Let me introduce you to Mr. Charles MacKay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Published in 1852. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.
From what I've heard, QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down, but rather to try to stop commonly adjacent letters being adjacent on the keyboard.
I think a glance at the top row is enough to disprove that -- qw/wq and yu/uy are the only uncommon two-letter combos, while extremely common ones like we, er/re, rt/tr, io/oi, and ty are present. There are even several common three letter combinations -- wer, tre, ert, rty, and poi. If you expand to include vertically adjacent keys, you'll find even more.
Somebody obviously never played pirated computer games in the '80s. The "cracker" who had defeated the copy protection on the original software would add a splash screen with his name when he distributed the game.
Similarly (although perhaps not strictly digitally), you couldn't just hook two VCRs together and copy a film you rented at Blockbuster onto a blank tape.
More to the point, every artist on Amazon's MP3 store (which is most everyone now) is offering DRM free music, albeit at 256 VBR with no lossless option. How is it news when an artist does the same thing through his own website, unless he also does free/donation pricing a la Radiohead and NIN?
What's wrong with charging your friends for helping them? In high school, when I was the only kid around with a PC, I'd charge $5 to type reports for people. My friend Mike, who was the only one of us with a car, expected people to chip in for gas when we went anywhere. Friendship doesn't overcome basic market forces.
You're overlooking the fact that vaccines are not 100% effective -- they don't always take, and even if they do, they can wear off over time. If enough parents decide to abstain from vaccinations, not only are they putting their sprogs at risk, they're putting people who've had their shots at risk.
If there is no connection why do we see so many stories similar to mine?
Repeat after me, "Correlation does not equal causation." This is a basic scientific principle which anyone geeky enough to post to/. should be familiar with.
Yahoo isn't the marketplace, and the market isn't damaged when a company fails. In fact, failure is often good for the market, though you wouldn't know it listening to the Bush and Obama people.
Don't some ISPs intentionally drop packets as a way of blocking/throttling bittorrent? I can see how the statement that in such a situation packet loss is noticeable to users is true.
(and no, I do not count a company that publishes Halo fanfiction "books" to be a publisher.)
You mean Tor, the publishing company that puts out Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, Robert Charles Wilson, John Scalzi, the Wheel of Time, and Malazan in addition to Doctorow's latest book?
There are many reasons to think Doctorow is an intellectual lightweight, wannabe Jacobin, and all-around poseur, but this ain't it.
No it's not. Gutenberg deals primarily in books published prior to 1923, with a few more recent items where someone screwed up the renewal. That means the vast bulk of science fiction and hard-boiled novels are still copyrighted (Gutenberg has maybe a hundred sci fi books if you don't count Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and other pre-Gernsback writers.).
In fact, there's a website, Munseys.com that specializes in hard-boiled abandon-ware, though Conde Nast has gone after them several times for publishing ebooks of things that haven't seen print for decades.
Do you really want to live in a world where violating a website's TOS is criminal fraud? You lie on a site's registration page because they're asking intrusive questions that have nothing to do with the service they offer, and you get police knocking on your door?
Re:have a problem with made up words?
on
Anathem
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· Score: 2, Funny
I have to disagree, my droog. Proctolexicogenesis is doubleplusungood. Any muggle author or holodeck scenarist worth his quatloos should be able to make do with the words that exist in plain frakking English.
Actually, the article doesn't say it doesn't work. It says it has a high false-positive rate. To determine whether it works, we need to know its false negative rate as well. If the method detected 99% of all bad guys in airports, one could make an argument that the false-positives are a reasonable trade-off; but if it's only identifying 1% of all baddies in addition to the 99% false-positive rate, it'd be no more useful than random screenings.
Your self-esteem should be low if you paid money to use Classmates.com as it does what MySpace and FaceBook do for free.
Not quite. MySpace and Facebook exist so you can keep in touch with your friends from high school and college. Classmates.com exists so your entire graduating class can keep in touch and organize reunions. The fact that Classmates.com charges crazy amounts of money for this little service is outrageous, but it's not the same service as other social networks.
Not only haven't they seen the Cage, they apparently haven't seen Where No Man Has Gone Before, where the Enterprise had a completely different CMO even with Kirk in command. There also hasn't been any reference to Gary Mitchell, who's another key figure who should be aboard for Kirk's first mission.
Look at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comic, not movie). Look at the way Lovecraft and Jules Verne wrote sequels to Edgar Allen Poe stories. Look at the thousands of stories based upon King Arthur. Great artists can create great art when allowed to play in someone else's sandbox.
Come on, don't you want Alan Moore to write a comic in which Captain Blood, Solomon Kane, and Robinson Crusoe team up to discover King Solomon's Mines?
Actually, it's not a replacement unless it can distinguish audiobooks and podcasts from music, so I don't go from "Stairway to Heaven" to chapter 20 of "Oliver Twist," when I'm listening with random play on.
Have you ever looked at what itunes does when you tell it to organize your library for you? When you just keep your hands off?
Yes, it takes my audiobooks and dumps them into the same folder with music. This is dumb.
However, since the competition is even dumber -- i.e., at least iTunes separates audiobooks and music in the interface -- I've settled for turning folder management off and doing it myself.
My district in Northern Virginia only got its first electronic voting machine in '04, and didn't make the complete switch until '06. If they're going to wait for the machines to wear out, it'll be decades.
And too, prior to the electronic machines, we used mechanical booths not paper, which worked perfectly fine, so I doubt they're actually going back to the equally problematic paper (punch card, scantron, or other) ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me introduce you to Mr. Charles MacKay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Published in 1852. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.
I think a glance at the top row is enough to disprove that -- qw/wq and yu/uy are the only uncommon two-letter combos, while extremely common ones like we, er/re, rt/tr, io/oi, and ty are present. There are even several common three letter combinations -- wer, tre, ert, rty, and poi. If you expand to include vertically adjacent keys, you'll find even more.
I know that was a joke, but even with the tax, it'd be cheaper to shop online.
I've always thought it'd be neat to turn the Zork series into a top-down Zelda style game.
Somebody obviously never played pirated computer games in the '80s. The "cracker" who had defeated the copy protection on the original software would add a splash screen with his name when he distributed the game. Similarly (although perhaps not strictly digitally), you couldn't just hook two VCRs together and copy a film you rented at Blockbuster onto a blank tape.
More to the point, every artist on Amazon's MP3 store (which is most everyone now) is offering DRM free music, albeit at 256 VBR with no lossless option. How is it news when an artist does the same thing through his own website, unless he also does free/donation pricing a la Radiohead and NIN?
What's wrong with charging your friends for helping them? In high school, when I was the only kid around with a PC, I'd charge $5 to type reports for people. My friend Mike, who was the only one of us with a car, expected people to chip in for gas when we went anywhere. Friendship doesn't overcome basic market forces.
You're overlooking the fact that vaccines are not 100% effective -- they don't always take, and even if they do, they can wear off over time. If enough parents decide to abstain from vaccinations, not only are they putting their sprogs at risk, they're putting people who've had their shots at risk.
Repeat after me, "Correlation does not equal causation." This is a basic scientific principle which anyone geeky enough to post to /. should be familiar with.
Yahoo isn't the marketplace, and the market isn't damaged when a company fails. In fact, failure is often good for the market, though you wouldn't know it listening to the Bush and Obama people.
That's only because they didn't test Lynx, which blows away even Firefox.
But Lynx has the best pop-up blocking in the industry, 100% prevents cross-site scripting, and reduces most ads to small text links.
Don't some ISPs intentionally drop packets as a way of blocking/throttling bittorrent? I can see how the statement that in such a situation packet loss is noticeable to users is true.
You mean Tor, the publishing company that puts out Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, Robert Charles Wilson, John Scalzi, the Wheel of Time, and Malazan in addition to Doctorow's latest book?
There are many reasons to think Doctorow is an intellectual lightweight, wannabe Jacobin, and all-around poseur, but this ain't it.
No it's not. Gutenberg deals primarily in books published prior to 1923, with a few more recent items where someone screwed up the renewal. That means the vast bulk of science fiction and hard-boiled novels are still copyrighted (Gutenberg has maybe a hundred sci fi books if you don't count Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and other pre-Gernsback writers.).
In fact, there's a website, Munseys.com that specializes in hard-boiled abandon-ware, though Conde Nast has gone after them several times for publishing ebooks of things that haven't seen print for decades.
Do you really want to live in a world where violating a website's TOS is criminal fraud? You lie on a site's registration page because they're asking intrusive questions that have nothing to do with the service they offer, and you get police knocking on your door?
I have to disagree, my droog. Proctolexicogenesis is doubleplusungood. Any muggle author or holodeck scenarist worth his quatloos should be able to make do with the words that exist in plain frakking English.
Actually, the article doesn't say it doesn't work. It says it has a high false-positive rate. To determine whether it works, we need to know its false negative rate as well. If the method detected 99% of all bad guys in airports, one could make an argument that the false-positives are a reasonable trade-off; but if it's only identifying 1% of all baddies in addition to the 99% false-positive rate, it'd be no more useful than random screenings.
Not quite. MySpace and Facebook exist so you can keep in touch with your friends from high school and college. Classmates.com exists so your entire graduating class can keep in touch and organize reunions. The fact that Classmates.com charges crazy amounts of money for this little service is outrageous, but it's not the same service as other social networks.
Not only haven't they seen the Cage, they apparently haven't seen Where No Man Has Gone Before, where the Enterprise had a completely different CMO even with Kirk in command. There also hasn't been any reference to Gary Mitchell, who's another key figure who should be aboard for Kirk's first mission.
Look at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comic, not movie). Look at the way Lovecraft and Jules Verne wrote sequels to Edgar Allen Poe stories. Look at the thousands of stories based upon King Arthur. Great artists can create great art when allowed to play in someone else's sandbox.
Come on, don't you want Alan Moore to write a comic in which Captain Blood, Solomon Kane, and Robinson Crusoe team up to discover King Solomon's Mines?
Actually, it's not a replacement unless it can distinguish audiobooks and podcasts from music, so I don't go from "Stairway to Heaven" to chapter 20 of "Oliver Twist," when I'm listening with random play on.
Yes, it takes my audiobooks and dumps them into the same folder with music. This is dumb.
However, since the competition is even dumber -- i.e., at least iTunes separates audiobooks and music in the interface -- I've settled for turning folder management off and doing it myself.
Threefish is to Twofish as Dreadfish is to Blowfish.
My district in Northern Virginia only got its first electronic voting machine in '04, and didn't make the complete switch until '06. If they're going to wait for the machines to wear out, it'll be decades.
And too, prior to the electronic machines, we used mechanical booths not paper, which worked perfectly fine, so I doubt they're actually going back to the equally problematic paper (punch card, scantron, or other) ballot.