...he of "Dyn-O-Mite!" fame. Talking about Northern Ireland:
"You've got Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants. I guess it goes to show you -- without Blacks or Jews, people will improvise!"
Well, he might be a prison inmate, in which case he may just enjoy talking to someone new. Of course, he could probably also one-up you in the "dark secret" category...
I forgot to mention that my subwoofer is a Hsu Research VST-2 (www.hsuresearch.com), a small company from California. It's the kind of small where the company founder (Dr. Hsu) will give you subwoofer placement recommendations based on the sketches of your living room you send in. The local dealer who carries Paradigm actually carries these as the subwoofer they recommend. You can get other good subwoofer recommendations elsewhere in the thread, but I thought I'd put in a plug for the little guy.
Unless you go really high-end, Paradigms are tough to beat. They're usually the best value at any given price point -- bless the Canucks and the strong dollar. Buy whatever model you can afford. If you're mainly interested in Home Theater, then I'd go with the matching speakers all-around. If music is more important, I'd devote more money to the main speakers, then the center-channel, then the surrounds (which is what I did). I'd still use the same brand all-around to make sure the timbre matching is good. Get a subwoofer if you want better rumbling tanks/stomping dinosaurs/earth-shattering explosions (actually, a powered subwoofer also helps with music by taking the load off of your receiver for the low end). Of course, if you live in an apartment or condo, the subwoofer might make you unpopular with the neighbors.
As far as A/V receivers go, I'm a fan of Denon, but I can't argue with NAD. Onkyo is also pretty well regarded.
I believe on Sunday (10 Dec) from 1-7 PM EST they will be showing all the episodes back-to-back. So if you're up for six straight hours of spice-addled goodness, go for it. (Info courtesy of my TiVo.)
When I saw Dune at the theater they actually gave you a sheet of paper with a *glossary*! Not a good sign the movie will be easy to follow. I think I still have it lying around somewhere.
Hopefully the SciFi series won't have characters whispering their thoughts to themselves. Whenever Kyle McLachlan kept whispering "the spice..." to himself I wanted to yell "Yo, Spice Boy! No one can hear you!"
Isn't "Felicia's Journey" directed by Canada's own (by way of Armenia and Egypt) Atom Egoyan? Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of movies that are not easy to peg to one country.
BTW, I also highly recommend Egoyan's "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter".
Bit of trivia: His father named him "Atom" in honor of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. How funky is that? So who among you will be the first to name your kid "Linus", "Linux", or better yet, "Kernel"?
What I'm curious about is whether the Germans ban any movies, since there are many CoS devotees in Hollywood. Are Travolta movies prohibited, especially "Battlefield Earth"? (Well, OK, you could ban that simply as a "crime against humanity") How about Tom Cruise films?
While it's well and good to make their stand against the CoS (given recent German history, I'll cut them some slack on the freedom of religion and association issues), but it seems like taking on M$ but not Hollywood is kinda questionable -- "Well, if we ban movies people will actually be upset -- they gotta have their MI2. But no one really cares about some defrag utility".
Like the post above, my high school was a pretty decent place compared to some. There were 'cliques', but they weren't very hardcore and it was possible to belong to multiple groups. I was in the college prep classes, but I also played football and did theater. There were very few 1-to-1 correlations between belonging to one group and another, but instead a lot of cross-pollination.
On the football team, everybody was given some "-Dawg" related nickname. Names like "Junkyard-Dawg", "Higgy-Dawg", etc. Mine was "Mr. Peabody" (To the Wayback Machine, Sherman!). Go figure;-)
Associate with people not like yourself. My experiences in high school, college, and especially the military showed me there are decent people (and dicks) from all walks of life and backgrounds. It's a useful perspective to have.
Yeah, the "liberal" version of diversity often means that you can be straight/gay/bi, white/black/purple...whatever, as long as you *think* like they do. There is never the idea that reasonable people can disagree -- any opinion other than theirs gets you shouted down and/or denounced as evil.
Now I'm not saying that all liberals think that way, but they're there, just as surely as there are Bible-Thumpers on the right. Of course, you're free to disagree;-)
"Homecoming" is a tradition associated with American Football at the High School level (it's sometimes practiced in College but doesn't mean nearly as much there). At some point in the early/mid-season the team will play a couple of away games, the first home game after the road trip is the "homecoming" game.
In association with the game there will be a school dance, with a Homecoming King and Queen selected by popular vote. It's basically an excuse to have a dance/celebration in the Fall, and of course you try to schedule the game against a crummy team so you will win...
FYI, the anti-aircraft missile was called the Genie, and was meant to be carried by the F-102 or the F-106 (it may be one or the other, or both, I forget). I remember seeing a picture of some of the workers on the project standing at "ground zero" during a test. I'd be curious to see how they fared over the years. Fallout probably wouldn't be much of a problem with the Genie since the explosions would have been at high altitude. EMP might be another matter.
Some additional devices were a nuclear howitzer meant to destroy Red Army armored columns (just be sure the shells don't land short...) and spacecraft propulsion. I think that project was called Orion (don't hold me to that) and the idea was to toss out one small nuke after another from the back of the spacecraft, using the kick from each detonation to gain velocity.
Screw the NBC-style coverage. They should have four finalists in each area square off in front of a studio audience -- the Iron Chemists would have to whip up some new and useful compound from a set of ingredients, the Iron Doctors would have to perform speed-surgery, and the Iron Peacemakers would have to break up some arguments.
Oh sure, it seems like fun and games now, but that's how Gerald Bull started out. One day you're launching potatoes across the road, a few years later Saddam Hussein wants you to launch canned hams into Israel and the Mossad is breaking down your door...
Yeah, those wacky Brits. I remember seeing a documentary from the U.K. where they took infrared video of a man and woman in a state of arousal -- shades of blue to indicate cool, yellow/orange to indicate mildly warm, and reds to indicate hot.
The woman was a wonderful palette of yellows and oranges, with a few patches of red (the locations are an exercise left to the reader).
The man was dark blue all over with a single spot fiery red (again, you can guess where). Go figure...
...the whole 'amateur' thing was concocted up for the modern Olympics to ensure only wealthy folks could participate. A steel worker in Sheffield in the 1890s couldn't afford to seriously train for a sport and *not* get paid for it, while the Duke of Somewhereshire had plenty of leisure time on his hands. Winners in the ancient Olympic games received great material rewards, not just a medal and a laurel wreath.
Really, the whole 'amateur' thing has been a farce for a long time. How exactly were Soviet athletes amateurs? In my book, if you don't have a full-time, non-sports related job, and all you do is train, and someone takes care of your food and housing, then your *job* is being an athlete and you are a professional. (You may be underpaid, but that is another issue.) I doubt many of the Red Army hockey players spent time walking point in Afghanistan.
Lest anyone think I'm just digging on the Soviets, it's hardly better here. Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson don't go off to day jobs after their training sessions. Odds are that a track star went to college on a scholarship and hasn't seen a regular job since. Athletes get paid for appearances, for sponsorships, etc. -- the only thing they don't get paid for is the actual competition, and this is only a small portion of the money a pro athlete makes. Just ask Tiger Woods.
Save for Team Handball and Curling, there really aren't any true amateurs in the Olympics anymore, and there haven't been for a long time.
If a researcher wants to make big bucks, here's a novel idea: WORK FOR A FSCKING COMPANY! Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC ring a bell? Ever look for "IBM" or "Apple Computer" in the patent database?
Universities, both public and private, receive substantial amounts of taxpayer-derived money both directly (e.g., grants) and from their status as educational institutions. The public should not have to subsidize research which primarily benefits corporations. If they want to become profit-centered institutions, they should be stripped of their educational status and forced to incorporate -- no more grant money, no more tax-free donations, no more.edu ("Damn, Columbia.com is already taken!"). Survive without Government subsidy -- THAT is the Free Market, not this Corporate Welfare bullshit.
The other beef I have is other posters saying that profit-driven research will lead to more products the consumer wants. NOBODY knows what products they want 20, 30, or 50 years from now, because they don't know what will be possible then. High-end research -- the kind done by Universities, defines what is possible down the road.
For-profit research also raises the question: Profitable when? Most companies only look at this or next quarter's bottom line. Experiment for the reader: Go to Company X and tell them the product of your research will be hugely profitable, but only after fifteen years of constant investment. Until then it will just be a cash sinkhole. Wait for reaction.
The Soviet Union fell behind the US in the technology race because they lacked a critical component in the flow-down from high-end research to everyday products. They had world-class physicists and mathematicians at the high-end. They had engineers who were very innnovative working with the materials at hand (witness the Mig-25). What they lacked was that middle component that moved technology between the two ends -- and that was profit-driven companies.
We had all three components, but I'm afraid we'll end up sacrificing the high-end component to feed the profit appetite of the middle -- to whip out the cliche, we'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In the end we'll wind up with the ultimate bitchin' version of today's technology, not tomorrow's.
Like it or not, we do *not* live in a true Capitalist state. Not-for-profit organizations -- the Government and its labs, and the Universities -- make substantial contributions to our technology base which companies later run with, and I'd like to keep it that way.
There are no more 'Rogue Nations', only 'Countries of Concern'. I know it's true 'cuz Maddy Albright said so.
Re:Another Industrial Design Coup for Apple
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
·
· Score: 2
Damn, 3M invented Post-It Notes *and* the Palm? They are some smart muthas! I think you mean 3Com. In actuality, at first it was just the Palm Corporation, who were then bought out by USRobotics, who then merged into 3Com, who then spun Palm back into an independant company. Go figure.
Anyway, I had a Newton 100 and it did indeed suck down batteries (though some CE devices are about as bad). As for the handwriting recognition, there was a great third-party recognition app that worked much better, except you had to learn some special character strokes. It was called Graffitti and it was made by -- oh yeah, Palm. When I first saw that Palm had made their own PDA (the Pilot 1000 and 5000) I knew I had to get one. I kept that Pilot 5000 until I bought a Palm V. The smaller size was always the attraction for me, though the Newton MessagePad 2000 was a pretty impressive machine.
...that it's a little odd to name a security enhancement after a fortress that was successfully stormed (admittedly by the good guys). Though not an exact analogy, it's kind of like a Texan naming their security system The Alamo. Which reminds me -- Go Armstrong!
Anyway, at least they didn't name it the "Maginot Line" or "Dien Bien Phu".
Slashdot Mirror
...he of "Dyn-O-Mite!" fame. Talking about Northern Ireland:
"You've got Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants. I guess it goes to show you -- without Blacks or Jews, people will improvise!"
Well, he might be a prison inmate, in which case he may just enjoy talking to someone new. Of course, he could probably also one-up you in the "dark secret" category...
I forgot to mention that my subwoofer is a Hsu Research VST-2 (www.hsuresearch.com), a small company from California. It's the kind of small where the company founder (Dr. Hsu) will give you subwoofer placement recommendations based on the sketches of your living room you send in. The local dealer who carries Paradigm actually carries these as the subwoofer they recommend. You can get other good subwoofer recommendations elsewhere in the thread, but I thought I'd put in a plug for the little guy.
Unless you go really high-end, Paradigms are tough to beat. They're usually the best value at any given price point -- bless the Canucks and the strong dollar. Buy whatever model you can afford. If you're mainly interested in Home Theater, then I'd go with the matching speakers all-around. If music is more important, I'd devote more money to the main speakers, then the center-channel, then the surrounds (which is what I did). I'd still use the same brand all-around to make sure the timbre matching is good. Get a subwoofer if you want better rumbling tanks/stomping dinosaurs/earth-shattering explosions (actually, a powered subwoofer also helps with music by taking the load off of your receiver for the low end). Of course, if you live in an apartment or condo, the subwoofer might make you unpopular with the neighbors.
As far as A/V receivers go, I'm a fan of Denon, but I can't argue with NAD. Onkyo is also pretty well regarded.
...just be sure to comment out "backdoor.h" before compiling anything...
Oh nevermind.
I believe on Sunday (10 Dec) from 1-7 PM EST they will be showing all the episodes back-to-back. So if you're up for six straight hours of spice-addled goodness, go for it. (Info courtesy of my TiVo.)
Hopefully the SciFi series won't have characters whispering their thoughts to themselves. Whenever Kyle McLachlan kept whispering "the spice..." to himself I wanted to yell "Yo, Spice Boy! No one can hear you!"
Isn't "Felicia's Journey" directed by Canada's own (by way of Armenia and Egypt) Atom Egoyan? Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of movies that are not easy to peg to one country.
BTW, I also highly recommend Egoyan's "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter".
Bit of trivia: His father named him "Atom" in honor of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. How funky is that? So who among you will be the first to name your kid "Linus", "Linux", or better yet, "Kernel"?
What I'm curious about is whether the Germans ban any movies, since there are many CoS devotees in Hollywood. Are Travolta movies prohibited, especially "Battlefield Earth"? (Well, OK, you could ban that simply as a "crime against humanity") How about Tom Cruise films?
While it's well and good to make their stand against the CoS (given recent German history, I'll cut them some slack on the freedom of religion and association issues), but it seems like taking on M$ but not Hollywood is kinda questionable -- "Well, if we ban movies people will actually be upset -- they gotta have their MI2. But no one really cares about some defrag utility".
Like the post above, my high school was a pretty decent place compared to some. There were 'cliques', but they weren't very hardcore and it was possible to belong to multiple groups. I was in the college prep classes, but I also played football and did theater. There were very few 1-to-1 correlations between belonging to one group and another, but instead a lot of cross-pollination.
;-)
On the football team, everybody was given some "-Dawg" related nickname. Names like "Junkyard-Dawg", "Higgy-Dawg", etc. Mine was "Mr. Peabody" (To the Wayback Machine, Sherman!). Go figure
Associate with people not like yourself. My experiences in high school, college, and especially the military showed me there are decent people (and dicks) from all walks of life and backgrounds. It's a useful perspective to have.
Yeah, the "liberal" version of diversity often means that you can be straight/gay/bi, white/black/purple...whatever, as long as you *think* like they do. There is never the idea that reasonable people can disagree -- any opinion other than theirs gets you shouted down and/or denounced as evil.
;-)
Now I'm not saying that all liberals think that way, but they're there, just as surely as there are Bible-Thumpers on the right. Of course, you're free to disagree
"Homecoming" is a tradition associated with American Football at the High School level (it's sometimes practiced in College but doesn't mean nearly as much there). At some point in the early/mid-season the team will play a couple of away games, the first home game after the road trip is the "homecoming" game.
In association with the game there will be a school dance, with a Homecoming King and Queen selected by popular vote. It's basically an excuse to have a dance/celebration in the Fall, and of course you try to schedule the game against a crummy team so you will win...
FYI, the anti-aircraft missile was called the Genie, and was meant to be carried by the F-102 or the F-106 (it may be one or the other, or both, I forget). I remember seeing a picture of some of the workers on the project standing at "ground zero" during a test. I'd be curious to see how they fared over the years. Fallout probably wouldn't be much of a problem with the Genie since the explosions would have been at high altitude. EMP might be another matter.
Some additional devices were a nuclear howitzer meant to destroy Red Army armored columns (just be sure the shells don't land short...) and spacecraft propulsion. I think that project was called Orion (don't hold me to that) and the idea was to toss out one small nuke after another from the back of the spacecraft, using the kick from each detonation to gain velocity.
Isn't it obvious? These are chew toys for the new AIBO. The handle is just so you don't get slobber on you when you pick it up.
Screw the NBC-style coverage. They should have four finalists in each area square off in front of a studio audience -- the Iron Chemists would have to whip up some new and useful compound from a set of ingredients, the Iron Doctors would have to perform speed-surgery, and the Iron Peacemakers would have to break up some arguments.
Oh sure, it seems like fun and games now, but that's how Gerald Bull started out. One day you're launching potatoes across the road, a few years later Saddam Hussein wants you to launch canned hams into Israel and the Mossad is breaking down your door...
Yeah, those wacky Brits. I remember seeing a documentary from the U.K. where they took infrared video of a man and woman in a state of arousal -- shades of blue to indicate cool, yellow/orange to indicate mildly warm, and reds to indicate hot.
The woman was a wonderful palette of yellows and oranges, with a few patches of red (the locations are an exercise left to the reader).
The man was dark blue all over with a single spot fiery red (again, you can guess where). Go figure...
It'll just sit there and not do anything...
...cuz MC Hawking is gonna drop some mad science on yo ass...
...the whole 'amateur' thing was concocted up for the modern Olympics to ensure only wealthy folks could participate. A steel worker in Sheffield in the 1890s couldn't afford to seriously train for a sport and *not* get paid for it, while the Duke of Somewhereshire had plenty of leisure time on his hands. Winners in the ancient Olympic games received great material rewards, not just a medal and a laurel wreath.
Really, the whole 'amateur' thing has been a farce for a long time. How exactly were Soviet athletes amateurs? In my book, if you don't have a full-time, non-sports related job, and all you do is train, and someone takes care of your food and housing, then your *job* is being an athlete and you are a professional. (You may be underpaid, but that is another issue.) I doubt many of the Red Army hockey players spent time walking point in Afghanistan.
Lest anyone think I'm just digging on the Soviets, it's hardly better here. Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson don't go off to day jobs after their training sessions. Odds are that a track star went to college on a scholarship and hasn't seen a regular job since. Athletes get paid for appearances, for sponsorships, etc. -- the only thing they don't get paid for is the actual competition, and this is only a small portion of the money a pro athlete makes. Just ask Tiger Woods.
Save for Team Handball and Curling, there really aren't any true amateurs in the Olympics anymore, and there haven't been for a long time.
Geez, where to begin...
.edu ("Damn, Columbia.com is already taken!"). Survive without Government subsidy -- THAT is the Free Market, not this Corporate Welfare bullshit.
If a researcher wants to make big bucks, here's a novel idea: WORK FOR A FSCKING COMPANY! Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC ring a bell? Ever look for "IBM" or "Apple Computer" in the patent database?
Universities, both public and private, receive substantial amounts of taxpayer-derived money both directly (e.g., grants) and from their status as educational institutions. The public should not have to subsidize research which primarily benefits corporations. If they want to become profit-centered institutions, they should be stripped of their educational status and forced to incorporate -- no more grant money, no more tax-free donations, no more
The other beef I have is other posters saying that profit-driven research will lead to more products the consumer wants. NOBODY knows what products they want 20, 30, or 50 years from now, because they don't know what will be possible then. High-end research -- the kind done by Universities, defines what is possible down the road.
For-profit research also raises the question: Profitable when? Most companies only look at this or next quarter's bottom line. Experiment for the reader: Go to Company X and tell them the product of your research will be hugely profitable, but only after fifteen years of constant investment. Until then it will just be a cash sinkhole. Wait for reaction.
The Soviet Union fell behind the US in the technology race because they lacked a critical component in the flow-down from high-end research to everyday products. They had world-class physicists and mathematicians at the high-end. They had engineers who were very innnovative working with the materials at hand (witness the Mig-25). What they lacked was that middle component that moved technology between the two ends -- and that was profit-driven companies.
We had all three components, but I'm afraid we'll end up sacrificing the high-end component to feed the profit appetite of the middle -- to whip out the cliche, we'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In the end we'll wind up with the ultimate bitchin' version of today's technology, not tomorrow's.
Like it or not, we do *not* live in a true Capitalist state. Not-for-profit organizations -- the Government and its labs, and the Universities -- make substantial contributions to our technology base which companies later run with, and I'd like to keep it that way.
There are no more 'Rogue Nations', only 'Countries of Concern'. I know it's true 'cuz Maddy Albright said so.
Damn, 3M invented Post-It Notes *and* the Palm? They are some smart muthas! I think you mean 3Com. In actuality, at first it was just the Palm Corporation, who were then bought out by USRobotics, who then merged into 3Com, who then spun Palm back into an independant company. Go figure.
Anyway, I had a Newton 100 and it did indeed suck down batteries (though some CE devices are about as bad). As for the handwriting recognition, there was a great third-party recognition app that worked much better, except you had to learn some special character strokes. It was called Graffitti and it was made by -- oh yeah, Palm. When I first saw that Palm had made their own PDA (the Pilot 1000 and 5000) I knew I had to get one. I kept that Pilot 5000 until I bought a Palm V. The smaller size was always the attraction for me, though the Newton MessagePad 2000 was a pretty impressive machine.
...that it's a little odd to name a security enhancement after a fortress that was successfully stormed (admittedly by the good guys). Though not an exact analogy, it's kind of like a Texan naming their security system The Alamo. Which reminds me -- Go Armstrong!
Anyway, at least they didn't name it the "Maginot Line" or "Dien Bien Phu".