I wouldn't. More than likely Bond has already had a date with her, and I don't want to be diagnosed with diseases Bond1 -Bond18
. Better to have a cool gadget in my book -- if You Only Live Twice I'm not going to waste one of my lives suffering with venerial diseases.
Hmm... you could make a case that CD/DVD manufacturing equipment makes piracy possible... including the CD/DVD manufacturing equipment the MPAA and RIAA member companies (or the manufacturing companies they hire) use to stamp the CDs. It would be a shame if those companies couldn't use their equipment to stamp CDs for RIAA member companies, or even more interestingly, for Microsoft... you don't think they create each Windows XP CD individually, do you?
Individual artists could also make the case that, for example, sound mixers could allow the major record labels to "accidentally" include their copyrighted material in with another artist's songs, and therefore should be banned. This could get interesting.
That's only partly true. Game titles that appeal to US audiences more than Japanese audiences are available in the US first, games like Grand Theft Auto, first-person shooters, etc.
Role-playing games, such as Xenosaga Episode 1 (about a year between when it came out in Japan and when it reached the US), Xenosaga Episode 2 (available in Japan 6/24/04, available in the US 2/15/05... hopefully), Final Fantasy 7 (available in Japan 1/31/97, in the US 8/31/97), etc. often come out in Japan first -- and some that come out in Japan don't come out here at all or come out MUCH later than in Japan.
For instance, Final Fantasy 5 came out for the Super Famicon [I assume, even though the GameFaqs page lists it as SNES] in 1992. For Playstation, it came out in 1998 in Japan. US gamers had to wait until 1999 for it to come out as part of Final Fantasy Anthology for the PS. The Final Fantasy series isn't exactly unknown here in the US... and yet we had to wait for that game for about 7 years.
The types of games that you're thinking of that are available here first are probably the types of games mentioned in this article.
But at least, looking at the release dates on the pages linked above, RPG fans in the US are luckier than those in Europe:)
It depends how you explained it. If you explained it in terms of the cones in the eye and the wavelengths that make up visible light then they probably would be able to understand at least theoretically what it is to see.
Now you'd probably have trouble explaining what, for instance, a beautiful painting looks like or why we find it beautiful -- that doesn't come out very well in terms of wavelengths of light reflecting off it. But you could probably get a basic understanding of sight across to the alien.
As an example closer to earth, there are some creatures that can say (or could if they could speak) "I can detect objects from a decent distance away without being in physical contact or within sight of the object" -- think about bats and some aquatic creatures that use echolocation. We lack all but very crude echolocation (getting a general sense of the size of your surroundings based on whether or not you hear an echo) but we can still understand what those creatures are doing, basically.
Actually, since your cat's been attending Trinity Southern, it's actually Dr. Mittens, PhD. It has a Doctor of Pouncing and Hunting degree.
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
on
SCO.com Defaced
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· Score: 1
It doesn't matter if it's minor compared to what SCO is doing. It's a crime, and it provides SCO with additional ammunition to use in their FUD war. For both those reasons it's a bad idea to do things like this.
If you want to fight SCO, then fight them... but don't do it like this. Because of this attack, the SCO group can put out a press release saying something like "The supporters of Linux include criminals who were willing to invade our web server, deface our website, etc." Now if I were John Q. Public, an average Joe who didn't know about either the SCO group or Linux, that press release would not give me a good first impression of Linux.
Now admittedly, the fight against SCO is going to be won or lost in the courtroom, not the court of public opinion. However, once the SCO fight is done, the Linux community will have to deal with the court of public opinion to get Linux adopted by the general population. It will be much easier to do so if the general impression of Linux and the Linux community is positive rather than that of a group that includes criminals who would try to suppress their opponents' views by illegal actions.
Indeed. A good example of this is in the novel The Clan of the Cave Bear. The shaman in the group detailed in this novel was born with a deformed arm and leg, I believe, and lost an eye to a cave bear attack. (I don't have my copy of the book here at work, but I believe those were all of Creb's physical differences from the rest of the Clan members.) Yet he still managed to contribute to the Clan society as their shaman.
In addition, I seem to remember that some of the older males in the Clan, those who were too old to hunt with the rest of the Clan, taught the boys who were too young to hunt the skills that the boys would need when they became old enough to hunt. One specific example I can remember was the sling training that Ayla spied upon. I imagine it would be the same if someone were to be disabled but had a useful skill.
No, you're not mapping out the area when you geocache. Geocaching is a lot like searching for buried treasure. Generally, people hide boxes filled with random goodies in somewhat remote locations and post the GPS coordinates (the 'treasure map', basically) to websites like the one above. Then people go find the caches, record that they've been there on a log, and exchange an item in the cache for one they've brought.
If you had permission from the owner of the land on which the cave was built, you could combine geocaching with spelunking... make it truly a quest for some buried treasure. Just make sure you don't go overboard... not like the characters in the Knights of the Dinner Table when one of them set up a cache and then decided to defend it (issue 64).
I'd imagine (though IANAL) that until or unless the suit SCO filed against IBM has been thrown out with some comment to the effect that the judge thought this was a frivolous lawsuit, they wouldn't be able to proceed very far. I think they'd have a MUCH better chance at winning such a countersuit after the judge in the original suit gives his decision -- the judge's opinion should have a very high weight with the judge who would be ruling on the countersuit.
Now when/if SCO loses, of course, IBM will come back and hit them like a freight train. It's a little too early for that right now, though.
Non voters care, but they realize the futility of voting.
Keep in mind that the presidency was NOT the only item on the ballot. 34 senate seats out of 100, 435 positions in the House of Representatives, and 11 governorships were also up-for-grabs. Now perhaps you couldn't have changed the outcome of the Presidential election by voting. However, at the state or congressional district level, there are fewer votes involved and so your vote matters more.
On the page above, look at the South Dakota Senate race. Thune beat Daschle by a little over 4,000 votes with a total of about 400,000 votes cast. The difference in the Kentucky Senate race was about 23,000 votes. 1.6 million were cast. In the New Hampshire governor's race, 13,000 out of 650,000 votes separated the winner from the loser.
Don't equate "my vote doesn't count for the Presidential race" with "my vote doesn't count at all". Sometimes, the small stuff matters.
Yes, there are some lines that may not need comments. However, if your comments are simply the code described in English, they don't necessarily add value. Rather than adding a comment like the one you described, I think a comment like "Loop over the elements of the array and..." would be more appropriate. Now for some blocks of code, identifying exactly why you chose to implement it the way you did has value, especially when it's not obvious or when it may not be obvious when you go back to your code 6 months from now.
I've seen some pieces of well-commented code in programming languages I can't write or can't write well that I was able to understand and troubleshoot just from what the comments were describing about what the algorithm was doing.
It's a lot easier to remove a redundant comment a few months down the line than to go back and add a comment at that time, when you may scratch your head and say "Now why did I do that?"
Someone should record when prosco.net is made available for people to read and when the slashdotting takes it down. I'm guessing that it'll probably take no more than an hour or two for the site to grind to a screeching halt, and another hour or so after that before smoke comes out of the server.
Before you check no, trying to go to prosco.net doesn't do anything yet.
Keep in mind that kids also receive money sometimes for birthdays and other holidays from relatives, so you can't count on kids only being able to buy stuff after they've demonstrated maturity by working for their cash.
Looking around, I found a description of what exactly the program is designed to do:
Participating retailers have agreed not to sell or rent "M"- rated (Mature) games to customers under the age of 17, or games rated "AO" (Adults Only) to customers under the age of 18. These retailers are also displaying store signs which advise customers of their participation in the program and promote awareness and understanding of the ESRB rating system.
This seems reasonable. If you're a parent, and your kid wants a game that's rated as Mature (intended for 17+) IMHO you should have a discussion with your kid to make sure that they're mature enough to handle it, rather than assuming that they are. It's a lot less stressful to figure out if your child is mature enough to handle, say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City BEFORE you let them buy or play it than after.
Also like the story "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov. If we were to do something like this in real life, I hope that Diebold wouldn't get the contract to make Multivac, the machine that was used to select the lone voter in the story.
What you're describing is basically a Catch-22 situation. The 2-party system has to be changed before someone not in one of the two major political parties can win, but the system won't change unless something major happens to shake it up... like a third-party candidate winning.
Frankly, I'm fed up with both parties. Now what would be really interesting would be if a group of people who had a Clue would start working now to get momentum going for a third-party candidate to challenge the Democrats and Republicans in 2008. After all, one definition of impulse is:
the product of force and the time interval over which the force acts
Now the major parties have a lot of force, but act over a short period of time. A minor party might be able to cause the same impulse by using less force but for a longer period of time.
Why couldn't the record companies make money from rereleasing the songs in a new format? IANAL, but the songs being in the public domain doesn't prevent the record companies from rereleasing them in the new format -- by my understanding, it means that the songs are open to use by anyone.
Now since the record companies own the masters to those songs, they can convert them to the new format and sell them. Since the songs are in the public domain once one person buys the recording in the new format, they can distribute them as widely as they want... but there are still going to be people who will want to purchase a copy for themselves directly from the record company or who are not technically savvy enough to get a copy for free.
Case in point: even if my mother wanted to download a song that was freely available on the web, even if it was legally available (say the artist released it on his or her website)... it would take her a while to figure out how to download it, how to play it, and forget trying to go through the steps to burn it onto a CD for her CD player:) If someone were to release that freely-available song on CD at a reasonable price, she might find it worthwhile to buy the CD rather than try to get it on her own. [1]
[1] Actually, she'd probably ask myself or my brother to get it for her. That's beside the point. If neither of us were available, she'd probably buy it rather than download it.
Yeah Brain, but where would we find enough Diebold programmers who have that much knowledge?
From the first part of the article: But the vulnerabilities do show incompetence and indicate that Diebold programmers simply don't know how to design a secure system.
Another comment I found particularly interesting occurs on the third page of the article: But speaking generally on the vulnerabilities Harris mentions, Diebold spokesman David Bear said by phone that no one would risk manipulating votes in an election because it's against the law and carries a heavy penalty.
Suuuuuuuure... and no one would risk committing securities fraud because it's against the law and carries a heavy penalty *cough*Enron*cough* or would risk driving above the speed limit because it's against the law and carries a penalty (whether it's a heavy penalty depends on just how fast you were driving.)
Hmm... I think someone should look into making a Simpsons of Catan game. [Or should it be called "Die Siedler von Springfield"?] Then any inconsistencies in the location of various buildings could be explained as a shuffle of the tiles.
Now all we'd have to do is come up with resources... let's see, there's beer, donuts, plutonium... we need two more.
I wouldn't mind seeing them bring Takeshi's Castle to American TV. It reminds me of American Gladiators, which if I remember correctly also had international versions.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to win the date with a sexy Russian agent.
I wouldn't. More than likely Bond has already had a date with her, and I don't want to be diagnosed with diseases Bond1 -Bond18 . Better to have a cool gadget in my book -- if You Only Live Twice I'm not going to waste one of my lives suffering with venerial diseases.
Hmm ... you could make a case that CD/DVD manufacturing equipment makes piracy possible ... including the CD/DVD manufacturing equipment the MPAA and RIAA member companies (or the manufacturing companies they hire) use to stamp the CDs. It would be a shame if those companies couldn't use their equipment to stamp CDs for RIAA member companies, or even more interestingly, for Microsoft ... you don't think they create each Windows XP CD individually, do you?
Individual artists could also make the case that, for example, sound mixers could allow the major record labels to "accidentally" include their copyrighted material in with another artist's songs, and therefore should be banned. This could get interesting.
I can't resist ...
... that's not Pitr. He just bought the missile.
In Soviet Russia, from orbit your ISP nukes you!
Oh wait
Many hot game titles are available here first
... hopefully), Final Fantasy 7 (available in Japan 1/31/97, in the US 8/31/97), etc. often come out in Japan first -- and some that come out in Japan don't come out here at all or come out MUCH later than in Japan.
... and yet we had to wait for that game for about 7 years.
:)
That's only partly true. Game titles that appeal to US audiences more than Japanese audiences are available in the US first, games like Grand Theft Auto, first-person shooters, etc.
Role-playing games, such as Xenosaga Episode 1 (about a year between when it came out in Japan and when it reached the US), Xenosaga Episode 2 (available in Japan 6/24/04, available in the US 2/15/05
For instance, Final Fantasy 5 came out for the Super Famicon [I assume, even though the GameFaqs page lists it as SNES] in 1992. For Playstation, it came out in 1998 in Japan. US gamers had to wait until 1999 for it to come out as part of Final Fantasy Anthology for the PS. The Final Fantasy series isn't exactly unknown here in the US
The types of games that you're thinking of that are available here first are probably the types of games mentioned in this article.
But at least, looking at the release dates on the pages linked above, RPG fans in the US are luckier than those in Europe
It depends how you explained it. If you explained it in terms of the cones in the eye and the wavelengths that make up visible light then they probably would be able to understand at least theoretically what it is to see.
Now you'd probably have trouble explaining what, for instance, a beautiful painting looks like or why we find it beautiful -- that doesn't come out very well in terms of wavelengths of light reflecting off it. But you could probably get a basic understanding of sight across to the alien.
As an example closer to earth, there are some creatures that can say (or could if they could speak) "I can detect objects from a decent distance away without being in physical contact or within sight of the object" -- think about bats and some aquatic creatures that use echolocation. We lack all but very crude echolocation (getting a general sense of the size of your surroundings based on whether or not you hear an echo) but we can still understand what those creatures are doing, basically.
Actually, since your cat's been attending Trinity Southern, it's actually Dr. Mittens, PhD. It has a Doctor of Pouncing and Hunting degree.
It doesn't matter if it's minor compared to what SCO is doing. It's a crime, and it provides SCO with additional ammunition to use in their FUD war. For both those reasons it's a bad idea to do things like this.
... but don't do it like this. Because of this attack, the SCO group can put out a press release saying something like "The supporters of Linux include criminals who were willing to invade our web server, deface our website, etc." Now if I were John Q. Public, an average Joe who didn't know about either the SCO group or Linux, that press release would not give me a good first impression of Linux.
If you want to fight SCO, then fight them
Now admittedly, the fight against SCO is going to be won or lost in the courtroom, not the court of public opinion. However, once the SCO fight is done, the Linux community will have to deal with the court of public opinion to get Linux adopted by the general population. It will be much easier to do so if the general impression of Linux and the Linux community is positive rather than that of a group that includes criminals who would try to suppress their opponents' views by illegal actions.
Indeed. A good example of this is in the novel The Clan of the Cave Bear. The shaman in the group detailed in this novel was born with a deformed arm and leg, I believe, and lost an eye to a cave bear attack. (I don't have my copy of the book here at work, but I believe those were all of Creb's physical differences from the rest of the Clan members.) Yet he still managed to contribute to the Clan society as their shaman.
In addition, I seem to remember that some of the older males in the Clan, those who were too old to hunt with the rest of the Clan, taught the boys who were too young to hunt the skills that the boys would need when they became old enough to hunt. One specific example I can remember was the sling training that Ayla spied upon. I imagine it would be the same if someone were to be disabled but had a useful skill.
No, you're not mapping out the area when you geocache. Geocaching is a lot like searching for buried treasure. Generally, people hide boxes filled with random goodies in somewhat remote locations and post the GPS coordinates (the 'treasure map', basically) to websites like the one above. Then people go find the caches, record that they've been there on a log, and exchange an item in the cache for one they've brought.
... make it truly a quest for some buried treasure. Just make sure you don't go overboard ... not like the characters in the Knights of the Dinner Table when one of them set up a cache and then decided to defend it (issue 64).
If you had permission from the owner of the land on which the cave was built, you could combine geocaching with spelunking
I'd imagine (though IANAL) that until or unless the suit SCO filed against IBM has been thrown out with some comment to the effect that the judge thought this was a frivolous lawsuit, they wouldn't be able to proceed very far. I think they'd have a MUCH better chance at winning such a countersuit after the judge in the original suit gives his decision -- the judge's opinion should have a very high weight with the judge who would be ruling on the countersuit.
Now when/if SCO loses, of course, IBM will come back and hit them like a freight train. It's a little too early for that right now, though.
Non voters care, but they realize the futility of voting.
Keep in mind that the presidency was NOT the only item on the ballot. 34 senate seats out of 100, 435 positions in the House of Representatives, and 11 governorships were also up-for-grabs. Now perhaps you couldn't have changed the outcome of the Presidential election by voting. However, at the state or congressional district level, there are fewer votes involved and so your vote matters more.
On the page above, look at the South Dakota Senate race. Thune beat Daschle by a little over 4,000 votes with a total of about 400,000 votes cast. The difference in the Kentucky Senate race was about 23,000 votes. 1.6 million were cast. In the New Hampshire governor's race, 13,000 out of 650,000 votes separated the winner from the loser.
Don't equate "my vote doesn't count for the Presidential race" with "my vote doesn't count at all". Sometimes, the small stuff matters.
Yes, there are some lines that may not need comments. However, if your comments are simply the code described in English, they don't necessarily add value. Rather than adding a comment like the one you described, I think a comment like "Loop over the elements of the array and ..." would be more appropriate. Now for some blocks of code, identifying exactly why you chose to implement it the way you did has value, especially when it's not obvious or when it may not be obvious when you go back to your code 6 months from now.
I've seen some pieces of well-commented code in programming languages I can't write or can't write well that I was able to understand and troubleshoot just from what the comments were describing about what the algorithm was doing.
It's a lot easier to remove a redundant comment a few months down the line than to go back and add a comment at that time, when you may scratch your head and say "Now why did I do that?"
Someone should record when prosco.net is made available for people to read and when the slashdotting takes it down. I'm guessing that it'll probably take no more than an hour or two for the site to grind to a screeching halt, and another hour or so after that before smoke comes out of the server.
Before you check no, trying to go to prosco.net doesn't do anything yet.
Looking around, I found a description of what exactly the program is designed to do:
This seems reasonable. If you're a parent, and your kid wants a game that's rated as Mature (intended for 17+) IMHO you should have a discussion with your kid to make sure that they're mature enough to handle it, rather than assuming that they are. It's a lot less stressful to figure out if your child is mature enough to handle, say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City BEFORE you let them buy or play it than after.
Also like the story "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov. If we were to do something like this in real life, I hope that Diebold wouldn't get the contract to make Multivac, the machine that was used to select the lone voter in the story.
Just wait. I'm sure that's on somebody's plans for DMCA 2: The Search for More Money.
I thought I'd heard people remark that your posts had started improving in the last few weeks.
What you're describing is basically a Catch-22 situation. The 2-party system has to be changed before someone not in one of the two major political parties can win, but the system won't change unless something major happens to shake it up ... like a third-party candidate winning.
... CowboyNeal in 2008!
Frankly, I'm fed up with both parties. Now what would be really interesting would be if a group of people who had a Clue would start working now to get momentum going for a third-party candidate to challenge the Democrats and Republicans in 2008. After all, one definition of impulse is:
the product of force and the time interval over which the force acts
Now the major parties have a lot of force, but act over a short period of time. A minor party might be able to cause the same impulse by using less force but for a longer period of time.
So
How about their mission, vision, and values?
Why couldn't the record companies make money from rereleasing the songs in a new format? IANAL, but the songs being in the public domain doesn't prevent the record companies from rereleasing them in the new format -- by my understanding, it means that the songs are open to use by anyone.
... but there are still going to be people who will want to purchase a copy for themselves directly from the record company or who are not technically savvy enough to get a copy for free.
... it would take her a while to figure out how to download it, how to play it, and forget trying to go through the steps to burn it onto a CD for her CD player :) If someone were to release that freely-available song on CD at a reasonable price, she might find it worthwhile to buy the CD rather than try to get it on her own. [1]
Now since the record companies own the masters to those songs, they can convert them to the new format and sell them. Since the songs are in the public domain once one person buys the recording in the new format, they can distribute them as widely as they want
Case in point: even if my mother wanted to download a song that was freely available on the web, even if it was legally available (say the artist released it on his or her website)
[1] Actually, she'd probably ask myself or my brother to get it for her. That's beside the point. If neither of us were available, she'd probably buy it rather than download it.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
... and no one would risk committing securities fraud because it's against the law and carries a heavy penalty *cough*Enron*cough* or would risk driving above the speed limit because it's against the law and carries a penalty (whether it's a heavy penalty depends on just how fast you were driving.)
Yeah Brain, but where would we find enough Diebold programmers who have that much knowledge?
From the first part of the article:
But the vulnerabilities do show incompetence and indicate that Diebold programmers simply don't know how to design a secure system.
Another comment I found particularly interesting occurs on the third page of the article:
But speaking generally on the vulnerabilities Harris mentions, Diebold spokesman David Bear said by phone that no one would risk manipulating votes in an election because it's against the law and carries a heavy penalty.
Suuuuuuuure
Hmm ... I think someone should look into making a Simpsons of Catan game. [Or should it be called "Die Siedler von Springfield"?] Then any inconsistencies in the location of various buildings could be explained as a shuffle of the tiles.
... let's see, there's beer, donuts, plutonium ... we need two more.
Now all we'd have to do is come up with resources
Is that the original Takeshi's Castle or the remix?
I wouldn't mind seeing them bring Takeshi's Castle to American TV. It reminds me of American Gladiators, which if I remember correctly also had international versions.
an honorary Darwin award, I think.
If you've heard of something like this related to the Darwins, perhaps you're thinking of this urban legend.
It depends ... how fast can you eat beans? Produce your own natural fuel.