Re:-1 karma for picking on "incredibly unique"
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
Admittedly "incredibly unique" probably still isn't the deftest choice of words,
I like the bit about "transitioning" myself.
I enjoyment a bit of transitioning myself every now and then. Anyone who doesn't possession the spare time for it doesn't comprehension what they're deprivation of.
There's a good quote about translating that passage from Latin. I think it's from Gore Vidal, but am not sure.
Tiberius, Capri. Pool of water. Small children... So far so good. One's laborious translation was making awful sense. Then... fish. Fish? The erotic mental image became surreal. Another victory for the Loeb Library's sly translator, J.C. Rolfe, who, correctly anticipating the pruriency of schoolboy readers, left Suetonius's gaudier passages in the hard original. One failed to crack those intriguing footnotes not because the syntax was so difficult (though it was not easy for students drilled in military rather than civilian Latin) but because the range of vice revealed was considerably beyond the imagination of even the most depraved schoolboy. There was a point at which one rejected one's own translation. Tiberius and the little fish, for instance.
It would, but I think one good reason to prioritise Rome is because the layout of the city changed in infuriatingly complicated ways during the centuries it was at its peak. The enormous building works instituted under some emperors (e.g. Augustus and Nero) make it very tiresome trying to work out what was where. It's basically impossible to represent that on a paper map: you need layers of maps. Such things are available, but an electronic version would be very nice.
If it weren't for that complexity, I reckon a single paper map would be just fine. In the case of classical Athens, say, a single paper map is basically fine, as the city's layout was fairly constant during its heyday. (Sure, they built a new acropolis, but it just occupied the site of the old one, mostly.) Conversely, studying archaeological sites whose history spans centuries or millennia -- say, Troy -- would be much easier with a diachronic map of the kind I envisage.
Unfortunately, what they've done isn't actually a diachronic map: it's focussed just on one period (320 CE). So, while glad of this for what it is, I for one am left annoyed at what might have been...
Since neither this article nor any other report I can find actually gives the reference for the joke, those wanting to look at critical editions can find it under Philogelos 18. Here's my literal translation:
Someone met an academic and said, "The slave you sold me died." "By the gods!" he said. "When he was at my place he didn't do anything like that."
I can't reproduce here the text for those who can read ancient Greek, as Slashdot won't allow non-Roman alphabets. Here's a transliterated form, though (minus the diacritics):
scholastikôi tis apantêsas eipen: ho doulos, hon epôlêas moi, apethane. ma tous theous, ephê, par' emoi hote ên, toiouton ouden epoiêsen.
I don't understand why the article talks as though the joke has just been discovered. There have been at least three critical editions in the last 50 years, and a few translations.
Does anyone has recommendations of better science news forums? Where you know, people actually focus on Science?
Academic journals.
I'm very much afraid that other than in costly peer-reviewed forums like those, the discourse doesn't get a great deal better than Slashdot. Even in academic journals the discourse is often poorly focussed and off-topic. Even discipline-specific mailing lists aren't noticeably better: I'm not even subscribed to the most important one for my field because it's just full of US-centric political rants.
(I speak as someone who studies ancient cultures professionally, and who is keenly aware that this story is not remotely "science" in a sense that most people here would tolerate... unless you're one of the rare birds who accept that the natural sciences and human sciences -- humanities -- have anything in common.)
Such tests have been available for a long time (though I think that can't possibly be a complete list: I thought there had been loads more tests than that). This item happens to focus on a single-format MP3 128 kb/s test; why this is newsworthy when all the other tests aren't, I'm not sure.
I always go back to the democratic foundations of ancient Athenian Greece where it was one vote per citizen and there was true debate in the town forum and citizens voted on potsherds with the mark of the person they wanted. Simple and effective.
Just FYI: that's not quite accurate. (I take it that you're thinking of democratic Athens, rather than any other state in Greece.) The only state officials who were elected by the populace were military generals; all other posts -- council-members, various kinds of representatives and bureaucrats, juries, etc. -- were appointed randomly. The Athenians regarded voting for representatives as fundamentally undemocratic. Voting in the assembly was done by a show of hands; writing names on potsherds was only for ostracisms (i.e. imposing a 10-year exile on any citizen if it was decided that political affairs were being unduly dominated by one individual).
Before idealising that system, it's worth bearing in mind that the Athenian democratic regime was extremely fickle and responsible for some appalling atrocities.
When I bought my eee PC, I was confident that I'll install Unbuntu eee immediately to it, but now, after a week of use, I actually like the preinstalled Linux. It provides everything I need - and I consider myself a geek - and it has a terminal, which is great, because I don't necessarily need any fancy GUI systems, the shell is enough for most "geek stuff" for me.
I'll second that. I tried using full KDE for a while, but fairly soon realised that it didn't provide me with anything I really missed in "easy mode", and it was taking three-to-four times as long to finish booting up.
I had made the mistake of trying to treat my netbook as a desktop. In fact the vanilla version is pretty much dead-on perfectly designed to the situations in which I actually use it. The fact that "Firefox" is labelled "web" is nothing in comparison to the 15 second boot-up time. Could it be better? Sure. But it does exactly what I bought it for.
Many open source licenses do behave rather similarly to a cancer (though admittedly, the characterization contains grossly unfair pejorative connotations). I'd think virus would be a more appropriate characterization, (with two notable exceptions, cancers aren't transmissible in any significant way),
That would be a tolerable analogy for licences generally, as exactly the same applies to every proprietary licence. I'd be happier if people comparing, say, the GPL to a "virus" were also comparing, say, every other licence that has ever been written.
You want to alter or redistribute Microsoft's software? Well, you can't unless you agree to some licence terms (assuming that Microsoft offers any). So your release is infected by someone else's licensing terms, so the "virus" has been spread. Only in this case it's likely to be a nasty virus.
Believe it or not, it's not a singleton -- though this one's source is less interesting, in that it doesn't check a variable.
At least both of them provide RSS feeds. (I had a bit of a start one day about three weeks ago when I noticed there was a new entry on one of the feeds.)
Thank you for that, I had read it a long time ago but had forgotten it. It's a real gem. I find it pleasing indeed, and it demonstrates Asimov's influence, that the two example planets he chooses to discuss are Earth and Trantor.
Soundtrack based on intensity of action goes back a lot further than that! Ballblazer (1984), one of the early great Lucasfilm (as it was then) games, had an in-game percussion-like soundtrack -- I say "percussion-like", as it consisted of beeps and boops, at least in the Atari 800 version that I played -- which varied in tempo and texture according to what was going on in the game. (It also had title music that was partially generated from random numbers, but that's a separate matter.) It had superb sound, and remains one of my favourite soundtracks.
Probably because Linux had already been announced in August 1991, so that is probably the more important anniversary. But the October post linked in the summary is the first usenet post to refer to it as Linux, and to link to the source.
(Incidentally, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I think the 28th of September was also a fairly important anniversary...)
Surely the person who truly wants to preserve their privacy, whether for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, would not want to draw attention to him/herself by using an OS that less than 1% of the world population uses?
Seems to me that using a homegrown OS, or even Linux, is tantamount to waving a big red banner labelled "Hey! I use a non-orthodox OS and am technically competent! I am likely to have secured my data in a comparatively unusual fashion!" Sure, technology like TrueCrypt can provide "proper" security, but that doesn't protect against whimsical, extra-judicial, or other asystematic abuse, confiscation, and imprisonment. For that, I reckon you still need security through obscurity -- i.e., not sticking out from the crowd.
The GP was commenting on the second paragraph of TFA --
What if, through the magic of technological progress, dropping 80 bucks on a video card could get you a GPU that will slice through the latest games with relative ease? What if it could help decode HD video streams perfectly, even on a slow CPU? If such a beast existed,...
-- and was pointing out exactly the same thing that you did: that it is difficult to walk five steps without falling over as many such beasts.
Not everyone feels a deep-seated emotional need to boast of the power of their video card, or the size of their monitor, you know.
It's not for the sake of Google Maps, it's to be visible to passengers in passing planes. Notice the major international airport (O'Hare) about 500 m south-west of that spot...
Here's another company logo just to the south of O'Hare. Sometimes you see them further away if the building is in a flight-path. Here and here are a couple several km away from Auckland Airport; notice the different orientation of the logos, depending on the angle the building will be visible from.
Methinks you should get your Blu-Ray discs somewhere else. The most expensive Blu-Ray film available from DSE is the third Pirates of the Caribbean film at $58.87.
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly "incredibly unique" probably still isn't the deftest choice of words,
I like the bit about "transitioning" myself.
I enjoyment a bit of transitioning myself every now and then. Anyone who doesn't possession the spare time for it doesn't comprehension what they're deprivation of.
Also Emperor Tiberius was the original Michael Jackson.
There's a good quote about translating that passage from Latin. I think it's from Gore Vidal, but am not sure.
Tiberius, Capri. Pool of water. Small children ... So far so good. One's laborious translation was making awful sense. Then ... fish. Fish? The erotic mental image became surreal. Another victory for the Loeb Library's sly translator, J.C. Rolfe, who, correctly anticipating the pruriency of schoolboy readers, left Suetonius's gaudier passages in the hard original. One failed to crack those intriguing footnotes not because the syntax was so difficult (though it was not easy for students drilled in military rather than civilian Latin) but because the range of vice revealed was considerably beyond the imagination of even the most depraved schoolboy. There was a point at which one rejected one's own translation. Tiberius and the little fish, for instance.
Ego saltem nouos Romanos dominos nostros saluere iubeo.
nonne scribere vis, "salvere volo"? quod scripsisti intellegitur, "I for one command our new Roman overlords to say hello" ...
The longer a country's name is, the less likely it is to be true...
Like "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" ...
Hm, come to think of it, you have a point.
It would, but I think one good reason to prioritise Rome is because the layout of the city changed in infuriatingly complicated ways during the centuries it was at its peak. The enormous building works instituted under some emperors (e.g. Augustus and Nero) make it very tiresome trying to work out what was where. It's basically impossible to represent that on a paper map: you need layers of maps. Such things are available, but an electronic version would be very nice.
If it weren't for that complexity, I reckon a single paper map would be just fine. In the case of classical Athens, say, a single paper map is basically fine, as the city's layout was fairly constant during its heyday. (Sure, they built a new acropolis, but it just occupied the site of the old one, mostly.) Conversely, studying archaeological sites whose history spans centuries or millennia -- say, Troy -- would be much easier with a diachronic map of the kind I envisage.
Unfortunately, what they've done isn't actually a diachronic map: it's focussed just on one period (320 CE). So, while glad of this for what it is, I for one am left annoyed at what might have been ...
Since neither this article nor any other report I can find actually gives the reference for the joke, those wanting to look at critical editions can find it under Philogelos 18. Here's my literal translation:
Someone met an academic and said, "The slave you sold me died." "By the gods!" he said. "When he was at my place he didn't do anything like that."
I can't reproduce here the text for those who can read ancient Greek, as Slashdot won't allow non-Roman alphabets. Here's a transliterated form, though (minus the diacritics):
scholastikôi tis apantêsas eipen: ho doulos, hon epôlêas moi, apethane. ma tous theous, ephê, par' emoi hote ên, toiouton ouden epoiêsen.
I don't understand why the article talks as though the joke has just been discovered. There have been at least three critical editions in the last 50 years, and a few translations.
Has everyone forgottten the Dalek Reality Bomb
We were trying to. And now you've gone and reminded us, you insensitive clod!
Does anyone has recommendations of better science news forums? Where you know, people actually focus on Science?
Academic journals.
I'm very much afraid that other than in costly peer-reviewed forums like those, the discourse doesn't get a great deal better than Slashdot. Even in academic journals the discourse is often poorly focussed and off-topic. Even discipline-specific mailing lists aren't noticeably better: I'm not even subscribed to the most important one for my field because it's just full of US-centric political rants.
(I speak as someone who studies ancient cultures professionally, and who is keenly aware that this story is not remotely "science" in a sense that most people here would tolerate ... unless you're one of the rare birds who accept that the natural sciences and human sciences -- humanities -- have anything in common.)
Such tests have been available for a long time (though I think that can't possibly be a complete list: I thought there had been loads more tests than that). This item happens to focus on a single-format MP3 128 kb/s test; why this is newsworthy when all the other tests aren't, I'm not sure.
Fortunately someone on the HydrogenAudio forum was equally annoyed and has posted all the samples in a single zip file (54 MB file).
I always go back to the democratic foundations of ancient Athenian Greece where it was one vote per citizen and there was true debate in the town forum and citizens voted on potsherds with the mark of the person they wanted. Simple and effective.
Just FYI: that's not quite accurate. (I take it that you're thinking of democratic Athens, rather than any other state in Greece.) The only state officials who were elected by the populace were military generals; all other posts -- council-members, various kinds of representatives and bureaucrats, juries, etc. -- were appointed randomly. The Athenians regarded voting for representatives as fundamentally undemocratic. Voting in the assembly was done by a show of hands; writing names on potsherds was only for ostracisms (i.e. imposing a 10-year exile on any citizen if it was decided that political affairs were being unduly dominated by one individual).
Before idealising that system, it's worth bearing in mind that the Athenian democratic regime was extremely fickle and responsible for some appalling atrocities.
When I bought my eee PC, I was confident that I'll install Unbuntu eee immediately to it, but now, after a week of use, I actually like the preinstalled Linux. It provides everything I need - and I consider myself a geek - and it has a terminal, which is great, because I don't necessarily need any fancy GUI systems, the shell is enough for most "geek stuff" for me.
I'll second that. I tried using full KDE for a while, but fairly soon realised that it didn't provide me with anything I really missed in "easy mode", and it was taking three-to-four times as long to finish booting up.
I had made the mistake of trying to treat my netbook as a desktop. In fact the vanilla version is pretty much dead-on perfectly designed to the situations in which I actually use it. The fact that "Firefox" is labelled "web" is nothing in comparison to the 15 second boot-up time. Could it be better? Sure. But it does exactly what I bought it for.
Oh wait, I don't own any EA games anyway.
I do -- M.U.L.E.
I think that's the last EA game I bought ...
How very timely this Dilbert strip is, then!
Many open source licenses do behave rather similarly to a cancer (though admittedly, the characterization contains grossly unfair pejorative connotations). I'd think virus would be a more appropriate characterization, (with two notable exceptions, cancers aren't transmissible in any significant way),
That would be a tolerable analogy for licences generally, as exactly the same applies to every proprietary licence. I'd be happier if people comparing, say, the GPL to a "virus" were also comparing, say, every other licence that has ever been written.
You want to alter or redistribute Microsoft's software? Well, you can't unless you agree to some licence terms (assuming that Microsoft offers any). So your release is infected by someone else's licensing terms, so the "virus" has been spread. Only in this case it's likely to be a nasty virus.
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
Believe it or not, it's not a singleton -- though this one's source is less interesting, in that it doesn't check a variable.
At least both of them provide RSS feeds. (I had a bit of a start one day about three weeks ago when I noticed there was a new entry on one of the feeds.)
In the end, I was happy with the result from the company. I decided to install the game, since I have less of an issue with DRM and Freeware.
Sir, you have made my day. Thanks for the out-loud laugh before I even touch my coffee.
Thank you for that, I had read it a long time ago but had forgotten it. It's a real gem. I find it pleasing indeed, and it demonstrates Asimov's influence, that the two example planets he chooses to discuss are Earth and Trantor.
Soundtrack based on intensity of action goes back a lot further than that! Ballblazer (1984), one of the early great Lucasfilm (as it was then) games, had an in-game percussion-like soundtrack -- I say "percussion-like", as it consisted of beeps and boops, at least in the Atari 800 version that I played -- which varied in tempo and texture according to what was going on in the game. (It also had title music that was partially generated from random numbers, but that's a separate matter.) It had superb sound, and remains one of my favourite soundtracks.
Probably because Linux had already been announced in August 1991, so that is probably the more important anniversary. But the October post linked in the summary is the first usenet post to refer to it as Linux, and to link to the source.
(Incidentally, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I think the 28th of September was also a fairly important anniversary ...)
Surely the person who truly wants to preserve their privacy, whether for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, would not want to draw attention to him/herself by using an OS that less than 1% of the world population uses?
Seems to me that using a homegrown OS, or even Linux, is tantamount to waving a big red banner labelled "Hey! I use a non-orthodox OS and am technically competent! I am likely to have secured my data in a comparatively unusual fashion!" Sure, technology like TrueCrypt can provide "proper" security, but that doesn't protect against whimsical, extra-judicial, or other asystematic abuse, confiscation, and imprisonment. For that, I reckon you still need security through obscurity -- i.e., not sticking out from the crowd.
"Its time for revolution! Viva Quebec!"
"Car ton bras sait porter l'épée", indeed. (But it might be wise to learn to say that in French ... "Vive le Québec", not "viva".)
The GP was commenting on the second paragraph of TFA --
What if, through the magic of technological progress, dropping 80 bucks on a video card could get you a GPU that will slice through the latest games with relative ease? What if it could help decode HD video streams perfectly, even on a slow CPU? If such a beast existed,...
-- and was pointing out exactly the same thing that you did: that it is difficult to walk five steps without falling over as many such beasts.
Not everyone feels a deep-seated emotional need to boast of the power of their video card, or the size of their monitor, you know.
It's not for the sake of Google Maps, it's to be visible to passengers in passing planes. Notice the major international airport (O'Hare) about 500 m south-west of that spot ...
Here's another company logo just to the south of O'Hare. Sometimes you see them further away if the building is in a flight-path. Here and here are a couple several km away from Auckland Airport; notice the different orientation of the logos, depending on the angle the building will be visible from.
Methinks you should get your Blu-Ray discs somewhere else. The most expensive Blu-Ray film available from DSE is the third Pirates of the Caribbean film at $58.87.