...well, actually, a share in one of these. I never got very good with it, but one of the other owners used it the way you'd use a dirt bike in the woods - and could get places that were pretty amazing. We'd all wear dirt-bike gear when using it (there was a good deal of falling down and banging into stuff involved) but nobody broke any bones before we wore it out past repairability (couple of sprained thumbs and a lot of bruises). And, no, they weren't particularly repairable, in spite of being essentially a ported two-stroke (so dead simple mechanically - no crank or bearings, even). Speaking of "two stroke", yes they did smoke. I'd like another one, please...
You've got the sales model right (it's called a "razor" when it's a physical something stuck in a box of something you're buying, might be the same in this instance)
Do you really think ms gets money to install "Desktop Icons" and "Startup Menu Items"?
And thanks for pointing at the de-crapifier. I've been doing a format / re-install the OS when clients buy a box from Dell. Any idea if it completely removes the AOL stuff (the AOL uninstall does not - at least for ver 9.0 )
I worked at Lotus Development in the '80s and 90's (with Frankston and Ozzie, BTW, who are now both at MS)
We (Lotus) were on the receiving end of a number of unfair practices (unfair in the sense of a business using a near-monopoly in one area to push domination of their other business - in this case using Windows to push Excel, Word, and Powerpoint).
My own experience had to do with undocumented win API calls: Whenever a new version of a MS Office product came out, we'd get busy with our debuggers to find all the new cool stuff that MS had added to win (but not bothered to document) so their apps could run faster and be smaller (size was still an issue at the time).
As well, they'd engineered visual basic for apps (VBA) so that, although it would run when called by any app, it would run a lot slower for non-ms apps. We (Lotus) ended up having to build LotusScript, a VBA compatible app language.
BTW, these first two were being investigated by the DOJ - but the investigation was quashed when the Reagan administration came in.
Then there was MS's proclivity for implementing network standards in as proprietary a way as they could do it. If there was a standard, or if Novell already had a protocol, MS was sure to do it a different way.
Then there's the hidden/undocumented format of data files for their Office products, so if you wanted to inter-operate you had to reverse engineer (although this may simply have been so that they could force thir corporate/enterprise customers to upgrade completely to the newest versions as soon as some PCs had those versions). BTW, ever notice how early versions of Word could read and write WordPerfect files, but , somewhere along the way, they forgot how. Not just WP files - pick your competing product and notice how the competing MS product is compatible until they're dominant (IMHO the "extinguish" part of "dominate and extinguish")
Then there was the whole "windows tax" thing where computer suppliers got one price for windows if they committed to putting it on every box they sold - and a much higher price if they didn't commit.
Then there was the whole Netscape / IE thing, which IMHO was simply another MS "engulf and destroy".
And there's more - some of which I never got full details on. For instance, there was at least one instance of a couple of ex-Loti going out and building an OS for handhelds. MS employees signed NDAs and were supposed to be working on MS apps for that platform - but instead MS introduced a competing platform - using (perhaps coincidentally) many of the same ideas. Not totally sure what happened there and I'd love to get the whole story.
So... I'm not sure hatred is the right word, but I'd guess that a large proportion of folks here have been up against at least one of these issues. When you realize that it's on purpose, it's like realizing that, say, an opposing football team is deliberately injuring your players as a way to win (as opposed to out playing them). It engenders a bit of dislike - even if they're the leading team and you have to play them.
Now, there were a couple of places where the MS locomotive could have been derailed (imagine if OS|2 wasn't released in a crippled format so it could run on the 286 - and imagine if Steve Jobs had, instead of making Next a "next-mac" company, instead went head-to-head with MS's OS business - NextOS for PC hardware. It was good but hobbled by expensive hardware.
But that wasn't your question...
When/where did you go to school? I had some dealings with Bjarne in '83 or 84 (I forget which) while working at Cullinet. He was trying to get us to switch to C with cfront (pretty nearly what C++ became). I remember him as being a really great guy - who could put you to sleep in a meeting in about five minutes.
The virus that caused the 1917 influenza epidemic was recently unearthed (matter of finding some human remains that still had virus). The reasons were positive (analyze virus, try to figure out how it re-assembled itself in that deadly-to-humans way, see how close to totally screwed we all are with the current avian flu). AFAIK the virus itself was destroyed after it was sequenced. But still - I'd have thought long and hard before doing something like that - and would likely have decided that it wasn't worth the risk. BTW, we are essentially one "switch" away from being very screwed - and the influenza virus is really bad at re-assembling itself, which means that evolution works very fast with it. The major risk is industrially raised chicken - notably "broiler sheds" where thousands of chickens live in very little space, and in their own shit. Normally an extra virulent strain of a disease will die out because if you kill the host very quickly, there's little time for the infection to spread (so a selection pressure for less virulence) - but this doesn't count in situations where the healthy can't get away from the sick. Have a look at http://birdflubook.com/ for the semi-technical story.
I read "confessions" and was impressed by it (even with the unsubstantiated bits - which is how someone in Perkins' purported position would see things), but then read David McCullough's "Path between the Seas" - and one of these two authors is just plain wrong about the series of events that caused Panama to become an independant nation (particularly the parts about Kermit Roosevelt). On the other hand, I also read Graham Greene's "Getting to know the General" and I think Perkins might be entirely right about the CIA having a hand in Torrijos' assasination (his private plane blew up in clear sky), which left them with supposedly-more-malleable ol' pineapple face holding the reins.
On balance, yeah, read "Confessions", but don't take it as gospel - just acusations worth following up with more investigation.
I've had no problems with VBR on an Audiotron. I know they're no longer produced/supported, but there might be a slightly more recent firmware version that fixes that issue for you. Sure would be nice if they suported ogg or flac, but they were betting on microsoft DRM formats (which IMHO is why it's running wince not embedded linux) Now, back to the antiRIAA rants...
Banks seem to be setting thir customers up for phishing - at least phone phishing. For instance, I just got an email from one of the banks that I hold a Visa with - their security department wanted to verify some charges. They asked me to call an 800 number - but not the one on the back of my card. I called the number, wondering if it was a scam (and not ready to give any info). The automated voice system "sounded" right, but when it asked me to enter my card number, I hung up - called the service number on the back of my card, waded through layers of menus, finally got a human, and asked to be transferred to security. Turns out it was really an email from security (I'd bought a car part from a leathermaker in England and they wanted to to verify that charge - even though it was under $30).
My solution - which I asked the security person I spoke with to please at least put "in the suggestion box" is to change the email and main automated voice system so the emails would say "Please call the service number on the back of your card, then press '8' for security" rather than some unfamiliar 800 number...
I know how voice systems work, I know how 1-800 call distribution systems work. Doing something like this woldn't be hard or expensive - and if security isn't in the same location as their other customer service folks (I don't know if they are) it doesn't matter.
... and the point was to protect kids from online predators, why not make passing a multiple choice test (with link to info so kids can go crib the answers) part of what's required?
Seems like at least one point of the age limitation was to screen out those kids who were so young they had no clue about online predators - so why not at least try to educate 'em - the ones over 13 who can't pass maybe shouldn't be there anyway (?)
Or... work it like a game. Get some folks (maybe even other 13 year olds) to act in the guise of an online predator (special login, interactions logged, etc.) The folks on the board who fall for the fake predator, get sandboxed until they show (more tests, I guess) that they're competent. The faker-predators get points, and maybe get to tell the gullible that they "own all their bases" - or whatever.. And the non-gullible also get points for turning in predators, real or fake.
Sure, there'll still be real predators - but the kids will be "playing" against them. Ever seen a grown up try to compete agains kids in an online game?
I have a friend who got hit by a parting cable (he was a supercargo on a supertanker - happened when they were warping in to a dock). He woke up in the hospital - doesn't remember it a bit - lost almost all his teeth to a strand that came through his face. Of course, he doesn't have to ever work again...
"If you're not part of the solution, there's a good living to be made in prolonging the problem"
Re:Inband markers are used in the US?
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, don't know if it's still all in-band. It was in '95 or so (last time I was interested in this).
Of course we don't have a "jingle" - that's time they could sell to advertisers.
The downside of not watching any TV is that I've lost any capability I may once have had to "tune them out", which makes them all incredibly irritating if I'm at a friend's house and a TV is on.
Sorry about Amango (and extra sorry about no BSG). Is there another netflix-like service elsewhere in the EU? Failing that, there's always usenet.
And, yeah, you definitely have access to good beer - the microbreweries around the Boston area aren't so bad, but really good beer isn't a given if you go to a restaurant or the local bar
ReplayTV's skipping != Tivo's skipping
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
Tivo skips forward like a VCR with ultra-fast fast-forward. You have to control the skipping yourself.
ReplayTVs skipping was a "mode" as in "skip all commercials" (they were using the in-band signaling used by the networks to mark the start and end of a commercial block to their affiliates - put there because the affiliates would then, potentially, replace some/all of those commercials with their own). So, as a ReplayTV user (at least when watching recorded TV) commercials weren't something to skip forward past, but just weren't there - at least in theory, but in practice they almost weren't there...
Of course, this doesn't fix the problem that, even with commercials removed, there isn't a lot on commercial TV worth watching (just my personal value judgment, natch) I'd be willing to pay for the few that I do like to watch - come to think of it, that's exactly what I do: DVD's from NetFlix of things like BSG and Firefly.
>>my 1989 Sony 21" Trinitron will be my last video monitor when it breaks down
Don't forget to buy an A-to-D converter now so you at least have the option of using PC monitors (or projectors) when that Trinitron does fail, so you can at least use the analog-out "support for legacy devices" on whatever device you're using that's otherwise HDMI-only.
Woah - hey!
Crossing in the middle of the block is actually safer than at the corner(unless there's a light with a pedestrian cycle) - there's only traffic coming from two directions, not four.
But you only have part of the answer.
Yes the US has been a particularly bad actor on the international scene, and yes, terrorisim is about the only option a far-weaker opponent has (well, other than passive resistance, which worked in India against the Brits - but your opponent has to have some morals, and we (the US), apparently do not - again in the international area).
If this was the only reason, we'd have terrorists galore in South and Latin America.
So why terrorists from the Middle East?
One additional part of the answer is Wahibism and other extreme forms of Islam. It's not just fundamentalisam, but the imams teach that "jihad" is a religious duty - lile pilgramage. They also teach that infidels are unworthy of life - and have redefined places like Europe from "places of truce" to "places of war".
Islam in general does not have a tradition of individual dissent (not just protestantism, but the notion that a worshiper can disagree with a priest over the meaning of something in the holy writings), so Islamists are poorly equipped to disagree with the above imam's teachings. IMHO, it'd be a bit different with individual voices speaking out.
And Wahibism (once considered to be an odd, deviant sect confined to Suadi Arabia) has been spread worldwide - the Saudis have spent millions on mosques all over the world, and the imams there are teaching, yup - Wahibism.
I'm sure there are other parts of the answer...
I get your point - but what does being christian (or not) have to do with being trustworthy around a nubile female?
Christian males have less sex drive or something?
I submit that the shape of the numerals is not very important, while the decimal notation and especially the concept of zero are the major invention here.
The shape of the numerals has nothing to do with it - it's the polynomial notation (i.e. 124 is "one of hundreds, two of tens, four of ones"). Also note that it's actually written right-to-left, so really "four of ones, two of tens, one of hundreds". Yes arabic script is left to right - but maybe sanskrit is too.
The issue with zero wasn't so much that it wasn't known as that it was considered to be "not a number" as it caused a lot of notions about numbers to "blow up" and the easiest way 'round the problem was to say - oh, that's a useful placeholder in polynomial notation, but it's not actually a number - the same way that infinity's not a number.
As far as 9th century Muslim astronomers knew the Earth was round - you're a victim of bad teaching in American History class - sailors all knew the earth was round - you can actually see ships disappearing (first the hull, then lower sails, then upper, then top pennant) as they move away.
Yes, Erasthonese was very clever in his measurement. The 9th century Muslim astronomers probably were, too. No idea if they were independant.
>Lord knows they did a real job on Starship Troopers.
Woah- hey!
Starship Troopers was a parody.
Have a look at Verhoeven 's other movies (particularly "Soldier of Orange" for anti-fascism)
BTW, Heinlein himself writes about glorifying things to extremes to get people to see that it's wrong (in "If this goes on..."). No idea if Verhoeven had read that story.
Doesn't it seem obvious that spammers have their own honeypots (in order to harvest addresses from each other)? Of course, the advantage with a spammer's honey pot is that he/she doesn't have to worry about mitigating any damage - just let that spam spew through - so long as you get a copy of the addresses.
Unless you think they all meet somewhere and trade/sell addresses...? What makes you think they treat each other honorably when they can just steal?
It depends on what you mean by "surround".
If you mean the actual experience of "surround" while actually being somewhere where the music is being played, well, then you don't need multi channels for that - you just need microphones and microphone surrounds that more closely emulate the human head and pinna (outer ear)- and they need to be where the listener would be.
Imagine, if you would, an exact mold of your head, of the same acoustical reflectivity of your head, with microphones in the "ears" - and the head-model at the top of a seat, say, in a concert hall.
You get appropriately timed reverb because you're in the right place. Lookup psychacoustics for more info on how our brains interpret micro-delay sound sources.
You get appropriate sound shadows and frequency dependent phase inversions because of the head model and 'phone placement. Look up HRTF for more info on this.
What you don't get is the ability to turn your head and have the relative volume/shadows/inversion/etc change (the other sound source locator we use). Not sure how important this is for reproducing a concert hall experience.
So... this all already exists - it's called binaural http://www.binaural.com/binfaq.html recording.
Unlike the other nonsense the recording industry is trying to do, IMHO, this legitimately gives them a reason to see us both earphone-specific and "traditional" recordings - at least of live events.
Is there a way to take a pre-existing recording and binaural-ify it? Maybe - especially if thay had multiple channels. Imagine a multi=track recording played back in "perfect" room with each track going to the appropriate speaker, and a biaural head-form re-recording it. You'd at least get as good (in the sense of surround-experience) as someone sitting in that "perfect" room, listening to the same playback.
I image you could do that via HRTF - but only if you had location information for each channel. Once you have that, adding delay, reverb, reflections, etc, becomes do-able. Yamaha, for instance, had sound engineets go around the world measuring, delay, reflection, reverb in various concert halls - with the aim of being able to take twh channel sound and add at least some of the ambience of a particular concert hall to the back channels. Not the same problem here, but a bit related.
I've been very impressed with the evolution of Minolta's 7 series (now the 'A' series) over the years.
It seems they actually pay attention to what users on the forums have to say, and each successive model has a UI that's somewhat easier to use than the one before, without giving up the option of manual control.
Slashdot Mirror
...well, actually, a share in one of these. I never got very good with it, but one of the other owners used it the way you'd use a dirt bike in the woods - and could get places that were pretty amazing.
We'd all wear dirt-bike gear when using it (there was a good deal of falling down and banging into stuff involved) but nobody broke any bones before we wore it out past repairability (couple of sprained thumbs and a lot of bruises). And, no, they weren't particularly repairable, in spite of being essentially a ported two-stroke (so dead simple mechanically - no crank or bearings, even). Speaking of "two stroke", yes they did smoke.
I'd like another one, please...
Do you really think ms gets money to install "Desktop Icons" and "Startup Menu Items"?
And thanks for pointing at the de-crapifier. I've been doing a format / re-install the OS when clients buy a box from Dell. Any idea if it completely removes the AOL stuff (the AOL uninstall does not - at least for ver 9.0 )
There's a big difference between fast moving rotors (old tech) and much bigger, slower moving ones.
We (Lotus) were on the receiving end of a number of unfair practices (unfair in the sense of a business using a near-monopoly in one area to push domination of their other business - in this case using Windows to push Excel, Word, and Powerpoint). My own experience had to do with undocumented win API calls: Whenever a new version of a MS Office product came out, we'd get busy with our debuggers to find all the new cool stuff that MS had added to win (but not bothered to document) so their apps could run faster and be smaller (size was still an issue at the time).
As well, they'd engineered visual basic for apps (VBA) so that, although it would run when called by any app, it would run a lot slower for non-ms apps. We (Lotus) ended up having to build LotusScript, a VBA compatible app language.
BTW, these first two were being investigated by the DOJ - but the investigation was quashed when the Reagan administration came in.
Then there was MS's proclivity for implementing network standards in as proprietary a way as they could do it. If there was a standard, or if Novell already had a protocol, MS was sure to do it a different way.
Then there's the hidden/undocumented format of data files for their Office products, so if you wanted to inter-operate you had to reverse engineer (although this may simply have been so that they could force thir corporate/enterprise customers to upgrade completely to the newest versions as soon as some PCs had those versions). BTW, ever notice how early versions of Word could read and write WordPerfect files, but , somewhere along the way, they forgot how. Not just WP files - pick your competing product and notice how the competing MS product is compatible until they're dominant (IMHO the "extinguish" part of "dominate and extinguish")
Then there was the whole "windows tax" thing where computer suppliers got one price for windows if they committed to putting it on every box they sold - and a much higher price if they didn't commit.
Then there was the whole Netscape / IE thing, which IMHO was simply another MS "engulf and destroy".
And there's more - some of which I never got full details on. For instance, there was at least one instance of a couple of ex-Loti going out and building an OS for handhelds. MS employees signed NDAs and were supposed to be working on MS apps for that platform - but instead MS introduced a competing platform - using (perhaps coincidentally) many of the same ideas. Not totally sure what happened there and I'd love to get the whole story.
So... I'm not sure hatred is the right word, but I'd guess that a large proportion of folks here have been up against at least one of these issues. When you realize that it's on purpose, it's like realizing that, say, an opposing football team is deliberately injuring your players as a way to win (as opposed to out playing them). It engenders a bit of dislike - even if they're the leading team and you have to play them.
Now, there were a couple of places where the MS locomotive could have been derailed (imagine if OS|2 wasn't released in a crippled format so it could run on the 286 - and imagine if Steve Jobs had, instead of making Next a "next-mac" company, instead went head-to-head with MS's OS business - NextOS for PC hardware. It was good but hobbled by expensive hardware. But that wasn't your question...
When/where did you go to school?
I had some dealings with Bjarne in '83 or 84 (I forget which) while working at Cullinet. He was trying to get us to switch to C with cfront (pretty nearly what C++ became).
I remember him as being a really great guy - who could put you to sleep in a meeting in about five minutes.
...but I'll bet they don't see icebergs that often.
The virus that caused the 1917 influenza epidemic was recently unearthed (matter of finding some human remains that still had virus).
The reasons were positive (analyze virus, try to figure out how it re-assembled itself in that deadly-to-humans way, see how close to totally screwed we all are with the current avian flu). AFAIK the virus itself was destroyed after it was sequenced.
But still - I'd have thought long and hard before doing something like that - and would likely have decided that it wasn't worth the risk.
BTW, we are essentially one "switch" away from being very screwed - and the influenza virus is really bad at re-assembling itself, which means that evolution works very fast with it. The major risk is industrially raised chicken - notably "broiler sheds" where thousands of chickens live in very little space, and in their own shit. Normally an extra virulent strain of a disease will die out because if you kill the host very quickly, there's little time for the infection to spread (so a selection pressure for less virulence) - but this doesn't count in situations where the healthy can't get away from the sick.
Have a look at http://birdflubook.com/ for the semi-technical story.
I read "confessions" and was impressed by it (even with the unsubstantiated bits - which is how someone in Perkins' purported position would see things), but then read David McCullough's "Path between the Seas" - and one of these two authors is just plain wrong about the series of events that caused Panama to become an independant nation (particularly the parts about Kermit Roosevelt).
On the other hand, I also read Graham Greene's "Getting to know the General" and I think Perkins might be entirely right about the CIA having a hand in Torrijos' assasination (his private plane blew up in clear sky), which left them with supposedly-more-malleable ol' pineapple face holding the reins.
On balance, yeah, read "Confessions", but don't take it as gospel - just acusations worth following up with more investigation.
I've had no problems with VBR on an Audiotron. I know they're no longer produced/supported, but there might be a slightly more recent firmware version that fixes that issue for you.
Sure would be nice if they suported ogg or flac, but they were betting on microsoft DRM formats (which IMHO is why it's running wince not embedded linux)
Now, back to the antiRIAA rants...
Banks seem to be setting thir customers up for phishing - at least phone phishing.
For instance, I just got an email from one of the banks that I hold a Visa with - their security department wanted to verify some charges. They asked me to call an 800 number - but not the one on the back of my card.
I called the number, wondering if it was a scam (and not ready to give any info). The automated voice system "sounded" right, but when it asked me to enter my card number, I hung up - called the service number on the back of my card, waded through layers of menus, finally got a human, and asked to be transferred to security.
Turns out it was really an email from security (I'd bought a car part from a leathermaker in England and they wanted to to verify that charge - even though it was under $30).
My solution - which I asked the security person I spoke with to please at least put "in the suggestion box" is to change the email and main automated voice system so the emails would say "Please call the service number on the back of your card, then press '8' for security" rather than some unfamiliar 800 number...
I know how voice systems work, I know how 1-800 call distribution systems work. Doing something like this woldn't be hard or expensive - and if security isn't in the same location as their other customer service folks (I don't know if they are) it doesn't matter.
Seems like at least one point of the age limitation was to screen out those kids who were so young they had no clue about online predators - so why not at least try to educate 'em - the ones over 13 who can't pass maybe shouldn't be there anyway (?)
Or... work it like a game. Get some folks (maybe even other 13 year olds) to act in the guise of an online predator (special login, interactions logged, etc.) The folks on the board who fall for the fake predator, get sandboxed until they show (more tests, I guess) that they're competent. The faker-predators get points, and maybe get to tell the gullible that they "own all their bases" - or whatever.. And the non-gullible also get points for turning in predators, real or fake.
Sure, there'll still be real predators - but the kids will be "playing" against them. Ever seen a grown up try to compete agains kids in an online game?
I have a friend who got hit by a parting cable (he was a supercargo on a supertanker - happened when they were warping in to a dock).
He woke up in the hospital - doesn't remember it a bit - lost almost all his teeth to a strand that came through his face.
Of course, he doesn't have to ever work again...
Normal human behavior.
Say I have twenty decent interactions with cops and one very unpleasant one. Which one am I going to remember?
"If you're not part of the solution, there's a good living to be made in prolonging the problem"
Sorry, don't know if it's still all in-band. It was in '95 or so (last time I was interested in this). Of course we don't have a "jingle" - that's time they could sell to advertisers. The downside of not watching any TV is that I've lost any capability I may once have had to "tune them out", which makes them all incredibly irritating if I'm at a friend's house and a TV is on. Sorry about Amango (and extra sorry about no BSG). Is there another netflix-like service elsewhere in the EU? Failing that, there's always usenet. And, yeah, you definitely have access to good beer - the microbreweries around the Boston area aren't so bad, but really good beer isn't a given if you go to a restaurant or the local bar
Tivo skips forward like a VCR with ultra-fast fast-forward. You have to control the skipping yourself.
ReplayTVs skipping was a "mode" as in "skip all commercials" (they were using the in-band signaling used by the networks to mark the start and end of a commercial block to their affiliates - put there because the affiliates would then, potentially, replace some/all of those commercials with their own). So, as a ReplayTV user (at least when watching recorded TV) commercials weren't something to skip forward past, but just weren't there - at least in theory, but in practice they almost weren't there...
Of course, this doesn't fix the problem that, even with commercials removed, there isn't a lot on commercial TV worth watching (just my personal value judgment, natch) I'd be willing to pay for the few that I do like to watch - come to think of it, that's exactly what I do: DVD's from NetFlix of things like BSG and Firefly.
Don't forget to buy an A-to-D converter now so you at least have the option of using PC monitors (or projectors) when that Trinitron does fail, so you can at least use the analog-out "support for legacy devices" on whatever device you're using that's otherwise HDMI-only.
Woah - hey! Crossing in the middle of the block is actually safer than at the corner(unless there's a light with a pedestrian cycle) - there's only traffic coming from two directions, not four.
So why terrorists from the Middle East?
One additional part of the answer is Wahibism and other extreme forms of Islam. It's not just fundamentalisam, but the imams teach that "jihad" is a religious duty - lile pilgramage. They also teach that infidels are unworthy of life - and have redefined places like Europe from "places of truce" to "places of war". Islam in general does not have a tradition of individual dissent (not just protestantism, but the notion that a worshiper can disagree with a priest over the meaning of something in the holy writings), so Islamists are poorly equipped to disagree with the above imam's teachings. IMHO, it'd be a bit different with individual voices speaking out. And Wahibism (once considered to be an odd, deviant sect confined to Suadi Arabia) has been spread worldwide - the Saudis have spent millions on mosques all over the world, and the imams there are teaching, yup - Wahibism. I'm sure there are other parts of the answer...
I get your point - but what does being christian (or not) have to do with being trustworthy around a nubile female? Christian males have less sex drive or something?
The shape of the numerals has nothing to do with it - it's the polynomial notation (i.e. 124 is "one of hundreds, two of tens, four of ones"). Also note that it's actually written right-to-left, so really "four of ones, two of tens, one of hundreds". Yes arabic script is left to right - but maybe sanskrit is too. The issue with zero wasn't so much that it wasn't known as that it was considered to be "not a number" as it caused a lot of notions about numbers to "blow up" and the easiest way 'round the problem was to say - oh, that's a useful placeholder in polynomial notation, but it's not actually a number - the same way that infinity's not a number. As far as 9th century Muslim astronomers knew the Earth was round - you're a victim of bad teaching in American History class - sailors all knew the earth was round - you can actually see ships disappearing (first the hull, then lower sails, then upper, then top pennant) as they move away. Yes, Erasthonese was very clever in his measurement. The 9th century Muslim astronomers probably were, too. No idea if they were independant.
Woah- hey! Starship Troopers was a parody. Have a look at Verhoeven 's other movies (particularly "Soldier of Orange" for anti-fascism) BTW, Heinlein himself writes about glorifying things to extremes to get people to see that it's wrong (in "If this goes on..."). No idea if Verhoeven had read that story.
Doesn't it seem obvious that spammers have their own honeypots (in order to harvest addresses from each other)? Of course, the advantage with a spammer's honey pot is that he/she doesn't have to worry about mitigating any damage - just let that spam spew through - so long as you get a copy of the addresses. Unless you think they all meet somewhere and trade/sell addresses...? What makes you think they treat each other honorably when they can just steal?
It depends on what you mean by "surround". If you mean the actual experience of "surround" while actually being somewhere where the music is being played, well, then you don't need multi channels for that - you just need microphones and microphone surrounds that more closely emulate the human head and pinna (outer ear)- and they need to be where the listener would be. Imagine, if you would, an exact mold of your head, of the same acoustical reflectivity of your head, with microphones in the "ears" - and the head-model at the top of a seat, say, in a concert hall. You get appropriately timed reverb because you're in the right place. Lookup psychacoustics for more info on how our brains interpret micro-delay sound sources. You get appropriate sound shadows and frequency dependent phase inversions because of the head model and 'phone placement. Look up HRTF for more info on this. What you don't get is the ability to turn your head and have the relative volume/shadows/inversion/etc change (the other sound source locator we use). Not sure how important this is for reproducing a concert hall experience. So... this all already exists - it's called binaural http://www.binaural.com/binfaq.html recording. Unlike the other nonsense the recording industry is trying to do, IMHO, this legitimately gives them a reason to see us both earphone-specific and "traditional" recordings - at least of live events. Is there a way to take a pre-existing recording and binaural-ify it? Maybe - especially if thay had multiple channels. Imagine a multi=track recording played back in "perfect" room with each track going to the appropriate speaker, and a biaural head-form re-recording it. You'd at least get as good (in the sense of surround-experience) as someone sitting in that "perfect" room, listening to the same playback. I image you could do that via HRTF - but only if you had location information for each channel. Once you have that, adding delay, reverb, reflections, etc, becomes do-able. Yamaha, for instance, had sound engineets go around the world measuring, delay, reflection, reverb in various concert halls - with the aim of being able to take twh channel sound and add at least some of the ambience of a particular concert hall to the back channels. Not the same problem here, but a bit related.
I've been very impressed with the evolution of Minolta's 7 series (now the 'A' series) over the years. It seems they actually pay attention to what users on the forums have to say, and each successive model has a UI that's somewhat easier to use than the one before, without giving up the option of manual control.