The average non-audiophile will never be able to tell the difference between a 128kbit stereo mp3 and a CD.
I'm not an audiophile, and I can tell the difference between a CD and 196kbit mp3. If you gave the average person the Pepsi Challenge with mp3s and CDs, I bet they could tell the difference too.
The NSA is a political organization, not a scientific institution.
The NSA has some hella good mathematicians working for them. As others have already pointed out, the NSA has on occassion announced that certain cryptosystems are insecure before anyone on the outside had even developed the theorems necessary to attack the system.
And as any true tin-foil-hatter knows, the NSA developed quantum computers fifteen years ago.
They have vested interests in promoting standards 5-10 years behind their current technologies.
The side of the house interested in reading people's mail might, but the other half of the agency is interested in keeping secrets secret, and that means letting Americans have encryption that the Chinese can't break.
This is nothing compared to the story last year about the NSA tracking email to identify a terror cell in Britain. An astonishing number of Slashdot users were shocked to discover that the National Security Agency spies on people.
If the spoilers I read for the final episode (two words: reset, button) are correct, then appalling is an understatement.
Not that this is the first time a Trek actor has complained about the awful writing of modern Trek. Robert Beltran was extremely vocal about how awful Voyager was.
Because all too often fans act like religious fanatics over mediocre drivel, which makes it easier for execs to dismiss the outcry when a truly great show like Firefly gets canceled.
No, the FCC only has authority over broadcast media, because the radio spectrum is legally national property that's rented to private organizations. There are people out there who want the FCC to have control over satellite and landline communications, but that'd require an overhaul of their charter, and probably wouldn't pass legal muster.
No. Just about the only specific temperatures people care about in their daily lives is when rain turns to snow and ice. Using Celcius is very convenient -- if the temp is negative, it's freezing, if it's positive, it's not.
Except that it can snow, and even stick to the ground, when the air temperature is above freezing.
And if you aren't living at sea-level, things are even more muddled.
However, I don't see why it would bar others convicted of similar violations from using it as a precedent example.
If they cannot ever do so, I'm interested in hearing how that works.
The spammer was convicted under a Virginia law. Virginia law only applies in 2% of US states. If the judge's decision sets a usable precedent, it only applies to spammers prosecuted in Virginia. (Of course, it may be that the judge's decision is based upon a particular error the prosecutor made, in which case it doesn't even apply in Virginia unless other prosecutors make the same mistake.)
Obviously Apple needs to take a page from PGP/GPG. "iTunes will now generate a playlist. Please move your mouse around the screen like an idiot until we're through."
On a more serious note, I wonder if it'd be possible to pull random data from the music files?
Certainly the *manufacturers* of medicines will tell you to throw away all meds the instant they hit the expiration date (which is the lesser of the manuf.'s expiration date or 1 year from dispensing the med).
If you could get sued for millions of dollars if your product went bad, you'd hedge the expiration date too.
Yeah, and when the UN didn't step in, the US stepped right in and took care of things, right? Oh yeah... we were completely ineffective there too.
Um, you know, the UN did step in in Rwanda. The complaint against them is that they didn't accomplish anything -- if anything, they made matters worse by attracting people to safe-zones that turned out not to be safe.
I didn't claim that Stratego was a perfect mapping of a real-world battlefield, just that imperfect knowledge is a factor in real-world strategy, and Stratego can't be discounted as a strategy game for including it.
Stratego is like poker, you are playing against a person, not a board. The completely random
But a Stratego board isn't laid out randomly -- or if it is, you're playing against a fool. In fact, how you array your pieces in Stratego is itself a strategic decision since it determines how much defensive and offensive power you're going to have; and how you probe your opponent's forces is also a matter of strategy.
and unknown layout of the board makes for a very complex and entertaining, but not very strategic, game.
I don't see how imperfect knowledge of your opponent means the game doesn't require strategy -- certainly real-world strategians don't always know what pieces the other side has where.
Actually, I think most of the popular two player strategy games other than chess (like checkers, othello, mancalla, go) are harder to become good at than chess. Reason: In Chess, different pieces look different and are worth different amounts, strategically speaking.
Is there some reason why Stratego doesn't count as a strategy game?
In chess, there are approximately 71,000 possible board possitions after four moves, compared to over 16.7 billion in full board Go. Even on a simplified 5x5 board, there are more than 300,000 combos after four moves.
ummmm...i don't know what statistics class you took, but in mine every time you eliminate a possibility the likeliness of finding a collision would be greater than the previous since there are a finite amount of possibilities.
Which is all well and good once you have the algorithim running. But until you do, all you can say is that the odds of finding the right answer will be the same for any given attempt, be it first, last, or 1,000,002,193,439,329,010.
We may disagree on some of the smaller points of it, but the general principles are there. Don't steal, don't murder,
Yes, all cultures agree murder is wrong, but that's because murder is, by definition, the unlawful killing of a person. What constitutues an unlawful killing, however, has varied greatly from culture to culture. The Romans, for example, believed a head-of-household had an absolute, unquestionable right to kill his children, which is, by the standards of just about every Western culture since, one of the most heinous forms of murder.
Slashdot Mirror
The average non-audiophile will never be able to tell the difference between a 128kbit stereo mp3 and a CD.
I'm not an audiophile, and I can tell the difference between a CD and 196kbit mp3. If you gave the average person the Pepsi Challenge with mp3s and CDs, I bet they could tell the difference too.
Why not put science in the hands of politicians? I've got one word for you: Lysenkoism.
The NSA is a political organization, not a scientific institution.
The NSA has some hella good mathematicians working for them. As others have already pointed out, the NSA has on occassion announced that certain cryptosystems are insecure before anyone on the outside had even developed the theorems necessary to attack the system.
And as any true tin-foil-hatter knows, the NSA developed quantum computers fifteen years ago.
They have vested interests in promoting standards 5-10 years behind their current technologies.
The side of the house interested in reading people's mail might, but the other half of the agency is interested in keeping secrets secret, and that means letting Americans have encryption that the Chinese can't break.
This is nothing compared to the story last year about the NSA tracking email to identify a terror cell in Britain. An astonishing number of Slashdot users were shocked to discover that the National Security Agency spies on people.
I've seen the Director's Commentary for other television shows like CSI, but then I had to pay upwards of $60US per season for the privildge.
Upwards of $60? Jeez are you ever watching the wrong shows. Most Fox owned series top out at $60 MSRP, and retail for $10-15 less than that.
If the spoilers I read for the final episode (two words: reset, button) are correct, then appalling is an understatement.
Not that this is the first time a Trek actor has complained about the awful writing of modern Trek. Robert Beltran was extremely vocal about how awful Voyager was.
Because all too often fans act like religious fanatics over mediocre drivel, which makes it easier for execs to dismiss the outcry when a truly great show like Firefly gets canceled.
Ummm... isn't this the FCC's job?
No, the FCC only has authority over broadcast media, because the radio spectrum is legally national property that's rented to private organizations. There are people out there who want the FCC to have control over satellite and landline communications, but that'd require an overhaul of their charter, and probably wouldn't pass legal muster.
No. Just about the only specific temperatures people care about in their daily lives is when rain turns to snow and ice. Using Celcius is very convenient -- if the temp is negative, it's freezing, if it's positive, it's not.
Except that it can snow, and even stick to the ground, when the air temperature is above freezing.
And if you aren't living at sea-level, things are even more muddled.
Most Austrians don't like his relatively recent conservative turn
Recent? He's been pretty open about leaning to the right for at least fifteen years.
However, I don't see why it would bar others convicted of similar violations from using it as a precedent example.
If they cannot ever do so, I'm interested in hearing how that works.
The spammer was convicted under a Virginia law. Virginia law only applies in 2% of US states. If the judge's decision sets a usable precedent, it only applies to spammers prosecuted in Virginia. (Of course, it may be that the judge's decision is based upon a particular error the prosecutor made, in which case it doesn't even apply in Virginia unless other prosecutors make the same mistake.)
Obviously Apple needs to take a page from PGP/GPG. "iTunes will now generate a playlist. Please move your mouse around the screen like an idiot until we're through."
On a more serious note, I wonder if it'd be possible to pull random data from the music files?
Am I the only one who remembers the older, better series.
Yes. The rest of us remember the older, crappier series.
Man, I wish I had mod points right now so I could get you for posting spoilers like that.
If it was caught and channeled we wouldn't be able to see it. Cos it would be caught and channeled.
So not only has this civilization built a Dyson sphere around their galaxy, but they've gotten around the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
You really shouldn't fanwank unless you have the entire series committed to memory.
If she's talking about her adoptive mother, it invalidates the entire scene.
Episode II is a great movie if you just hit the NEXT button every time Anakin and Padme are together in a non-battle scene.
Certainly the *manufacturers* of medicines will tell you to throw away all meds the instant they hit the expiration date (which is the lesser of the manuf.'s expiration date or 1 year from dispensing the med).
If you could get sued for millions of dollars if your product went bad, you'd hedge the expiration date too.
Rwanda
Yeah, and when the UN didn't step in, the US stepped right in and took care of things, right? Oh yeah... we were completely ineffective there too.
Um, you know, the UN did step in in Rwanda. The complaint against them is that they didn't accomplish anything -- if anything, they made matters worse by attracting people to safe-zones that turned out not to be safe.
I didn't claim that Stratego was a perfect mapping of a real-world battlefield, just that imperfect knowledge is a factor in real-world strategy, and Stratego can't be discounted as a strategy game for including it.
Stratego is like poker, you are playing against a person, not a board. The completely random
But a Stratego board isn't laid out randomly -- or if it is, you're playing against a fool. In fact, how you array your pieces in Stratego is itself a strategic decision since it determines how much defensive and offensive power you're going to have; and how you probe your opponent's forces is also a matter of strategy.
and unknown layout of the board makes for a very complex and entertaining, but not very strategic, game.
I don't see how imperfect knowledge of your opponent means the game doesn't require strategy -- certainly real-world strategians don't always know what pieces the other side has where.
Actually, I think most of the popular two player strategy games other than chess (like checkers, othello, mancalla, go) are harder to become good at than chess. Reason: In Chess, different pieces look different and are worth different amounts, strategically speaking.
Is there some reason why Stratego doesn't count as a strategy game?
In chess, there are approximately 71,000 possible board possitions after four moves, compared to over 16.7 billion in full board Go. Even on a simplified 5x5 board, there are more than 300,000 combos after four moves.
ummmm...i don't know what statistics class you took, but in mine every time you eliminate a possibility the likeliness of finding a collision would be greater than the previous since there are a finite amount of possibilities.
Which is all well and good once you have the algorithim running. But until you do, all you can say is that the odds of finding the right answer will be the same for any given attempt, be it first, last, or 1,000,002,193,439,329,010.
We may disagree on some of the smaller points of it, but the general principles are there. Don't steal, don't murder,
Yes, all cultures agree murder is wrong, but that's because murder is, by definition, the unlawful killing of a person. What constitutues an unlawful killing, however, has varied greatly from culture to culture. The Romans, for example, believed a head-of-household had an absolute, unquestionable right to kill his children, which is, by the standards of just about every Western culture since, one of the most heinous forms of murder.