Aldous Huxley had it more right then George Orwell: distract the people with luxuries and short term goals, at the expense of long-term freedoms. That said, his dystopia was arguably not one: it wasn't like those who brooked changed were murdered or imprisoned or tortured - they were just discredited and lavished with benefits, but ultimately kept irrelevant.
I wondered about that for a while. It's cheaper and easier to tell people you're shipping them off to a magical fantasy island of misfits then blowing their complacent brains out than it is to actually build and maintain a magical fantasy island of misfits. If it's really all full of alpha-pluses surely some would've found their way back to mainstream society by that point? It's open ended in the sense that Huxley never comes out and says it one way or another (they are never shown on the island in the book), but certainly Bernard was pretty upset by the prospect, maybe he suspected the real truth.
90 these days. And gearing up from heroic instances is enough to get you into Mogu'shan Vaults LFR, although being flung in with 24 other random people can be a bit of a trying experience.
Mogu'shan is weaksauce in LFR. Heart of Fear will still faceroll an incompetent group just because the fight mechanics are hardcore and twitchy. Oddly, once you finish that up Terrace of Endless Spring is back to easymode. Go figure.
We should also devote equal time in astronomy to the hypothesis that the Sun revolves around the Earth...
Well, you could use a reference frame in which the sun revolves around the Earth, it is entirely up to you which frame you choose to work in. However, just as with the "earth revolving around the moon" reference frame, the equations *quickly* become unwieldy, error prone, and exceedingly difficult to work with.
I've got a full blade enclosure drawing 2700W currently for 16 servers ( ~= 168W/server) . I'm a little incredulous that your server, even non-blade, is pulling 5x that amount continuously.
'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.'
Gavin Newsom, present. This guy is a political diva. Don't pay attention to him. His book and his overall schtick are pure self-promotion. In California, "lieutenant governor" means "guy who has no duties whatsoever and is there in case the governor dies or something."
Definitely. It's pretty much thinking like a one year old playing peek-a-boo. The thinking is that if I don't see it then it's not there. Those full time teams are still there they just don't work for you specifically anymore. And you're still paying for all of their time that they devote to you.
I think the perfect fit for cloud, outside of the above mentioned small business, is in the 3rd party app space. It makes sense to me for vendors to offer hosted solutions in the cloud, instead of dealing with each client's personal hardware choice, configuration standard, etc. I'm a big fan of cloud in that regard, but too often it's just a stupid buzzword.
I agree with you to a point. Certain apps that are easily commiditized are great for hosting in the cloud. Especially where complex network configuration is involved (I'm looking at *you* Mobile Device Management). But there are many third party apps that seem like you could foist off into the cloud that just require so much customization, tweaking, and ongoing maintenance that you just can't afford to have them out of your control. Any engineering app for instance, and certainly any business management platform like SAP would be right out.
When it says the days of man will be 120 years (Genesis 6:3) it's referring to the time until the flood wipes out most of them. The closest reference to how old a person can live is in Psalm 90:10 where it says 70 years, or 80 if he is strong enough. It's not so much a hard and fast line in the sand as it is a kind of "warranty now expired" kind of thing. And it is pretty consistent with observed life expectancy. Of course, out of 7 billion+ people on the world some freak is going to make to 120+ years at some point.
I thought political speech was even better protected in the US? Or doesn't it count if it's by a dictator who isn't propped up by the Pentagon?
Thing is, a private company can do whatever they want in the way of censorship. The law and the constitution protect you from the government impinging upon your rights. My guess is that YouTube would have removed this trash anyway eventually, and they are under no obligation to respect "free speech" rights. Moreover, it wasn't the government that requested the takedown, it was Activision. And YouTube did so. I'm all about defending the constitution and everything, but there's really no grist here for that mill.
The biggest poll of world opinion was carried out by Gallup International in 37 countries in late September (Gallup International 2001). It found that apart from the US, Israel and India a majority of people in every country surveyed preferred extradition and trial of suspects to a US attack.
This was what we wanted as well. Then the Taliban told us to go fuck ourselves. Then we blew the shit out of them. Every country in the world either got behind us or was at least smart enough to get out of the way of the injured, rabid, bulldog that Afghanistan had just poked with a stick.
I'm with you in that Iraq was unjustified and stupid and nobody had any business in that mess (least of all the U.S.), and you can argue that Afghanistan has been poorly managed, but that initial invasion was inevitable and pretty thoroughly justified.
To connect up with a more current possibility - if North Korea were to do something as thoroughly boneheaded as the launch and detonate a nuclear weapon at the western seaboard of the United States I am absolutely certain that Britain, Israel, and probably the majority of the free world would jump on board with an invasion. Heck, if NK was that utterly stupid, China would probably bitch slap them for it.
It's like when Iran got upset about the way the movie "300" portrayed Persians as bloodthirsty psychos. I said it then and I'll say it now: Americans are too ignorant to make that connection. Hell, few Americans realize that Iranians are not Arabs. Even fewer will know enough about Turkish architecture to figure out that maybe Jabba's Lego palace looks vaguely like a real palace in Turkey. It really is a silly thing to be upset about.
Eclipse is the emacs of the IDE world. It tries to be everything to everyone - infinite customizability, plugins, addons, tweaks you can make...it is at the point where for a new user it is really difficult to get a starting point to go from, and finding simple commands can be a PITA to find since they're in non-obvious (unless you've been using Eclipse for years) places.
NetBeans does a better job of exposing the functionality you need, though the extensibility is more limited (like vi or nano).
Which makes sense. If your buddy walked over into a bush and a saber-toothed tiger ate him, you would probably want to avoid that bush forever. The problem is that our wiring is fundamentally unchanged since our caveman days, and technology has introduced a host of problems that we are ill-equipped to deal with. As much as we like to think of ourselves as "enlightened" our fundamental reactions to base stimuli (food, sex, violence, fear) have not and likely will not change in any appreciable degree.
I think it would be way more interesting (and revealing) to ask them to do FizzBuzz *without* using the mod function. See how many different approaches and answers you get, and challenge them on their decision, making them defend their chosen method.
Why would this hinder piracy? This is just about pixel resolution, and file-size, no?
Because of the file sizes involved. An uncompressed movie would be about 3.6TB, so if you achieved 50% reduction through compression it's still 1.8TB.
The 50% improvement is supposed to be over and above what h.264 gets. I.E. it will take a Blu-ray from 34GB compressed down to 17GB compressed. Although, I'm a bit skeptical that you can get that much of an improvement without sacrificing something of image quality.
Incidentally, your numbers are not horribly far off if you are considering lossless compression - ratios from 2:1 - 4:1 are about as good as it gets. But then you're preserving CCD noise and other digital artifacts that really have no bearing on the scene and aren't noticeable to the eye. That's why, for the foreseeable future, videos will be compressed with lossy compression.
I think it's intentional. They make Win8's interface as utterly horrid as possible, and then when Win9 comes out with a more streamlined (but still heavily locked-in) interface it will look like the second coming by comparison.
It's like you're still being beaten and whipped, but now it's only half as bad so it's kind of a relief.
Oh, I'm sure what the kids did was stupid, dangerous, and put the parents at risk. I was merely making the point that not all drugs that knock you out have a lethal side effect at much beyond the therapeutic dose.
The original article didn't state where they got the drugs from. Ketamine is used fairly extensively in animal medicine (especially as a horse tranquilizer) and may or may not be readily accessible to teens if they have close contact with a country vet, for instance.
And finally, you are correct that ketamine has been indirectly responsible for deaths because people are paralyzed and they burn/drown/freeze/whatever, but there were no cases (that I know of) where death was a direct result of ketamine overdose. In any case I'm sure these kids don't know jack about pharmacology or common sense and I am glad that the law slapped 'em down.
The line between a dose that will reliably put a random person out against their will and what can shut down breathing or perhaps cause vomit aspiration is famously thin when you don't know about drug interactions, medical conditions, if they drank a couple beers on the way home, etc. etc.
Well, it does depend on the drug. Ketamine for instance will knock people out (welcome to the K-hole!) but the risk of overdosing is minimal since it actually increases blood pressure and doesn't depress breathing. For that reason it's a preferred anesthetic for less than ideal situations (battlefield, triage center, disaster areas) because it is damn hard to accidentally kill someone with it, but damn easy to knock them out reliably.
The 1 petabyte is going to include rough cuts, edits, deleted scenes, CGI models, textures, concept art, storyboards, and basically a crapton of supporting files and datasets. Your realistic data-->project throughput is more likely on the order of 200-300MB/s for raw HD 3D display. Still a lot, but decidedly feasible.
And what goes to your local theater is more than likely compressed in some fashion, at least down to Blue-Ray (or maybe slightly higher). I would be surprised if the final cut delivered to the theater was much over 100GB.
Even for 48fps 3D, it would require less than 2TB/hour of uncompressed 4:2:2 video (at 1920x1080), so although nobody is shipping a petabyte around, it's possible that the uncompressed data is being shipped around.
Except that they're probably storing it with some kind of RGBA (32-bit) uncompressed standard, which brings you to ~2.6TB/hour. And then if you decide to shoot it in 4K (4096x2160) that brings you to 11.2TB/hour or a bit over 30TB for the raw version of The Hobbit (48fps, 3-D). Now add in all of the rough cuts, editing revisions, unused footage, CGI, and everything else and you could see it *very* easily getting up over a petabyte. That's just for the studio though. What goes out the door, even in its rawest form, wouldn't get anywhere close to that.
As an aside, even ridiculously oversampled audio, running at 192k, 96-bit, 8 channels, and uncompressed is only going to run you ~62GB / hour.
Presumably when you're cleaning a firearm you have rendered it inoperable before point the muzzle all over the place. Rule I becomes irrelevant (okay it's loaded but it's not going to fire so BFD), and Rule II...so if it magically fired while you were cleaning it, you would be willing to take the responsibility for that (and it would also be assumed that you're not being a dick and pointing the gun at a kid or your spouse as you're cleaning it).
There's a corollary to rule I: Even if you just watched your friend unload and clear the chamber, the ammo fairies will have reloaded the gun before he handed it to you. It is STILL LOADED.
Slashdot Mirror
Aldous Huxley had it more right then George Orwell: distract the people with luxuries and short term goals, at the expense of long-term freedoms. That said, his dystopia was arguably not one: it wasn't like those who brooked changed were murdered or imprisoned or tortured - they were just discredited and lavished with benefits, but ultimately kept irrelevant.
I wondered about that for a while. It's cheaper and easier to tell people you're shipping them off to a magical fantasy island of misfits then blowing their complacent brains out than it is to actually build and maintain a magical fantasy island of misfits. If it's really all full of alpha-pluses surely some would've found their way back to mainstream society by that point? It's open ended in the sense that Huxley never comes out and says it one way or another (they are never shown on the island in the book), but certainly Bernard was pretty upset by the prospect, maybe he suspected the real truth.
90 these days. And gearing up from heroic instances is enough to get you into Mogu'shan Vaults LFR, although being flung in with 24 other random people can be a bit of a trying experience.
Mogu'shan is weaksauce in LFR. Heart of Fear will still faceroll an incompetent group just because the fight mechanics are hardcore and twitchy. Oddly, once you finish that up Terrace of Endless Spring is back to easymode. Go figure.
We should also devote equal time in astronomy to the hypothesis that the Sun revolves around the Earth...
Well, you could use a reference frame in which the sun revolves around the Earth, it is entirely up to you which frame you choose to work in. However, just as with the "earth revolving around the moon" reference frame, the equations *quickly* become unwieldy, error prone, and exceedingly difficult to work with.
I've got a full blade enclosure drawing 2700W currently for 16 servers ( ~= 168W/server) . I'm a little incredulous that your server, even non-blade, is pulling 5x that amount continuously.
'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.'
Gavin Newsom, present. This guy is a political diva. Don't pay attention to him. His book and his overall schtick are pure self-promotion. In California, "lieutenant governor" means "guy who has no duties whatsoever and is there in case the governor dies or something."
Definitely. It's pretty much thinking like a one year old playing peek-a-boo. The thinking is that if I don't see it then it's not there. Those full time teams are still there they just don't work for you specifically anymore. And you're still paying for all of their time that they devote to you.
I think the perfect fit for cloud, outside of the above mentioned small business, is in the 3rd party app space. It makes sense to me for vendors to offer hosted solutions in the cloud, instead of dealing with each client's personal hardware choice, configuration standard, etc. I'm a big fan of cloud in that regard, but too often it's just a stupid buzzword.
I agree with you to a point. Certain apps that are easily commiditized are great for hosting in the cloud. Especially where complex network configuration is involved (I'm looking at *you* Mobile Device Management). But there are many third party apps that seem like you could foist off into the cloud that just require so much customization, tweaking, and ongoing maintenance that you just can't afford to have them out of your control. Any engineering app for instance, and certainly any business management platform like SAP would be right out.
When it says the days of man will be 120 years (Genesis 6:3) it's referring to the time until the flood wipes out most of them. The closest reference to how old a person can live is in Psalm 90:10 where it says 70 years, or 80 if he is strong enough. It's not so much a hard and fast line in the sand as it is a kind of "warranty now expired" kind of thing. And it is pretty consistent with observed life expectancy. Of course, out of 7 billion+ people on the world some freak is going to make to 120+ years at some point.
Conveniently written about the same time as the second linked forum post!
I thought political speech was even better protected in the US? Or doesn't it count if it's by a dictator who isn't propped up by the Pentagon?
Thing is, a private company can do whatever they want in the way of censorship. The law and the constitution protect you from the government impinging upon your rights. My guess is that YouTube would have removed this trash anyway eventually, and they are under no obligation to respect "free speech" rights. Moreover, it wasn't the government that requested the takedown, it was Activision. And YouTube did so. I'm all about defending the constitution and everything, but there's really no grist here for that mill.
we could be quite certain the Israelis and Brits would get beat up with us
You are joking right? You do realise that in 2001, 75% of the British public did not want to be part of the Afghan war. http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/154/26553.htm1
From your linked article:
The biggest poll of world opinion was carried out by Gallup International in 37 countries in late September (Gallup International 2001). It found that apart from the US, Israel and India a majority of people in every country surveyed preferred extradition and trial of suspects to a US attack.
This was what we wanted as well. Then the Taliban told us to go fuck ourselves. Then we blew the shit out of them. Every country in the world either got behind us or was at least smart enough to get out of the way of the injured, rabid, bulldog that Afghanistan had just poked with a stick.
I'm with you in that Iraq was unjustified and stupid and nobody had any business in that mess (least of all the U.S.), and you can argue that Afghanistan has been poorly managed, but that initial invasion was inevitable and pretty thoroughly justified.
To connect up with a more current possibility - if North Korea were to do something as thoroughly boneheaded as the launch and detonate a nuclear weapon at the western seaboard of the United States I am absolutely certain that Britain, Israel, and probably the majority of the free world would jump on board with an invasion. Heck, if NK was that utterly stupid, China would probably bitch slap them for it.
It's like when Iran got upset about the way the movie "300" portrayed Persians as bloodthirsty psychos. I said it then and I'll say it now: Americans are too ignorant to make that connection. Hell, few Americans realize that Iranians are not Arabs. Even fewer will know enough about Turkish architecture to figure out that maybe Jabba's Lego palace looks vaguely like a real palace in Turkey. It really is a silly thing to be upset about.
Eclipse is the emacs of the IDE world. It tries to be everything to everyone - infinite customizability, plugins, addons, tweaks you can make...it is at the point where for a new user it is really difficult to get a starting point to go from, and finding simple commands can be a PITA to find since they're in non-obvious (unless you've been using Eclipse for years) places.
NetBeans does a better job of exposing the functionality you need, though the extensibility is more limited (like vi or nano).
Which makes sense. If your buddy walked over into a bush and a saber-toothed tiger ate him, you would probably want to avoid that bush forever. The problem is that our wiring is fundamentally unchanged since our caveman days, and technology has introduced a host of problems that we are ill-equipped to deal with. As much as we like to think of ourselves as "enlightened" our fundamental reactions to base stimuli (food, sex, violence, fear) have not and likely will not change in any appreciable degree.
I think it would be way more interesting (and revealing) to ask them to do FizzBuzz *without* using the mod function. See how many different approaches and answers you get, and challenge them on their decision, making them defend their chosen method.
Why would this hinder piracy? This is just about pixel resolution, and file-size, no?
Because of the file sizes involved. An uncompressed movie would be about 3.6TB, so if you achieved 50% reduction through compression it's still 1.8TB.
The 50% improvement is supposed to be over and above what h.264 gets. I.E. it will take a Blu-ray from 34GB compressed down to 17GB compressed. Although, I'm a bit skeptical that you can get that much of an improvement without sacrificing something of image quality.
Incidentally, your numbers are not horribly far off if you are considering lossless compression - ratios from 2:1 - 4:1 are about as good as it gets. But then you're preserving CCD noise and other digital artifacts that really have no bearing on the scene and aren't noticeable to the eye. That's why, for the foreseeable future, videos will be compressed with lossy compression.
I think it's intentional. They make Win8's interface as utterly horrid as possible, and then when Win9 comes out with a more streamlined (but still heavily locked-in) interface it will look like the second coming by comparison.
It's like you're still being beaten and whipped, but now it's only half as bad so it's kind of a relief.
Oh, I'm sure what the kids did was stupid, dangerous, and put the parents at risk. I was merely making the point that not all drugs that knock you out have a lethal side effect at much beyond the therapeutic dose.
The original article didn't state where they got the drugs from. Ketamine is used fairly extensively in animal medicine (especially as a horse tranquilizer) and may or may not be readily accessible to teens if they have close contact with a country vet, for instance.
And finally, you are correct that ketamine has been indirectly responsible for deaths because people are paralyzed and they burn/drown/freeze/whatever, but there were no cases (that I know of) where death was a direct result of ketamine overdose. In any case I'm sure these kids don't know jack about pharmacology or common sense and I am glad that the law slapped 'em down.
"I am not a doctor"
It shows.
The line between a dose that will reliably put a random person out against their will and what can shut down breathing or perhaps cause vomit aspiration is famously thin when you don't know about drug interactions, medical conditions, if they drank a couple beers on the way home, etc. etc.
Well, it does depend on the drug. Ketamine for instance will knock people out (welcome to the K-hole!) but the risk of overdosing is minimal since it actually increases blood pressure and doesn't depress breathing. For that reason it's a preferred anesthetic for less than ideal situations (battlefield, triage center, disaster areas) because it is damn hard to accidentally kill someone with it, but damn easy to knock them out reliably.
The assumption that parents/police/government know best is wrong.
Obvious troll is obvious.
The 1 petabyte is going to include rough cuts, edits, deleted scenes, CGI models, textures, concept art, storyboards, and basically a crapton of supporting files and datasets. Your realistic data-->project throughput is more likely on the order of 200-300MB/s for raw HD 3D display. Still a lot, but decidedly feasible.
And what goes to your local theater is more than likely compressed in some fashion, at least down to Blue-Ray (or maybe slightly higher). I would be surprised if the final cut delivered to the theater was much over 100GB.
Even for 48fps 3D, it would require less than 2TB/hour of uncompressed 4:2:2 video (at 1920x1080), so although nobody is shipping a petabyte around, it's possible that the uncompressed data is being shipped around.
Except that they're probably storing it with some kind of RGBA (32-bit) uncompressed standard, which brings you to ~2.6TB/hour. And then if you decide to shoot it in 4K (4096x2160) that brings you to 11.2TB/hour or a bit over 30TB for the raw version of The Hobbit (48fps, 3-D). Now add in all of the rough cuts, editing revisions, unused footage, CGI, and everything else and you could see it *very* easily getting up over a petabyte. That's just for the studio though. What goes out the door, even in its rawest form, wouldn't get anywhere close to that.
As an aside, even ridiculously oversampled audio, running at 192k, 96-bit, 8 channels, and uncompressed is only going to run you ~62GB / hour.
No. Guns are designed to discharge a projectile at a high velocity. That is all.
They are not designed to hammer in nails, mow your lawn, or kill.
Incidentally, a 12 gauge shotgun makes an excellent tree trimmer for high and hard to reach branches, at least, out in the country =)
And even then, you always treat it as if it were loaded. Even when you know it isn't -- especially when you know it isn't.
I'm fond of saying: the second your are sure a gun isn't loaded is the same second the magic ammo fairies loaded it without you knowing.
Presumably when you're cleaning a firearm you have rendered it inoperable before point the muzzle all over the place. Rule I becomes irrelevant (okay it's loaded but it's not going to fire so BFD), and Rule II...so if it magically fired while you were cleaning it, you would be willing to take the responsibility for that (and it would also be assumed that you're not being a dick and pointing the gun at a kid or your spouse as you're cleaning it).
There's a corollary to rule I:
Even if you just watched your friend unload and clear the chamber, the ammo fairies will have reloaded the gun before he handed it to you. It is STILL LOADED.