Re:At least one counterexample.
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
A degree guarentees the people hiring you that you know what you say you know. It's that simple.
And I really don't think learning everything on your own is the best way to go. I'd much rather learn from a living, breathing human being than just a text book. Mainly because you can't ask text books questions.
Ziggy8675309asks: Has Metallica ever used or seen the Napster program? . . . metallica_lars_live: I've never been on any of these internet sites.
Lars, your response to that question speaks volumes about your ignorance on Napster and how it works.
So I'll ask the question again: Have you ever used Napster? Have you actually tried to get an understanding for yourself as to how the program works? You're a musician, not a computer geek, I understand that. When someone tells you about something that is going on in a field outside your own--especially if this someone is a lawyer or trusted advisor--you're going to trust them on it because you don't know about the subject yourself. But I urge you to anyway familiarize yourself with it.
Second question: Have your record sales been hurt as a result of Napster? Has there been any noticable either up or down?
If you answer no, then please stop to think about what you're gaining by suing Napster. Yes, you are in the legal right to do so, but are you really gaining anything? I am a long time fan of Metallica's music. I had not planned on buying Garage Inc. when it came out; I thought I wasn't interested in just covers. But when I heard an illegaly obtained mp3 of Turn The Page, I decided 40 seconds into the song that I was buying the album. I do not believe Napster poses a threat to your livliehood.
Third, from the Garage Inc. booklet:
But he [James] was astounded by the size and specialist depth of Ulrich's collection. It was, Hetfield says plainly, "fucking huge. . . . I would stay over at his place for days at a time, making tapes of his records and sleeping on the carpet."
That is no different than someone going on Napster and downloading a bunch of songs instead of buying the albums. How do you explain this?
Lastly, I'd just like to say that I find it unfortunate that what is likely to be the only chance to communicate with one of my favorite bands is under such circumstances. I've been a fan of your music for nearly a decade now. I understand your fears regarding Napster, and I agree with some of your points, but overall, I think you are making a mistake.
The reason is a simple matter of numbers. The number of people getting their music through Napster is more than the number of peopel getting their music through CD-Rs. I'm sure it happens, but it's not as much as Napster, thus not as harmful, and not as nearly easy to document.
I think what caused the confusion was that one of the early American founders was known to quote it. Samuel Johnson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, one of them, I think.
Please. What a load of crap. Free press means letting the press be free, i.e., not forcing it to do anything. That means allowing anyone to publish anything, regardles of who they are, or what they are saying.
You don't really seem to understand the word "free" in this context. It means free as in uninhibited.
I have every one of their albums (and two of the newer videos to boot), and I found this news very disheartening.
I love Metallica's music, and because of that, I wanted to hear their newest song, I Disapear, which is on the soon to be released Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, and is playing on the radio. So I used Napster to get the mp3. I have no intention of buying the MI2 soundtrack, but frankly, that doens't bother me, because Metallica would get such a small cut of that sale anyway, and I'm not buying a soundtrack for one song from one band.
On the other hand, a while back, I had no intentiontion of buy Garage Inc.--it's all covers, I said, I have no interest.
Then a friend sent me the mp3 of Turn The Page. I bought Garage Inc. three days later. I would not have bought that album if it wasn't for the mp3 I heard, and I'm was (and still am) very satisfied with the purchase.
Wrong. That's the records stores raping you. I bought Garage Inc. and S&M for $18 (both are two CDs, over two hours of music), and all of the others for $12-13. Metallica does not control how high stores price their CDs.
Skins not required, eh? Have you seen the default skin (or "package," as they call it; it has functionaltiy beyond just a skin) for Netscape 6? Ugliest thing in the world. I certainly consider it a requirement to change that abomination.
Problem is, there aren't any packages out for Netscape 6 that both look good and are fully functional. (By "look good" I mean not god-awful ugly, and the buttons are relatively small so the interface doesn't take up a large chunk of my viewing area.)
Customization is good and all, but it's not an excuse to neglect to make a good UI in the first place.
Bingo. Couldn't have said it better myself. I interned around capitol hill (at the ACLU, to be precise; it's a stone's throw away from the Supreme Court), so I would pass the Supreme Court and the Capitol whenever I went in.
I passed the group of people (like six or seven, ten max) protesting Mitnick's imprisonment on the day people were supposed to protest at federal courts around the country, and man was that sad. They just seemed to stay huddled in their group, not really approaching people (killing the point of disseminating information).
Another day, a few weeks ago, a friend and I got bored, so we just walked around the Capital area. There was some protest going on (well, it was more a rally since it was sponsored by a congressman) about health care. I agreed with what they were saying (health care for everyone, even if it would cost more money), but I couldn't help but think "What are they accomplishing?"
Protests like this are masturbation. You don't really accomplish anything other than make yourself feel better because you at least did something. Protests don't get the eyes of policy makers unless you capture the eyes of the public, and the public probably doesn't care about a protest like this. It's just another protest; the people who work in DC are used to seeing them, it's not much new.
In short, if you really want something done about the DMCA, a protest isn't the answer. You need to find a real means of change, not just an outlet.
I was wondering why Mozilla was god-awful ugly. It's looks are based off of a god-awful ugly website.
The first thing I did after installing Mozilla (Win32 version) was look for a way to change the looks--reduce the size of the top navigation bar, change the color scheme, anything. Someone can sit there are say that the looks don't matter, but when the navigation colors and icons are so egregious that they distract my eyes from the current webpage I'm looking at, there is a definite design problem at hand. Things like the navigation bar should not be a visual focus. I use my web browser to look at web pages, I don't go to web pages so I can look at my web broswer.
Of course, then it crashed when I tried to view a page's source code, so I only still have it on my computer as a novelty. Ugly, crashy, I'll pass. Netscape 4.7 may not be the most stable piece of work, but it's definitely more dependable than Mozilla is.
Oh, and irony alert: The bug reporting program wasn't working properly either. I made an honest attempt to report exactly why it crashed, but I stopped trying to get it to work after the third of fourth crash.
Re:Accuratly calculating Pi
on
Happy Pi Day!
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· Score: 1
I can't tell if you these people are off in their calculation of pi, but I can tell you that you can not generate random numbers in software. Think about it. If you can write a program to generate a set of numbers, it is, by definition, not random. You can't use deterministic means to achieve randomness. Using things like the OSes time/date stamp, you can achieve pseudo-random numbers that would repeat after a few hundred thousand iterations, but that's still not random.
After the movie, I said to my friends "I would have loved that movie if I was ten." My friend thought he would have found it incredibley boring and over his head if he was ten, but that's the type of thing I would have liked at that age.
Know what though? Doesn't do shit for me now. This movie wasn't aimed at ten-year-olds either. I paid $8.50 for it, and it most certainly wasn't worth that or my time.
Star Wars is fantasy just as much as it is sicence fiction. This movie isn't just science fiction, it tries to be realistic science fiction.
And the movie being bad has nothing to do with the physics. Well, it certainly helps, but it was bad otherwise. The three friends I saw it with have the physics knowledge of your average movie-goer, and still thought it sucked.
Good science fiction doesn't invalidate what is known to be true. Good science fiction tries to answer questions that haven't been answered yet. (Meaning the fiction parts can't be proven false, like warp speed; you can't prove travel beyond the speed of light is impossible, even though it contradicts current theories.)
And science aside, the movie was still bad. Bad dialouge, bad story (took them forever to get to the point of the movie), and did anyone else notice the score? It sounded downright awful in some places.
Nope (re: water in face freezing and boiling.) Check out a Straight Dope on the very same subject.
Or that the hook wasn't that heavy.
Doesn't matter. Momentum is mass times velocity. If Robbins impacted with that spacecraft at 32 m/s, the hook was traveling faster than that, maybe twice that. She wouldn't move back too fast--maybe 5, 10 m/s--but it would have made a difference giving the circumstances.
I certainly won't get them all, but here's what I caught:
The whole greenhouse thing has been slammed by several people, so I'll pass on that.
When Tim Robbins removed his helmet. Ummm... no. His face wouldn't freeze immediately. It wouldn't freeze at all. See, space isn't "cold." It doesn't have a temperature; what we consider heat is a function of moving particles. Space doesn't have any particles to move, so no temperature. It's called a heat sink. Anyway, his death wouldn't be instant, it would be plain death by of asphyxiation. Guess that would have been too gruesome for a PG movie sanctioned by NASA.
I'm no expert, but I think a freaking hull breach would immediately compromise the ship, not some slowly draining thing. That seemed too damned slow and leisurely.
Liquids don't freeze when they go out into space. They boil. We think of boiling as happening at high temperatures, but what is really going on is that the particles are moving fast enough to escape the air pressure keeping them in liquid form. If there is no air pressure, you boil at any temperature. After boiling, it would immediately sublimate, so you'd get a cloud of crystaline particles. Or something close to that.
When Tim Robbin's wife tried to save him by shooting her handy-dandy grappling hook thingy. Violates the law of convservation of momentum. Both her and the hook are stationary. Momenum = 0. She is stationary, hook is moving. Momentum = greater than zero. Not possible. What would happen is that the hook would move at a certain velocity, and then she would move backwards at a lesser velocity. Consider one velocity negative, the other positive (doesn't matter which way it goes), and the total momentum would be zero. Momentum would then be convserved. (The hook's mass times the hook's velocity plus her mass times her volicty.)
They spun the other half the ship so they could have what passes for gravity. Fine. But they stop that spinning at one point. If they stopped that spinning, conservation of angular momentum would come into play, and the entire ship would start spinning, ableit slower than the part.
As a general rule for CD-Rs, if the CD-R recorder is a stand-alone machine designed to copy primarily audio, rather than data or video, then the copying is allowed. If the CD-R recorder is a computer component, or a computer peripheral device designed to be a multi-purpose recorder (in other words, if it will record data and video as well as audio), then copying is not allowed.
So I can use a stereo that is capable of recording CDs to copy a CD, but I can't use a computer with a CD-R in it to copy CDs, even though they contain the (basicaly) the same hardware. The only real difference is the interface you have with the hardware. Riiiiiight.
They might as well just say "If there's possibility of the music getting onto a computer, then you can't do it," because that's what they're trying to do. Instead of saying that, they're blocking every means they can think of to achieve it in an ass-backwards kind of way.
Why aren't they worried about contaminating Jupiter? One very simple reason: It's a giant ball of gas. I don't think you're going to find any water there, and I certainly don't think you're going to find any life. It's essentially a star that almost-was.
Slashdot Mirror
And I really don't think learning everything on your own is the best way to go. I'd much rather learn from a living, breathing human being than just a text book. Mainly because you can't ask text books questions.
- Ziggy8675309asks: Has Metallica ever used or seen the Napster program?
Lars, your response to that question speaks volumes about your ignorance on Napster and how it works.. . .
metallica_lars_live: I've never been on any of these internet sites.
So I'll ask the question again: Have you ever used Napster? Have you actually tried to get an understanding for yourself as to how the program works? You're a musician, not a computer geek, I understand that. When someone tells you about something that is going on in a field outside your own--especially if this someone is a lawyer or trusted advisor--you're going to trust them on it because you don't know about the subject yourself. But I urge you to anyway familiarize yourself with it.
Second question: Have your record sales been hurt as a result of Napster? Has there been any noticable either up or down?
If you answer no, then please stop to think about what you're gaining by suing Napster. Yes, you are in the legal right to do so, but are you really gaining anything? I am a long time fan of Metallica's music. I had not planned on buying Garage Inc. when it came out; I thought I wasn't interested in just covers. But when I heard an illegaly obtained mp3 of Turn The Page, I decided 40 seconds into the song that I was buying the album. I do not believe Napster poses a threat to your livliehood.
Third, from the Garage Inc. booklet:
- But he [James] was astounded by the size and specialist depth of Ulrich's collection. It was, Hetfield says plainly, "fucking huge. . . . I would stay over at his place for days at a time, making tapes of his records and sleeping on the carpet."
That is no different than someone going on Napster and downloading a bunch of songs instead of buying the albums. How do you explain this?Lastly, I'd just like to say that I find it unfortunate that what is likely to be the only chance to communicate with one of my favorite bands is under such circumstances. I've been a fan of your music for nearly a decade now. I understand your fears regarding Napster, and I agree with some of your points, but overall, I think you are making a mistake.
Scott Schneider
scschnei@vt.edu
The reason is a simple matter of numbers. The number of people getting their music through Napster is more than the number of peopel getting their music through CD-Rs. I'm sure it happens, but it's not as much as Napster, thus not as harmful, and not as nearly easy to document.
There are no laws that say men in prison can't write articles for a newspaper. I don't see how this is any different.
I think what caused the confusion was that one of the early American founders was known to quote it. Samuel Johnson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, one of them, I think.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
No, not the labor of the people to manufacture the CDs, but the labor of the band to produce the music.
Some things are worth more than the sum of their parts.
I'm a god-fearing Atheist. I don't belive in the Judeo-Christian god, but I'm scared he does in fact exist.
Please. What a load of crap. Free press means letting the press be free, i.e., not forcing it to do anything. That means allowing anyone to publish anything, regardles of who they are, or what they are saying.
You don't really seem to understand the word "free" in this context. It means free as in uninhibited.
I love Metallica's music, and because of that, I wanted to hear their newest song, I Disapear, which is on the soon to be released Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, and is playing on the radio. So I used Napster to get the mp3. I have no intention of buying the MI2 soundtrack, but frankly, that doens't bother me, because Metallica would get such a small cut of that sale anyway, and I'm not buying a soundtrack for one song from one band.
On the other hand, a while back, I had no intentiontion of buy Garage Inc.--it's all covers, I said, I have no interest.
Then a friend sent me the mp3 of Turn The Page. I bought Garage Inc. three days later. I would not have bought that album if it wasn't for the mp3 I heard, and I'm was (and still am) very satisfied with the purchase.
This is still a very disturbing turn of events.
Wrong. That's the records stores raping you. I bought Garage Inc. and S&M for $18 (both are two CDs, over two hours of music), and all of the others for $12-13. Metallica does not control how high stores price their CDs.
Problem is, there aren't any packages out for Netscape 6 that both look good and are fully functional. (By "look good" I mean not god-awful ugly, and the buttons are relatively small so the interface doesn't take up a large chunk of my viewing area.)
Customization is good and all, but it's not an excuse to neglect to make a good UI in the first place.
I passed the group of people (like six or seven, ten max) protesting Mitnick's imprisonment on the day people were supposed to protest at federal courts around the country, and man was that sad. They just seemed to stay huddled in their group, not really approaching people (killing the point of disseminating information).
Another day, a few weeks ago, a friend and I got bored, so we just walked around the Capital area. There was some protest going on (well, it was more a rally since it was sponsored by a congressman) about health care. I agreed with what they were saying (health care for everyone, even if it would cost more money), but I couldn't help but think "What are they accomplishing?"
Protests like this are masturbation. You don't really accomplish anything other than make yourself feel better because you at least did something. Protests don't get the eyes of policy makers unless you capture the eyes of the public, and the public probably doesn't care about a protest like this. It's just another protest; the people who work in DC are used to seeing them, it's not much new.
In short, if you really want something done about the DMCA, a protest isn't the answer. You need to find a real means of change, not just an outlet.
The first thing I did after installing Mozilla (Win32 version) was look for a way to change the looks--reduce the size of the top navigation bar, change the color scheme, anything. Someone can sit there are say that the looks don't matter, but when the navigation colors and icons are so egregious that they distract my eyes from the current webpage I'm looking at, there is a definite design problem at hand. Things like the navigation bar should not be a visual focus. I use my web browser to look at web pages, I don't go to web pages so I can look at my web broswer.
Of course, then it crashed when I tried to view a page's source code, so I only still have it on my computer as a novelty. Ugly, crashy, I'll pass. Netscape 4.7 may not be the most stable piece of work, but it's definitely more dependable than Mozilla is.
Oh, and irony alert: The bug reporting program wasn't working properly either. I made an honest attempt to report exactly why it crashed, but I stopped trying to get it to work after the third of fourth crash.
I can't tell if you these people are off in their calculation of pi, but I can tell you that you can not generate random numbers in software. Think about it. If you can write a program to generate a set of numbers, it is, by definition, not random. You can't use deterministic means to achieve randomness. Using things like the OSes time/date stamp, you can achieve pseudo-random numbers that would repeat after a few hundred thousand iterations, but that's still not random.
Straight Dope on space with no suit
You must have missed the "180 days later" text at the bottom of the screen.
Know what though? Doesn't do shit for me now. This movie wasn't aimed at ten-year-olds either. I paid $8.50 for it, and it most certainly wasn't worth that or my time.
And the movie being bad has nothing to do with the physics. Well, it certainly helps, but it was bad otherwise. The three friends I saw it with have the physics knowledge of your average movie-goer, and still thought it sucked.
And science aside, the movie was still bad. Bad dialouge, bad story (took them forever to get to the point of the movie), and did anyone else notice the score? It sounded downright awful in some places.
Or that the hook wasn't that heavy.
Doesn't matter. Momentum is mass times velocity. If Robbins impacted with that spacecraft at 32 m/s, the hook was traveling faster than that, maybe twice that. She wouldn't move back too fast--maybe 5, 10 m/s--but it would have made a difference giving the circumstances.
- The whole greenhouse thing has been slammed by several people, so I'll pass on that.
- When Tim Robbins removed his helmet. Ummm... no. His face wouldn't freeze immediately. It wouldn't freeze at all. See, space isn't "cold." It doesn't have a temperature; what we consider heat is a function of moving particles. Space doesn't have any particles to move, so no temperature. It's called a heat sink. Anyway, his death wouldn't be instant, it would be plain death by of asphyxiation. Guess that would have been too gruesome for a PG movie sanctioned by NASA.
- I'm no expert, but I think a freaking hull breach would immediately compromise the ship, not some slowly draining thing. That seemed too damned slow and leisurely.
- Liquids don't freeze when they go out into space. They boil. We think of boiling as happening at high temperatures, but what is really going on is that the particles are moving fast enough to escape the air pressure keeping them in liquid form. If there is no air pressure, you boil at any temperature. After boiling, it would immediately sublimate, so you'd get a cloud of crystaline particles. Or something close to that.
- When Tim Robbin's wife tried to save him by shooting her handy-dandy grappling hook thingy. Violates the law of convservation of momentum. Both her and the hook are stationary. Momenum = 0. She is stationary, hook is moving. Momentum = greater than zero. Not possible. What would happen is that the hook would move at a certain velocity, and then she would move backwards at a lesser velocity. Consider one velocity negative, the other positive (doesn't matter which way it goes), and the total momentum would be zero. Momentum would then be convserved. (The hook's mass times the hook's velocity plus her mass times her volicty.)
- They spun the other half the ship so they could have what passes for gravity. Fine. But they stop that spinning at one point. If they stopped that spinning, conservation of angular momentum would come into play, and the entire ship would start spinning, ableit slower than the part.
That's about all I could catch. Anyone else?They might as well just say "If there's possibility of the music getting onto a computer, then you can't do it," because that's what they're trying to do. Instead of saying that, they're blocking every means they can think of to achieve it in an ass-backwards kind of way.
If there is a lifeform that can survive in Jupiter, I don't think some microbes from a dinky spacecraft are going to do it much harm.
Why aren't they worried about contaminating Jupiter? One very simple reason: It's a giant ball of gas. I don't think you're going to find any water there, and I certainly don't think you're going to find any life. It's essentially a star that almost-was.