Literacy is not creativity. It's memorization, mostly.
one responsibility is review before publication.
on
Free Speech And WebLogs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
A blog cannot carry out the responsibilities of a print journalist unless it has a very small number of submitters. Something like Slashdot cannot do it because there's too many people putting things up on the page, in the form of comments. In a newspaper, every editorial is reviewed before being published. Every letter to the editor is looked at before it is published. Slashdot doesn't do that with it's comments, and any other blog of similar size won't do it either, because there's no time to view everyone's submissions. That is one key way in which a blog cannot be a "real" journalistic outlet at cannot be held responsible for things said on the site. But that also means it doesn't get the protection "real" journalistic outlets get.
It was called Impossible Mission. I was on a retro 64 kick about a year ago and downloaded Vice (a c64 emulator) and several game disk dumps from www.lemon64.com (sadly, they no longer host the actual game disks. I think they ran into legal trouble). Impossible Mission was one of the ones I downloaded.
The truly sad thing is that I was able to beat it again. The first time I tried it. That's just...creepy.
I'd love to see a modern 3-D viewpoint version of it. I think with a behind-the-avataor camera viewpoint like Tomb Raider it would work well. And of course, the guy would have to do a flip every time you jumped, for no aparent reason.
Many sites requiring registration make it physically impossible to deep link to an article even if you DO have a working login and password. This is because they often use temporary cookies that expire to remember the fact that you are logged in, so the next day you have to log in through the home page again and a deep link URL won't work for you EVEN IF YOU HAVE registered. The difference between NYT and LA Times may vary well be a technical one, not a case of favoritism or hypocracy.
Depending on the way it was implemented, it might really be physically impossible to link to a site that uses registration, if that registration is in the form of temporary cookies or javascript that cannot be properly expressed in a URL. It may very well be that if you attempt to link to the article, the user gets kicked to the login page instead and the fact that he was going for the deep link to the article is forgotten by the server and even after giving a valid login it doesn't send him there, and just dumps him into the home page. I don't know how the LA Times is implemented. I have seen other sites that behaved this way, though.
The problem is that only a small percentage of the money I pay to see a movie is going toward funding the evil lawyers attacking fair use law. The vast majority is going toward stuff I *want* to support. I *want* to vote with my wallet by giving Peter Jackson money for Two Towers. I *want* to give money to the actors. I *want* to give money to the scriptwriters. I do *not* want to live in a world where there is no more entertainment industry. So what's to do? If you say a policy of zero tolerance is in order, such that as long as a company does any small thing I don't like I should never buy their products, then I'd never be buying anything at all, and would have to go off into the mountains to live as a hermit, growing my own food, sewing my own clothes, and so on.
So what's the *practical* answer? What can drive the message home to the entertainment industry without making it cease to exist? From the point of view of the MPAA members, reduced movie attendance because of a grievance over their legal policies looks indistinguishable from reduced movie attendance because people don't like their movies. It just looks like there is less of an audience.
This is especially a problem with the kinds of movies geeks like to see. If the industry sees that geek-friendly movies are not doing well, their reaction is NOT going to be to change their legal policies to appeal to the geeks. Their reaction is going to be, "Oh, I guess we should stop making movies like this - they don't seem to do very well for some reason." And then no more movies we like get made.
So, yes, I *am* going to be giving my money to see The Two Towers - multiple times. But I will be sure to balance that out with donations to the EFF.
The ability to attract foreigners to do tech research within a country is a part of that country's tech edge, and should be counted. Fermi was Italian, but Italy wasn't where he did his work. Von Braun was German, but the Apollo missions weren't based in Peenemunde. Turing gets major kudos for advances in computer science, but you cridited him for computer industry, which is something else entirely.
The problem with your analysis is that even in the original book form The Two Towers had more action and less development than Fellowship Of The Ring, so it's premature to blame this on "less Tolkien, more dumbed down Hollywood" especially when you haven't seen it yet. If this movie had an equal amount of slow melodrama as the first did, then THAT would be a departure from what Tolkien wrote.
Exactly what the more rational and less rabid of us have said all along. Linux has its place, which for most people is not the desktop.
No. The more rational and less rabid have been saying that MS existing on the desktop is fine SO LONG AS it doesn't do it in a way that precludes people who want to use Linux on the desktop from doing so also. The reason for the dislike of Windows on the desktop is because it has a virus effect that tends to spread - in order to use the files made by the guy who uses Windows, you too have to be using Windows. And then instead of just 90% or 95% of the desktops running Windows in the office you end up with 100% of them running Windows because the few who would work better with something else don't really have the option to do so.
We wouldn't have had to make defeat of Microsoft a goal if Microsoft hadn't made defeat of Linux a goal. They're the ones that threw down the gauntlet and said, in effect, "This town's not big enough for the both of us, one of us has to go."
It's got nothing to do with class and everything to do with culture clashes between urban and rural desires - clashes that will still exist even between people with the same racial background and same level of income. Questions like how much should be spent on roads, should there be farm subsidies, how much control should the government have over the school curriclum, does there need to be a federal speed limit? The answers to such questions vary widely depending on how dense the population is, and so there is always conflict between the political views of people based on how crowded their population is. For example, is Jaywalking a big problem that needs to be enforced or can the jaywalking laws be ignored? Well, that depends on how thick the traffic is and how many pedestrians there are. In the downtown of a big city, jaywalking laws make sense. Out in the small suburbs they really don't.
I'm not denying that the situation is unfair. I'm denying that you have the ability to read people's minds and figure out which specific issues it is the rural states are afraid of with regard to the voters in the urban states. All that mattes is that the rural states currently have more power under the existing system. It doesn't matter specificly in what ways they prefer to wield that power. The mere fact that they have it is more than enough to explain why they don't want to give it up.
And even look at moderation How many moderations do you see as 5 and -1 (1 and 2 happen without moderation) but there is usually only a little bit or 3s and 4s.
That's simply because there's a heck of a lot more than five people with moderator power on Slashdot, and all an individual moderator can do is give a post a +1, 0 or -1, and the posts max at 5 and min at -1. The story would be very different if the moderation worked like it did for Amazon, where the rank is the AVERAGE of everyone's rank rather than the SUM of bonuses and penalties that hit a ceiling very quickly.
A moderation of 3 or 4 on slashdot does not mean most people thought the post was slightly good. It means most people didn't bother giving it a rating and just a few people decided to call it good.
Slashdot moderation doesn't have a way to specify the *strength* of a moderator's opinion like Amazon does.
I'm pretty sure the original reasons have gone away.
Nope. If slow communication was the only reason for it, it could just as easily have been carried out by having each state collect together physical counts of the popular votes and the "electors" would just have been trustable couriers to carry the totals to a central location for national tallying. The electoral college was proposed as a comprimise to woo the more rural states that would have otherwise refused to join the union. The reason for not having the president voted by popular vote is simply that it would require a constitutional amendment to do so, which would require support of the senate. The Senate is the place where every state gets the same number of representatives. Those states that are less populous outnumber those states that are densely populated. There's a lot of rural land stretching across multiple states. Therefore the Senate is dominated by exactly those states that have the most to gain by keeping the electoral college in place. And that's the simple reason it's still there. The people who would have to shoot it down to change it are exactly the ones who benefit from it.
Did you know that, under the DMCA, it is not illegal to circumvent copy protection mechanisms for the purpose of making fair use of a work? [17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1)(B)]
Only if you are a cryptography whiz who came up with the algorithm all by yourself and then implemented it all by yourself, without any outside help. The DMCA makes it illegal to make a tool that lets someone do exactly what you mention above. It also makes it illegal to TELL SOMEONE HOW to do the above thing. Take your own advice and read the law - The fact that it lets you make a copy for fair use is fucking irrelevant when you aren't allowed to spread the knowlege of HOW, and learning how to do it is a nontrivial activity.
The Electoral Collage is was never necessary and is only kept in place for racist reasons (let's dillute the city vote the cities are full of you-know-who). Districting is a cruel joke. We need run-off elections when no one gets a majority.
Nice theory. Too bad the tendancy of "you know who" to live in the cities is more recent than the creation of the Electoral College. Nice try.
Petroleum is created in the Earth's crust at a slow geological pace from dead plants crushed under pressure, but we consume it at a normal human time scale. Therefore a shortage does exist. It existed from the moment we started using petroleum. It *will* run out - guaranteed. The political machinations of OPEC and the democrats only affects how long until that happens, not the fact that it inevitably WILL happen. Given how dependant on petroleum the US economy is for *everything*, it makes sense to get ready with something else to be prepared to make the switch when the time comes. I agree with you that there is still plenty of time and the panic the environmentalists are trying to instill is not warranted. I disagree that this means there is "not really a fossil fuel problem." It just means it's on a more long-term scale.
And furthermore, if what you need for the task at hand is a machine that behaves and thinks in every way just like a human being, then just hire a human being to do it.
It's the differences between computers and humans that make computers so damn useful. Tell a human to add up a list of 200 numbers and he'll likely take a long time, and get the wrong answer because humans suck at repetative boring tasks beyond the limit of their attention spans.
You start by saying I'm only "almost" correct, then proceed to describe a system that doesn't contradict what I said one bit. I'm confused.
The captions stored on the DVD as text doesn't preclude ALSO including font rendering hints on the DVD as well to tell the player what sort of font to attempt to use if it has it. This is no different than the situation with HTML files and different web browsers. My browser decides in the end what the text will look like. The file gives hints in the form of style sheets or <FONT> tags, but in the end it's the browser that makes the final decision - it might not have the font in question available and it might pick a different one. Or it might be a very simple browser like lynx that doesn't have the ability to change the font.
Yes, it is. *raises eyebrows in amusement; eyes twinkle* So?
So radiotherapy is not distinct from chemotherapy. as you had said. It's a subset of it, since radiotherapy also includes the use of stuff made of chemicals. Not only the injested iodine, but the plastic casings on the machinery, the silicone parts in the electronics of the machine, and so on and so forth.
Hold on while I do chemotherapy on you by putting this cast made of plaster and gauze on your broken arm.
The word "chemical" is such a broad term that most substances qualify, so stating that chemotherapy is "the use of chemical ages in the treatment or control of desease or mental illness" equates to saying "the treatment of diseases or mental illness, by the use of stuff." And that's broad enough to include taking asprin.
I don't know the DVD format much, it must be some sort of TIF on seperate data channel, or unicode text.
I'm pretty sure it's just stored as text strings. I say this because the downloadable DVD player "Ogle" has a means for you to pick a different font to use for captions, and when you do, the captions start looking different. So clearly they are not stored on the DVD as image files but as text.
This is a very reasonable statement and if you had led off with it I wouldn't have had an argument with you. It sounds very different from the statement you first made that I responded to. But anyway, in my opinion the specifics of the Dimitry case are such that he should not be held culpable because he didn't have enough knowlege over how his software would be sold. You don't seem to agree.
There is as much evidence--that is, legal evidence, not scientific evidence--for the existance of God as there is that there was a King Richard of England who fought in a war called the Crusades.
Wrong. King Richard is alleged to be a human being. I have personally witnessed many other examples of human beings. King Richard is alleged to be a King of England. I have witnessed England. Today we have evidence that England currently has a monarchy, if only a ceremonial one. Thus the class of things King Richard is alleged to have been is a class of things that have already been demonstrated to exist in other forms. Not so for God.
You have are argueing agaisnt a false effigy of the atheist stance, which is NOT the positive claim that God doesn't exist but rather the claim that non existence is the default hypothesis to use with when no compelling evidence has been observed to sway one's self.
This is the way sane people treat EVERY OTHER QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT A THING EXISTS other than god. For some reason people treat that one question differently than every thing else. An atheist simply chooses not to make that schism in his thought patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Literacy is not creativity. It's memorization, mostly.
A blog cannot carry out the responsibilities of a print journalist unless it has a very small number of submitters. Something like Slashdot cannot do it because there's too many people putting things up on the page, in the form of comments. In a newspaper, every editorial is reviewed before being published. Every letter to the editor is looked at before it is published. Slashdot doesn't do that with it's comments, and any other blog of similar size won't do it either, because there's no time to view everyone's submissions. That is one key way in which a blog cannot be a "real" journalistic outlet at cannot be held responsible for things said on the site. But that also means it doesn't get the protection "real" journalistic outlets get.
It was called Impossible Mission. I was on a retro 64 kick about a year ago and downloaded Vice (a c64 emulator) and several game disk dumps from www.lemon64.com (sadly, they no longer host the actual game disks. I think they ran into legal trouble). Impossible Mission was one of the ones I downloaded.
The truly sad thing is that I was able to beat it again. The first time I tried it. That's just...creepy.
"Destroy Him, My Robots."
*step* *step* *step* *BZzzzzzzssszzszzzt*
*step* *step* *jump* "AaaaahhhhhhAAaHHhhhhhhhh..."
That game was way ahead of it's time.
I'd love to see a modern 3-D viewpoint version of it. I think with a behind-the-avataor camera viewpoint like Tomb Raider it would work well. And of course, the guy would have to do a flip every time you jumped, for no aparent reason.
Many sites requiring registration make it physically impossible to deep link to an article even if you DO have a working login and password. This is because they often use temporary cookies that expire to remember the fact that you are logged in, so the next day you have to log in through the home page again and a deep link URL won't work for you EVEN IF YOU HAVE registered. The difference between NYT and LA Times may vary well be a technical one, not a case of favoritism or hypocracy.
Depending on the way it was implemented, it might really be physically impossible to link to a site that uses registration, if that registration is in the form of temporary cookies or javascript that cannot be properly expressed in a URL. It may very well be that if you attempt to link to the article, the user gets kicked to the login page instead and the fact that he was going for the deep link to the article is forgotten by the server and even after giving a valid login it doesn't send him there, and just dumps him into the home page. I don't know how the LA Times is implemented. I have seen other sites that behaved this way, though.
The problem is that only a small percentage of the money I pay to see a movie is going toward funding the evil lawyers attacking fair use law. The vast majority is going toward stuff I *want* to support. I *want* to vote with my wallet by giving Peter Jackson money for Two Towers. I *want* to give money to the actors. I *want* to give money to the scriptwriters. I do *not* want to live in a world where there is no more entertainment industry. So what's to do? If you say a policy of zero tolerance is in order, such that as long as a company does any small thing I don't like I should never buy their products, then I'd never be buying anything at all, and would have to go off into the mountains to live as a hermit, growing my own food, sewing my own clothes, and so on.
So what's the *practical* answer? What can drive the message home to the entertainment industry without making it cease to exist? From the point of view of the MPAA members, reduced movie attendance because of a grievance over their legal policies looks indistinguishable from reduced movie attendance because people don't like their movies. It just looks like there is less of an audience.
This is especially a problem with the kinds of movies geeks like to see. If the industry sees that geek-friendly movies are not doing well, their reaction is NOT going to be to change their legal policies to appeal to the geeks. Their reaction is going to be, "Oh, I guess we should stop making movies like this - they don't seem to do very well for some reason." And then no more movies we like get made.
So, yes, I *am* going to be giving my money to see The Two Towers - multiple times. But I will be sure to balance that out with donations to the EFF.
The ability to attract foreigners to do tech research within a country is a part of that country's tech edge, and should be counted. Fermi was Italian, but Italy wasn't where he did his work. Von Braun was German, but the Apollo missions weren't based in Peenemunde. Turing gets major kudos for advances in computer science, but you cridited him for computer industry, which is something else entirely.
The problem with your analysis is that even in the original book form The Two Towers had more action and less development than Fellowship Of The Ring, so it's premature to blame this on "less Tolkien, more dumbed down Hollywood" especially when you haven't seen it yet. If this movie had an equal amount of slow melodrama as the first did, then THAT would be a departure from what Tolkien wrote.
It's got nothing to do with class and everything to do with culture clashes between urban and rural desires - clashes that will still exist even between people with the same racial background and same level of income. Questions like how much should be spent on roads, should there be farm subsidies, how much control should the government have over the school curriclum, does there need to be a federal speed limit? The answers to such questions vary widely depending on how dense the population is, and so there is always conflict between the political views of people based on how crowded their population is. For example, is Jaywalking a big problem that needs to be enforced or can the jaywalking laws be ignored? Well, that depends on how thick the traffic is and how many pedestrians there are. In the downtown of a big city, jaywalking laws make sense. Out in the small suburbs they really don't.
I'm not denying that the situation is unfair. I'm denying that you have the ability to read people's minds and figure out which specific issues it is the rural states are afraid of with regard to the voters in the urban states.
All that mattes is that the rural states currently have more power under the existing system. It doesn't matter specificly in what ways they prefer to wield that power. The mere fact that they have it is more than enough to explain why they don't want to give it up.
That's simply because there's a heck of a lot more than five people with moderator power on Slashdot, and all an individual moderator can do is give a post a +1, 0 or -1, and the posts max at 5 and min at -1. The story would be very different if the moderation worked like it did for Amazon, where the rank is the AVERAGE of everyone's rank rather than the SUM of bonuses and penalties that hit a ceiling very quickly.
A moderation of 3 or 4 on slashdot does not mean most people thought the post was slightly good. It means most people didn't bother giving it a rating and just a few people decided to call it good.
Slashdot moderation doesn't have a way to specify the *strength* of a moderator's opinion like Amazon does.
Nope. If slow communication was the only reason for it, it could just as easily have been carried out by having each state collect together physical counts of the popular votes and the "electors" would just have been trustable couriers to carry the totals to a central location for national tallying. The electoral college was proposed as a comprimise to woo the more rural states that would have otherwise refused to join the union. The reason for not having the president voted by popular vote is simply that it would require a constitutional amendment to do so, which would require support of the senate. The Senate is the place where every state gets the same number of representatives. Those states that are less populous outnumber those states that are densely populated. There's a lot of rural land stretching across multiple states. Therefore the Senate is dominated by exactly those states that have the most to gain by keeping the electoral college in place. And that's the simple reason it's still there. The people who would have to shoot it down to change it are exactly the ones who benefit from it.
Only if you are a cryptography whiz who came up with the algorithm all by yourself and then implemented it all by yourself, without any outside help. The DMCA makes it illegal to make a tool that lets someone do exactly what you mention above. It also makes it illegal to TELL SOMEONE HOW to do the above thing. Take your own advice and read the law - The fact that it lets you make a copy for fair use is fucking irrelevant when you aren't allowed to spread the knowlege of HOW, and learning how to do it is a nontrivial activity.
Nice theory. Too bad the tendancy of "you know who" to live in the cities is more recent than the creation of the Electoral College. Nice try.
Petroleum is created in the Earth's crust at a slow geological pace from dead plants crushed under pressure, but we consume it at a normal human time scale. Therefore a shortage does exist. It existed from the moment we started using petroleum. It *will* run out - guaranteed. The political machinations of OPEC and the democrats only affects how long until that happens, not the fact that it inevitably WILL happen. Given how dependant on petroleum the US economy is for *everything*, it makes sense to get ready with something else to be prepared to make the switch when the time comes. I agree with you that there is still plenty of time and the panic the environmentalists are trying to instill is not warranted. I disagree that this means there is "not really a fossil fuel problem." It just means it's on a more long-term scale.
Re-read his post. His complaint wasn't about running out of memory. It was about being unable to back out of the situation by killing a process.
And furthermore, if what you need for the task at hand is a machine that behaves and thinks in every way just like a human being, then just hire a human being to do it.
It's the differences between computers and humans that make computers so damn useful. Tell a human to add up a list of 200 numbers and he'll likely take a long time, and get the wrong answer because humans suck at repetative boring tasks beyond the limit of their attention spans.
You start by saying I'm only "almost" correct, then proceed to describe a system that doesn't contradict what I said one bit. I'm confused.
The captions stored on the DVD as text doesn't preclude ALSO including font rendering hints on the DVD as well to tell the player what sort of font to attempt to use if it has it. This is no different than the situation with HTML files and different web browsers. My browser decides in the end what the text will look like. The file gives hints in the form of style sheets or <FONT> tags, but in the end it's the browser that makes the final decision - it might not have the font in question available and it might pick a different one. Or it might be a very simple browser like lynx that doesn't have the ability to change the font.
So radiotherapy is not distinct from chemotherapy. as you had said. It's a subset of it, since radiotherapy also includes the use of stuff made of chemicals. Not only the injested iodine, but the plastic casings on the machinery, the silicone parts in the electronics of the machine, and so on and so forth.
Hold on while I do chemotherapy on you by putting this cast made of plaster and gauze on your broken arm.
The word "chemical" is such a broad term that most substances qualify, so stating that chemotherapy is "the use of chemical ages in the treatment or control of desease or mental illness" equates to saying "the treatment of diseases or mental illness, by the use of stuff." And that's broad enough to include taking asprin.
I'm pretty sure it's just stored as text strings. I say this because the downloadable DVD player "Ogle" has a means for you to pick a different font to use for captions, and when you do, the captions start looking different. So clearly they are not stored on the DVD as image files but as text.
Wow. I was just playing that game this morning, and I was just on that very same scene. Neat coincidence.
This is a very reasonable statement and if you had led off with it I wouldn't have had an argument with you. It sounds very different from the statement you first made that I responded to. But anyway, in my opinion the specifics of the Dimitry case are such that he should not be held culpable because he didn't have enough knowlege over how his software would be sold. You don't seem to agree.
Wrong. King Richard is alleged to be a human being. I have personally witnessed many other examples of human beings. King Richard is alleged to be a King of England. I have witnessed England. Today we have evidence that England currently has a monarchy, if only a ceremonial one. Thus the class of things King Richard is alleged to have been is a class of things that have already been demonstrated to exist in other forms. Not so for God.
You have are argueing agaisnt a false effigy of the atheist stance, which is NOT the positive claim that God doesn't exist but rather the claim that non existence is the default hypothesis to use with when no compelling evidence has been observed to sway one's self.
This is the way sane people treat EVERY OTHER QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT A THING EXISTS other than god. For some reason people treat that one question differently than every thing else. An atheist simply chooses not to make that schism in his thought patterns.