As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive.
Despite it's counter-productiveness as a species the human race still engages itself in conflict wherever it can, usually because of scarcity of resources or for extending its control over other nations, and we're getting better at it. Religion and nationalism are often a means to an end in that aspect, allowing us to masquerade ulterior motivations as a need to protect (or advance) our cultural identity. Take for instance the conflicts the US has been engaged in under the guise of delivering freedom to foreign nations, or how islam fundamentalistic groups are using religion as their primary motivator for advancing their cause. Other such example include tribal genocide in Africa, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, and let's not forget the Israel-Palestine conflict which has gone through several iterations.
I would agree that war is extremely counter productive, but let us not kid ourselves and admit that we as a species have yet to overcome our desire for eliminating or controlling that which is different from our cultural identity.
Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor.
Our technological advances since World War II have included a significant amount of research in reducing the effort it would take to exterminate our neighbor and defending against our neighbor killing us. Take a look at the gulf wars and the pride displayed in the last one over the massive firepower used under the "Shock and Awe" slogan. In a single week enough money was brought to explosion to keep a small nation running for an entire year (perhaps two), and that's not even counting the amount of money that went into researching that weaponry.
Sure, we have made a diplomatic move towards sanity with the founding of the UN, but the true reason why we haven't descended into another world war is that several nations have the ability to obliterate all other nations at least once. We sit around the table discussing things, not because we don't want to hurl rocks at eachother, but because the rocks have gotten so big that any sufficiently large conflict would eradicate most of the world.
why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
To answer that question we need only look in the mirror. We are advanced enough to launch ourselves into space (albeit not very far at this point in time), yet our own planet is continuously at war, more often than not over resources under the guise of nationalism or religion. The moment a civilization starts exploring other solar systems it is more than likely that they are doing so for a need of resources. If what stands between you and those resources is a society that by itself is wrapped in conflict, nowhere near the technological advancements you possess, then the most logical conclusion is that you screw them over to keep your advantage. We could be screwed over in a trade agreement (the nice way), or we could be screwed over by warfare (most likely, the easy way, nuking us from orbit, the only way to be sure).
I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other
An alien race not ethically advanced enough could perhaps have a single nation or a unity of nations subjugating their planetary adversaries in their history. We only need to look at WWII to see that such a conflict lies well within the realm of possibilities. Being able to bomb someone out of existence doesn't mean that you yourself have to be free from strife and conflict either. The Iraq war was not waged by an entire nation of civilians
A bit redundant there, with 'sensible atheists', aren't we?
Well, there are those crazy atheists that have assigned an entity to represent disbelief in a higher power and have begun to worship it. That doesn't make any sense.
Where is it written that innocent television broadcasters need to put their lives on the line to adhere to your ideals?
Dear US,
We are very upset with this "freedom of speech" thing you have. If you do not cancel so called "freedom of speech" we will blow up all of your fast food restaurants.
Kind regards,
Religious Nut #523
P.S.: We would also be very pleased if you could find it in your heart to convert to our religion, as it will give us a +2 bonus to diplomatic relations and avoid the possibility of war.
I've spent many loading times in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, reading manuals. Guess its just me.
I never did that for those games. Downloaded them all from steam. But back in the day some games came with fold-out maps, an actual story in the manual, and something that made the experience just that bit more than sitting in front of a keyboard mashing buttons.
Somehow, not having all those little extras makes it feel like when I buy a physical copy I'm somehow just getting a cardboard box with a CD in it. It's like the companies that produce games no longer like their customers except for their money. Oh, don't get me wrong, the companies from way back were in it for the money too, but for some reason it seemed like they actually loved their work instead of churning out generic RPG #2945.
Wrong. Some of the phones use Qualcomm's Snapdragon which is not ARM based. Nexus One, HTC Desire, Incredible are Snapdragon.
You'd be surprised how many devices actually have an ARM inside, even if it's labeled something different.
Snapdragon is the name of the architecture of a family of chipsets with an ARM-based CPU.
For example, the Nintendo DS comes with an ARM 9 and an ARM 7 inside making it one of the cheaper ARM motherboards with a lot of peripherals for your amusement. Most ARM devboards cost more than a DS + cardreader, but they do tend to have more functional interfaces like CAN-bus, USB, serial ports and the like for addressing external devices.
Personally I hope Apple doesn't get to buy ARM, not out of spite or a dislike of mr Jobs, but they'd gain too much of a foothold in the portable devices market. Not just phones, but also the Nintendo DS (or whatever will succeed it). If I'm not mistaken a significant part of Apple's strategy for the iPad, iPod Touch and (to a lesser extent) the iPhone is mobile gaming.
With ARM in their hands, Apple theoretically could force the competition to have to switch architectures for their next generation devices, where typically these companies license a new processor. Sure, they'd miss out on the licensing deal for the processors for those competitors, but they'd have the advantage for a short but significant amount of time for their platform to pick up more users. The rest of ARM licensing will be business as usual, and from what I gather that is a very profitable business so it's not like it would be a bad investment.
So... With a mobile platform in one hand, and the offer to buy the company that designs and licenses nearly all other competitors CPUs in the other hand, you'll have to forgive me if I am a little more than wary of what their plans are for the future. And yes, this post is rife with speculation, but given the traction the apple products have right now, and the fact that they could deal a major blow to competitors in the near future while still making a nice profit, I would say that this is feasible.
With both engadget and Gizmodo getting their hands on the "next iPhone" in different bars in different cities, it is difficult to believe that somebody actually lost the phones. Either both engadget and Gizmodo got fooled or this is more a marketing campaign than lost phones. I would bet on latter.
"Oh hi you techreporters. I'll just be finishing my drink and then conveniently leaving my NEW FREAKIN' IPHONE 4 *cough* here for someone totally random to find."
Objective-C is what C++ could have been if they had done it right.
Oh God, don't... just... DON'T! I've seen this type of argument before, and the conversation that unfolded before my very eyes was a disaster. Had it been held on a forum, usenet or anything remotely related to internet it would have been called the flamewar of all times. We even had a guy trolling both camps, and all the discussion achieved was that both sides agreed that they disagreed.
Personally though, from what little experience I have with the language, I really dislike the way Objective-C code looks. The whole [ ] thing for calling methods looks unsightly and out of place.
Cat* aCat = [ [ Cat alloc ] init ];
just doesn't have the same elegance that
Cat * aCat = new Cat();
has to me. The whole [ ] syntax just gets on my nerves. Now, having said that, there's lots of things in C++ that gets on my nerves as well, but nothing quite as early on into the language as calling a method. I guess once you get used to it things 'll get better.
Australia's censor system needs a snappy title too.
Since Australia was originally used as a penal colony, I would suggest "The Australian Packet Prison". It has a nice ring to it, and I'm sure some will be offended. To top it off, it works great for Australia bashing.
Lucky you, I have an intranet page mandatory by corporate policy, which insists on resizing my browser to the size of the first screen of my desktop. Not instantly though, it waits just the right amount of time for me to drag my mouse to the title bar to move the window and then resizes. After 4 years of that horrid experience it still gets me every time I open up that page.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I never use the search box.
I never used the search box until I figured out that you can hack opensearch stuff into it. I built a webinterface with product listings for internal use, and there's a certain amount of joy in seeing people just typing what they're looking for in the search bar instead of seeing them wade through a menu, sigh, click on the search page, sigh again, type in the product number or name. I know, it would be a lot easier to just provide that search bar from the start in the index page, but the gods of house-style of spoken: "THOU SHALT CLICK THREE TIMES, OR SEARCH BE NOT FOR YE".
Also, the python documentation reference search is a single click away, which is something that I happen to use a lot when prototyping stuff. I don't use python on a daily basis (yeah I know, shame on me), so it's easy to just have it right there when I need it.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
You people are the scum of the earth, and enemies of freedom.
Time to take your meds dear, you're frothing at the mouth again.
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 3, Funny
MacGyver proved that you could solve any problem with a rubber band, a pen, and a paperclip.
Hey! That guy became a general in a top secret military project for visiting alien worlds! Don't ever make fun of the power of a paperclip.
People, snap out of it. Its just a tablet computer.
Yeah, but this one is hand-made by Steve Jobs, assembled on the thighs of Taiwanese virgins. If you sniff it real hard you can still smell the reality distortion field permeating the electronics.
It will also double as a paperweight and shiny object to distract other people.
Disclaimer: Taiwanese virgins may or may not be female. Applicability as paperweight is not guaranteed by the usermanual.
"In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."
In one case, the parents of a 9 year old girl weren't paying attention, like they should have been, while their daughter surfed the web
In other news a Mr. Dick Johnson also known to some as Richard Johnson was arrested last night for the use of his obscene name on the internet. Mr Johnson, a youth councelor at a local elementary school, was exposed to have an obscene name on the internet by the social networking service Google Buzz.
"We never questioned the mans name," spoke a school representative, "until he was found using the internet. I guess he contacted one of the parents and with the whole social-thingy-network of the Googles his name spread to children online. Stern action must be taken against people with silly names and Google to protect our children."
In the meantime an organisation has formed to protest this incident. The organisation known as "Protecting Eccentric Names from Internet Surfers" (P.E.N.I.S.) is making a stance against social networking incidents where the use of proper names has sparked incidents with parents of young children. Willy Dickins, head of the P.E.N.I.S. committee, commented that his name has often lead to misunderstandings. "Last year I got arrested for befriending someone on facebook and trying to send them a message", Willy spoke, "since that day I've been using the pseudonym FreeWilly, which is symbolic for me wanting to be free to use my own name again."
"It's all about the perception of my name and the context people see it in." said private Parts, a soldier in marine corps, "When I go online with my rank and surname, people automatically label me as a pervert.". The ever growing member list of P.E.N.I.S. shows that this problem is growing fast, and with the advent of technology expanding into areas where children may be confronted with these dubious names.
Have fun arguing, as the past few articles have been quite fruitful in that area. Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
Got a shitty village in the way of the interstate? Move. No pissy little lawsuits there to slow things down.
Except when you live in the village getting in the way of the interstate and the government offers you a the monetary equivalent of "Cry me a river" and bulldozes your house and any form of protest is met with imprisonment.
It's easy to get shit done when you don't have to listen to the people you're doing it for.
While most of the Chinese people I talked to were rather ignorant about news (nationally and internationally), pretty much all of them liked the government.
It would seem that the old saying "Ignorance is bliss" does appear to be stand.
I'd like to say that Jack Tramiel is the unsung hero of the personal computer [snip] By sparking the low-cost microcomputer revolution of the eighties, he prepared a whole generation to the modern digital age.
10 PRINT "THANK YOU JACK TRAMIEL"
20 GOTO 10
If it wasn't for the C64 I'd probably have never gotten into this stuff. God only knows what I would've wasted the years as a teenager on.
It's the reason HTML5 is coming. Flash is wrong and should, and pretty soon, will die.
While I am by no means a fan of flash, substitute HTML5 with SVG, XMLHttpRequest, web2.0 or whatever thing that surfaced on the web and you're drawing a timeline of death of flash prediction. This ugly beast doesn't go down easily.
After 17 weeks of trying and failing to get Nintendo to provide Pelloni with the SDK, on December 11, 2008, he decided to publicly protest to Nintendo by locking himself in his room for 100 days or until they provided him with the SDK, whichever came first.
I, for one, will be using my "end of Cold War" era Yaesu FRG-7700 shortwave radio to search for broadcasts from the Free World
Purely from a technical point of view, one could use such a shortwave radio together with a modem to create a network that could broadcast kitty porn, so, I'm afraid we're also going to have to confiscate that.
We're also going to have confiscate any flashlights you have, so you can't broadcast aforementioned kitty porn in binary signals to your neighbours. You don't happen to own two tin cans and a piece of string? We've had disturbing reports of people luring kitties by mewing loudly into one can.
I hate to say it, but soon the only network free of filters will be something like freenet, but oh snap... The very people this filter is trying to catch already are using this and similar technologies.
That said don't misconstrue this as to have any actual sympathy for people selling devices to get around copyright protection. I understand that these devices can be used for homebrewing. And I'll support the first to support any company that actually tries to make a business out of homebrewing for the Nintendo DS. But first that company will have to do a pretty damn good job convincing me they really are trying to make a business out of homebrewing and aren't using it as a legal pretext to allow people to pirate DS games.
There is no business in homebrewing on the DS. But as someone who's spent a substantial amount of time in tinkering with the DS, let me reassure you that it's a lot of FUN! (Warning: your definition of FUN may vary). By todays standards you've got a very limited amount of room to do your work in and you have to make the most out of it, and most of the code you write is going to be really close to the hardware. If you're remotely interested in this sort of thing (even if you're not going to write a game), the DS is a pretty cheap ARM platform for all the hardware that's in it:
two small screens, addressable through several memory banks, with several modes of operation (including a rudimentary OpenGL like 3D API on one of the screens)
a touch screen interface
wifi
sound output via speakers and input via microphone
The DSi even has two cameras onboard, but I don't think they're supported by libnds yet.
Oh, and of course, very interesting is that a lot of people have made the source code for their homebrew games available. Sometimes you'll just go and have a peek at how someone else did something, and discover something really ingenious, often optimized to give the best performance given the limited hardware available.
But let's face the fact, without Nintendos official seal of approval (read: a wheelbarrow of cash and a reputable game-company backing it) there will never be any real money in whatever you're going to code. If you want to do something commercially, you'll have to buy Nintendos tools, etc. If tinkering with a piece of hardware you buy is going to make you a criminal, I fear for the next generation of geeks.
I once coded a program for my own use that downloaded images from binary newsgroups, decoded them, and inserted them into a PostgreSQL database, with keywords extracted from the message.
So, I'm guessing you were building a porn search engine? For "research" purposes of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuking and terraforming a planet with intelligent life is genocide.
I believe after the nukes drop, the first step in terraforming would be the aliens demanding us to "cry them a river"
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive.
Despite it's counter-productiveness as a species the human race still engages itself in conflict wherever it can, usually because of scarcity of resources or for extending its control over other nations, and we're getting better at it. Religion and nationalism are often a means to an end in that aspect, allowing us to masquerade ulterior motivations as a need to protect (or advance) our cultural identity. Take for instance the conflicts the US has been engaged in under the guise of delivering freedom to foreign nations, or how islam fundamentalistic groups are using religion as their primary motivator for advancing their cause. Other such example include tribal genocide in Africa, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, and let's not forget the Israel-Palestine conflict which has gone through several iterations.
I would agree that war is extremely counter productive, but let us not kid ourselves and admit that we as a species have yet to overcome our desire for eliminating or controlling that which is different from our cultural identity.
Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor.
Our technological advances since World War II have included a significant amount of research in reducing the effort it would take to exterminate our neighbor and defending against our neighbor killing us. Take a look at the gulf wars and the pride displayed in the last one over the massive firepower used under the "Shock and Awe" slogan. In a single week enough money was brought to explosion to keep a small nation running for an entire year (perhaps two), and that's not even counting the amount of money that went into researching that weaponry.
Sure, we have made a diplomatic move towards sanity with the founding of the UN, but the true reason why we haven't descended into another world war is that several nations have the ability to obliterate all other nations at least once. We sit around the table discussing things, not because we don't want to hurl rocks at eachother, but because the rocks have gotten so big that any sufficiently large conflict would eradicate most of the world.
why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
To answer that question we need only look in the mirror. We are advanced enough to launch ourselves into space (albeit not very far at this point in time), yet our own planet is continuously at war, more often than not over resources under the guise of nationalism or religion. The moment a civilization starts exploring other solar systems it is more than likely that they are doing so for a need of resources. If what stands between you and those resources is a society that by itself is wrapped in conflict, nowhere near the technological advancements you possess, then the most logical conclusion is that you screw them over to keep your advantage. We could be screwed over in a trade agreement (the nice way), or we could be screwed over by warfare (most likely, the easy way, nuking us from orbit, the only way to be sure).
I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other
An alien race not ethically advanced enough could perhaps have a single nation or a unity of nations subjugating their planetary adversaries in their history. We only need to look at WWII to see that such a conflict lies well within the realm of possibilities. Being able to bomb someone out of existence doesn't mean that you yourself have to be free from strife and conflict either. The Iraq war was not waged by an entire nation of civilians
A bit redundant there, with 'sensible atheists', aren't we?
Well, there are those crazy atheists that have assigned an entity to represent disbelief in a higher power and have begun to worship it. That doesn't make any sense.
Where is it written that innocent television broadcasters need to put their lives on the line to adhere to your ideals?
Dear US,
We are very upset with this "freedom of speech" thing you have. If you do not cancel so called "freedom of speech" we will blow up all of your fast food restaurants.
Kind regards,
Religious Nut #523
P.S.: We would also be very pleased if you could find it in your heart to convert to our religion, as it will give us a +2 bonus to diplomatic relations and avoid the possibility of war.
I've spent many loading times in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, reading manuals. Guess its just me.
I never did that for those games. Downloaded them all from steam. But back in the day some games came with fold-out maps, an actual story in the manual, and something that made the experience just that bit more than sitting in front of a keyboard mashing buttons.
Somehow, not having all those little extras makes it feel like when I buy a physical copy I'm somehow just getting a cardboard box with a CD in it. It's like the companies that produce games no longer like their customers except for their money. Oh, don't get me wrong, the companies from way back were in it for the money too, but for some reason it seemed like they actually loved their work instead of churning out generic RPG #2945.
Wrong. Some of the phones use Qualcomm's Snapdragon which is not ARM based. Nexus One, HTC Desire, Incredible are Snapdragon.
You'd be surprised how many devices actually have an ARM inside, even if it's labeled something different.
Snapdragon is the name of the architecture of a family of chipsets with an ARM-based CPU.
For example, the Nintendo DS comes with an ARM 9 and an ARM 7 inside making it one of the cheaper ARM motherboards with a lot of peripherals for your amusement. Most ARM devboards cost more than a DS + cardreader, but they do tend to have more functional interfaces like CAN-bus, USB, serial ports and the like for addressing external devices.
Personally I hope Apple doesn't get to buy ARM, not out of spite or a dislike of mr Jobs, but they'd gain too much of a foothold in the portable devices market. Not just phones, but also the Nintendo DS (or whatever will succeed it). If I'm not mistaken a significant part of Apple's strategy for the iPad, iPod Touch and (to a lesser extent) the iPhone is mobile gaming.
With ARM in their hands, Apple theoretically could force the competition to have to switch architectures for their next generation devices, where typically these companies license a new processor. Sure, they'd miss out on the licensing deal for the processors for those competitors, but they'd have the advantage for a short but significant amount of time for their platform to pick up more users. The rest of ARM licensing will be business as usual, and from what I gather that is a very profitable business so it's not like it would be a bad investment.
So... With a mobile platform in one hand, and the offer to buy the company that designs and licenses nearly all other competitors CPUs in the other hand, you'll have to forgive me if I am a little more than wary of what their plans are for the future. And yes, this post is rife with speculation, but given the traction the apple products have right now, and the fact that they could deal a major blow to competitors in the near future while still making a nice profit, I would say that this is feasible.
With both engadget and Gizmodo getting their hands on the "next iPhone" in different bars in different cities, it is difficult to believe that somebody actually lost the phones. Either both engadget and Gizmodo got fooled or this is more a marketing campaign than lost phones. I would bet on latter.
"Oh hi you techreporters. I'll just be finishing my drink and then conveniently leaving my NEW FREAKIN' IPHONE 4 *cough* here for someone totally random to find."
What? It could happen...
Objective-C is what C++ could have been if they had done it right.
Oh God, don't... just... DON'T! I've seen this type of argument before, and the conversation that unfolded before my very eyes was a disaster. Had it been held on a forum, usenet or anything remotely related to internet it would have been called the flamewar of all times. We even had a guy trolling both camps, and all the discussion achieved was that both sides agreed that they disagreed.
Personally though, from what little experience I have with the language, I really dislike the way Objective-C code looks. The whole [ ] thing for calling methods looks unsightly and out of place.
Cat* aCat = [ [ Cat alloc ] init ];
just doesn't have the same elegance that
Cat * aCat = new Cat();
has to me. The whole [ ] syntax just gets on my nerves. Now, having said that, there's lots of things in C++ that gets on my nerves as well, but nothing quite as early on into the language as calling a method. I guess once you get used to it things 'll get better.
and if a few eggs get smashed along the way, they're quite fine with that.
Will their shareholders feel the same way when Ubisoft titles have the reputation of being flaky, hard to play, and prone to technical malfunction?
That'll depend on how many suckers keep buying the games.
Australia's censor system needs a snappy title too.
Since Australia was originally used as a penal colony, I would suggest "The Australian Packet Prison". It has a nice ring to it, and I'm sure some will be offended. To top it off, it works great for Australia bashing.
I just have Google as my home page
Lucky you, I have an intranet page mandatory by corporate policy, which insists on resizing my browser to the size of the first screen of my desktop. Not instantly though, it waits just the right amount of time for me to drag my mouse to the title bar to move the window and then resizes. After 4 years of that horrid experience it still gets me every time I open up that page.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I never use the search box.
I never used the search box until I figured out that you can hack opensearch stuff into it. I built a webinterface with product listings for internal use, and there's a certain amount of joy in seeing people just typing what they're looking for in the search bar instead of seeing them wade through a menu, sigh, click on the search page, sigh again, type in the product number or name. I know, it would be a lot easier to just provide that search bar from the start in the index page, but the gods of house-style of spoken: "THOU SHALT CLICK THREE TIMES, OR SEARCH BE NOT FOR YE".
Also, the python documentation reference search is a single click away, which is something that I happen to use a lot when prototyping stuff. I don't use python on a daily basis (yeah I know, shame on me), so it's easy to just have it right there when I need it.
You people are the scum of the earth, and enemies of freedom.
Time to take your meds dear, you're frothing at the mouth again.
MacGyver proved that you could solve any problem with a rubber band, a pen, and a paperclip.
Hey! That guy became a general in a top secret military project for visiting alien worlds! Don't ever make fun of the power of a paperclip.
People, snap out of it. Its just a tablet computer.
Yeah, but this one is hand-made by Steve Jobs, assembled on the thighs of Taiwanese virgins. If you sniff it real hard you can still smell the reality distortion field permeating the electronics.
It will also double as a paperweight and shiny object to distract other people.
Disclaimer: Taiwanese virgins may or may not be female. Applicability as paperweight is not guaranteed by the usermanual.
"In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."
In one case, the parents of a 9 year old girl weren't paying attention, like they should have been, while their daughter surfed the web
In other news a Mr. Dick Johnson also known to some as Richard Johnson was arrested last night for the use of his obscene name on the internet. Mr Johnson, a youth councelor at a local elementary school, was exposed to have an obscene name on the internet by the social networking service Google Buzz.
"We never questioned the mans name," spoke a school representative, "until he was found using the internet. I guess he contacted one of the parents and with the whole social-thingy-network of the Googles his name spread to children online. Stern action must be taken against people with silly names and Google to protect our children."
In the meantime an organisation has formed to protest this incident. The organisation known as "Protecting Eccentric Names from Internet Surfers" (P.E.N.I.S.) is making a stance against social networking incidents where the use of proper names has sparked incidents with parents of young children. Willy Dickins, head of the P.E.N.I.S. committee, commented that his name has often lead to misunderstandings. "Last year I got arrested for befriending someone on facebook and trying to send them a message", Willy spoke, "since that day I've been using the pseudonym FreeWilly, which is symbolic for me wanting to be free to use my own name again."
"It's all about the perception of my name and the context people see it in." said private Parts, a soldier in marine corps, "When I go online with my rank and surname, people automatically label me as a pervert.". The ever growing member list of P.E.N.I.S. shows that this problem is growing fast, and with the advent of technology expanding into areas where children may be confronted with these dubious names.
So before someone starts the whole "which codec is better" flamewar again: someone at xiph thinks theora is better, ars thinks h264 is better, and this guy has a do it yourself kit in the form of a shell script.
Have fun arguing, as the past few articles have been quite fruitful in that area. Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
Got a shitty village in the way of the interstate? Move. No pissy little lawsuits there to slow things down.
Except when you live in the village getting in the way of the interstate and the government offers you a the monetary equivalent of "Cry me a river" and bulldozes your house and any form of protest is met with imprisonment.
It's easy to get shit done when you don't have to listen to the people you're doing it for.
While most of the Chinese people I talked to were rather ignorant about news (nationally and internationally), pretty much all of them liked the government.
It would seem that the old saying "Ignorance is bliss" does appear to be stand.
I'd like to say that Jack Tramiel is the unsung hero of the personal computer [snip] By sparking the low-cost microcomputer revolution of the eighties, he prepared a whole generation to the modern digital age.
10 PRINT "THANK YOU JACK TRAMIEL"
20 GOTO 10
If it wasn't for the C64 I'd probably have never gotten into this stuff. God only knows what I would've wasted the years as a teenager on.
A customer desire is met with supply. Admit it--many of you wish you'd thought of this.
Screw thinking of it. I'm building my own rent-a-friend with blackjack and hookers. In fact, screw the rent-a-friend.
It's the reason HTML5 is coming. Flash is wrong and should, and pretty soon, will die.
While I am by no means a fan of flash, substitute HTML5 with SVG, XMLHttpRequest, web2.0 or whatever thing that surfaced on the web and you're drawing a timeline of death of flash prediction. This ugly beast doesn't go down easily.
After 17 weeks of trying and failing to get Nintendo to provide Pelloni with the SDK, on December 11, 2008, he decided to publicly protest to Nintendo by locking himself in his room for 100 days or until they provided him with the SDK, whichever came first.
Well, not that obviously.
I, for one, will be using my "end of Cold War" era Yaesu FRG-7700 shortwave radio to search for broadcasts from the Free World
Purely from a technical point of view, one could use such a shortwave radio together with a modem to create a network that could broadcast kitty porn, so, I'm afraid we're also going to have to confiscate that.
We're also going to have confiscate any flashlights you have, so you can't broadcast aforementioned kitty porn in binary signals to your neighbours. You don't happen to own two tin cans and a piece of string? We've had disturbing reports of people luring kitties by mewing loudly into one can.
I hate to say it, but soon the only network free of filters will be something like freenet, but oh snap... The very people this filter is trying to catch already are using this and similar technologies.
I sense some legal trouble for these guys in the near future..
Sadly PleaseSueMe.com has already been taken, or they would've been able to set a new trend.
That said don't misconstrue this as to have any actual sympathy for people selling devices to get around copyright protection. I understand that these devices can be used for homebrewing. And I'll support the first to support any company that actually tries to make a business out of homebrewing for the Nintendo DS. But first that company will have to do a pretty damn good job convincing me they really are trying to make a business out of homebrewing and aren't using it as a legal pretext to allow people to pirate DS games.
There is no business in homebrewing on the DS. But as someone who's spent a substantial amount of time in tinkering with the DS, let me reassure you that it's a lot of FUN! (Warning: your definition of FUN may vary). By todays standards you've got a very limited amount of room to do your work in and you have to make the most out of it, and most of the code you write is going to be really close to the hardware. If you're remotely interested in this sort of thing (even if you're not going to write a game), the DS is a pretty cheap ARM platform for all the hardware that's in it:
The DSi even has two cameras onboard, but I don't think they're supported by libnds yet.
Oh, and of course, very interesting is that a lot of people have made the source code for their homebrew games available. Sometimes you'll just go and have a peek at how someone else did something, and discover something really ingenious, often optimized to give the best performance given the limited hardware available.
But let's face the fact, without Nintendos official seal of approval (read: a wheelbarrow of cash and a reputable game-company backing it) there will never be any real money in whatever you're going to code. If you want to do something commercially, you'll have to buy Nintendos tools, etc. If tinkering with a piece of hardware you buy is going to make you a criminal, I fear for the next generation of geeks.
I once coded a program for my own use that downloaded images from binary newsgroups, decoded them, and inserted them into a PostgreSQL database, with keywords extracted from the message.
So, I'm guessing you were building a porn search engine? For "research" purposes of course.