I was hoping someone would mention that story! Read it in one of Asimov's anthologies way, way back and, even if THAT isn't the first execution of the idea, it's still the best as far as I'm concerned.
Re:I have a reason to live again
on
Futurama Returns
·
· Score: 1
That's always been one of my favorite Simpsons jokes that no-one else seems to have gotten. ('Cept, being not especially familiar with Shakespeare, I'd always mentally attributed the original quotation to Dorothy Parker - not sure exactly why my brane picked her,...)
And, as long as I'm off-topic, another Simpsons gem that slips by most people is early in the episode where Homer builds and mans the battle-bot; just after Bart has wrecked the poorly-assembled bike, Homer chases him down, armed with his spring-loaded first-aid kit. For maybe two frames, you can see that the last of the sharp, pointy, dangerous first-aid kit items that springs out and lodges itself razor-sharp-edge-first into Homer's face is,... a Band-Aid! That whole scene, in fact, starting with the bike falling apart piece by piece and ending with the band-aid, just kills me - the best slap-stick in the whole series, for my money.
...there's a place near here that's doing the same thing with a whole industry/product line - couterfeit food. Luckily, they're easy to spot, all being labelled with a big bright yellow M,...
I'd bet that the same factors apply for DVD-R and -RW - at least the physical media are pretty similar. One good thing about the DVD writeable standards are that there's a LOT of error correction encoding in the data - more, I'm pretty sure, than standard CD-ROM data, and definitely WAY more than Red-book audio CDs, which traded off some error correction robustness for space/duration.
But still, those pits and lands are an awful lot smaller than on a CD, so it still seems so easy for the least little scratch or nick to dink up some data.
As for my own usage, during the last year or so, I've burned a lot of data to DVD+R media (over 300 of'em so far), sticking as much as possible to Taiyo Yuden-manufactured media, and saving checksums for every-damn-thing on every disc burned - but I still feel kinda uneasy about it. I've got a fair stack of hard drives offline as a redundant backup method for most of that data, imperfect as that scheme is, and multiple copies of some especially crucial data.
Closer than the article, but still missing a crucial distinction. -R and -RW are very different. -R is pretty much as you say - the ink/dye/CHEMICAL layer that's written to is burned; this layer is not the reflective layer.
In -RW media, the write layer is a metallic layer that isn't "burned" but merely heated differentially to create regions of either more-crystalline or more-amorphous metal when cooled; these regions have different refractive characteristics, and can thus be distinguished by laser. This is why it's rewritable - the melting>glassy / melting>crystalline process is reversible.
...contains a succinct but detailed explanation as good as any I've seen (many other sources confuse refractivity with reflectivity, and don't clearly explain that the write layer and the reflective layer in a -RW medium are indeed different layers).
So, to blather on only a little bit longer (too late?), to respond to the immediate contention in this subthread, the reflective layer is in NO case the very same layer as the data is written to. But, in practice, the top coating containing the reflective layer on any -R medium is so bloody thin as to make no difference. If it becomes separated from the surface of the disc, you're hosed. If you want to see how thin this layer is, stick a CD-R in a microwave for a few seconds, till it flashes, and observe the resulting flakes.
Back to the bigger question, the paragraph in this crappy article that says "The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam" is needlessliy confusing things by including "CD-RW" in the statement - to conflate a REVERSIBLE phase-change/metal layer-writing process with a PERMANENT burn/dye layer write process is stupid and confusing to anyone who doesn't know better. Whose fault it was to include that, I dunno.
This still leaves the question open as to whether the sorta-stable phase-change alloy ages in substantially the same or else a very different way than the permanently altered -R ink/dye layer, and whether any such difference affects the useful lifespan. I've NEVER seen this specific question rigorously answered. I'd love to hear from anyone who has links or direct info.
A better analogy is: if atheism is a religion, then mocking stamp collectors is a hobby.
Mocking stamp collectors certainly could be a hobby because at least it's an action/activity, and not simply the absence of one.
To state a belief in a God or to state a belief in a lack of God is a religious belief.
Fine as far as it goes, but if you really don't see that this is a false dichotomy,... well, I'll draw it out from the start: A belief in the lack of (a) God is not the same as the simple lack of a belief in (a) God. I assert that the simple lack of belief in any god or gods is qualitatively different than either belief, positive or negative, for or against; it is simply the absence of belief.
Belief is based on what? Faith? Evidence? It seems to me a more useful definition of "religious" is any belief that's based only on faith, or at least which is inextricably tied in with faith. Belief based solely on evidence (and along with that, absence of belief based on lack of evidence) is, again I assert, something different and surely not religious.
But as far as I can tell, you either disagree or don't even consider the third stance, so it's not much worth trying to answer the rest of your observations,... Maybe later.
So Atheism does not conform to the following: religion -- 4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith I know many atheists who would say that is exactly what their belief/disbelief is.
So there are mushy definitions and less-well-spoken stances on every side of the issue - what's new? A more robust definition, it seems to me, is that a-theism is, very strictly, the absence of faith in things theistic. There isn't convincing evidence to support belief in (x), therefore I lack belief in (x).
"Ok, so now they teach the " Fact of Evolution" not the " Theory of Evolution" hmmm.... you know that humanism, atheism, and being agnostic are all religions too,... "
I wish I knew whom to give credit to for this quotation:
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Ditto. We had the Tuesday Night Drinking Society which met (of course, regularly every Wednesday night) in various local bars, as far back as the late 80's. Met a lot of funny, weird, smart, excellent people that way.
I also lay claim to being ahead of a big portion of the curve on computer dating - I met a girlfriend at a BBS party in 1994, way before all these newfangled match.coms with their pictures and forms to fill in and search engines.
What bothers me about churches specifically - or, more to the point, about Organized Religion in general - more than the weasel words about their "missions" and "visions" and such, is the huge amount of "middle management" in their structure.
To make an only somewhat bold and oversimplified assertion, we've seen the effects of the middle-management mentality in (among many other examples) the travesty that has been the Catholic church's handling of the sex-abusing priests: "Middle-management" shuffled most of them around and let them continues to get away with their sick activities, rather than just deal with them properly in the first place.
Would ANY of that happened if there weren't such a tall management structure, if the religion weren't so organized, if it were instead just a bunch of more-or-less disconnected churches who only paid heed to the main-line directly to their "CEO"? And isn't that the way it SHOULD be anyway?
Feel free to flame, but I just can't see the necessity for such a stratified power-structure in religion.
He played 'stunt guitar' in Frank Zappa's last touring band, has played with Robert Fripp (on a G3 tour), created one of the most ambitious and well-integrated rock-band-with-orchestra pieces ever (The Universe Will Provide, performed with the renowned Metropole Orkest), and is occasionally a member of Steve Vai's live band - he's the guy doubling Vai note-for-note with one hand and playing keyboard with the other. Unreal. And a helluva nice guy.
Bought 3 Maxtor hard disks last year, all the same model, all of them died within a month of each other. That sounds like bad gear to me.
I bought a 250GB Maxtor S-ATA drive a few months ago, and it died UGLY just recently. I'v enever had trouble with Maxtor before (and I actually like their HD utilities, MaxBlast; but I'm wondering now if I feel like trusting them any more.
I'm not sure what really caused this crash, but while re-installing a little shareware app (which I've used for years with no problem at all), the installer went off into the weeds, apparently overwrote part of the OS directories or possibly something in the master boot file/record/partition/whatever (not sure), and when I rebooted, I got the 'NTLDR not found' error. Reformatted the boot partition as part of trying to reinstall Win2K, but it wouldn't even finish formatting. Bought a different drive to use for boot, and got the 'NTLDR not found' error after trying to boot to a fresh Win2K install on THAT drive. Finally replaced the &&^$#@$ motherboard, and the new drive works fine. But the old Maxtor 250GB one is so hosed that Disk Manager won't even recognize the former boot partition, and half the data on the larger (~200GB) partition is toast. How the hell to diagnose what went wrong there?
Oh, I'd had a power outage a couple weeks before this all happened, and that seems to have taken out my *old* UPS (a Merlin-Gerin bought in 1997, so no great loss), and the humidty is pretty low, so I've been causing static shocks all over the place. Generally bad environment? Mebbe so, but that drive is highly suspect to me.
3) Grow an herb garden and learn to clean with things you can buy in bulk. Fresh herbs taste better and take very little effort to grow; just some sunshine and water. And you get as much as you want for free!
Right on! This was the first year I got serious about having a garden, and I've determined that the following EASY-to-grow things are MUCH better fresh outta your own dirt than in any grocery store:
Carrots
Strawberries - my GAWD, homegrown strawberries are delicious. The ones in the stores (here in Indiana) mostly taste like they were MINED, not grown on a plant.
Cucumbers - probably the biggest quality difference I noticed, aside from the strawberries
Tomatoes (especially big ones like brandywines, early girls and various sauce-tomatoes)
Broccoli's also better homegrown, but it tends to like cooler climates and, later in the year once the bugs have found your produce, it gets time-consuming picking the little caterpillars out of the florets; they don't necessarily float to the top when you boil it, let alone when you just steam it. I s'pose I'll try some kind of organic pesticide next year, but if that doesn't work well enough, it'll be worth buying broccoli at the store to save the trouble.
Back on topic, like many others here, I use the stupid customer cards at a coupla stores, but the ones I use certainly weren't registered with my real info. Anybody wanna trade cards for Krogers/Marsh?
IIRC it is there to distinguish acts committed intentionally from those committed by accident (or 'recklessly').
Well, yeah, that certainly would distinguish between "knowingly" and "unknowingly", but "willingly" seems to also imply "knowingly" and maybe a little bit more - the distinction between "willingly" and "knowingly" is the one that needs elucidation here.
This little phrase
...Purposefully, knowingly (differs from willingly--did away with malice aforethought)...
...from the "Murder" table here:
http://law.wustl.edu/Organizations/SBA/Outlines/Cr im%20Law%20ChartBrickey2002.htm
or
http://tinyurl.com/6n654
... implies that "willingly" means the perpetrator (huh-huh - fancy legal word there, and IAN even AL) not only knew, in this case, that s/he was sharing files, but knew that doing so was naughty (loosely put); by contrast, "knowingly" is a lower standard and only means the person knew s/he was sharing files. So that's why this change constitutes an expansion of the previous wording - more people would be "knowing" than necessarily "willing."
I'm sure there are better sites with more to-the-point examples and definitions,...
My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.
YES! Mod parent up! I can't tell you how many times I've had to take a long and circuitous route to get back to a directly linked page that, for example, requires cookies, 'cos it seems as if those framed pages of Hotmail's screw up cookie usage. (Or, maybe, data sent through the URL, or some other kinds of non-basic transactions, I dunno, . ..) One example, since I may not be describing it right: I have a 'wish list' of used CDs on file at Djangos.com. Djangos sends me an email when one arrives in stock, and I hit the link to buy it. When I get around to viewing my shopping cart and trying to pay, if I'm still in that *&$#^%$damn Hotmail-framed window, the transaction will fail every time. Highly annoying.
But, anyway, to get back a little closer to the topic at hand - my oldest Hotmail account (from way before MS bought 'em) got upgraded to 250MB in early August.
I've also used a telco who always puts in 9999999999.
Interesting. A couple weeks ago, I received a call on my Sprint cell-phone, which displayed the caller-id info as "111-111-1111." I laughed and ignored it, thinking it was either a) a fluke, or b) someone calling who was purposely obscuring their info (in which case, fdisk'em, I don't need to talk to 'em), but wonder now if it might have been someone I would have wanted to talk with, who just happened to be calling from a telco that puts in bad info for everyone. Anybody have any idea, based on the "111-111-1111" info?
And on an extra note as a Hotmail user, I don't trust anything they are saying right now, they promised more space like months ago and still haven't delivered. I love my Gmail though.
One of my free Hotmail accounts has already been upped to 250 MB, but the other hasn't. I wonder what sequence they're doing this in - oldest accounts first? The account that's been tweaked, I've had since 1997 or 1998 - it's one of the first 100,000 or so Hotmail accounts, from long before MS bought Hotmail.
GMail certainly has the potential to rock, but AFAIC, they're not fully "realized" yet. I'm wishing they'd incorporate a few other new features - mostly, an interface to handle files (sent/received as attachments or just uploaded) separately from any emails to which they're attached, and the ability to designate such files as public/shared or private - this could obviate some of the need for even mailing (and thus duplicating on their servers) large attachments.
Slashdot Mirror
I was hoping someone would mention that story! Read it in one of Asimov's anthologies way, way back and, even if THAT isn't the first execution of the idea, it's still the best as far as I'm concerned.
And, as long as I'm off-topic, another Simpsons gem that slips by most people is early in the episode where Homer builds and mans the battle-bot; just after Bart has wrecked the poorly-assembled bike, Homer chases him down, armed with his spring-loaded first-aid kit. For maybe two frames, you can see that the last of the sharp, pointy, dangerous first-aid kit items that springs out and lodges itself razor-sharp-edge-first into Homer's face is,... a Band-Aid! That whole scene, in fact, starting with the bike falling apart piece by piece and ending with the band-aid, just kills me - the best slap-stick in the whole series, for my money.
Awright - who taught Don King to type?
I would have made that exact same first post, but, you know,...
http://www.anuslaptops.com/
Though I hear actually ordering one can be rather difficult:
http://www.thescambaiter.com/forum/showthread.php? t=109&page=39&pp=25
...there's a place near here that's doing the same thing with a whole industry/product line - couterfeit food. Luckily, they're easy to spot, all being labelled with a big bright yellow M,...
But still, those pits and lands are an awful lot smaller than on a CD, so it still seems so easy for the least little scratch or nick to dink up some data.
As for my own usage, during the last year or so, I've burned a lot of data to DVD+R media (over 300 of'em so far), sticking as much as possible to Taiyo Yuden-manufactured media, and saving checksums for every-damn-thing on every disc burned - but I still feel kinda uneasy about it. I've got a fair stack of hard drives offline as a redundant backup method for most of that data, imperfect as that scheme is, and multiple copies of some especially crucial data.
In -RW media, the write layer is a metallic layer that isn't "burned" but merely heated differentially to create regions of either more-crystalline or more-amorphous metal when cooled; these regions have different refractive characteristics, and can thus be distinguished by laser. This is why it's rewritable - the melting>glassy / melting>crystalline process is reversible.
http://www.usbyte.com/common/Re-writable_CD.htm
So, to blather on only a little bit longer (too late?), to respond to the immediate contention in this subthread, the reflective layer is in NO case the very same layer as the data is written to. But, in practice, the top coating containing the reflective layer on any -R medium is so bloody thin as to make no difference. If it becomes separated from the surface of the disc, you're hosed. If you want to see how thin this layer is, stick a CD-R in a microwave for a few seconds, till it flashes, and observe the resulting flakes.
Back to the bigger question, the paragraph in this crappy article that says "The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam" is needlessliy confusing things by including "CD-RW" in the statement - to conflate a REVERSIBLE phase-change/metal layer-writing process with a PERMANENT burn/dye layer write process is stupid and confusing to anyone who doesn't know better. Whose fault it was to include that, I dunno.
This still leaves the question open as to whether the sorta-stable phase-change alloy ages in substantially the same or else a very different way than the permanently altered -R ink/dye layer, and whether any such difference affects the useful lifespan. I've NEVER seen this specific question rigorously answered. I'd love to hear from anyone who has links or direct info.
Mocking stamp collectors certainly could be a hobby because at least it's an action/activity, and not simply the absence of one.
To state a belief in a God or to state a belief in a lack of God is a religious belief.
Fine as far as it goes, but if you really don't see that this is a false dichotomy,... well, I'll draw it out from the start: A belief in the lack of (a) God is not the same as the simple lack of a belief in (a) God. I assert that the simple lack of belief in any god or gods is qualitatively different than either belief, positive or negative, for or against; it is simply the absence of belief. Belief is based on what? Faith? Evidence? It seems to me a more useful definition of "religious" is any belief that's based only on faith, or at least which is inextricably tied in with faith. Belief based solely on evidence (and along with that, absence of belief based on lack of evidence) is, again I assert, something different and surely not religious.
But as far as I can tell, you either disagree or don't even consider the third stance, so it's not much worth trying to answer the rest of your observations,... Maybe later.
So there are mushy definitions and less-well-spoken stances on every side of the issue - what's new? A more robust definition, it seems to me, is that a-theism is, very strictly, the absence of faith in things theistic. There isn't convincing evidence to support belief in (x), therefore I lack belief in (x).
I wish I knew whom to give credit to for this quotation:
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
"Then you can blame CNN. The quotes came from their site."
So, um, you're saying you, um, didn't RTFA?
I also lay claim to being ahead of a big portion of the curve on computer dating - I met a girlfriend at a BBS party in 1994, way before all these newfangled match.coms with their pictures and forms to fill in and search engines.
Hey you kids - get offa my lawn!
To make an only somewhat bold and oversimplified assertion, we've seen the effects of the middle-management mentality in (among many other examples) the travesty that has been the Catholic church's handling of the sex-abusing priests: "Middle-management" shuffled most of them around and let them continues to get away with their sick activities, rather than just deal with them properly in the first place.
Would ANY of that happened if there weren't such a tall management structure, if the religion weren't so organized, if it were instead just a bunch of more-or-less disconnected churches who only paid heed to the main-line directly to their "CEO"? And isn't that the way it SHOULD be anyway?
Feel free to flame, but I just can't see the necessity for such a stratified power-structure in religion.
Mike Keneally ( www.keneally.com )
He played 'stunt guitar' in Frank Zappa's last touring band, has played with Robert Fripp (on a G3 tour), created one of the most ambitious and well-integrated rock-band-with-orchestra pieces ever (The Universe Will Provide, performed with the renowned Metropole Orkest), and is occasionally a member of Steve Vai's live band - he's the guy doubling Vai note-for-note with one hand and playing keyboard with the other. Unreal. And a helluva nice guy.
I bought a 250GB Maxtor S-ATA drive a few months ago, and it died UGLY just recently. I'v enever had trouble with Maxtor before (and I actually like their HD utilities, MaxBlast; but I'm wondering now if I feel like trusting them any more.
I'm not sure what really caused this crash, but while re-installing a little shareware app (which I've used for years with no problem at all), the installer went off into the weeds, apparently overwrote part of the OS directories or possibly something in the master boot file/record/partition/whatever (not sure), and when I rebooted, I got the 'NTLDR not found' error. Reformatted the boot partition as part of trying to reinstall Win2K, but it wouldn't even finish formatting. Bought a different drive to use for boot, and got the 'NTLDR not found' error after trying to boot to a fresh Win2K install on THAT drive. Finally replaced the &&^$#@$ motherboard, and the new drive works fine. But the old Maxtor 250GB one is so hosed that Disk Manager won't even recognize the former boot partition, and half the data on the larger (~200GB) partition is toast. How the hell to diagnose what went wrong there?
Oh, I'd had a power outage a couple weeks before this all happened, and that seems to have taken out my *old* UPS (a Merlin-Gerin bought in 1997, so no great loss), and the humidty is pretty low, so I've been causing static shocks all over the place. Generally bad environment? Mebbe so, but that drive is highly suspect to me.
They're only [outrageous French accent] wafer thin![/outrageous French accent]
Right on! This was the first year I got serious about having a garden, and I've determined that the following EASY-to-grow things are MUCH better fresh outta your own dirt than in any grocery store:
Carrots
Strawberries - my GAWD, homegrown strawberries are delicious. The ones in the stores (here in Indiana) mostly taste like they were MINED, not grown on a plant.
Cucumbers - probably the biggest quality difference I noticed, aside from the strawberries
Tomatoes (especially big ones like brandywines, early girls and various sauce-tomatoes)
Broccoli's also better homegrown, but it tends to like cooler climates and, later in the year once the bugs have found your produce, it gets time-consuming picking the little caterpillars out of the florets; they don't necessarily float to the top when you boil it, let alone when you just steam it. I s'pose I'll try some kind of organic pesticide next year, but if that doesn't work well enough, it'll be worth buying broccoli at the store to save the trouble.
Back on topic, like many others here, I use the stupid customer cards at a coupla stores, but the ones I use certainly weren't registered with my real info. Anybody wanna trade cards for Krogers/Marsh?
I was about to propose the official trade name for the material: The Emperor's New Cloth. But ya pretty much beat me to it.
Well, yeah, that certainly would distinguish between "knowingly" and "unknowingly", but "willingly" seems to also imply "knowingly" and maybe a little bit more - the distinction between "willingly" and "knowingly" is the one that needs elucidation here. This little phrase
or
http://tinyurl.com/6n654
I'm sure there are better sites with more to-the-point examples and definitions,...
YES! Mod parent up! I can't tell you how many times I've had to take a long and circuitous route to get back to a directly linked page that, for example, requires cookies, 'cos it seems as if those framed pages of Hotmail's screw up cookie usage. (Or, maybe, data sent through the URL, or some other kinds of non-basic transactions, I dunno, . . .) One example, since I may not be describing it right: I have a 'wish list' of used CDs on file at Djangos.com. Djangos sends me an email when one arrives in stock, and I hit the link to buy it. When I get around to viewing my shopping cart and trying to pay, if I'm still in that *&$#^%$damn Hotmail-framed window, the transaction will fail every time. Highly annoying.
But, anyway, to get back a little closer to the topic at hand - my oldest Hotmail account (from way before MS bought 'em) got upgraded to 250MB in early August.
Inevitably,...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of grad students armed with abacii,....
I need this URL...for a friend.
www.[your-sister's-name-here].com
Sorry - not poking at you specifically - just couldn't resist the lure of the comic opportunity,... ;-)
Interesting. A couple weeks ago, I received a call on my Sprint cell-phone, which displayed the caller-id info as "111-111-1111." I laughed and ignored it, thinking it was either a) a fluke, or b) someone calling who was purposely obscuring their info (in which case, fdisk'em, I don't need to talk to 'em), but wonder now if it might have been someone I would have wanted to talk with, who just happened to be calling from a telco that puts in bad info for everyone. Anybody have any idea, based on the "111-111-1111" info?
One of my free Hotmail accounts has already been upped to 250 MB, but the other hasn't. I wonder what sequence they're doing this in - oldest accounts first? The account that's been tweaked, I've had since 1997 or 1998 - it's one of the first 100,000 or so Hotmail accounts, from long before MS bought Hotmail.
GMail certainly has the potential to rock, but AFAIC, they're not fully "realized" yet. I'm wishing they'd incorporate a few other new features - mostly, an interface to handle files (sent/received as attachments or just uploaded) separately from any emails to which they're attached, and the ability to designate such files as public/shared or private - this could obviate some of the need for even mailing (and thus duplicating on their servers) large attachments.