. That is to say, higher than was consumed by the Romans (in the form of Lead (II) Acetate from wine served from lead casks); they regularly lived 30 years or more.
Thing is, we're well aware of the dangers of Lead; even if it somehow found its way into all our water, we'd pretty quickly notice and take action to filter it out. The same applies to a lot of dangers. Human evolution, if not stopped, slowed dramatically when we were able to clear out most macro and microscopic dangers.
*blink*
Ok, I get that this is a joke, but what on EARTH is a spandrel, and why would one suddenly go all plastic?
That was special. Almost makes me want to install Linux on my girlfriend, just so I can try that.
Meanwhile, I agree with the killing Ann Coulter thing. She just makes humans look bad.
What I find is funny is this:
Given the trend, the chances of a REAL filesharer, one who takes precautions (ie: using something like PeerGuardian, and remaining conncted only as long as it takes to 'give what you get' - or less) getting caught and sued are about the same as the 90 year old granny who thinks a computer takes up a whole room and is 'nifty'.
That is to say, next to nil. The only people the RIAA are scaring are those who are too stupid to share in the first place. I mean, seriously, working out that the personal benefits of filesharing (given that you have ethical standards that allow it) far outweigh the risk-cost of getting sued is a no-brainer. The RIAA's desperate, gambling, and is going to need a rality check very, very soon.
Um. RTFS. it's not even an organism. It's a protein. Unless, of course, you're sardonically being the "oh noes! the world's gonna end soon!" guy. If that's the case, carry on.
Are you kidding? That was rather surprisingly sane and reasonable, considering it's Dvorak we're talking about.
He's actually exactly right for once; mass upgrades don't really occur in business until sp1. At home, not until sp2 or later. It won't flop, but it won't do spectacularly better or worse than any other MS product.
Instead, we'll all fail to notice that we're still giving the longest mass blowjob in history to the singular inept geek in the universe with enough balls to try out being a corporate slavemaster. Oh, and his football-necked pit bull.
Hm. Been doing that for five years now, alternating with 90, hunched forward and squinting (I lose my glasses a lot).
40 minutes, huh? That's weird. I have a nice little mplayer script that will rip movie->iPod (or any other format you'd care for) in under 20 minutes. At that resolution, the ultra-high-quality settings have little effect, so you can get by with just trellis quantization.
"People routinely ignore laws in the US."
OH NOES! IT'S a WORLdwIDe ProBleM!
Yeah. They do everywhere else too. The idea that the US is the only country in the world with scofflaws is... hilarious.
Almost everyone, whether they realize it or not, apply rational anarchy - the concept that breaking a law is OK if it's more convenient to do so and hurts no one - to their daily lives.
I'm sure the response is something like 'pirating music hurts the artists!'. You're not exactly correct. It hurts independent artists that are pirated. Labeled artists are nicely shielded, in that the larger amount of their income comes from concerts and shows. When it comes to recorded music, the labels hurt the artists, and they do so legally, with the excuse that marketing is *hard*. Never mind the excess to which the marketing is done; the Recording Industry has so many useless mouths to feed.
So, by and large, 'pirating music hurts the record industry' - except not even that's exactly true. Generally, piracy has increased music sales since the advent of peer to peer. Why? Cover art and literature. Extras. Stuff you can't fit into an audio file. Sure, there's scans floating around, but they're almost always of questionable quality and there's no standard for organization and formatting. It's the value-added stuff that keeps fans buying. And it's likely that most people wouldn't have bought the CD anyways. You develop a much larger collection of 'what the hell is this?' music when you're not paying for it.
So, 'pirating music hurts... ' what? Not society; the result of infinitely copyable music is that anyone who wants music has it, and the value of it. Since the harm to the music industry is largely fabricated, the costs are low. Meanwhile, most listeners to independent music are conscientious about what they buy v. what they copy - so the harm to them is relatively low. Mathematically, the social cost-benefit analysis is very highly weighted on the 'benefit' side.
How about the economy? That's hurt, right? I would doubt it. With very little harm in the two major industry domains (label and independent), the economic impact is scarce. Remember, filesharing has done little to affect buying habits; fans still purchase their fandom, and non-fans still don't buy CDs. On the other hand, filesharing has had a radio effect: people who weren't buying CDs before have become fans, and are now buying.
So why is the Industry going buck-nutty? Simple. They're led by old-school (ie: Machiavellian) businessmen. They see piracy - whether a sale was going to be made or not - as lost sales. It's part of the mindset, you see. 'They have the essence of my product and have not paid me for it, therefore they are in the wrong.' These people don't seem to understand that their sales of CDs, T-Shirts, concert tickets, posters, music video DVDs and other non- or poorly-reproducable goods benefit from the wide and free distribution of the non-value-added content (ie: sound only). It's not greed, mind you, or at least not greed that's out of line. It's a self-interest that is unfortunately reasonable in context of an older, less technology-aware business model.
So, when will things change? Well, taking 1998 as the advent of P2P, and assuming those entering college at that point will be the first business people to be, en masse, sympathetic to filesharing, and assuming that, being an old-school group of companies, the youngest executive leaders they will allow in the company would be 30, we can expect the RIAA to stop making asses out of themselves between 2010 and 2020.
It maxes out at about 27% efficiency, according to their own website. According to wikipedia, vapor-compression 'fridge cycle systems and turbines, which max out at 60% carnot under optimal conditions, and generally hang out in the neighborhood of 40% under working conditions. Meanwhile peltiers run around 15% carnot.
Since I can only assume that this thing's efficiency is carnot based (power-efficiency would give lower numbers, and thus lower investments), 27% doesn't seem like a huge leap in tech. Near doubling peltier does wonders for keeping a CPU cool, but utilizing waste heat? You're better off running water through the hot side of your air conditioner / fridge and into your water heater to save yourself a few joules.
Hehe. When I saw that I thought something similar:
"Wow. They got a pair of Macs to talk shit to one another."
"You will destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks?"
"We would destroy the Cybermen with ONE dalek."
I'm in a bad spot there at the moment;
My home keyboard shorted out, and I'm stuck with this wireless garbage-board with laptop-style keys and a space-bar that isn't quite as responsive as the rest of the keys.
Meanwhile, I've switched offices at work and the keyboard there has this weird setup for the home-end block of six, they're all vertical, and I keep accidentally pressing shift-delete when I mean shift-home. Makes coding a hell of a chore.
*hates it*
Meanwhile, I'm getting an optimus - just after christmas; I hope to reap a post-christmas price reduction. If I like it, I'll get another one for work, just for consistency. Like I do with my mouse.
You're assumingIneed to scrape hordes of sites. You're wrong. I generally only need one. The NS gets cached and the conny stays open.
/b /low to fork off a process for each year of scores). Not that I'm using that computer when it runs.
Still, they do take a while to run. 8 hours for the basketball box score scraper, and that's with cheater threading (using start
I know. Also, I'm not exactly certain why they used Ruby.
My favorite method is to use PHP as a backend for mshta; you can be guaranteed it'll run on any Windows machine, and you have the benefit that a linux machine will at least be able to run the back-end.
So that's what they're called. I've been building them for years, both for personal data collection and for research for professors I work for (I have a couple of acknowledgements to this effect). I've been calling them 'site scrapers' and 'data reapers'.
And I generally write 'em in PHP. Makes 'em nice and lightweight to redistribute (php.exe and php5ts.dll are usually all that's needed. Sometimes php_http.dll as well.)