Didn't-RTFA-Slashdot-reader: So this must mean there's life on Mars! Various blogs: Aliens found in radar scan of Mars! Slashdot-derivative-news-site: Alien Probe from Mars performs Radar Scan of NASA
Of course, that assumes there -is- a news site derivative of Slashdot. Isn't this pretty much the endpoint of second-hand news?
I agree that "phishing" is arcane and not helpful to people who aren't already familiar with the term and concept. But I think "Identity Theft Filter" is a bit confusing. I feel like a lot of people don't understand what identity theft is. "Malicious Websites" is OK, but it doesn't really explain how the site is malicious. (Browser exploit? Hate speech? etc.) Maybe "Deceptively Disguised Website" would be a good starting point. From there applications could guide users to explanations of why and (in simple terms) how websites are disguised, and what can happen if you're foolish enough to trust one.
The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
But the sad fact is that the situation with Intelligent Design is representative of the desires of the human beings who live here. Likewise, persecution of minorities and homosexuals is also representative of a lot of people, possibly even the majority (though I hate to accept that possibility.) I don't want the majority to rule if the majority is stupid. (Let's have the undereducated masses set the education policy to undermine education, so we'll have more undereducated masses!) There are a lot of people out there who allow their opinions to be swayed by what they hear, so there will always be someone manipulating those people. It'd be great if that weren't the case, but it ain't gonna happen. I'd just really like it if there were more companies willing to "take a stand" by doing something so radical as openly endorsing a scientific principle backed my so much evidence as to be generally accepted as fact.
I tried the PoC with FF1.0.7 and the DoS didn't NMS on any of my PCs, instead the FUHB BYKJFN MJNAJH on the NBoRX and your post is so dense with acronyms I have no idea what you're saying. I wish there were a moderation option for "-1: Unintelligible"
The "we won't promote your music if you don't let us put rootkits on your CDs" kind of leverage.
What does that have to do with this story? What does that have to do with tiered pricing? How is that an example of leverage over artists, when artists aren't the ones most likely to take issue with such measures?
I agree that there are absolutely times when you need to have access to a keyboard. However, I also feel there are times when the keyboard just gets in the way, and for those times I'd like the option of having it out of the way. I think a tablet-style mode would be great for certain circumstances, like if I were standing and holding the device, or if I were just doing something far removed from the process of typing (watching DVDs, playing games, editing graphics, etc.) and wanted the unit to be easier to handle.
I also believe in pen computing in general, being a long-time Palm user. It's not as efficient as a keyboard for data entry but it gives a nice unification to things - text entry and GUI operation aren't separate things like they tend to be on the desktop.
Whether those circumstances warrant having a swivel-capable screen, I'm not sure... That depends largely on the compromises involved in having the swivel mechanism. (Breakdown issues?) But I think a tablet mode would be nice to have, and I may look for that feature the next time I buy a new laptop. (So don't say "the rest of us" as if that includes everybody except FedEx workers...)
I'd be concerned that letting a manager program handle all of this might result in a hodge-podge of files outwith my control, then if something should happen to the organisational data, I'd have a pile of files with little, no or maybe even unintellgible organisation...:(
I've had the same concerns. Personally I feel that an important refinement to address these problems would be to add metadata and database functionality (in limited contexts - not every area of the filesystem needs to be or ought to have a database) to the filesystem, and integrate that functionality into the shell as well, so that applications which do this sort of organizational business can be built upon a system-wide organizational standard. This already exists to some level, but I'd like to see it become really standard. I don't think shell-control of that stuff replaces applications custom-designed for doing that work, but I feel like it'd make a great complement. Of course with today's apps you can generally go the other way - have the app manage the files, and then do queries into the app via scripting, etc. to get at the files - but I feel like having the foundation be something intrinsic to the OS's organizational structure has advantages.
As for the present - with MP3's I'm generally confident that the software I use won't screw the ID3 tags and so that information will always be available. (Of course, that can't account for your experience, where iTunes actually killed your ID3 data - I have no idea why that would happen.) I do worry about getting "locked-in" to a solution, be it iPhoto or some free alternative, or whatever - what if I spend all that time categorizing all my data, and then the new release of the commercial app is really foul, or the dev. team writing the free app decides not to work on it any more? Then I'm back where I started, and need to learn some whole new app and maybe import my data in, or else just fall back to old ways of organizing it. But I'm starting to feel it's worth the risk, for my photos at least. It's just getting too hard to usefully organize them in directories.
It'll happen eventually, but not until computers truly are pervasive. People will fully embrace online distribution only once every home has a data center of some kind, connected to the TV, and options exist for loaning, trading, transporting, etc. the data stored there.
All this technology exists already, and many of us are already there, but the key is that this has to become really common. That's going to take time.
Another factor is that "impulse buys" help to sell things - for instance, all the $10 DVDs stacked by the checkouts at Target. There's no reason that can't cooperate with the online distribution/data center model of things, but it's one reason why tangible products can be easier to sell than intangible ones.
I can certainly relate... Actually when I was a kid I never even really got past the copy protection in "Starcross"... I just didn't quite know what I was supposed to do.
I think most of the Infocom games aren't too bad in terms of the puzzles (not only how hard they are, but how well what you expect of them relates to what the programmer expected) but there are exceptions. The baseball puzzle in Zork II comes to mind, along with quite a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide (which is generally considered among the toughest, if not the toughest, of the original Infocom releases BTW). Also in contrast with many more contemporary adventure games (notably the Lucasarts games of the mid 90's) the games offered lots of potential to go far astray of where you needed to be in the game to potentially win. You could fail a certain task and keep on going - perhaps with no indication that you'd already lost the opportunity to win. (Sierra games of the mid-90s tended to kill you off pretty soon after failing something, where Lucasarts games mostly had a policy of not providing any way to lose the game)
It's neat and all that this appeared in the WSJ, but my reaction is strictly a "been there, done that, highly respect the people who made it possible." kind of thing. Like, props to the people who created Inform and reverse-engineered the Z-machine and all... I was on a kick of trying to make a Z-machine game back in '96 or so, but it's pretty much over for me at this point.
Personally I think actions have no business whatsoever inside the condition clause of an "if", "while", etc. "x = foo()" can easily go on another line. And if someone is sick enough to really want a side-effect inside of a boolean clause, they should use parens to make the order of operations easy to read.
As for the more general issue of "backwards comparisons"... The big thing I guess is that it helps people remember not to type "if (x = 3)" or whatever... not that that'll help them if both values being compared are variables.
But KITT would probably arrive in Mos Eisley and his wheels would do that Back To The Future 2 hover-conversion thing, and he'd fly into space and blow away some TIE fighters with his hidden laser cannons and stuff. But he'd probably wind up getting swayed by the Dark Side of the Force, and become Darth Vader's personal fighter. But he'd watch Vader's back - there'd be none of that crap with the Millennium Falcon flying out of nowhere to shoot his wingman, or his other dur-head wingman running into Vader, KITT would do some evasion and blow Luke to hell, then turn around and blow away Solo and the Wookie - and then Lando, for good measure. I know Lando hadn't gotten involved in the story yet at that point but KITT would've been all over that. It's called a pre-emptive strike. AI knows how to get it done.
Jury: We find the defendant guilty on each of the 100 million counts of computer tampering and 2 million counts of involuntary manslaughter. Judge: I hereby sentence you to 10 million sentences of 2 years of probation and 2 million sentences of 6 months in jail followed by 5 years probation. Due to the outrageous nature of your conduct, sentences are to be served consecutively. You should be out in time to watch the sun swallow the earth.
Yeah, but with good behavior they'll be out in 6 months...
Surely on occasion you feel a twinge of guilt that you're nothing more than an electronic drug peddler, giving anyone who is willing to pony up the cash their month's worth of e-dope after you get them hooked with a free sample.
You want to go home and think about your life... And don't call me Shirley!
Since when is manga a genre? Since when is manga a style?
Since people started using the word "Manga" to refer to "American comics crafted to look similar to Japanese animation or comics"...
I thought the story was a lot more interesting when I took it at face value, and thought that Japanese manga, translated obviously, was going to be serialized in US papers.
But Japanese-style? Big deal. I mean putting aside all the issues I have with this imitation (mainly that it's overdone, mostly poorly done, lacking the rigor, precision, or imagination that makes many good manga stand out from the rest, and that it often just looks like American comics with bigger eyes) this makes the story so much less interesting. Why? Because it's really just another case of "Newspaper picks up new syndicated comic strip". I do like that this could mean that newspapers are interested in revitalizing the comics page with things I'm actually likely to want to read - even imitation manga naturally holds the promise of imitating the features I enjoy - but I don't think we're quite there yet.
(Why would the story have been more significant had they been actual Japanese comics? I think the question needs to be addressed: First off, the newspapers would have less editorial control over the strips. They would be able to block certain strips, or ask for different translations, but in terms of the strips they get to work with they'd likely be at the mercy of the original Japanese source. Second, it would be representative of actual use of a piece of foreign culture, rather than an imitation of it. Given how uncommon that seems to be, I think that'd be a lot more interesting.)
I second the grandparent's suggestion that there are lots of other, perhaps more worthy American-produced comics out there. Things that are more experimental are fantastic, but naturally they're unproven, and the papers are looking for something that's a fairly safe bet. Such is life.:)
This whole "religion vs. science" debacle is a terrible shame. The dichotomy only exists for people who want it to exist -- not just the Christians engaging in wrongful coercion, but also those who hold tightly to evolution as a (fallacious) weapon against Christianity.
In truth, there is no conflict. Modern Western science owes its existence to Christian epistemology. The Platonism prevalent throughout the middle ages explicitly denied the possibility of a "scientific method." It was devout believers like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler who shook off the pervasive Greek influence and took to heart the notion that a rational God would make a world that can be rationally understood. Today we take that notion for granted, but it's arguably the most important development in all of science.
And yet here we are, and the two are in conflict. On one side, those who want the scientific method taught, and on the other side, those who want the teaching to be diluted with philosophies not at all subject to the scientific method, whose end brings about no advancement of scientific understanding, all for their own agenda of pleasing Christians who have misunderstood the message...
I understand your point about the church vs. the faith, and it's a good one - but the church is made up of the followers and the followers define the faith. They may not be representative of the whole of the faith but for whatever reason the faith has inspired this injustice.
Religion has nothing to contribute to the science of biology. Its inclusion into a program of biology education is therefore detrimental to that program.
But it's hard to play roulette or craps in microgravity... I mean, you could velcro your chips to the table to place your bet, but what happens to the dice or the ball?
Slashdot Mirror
Extrapolating forward:
Didn't-RTFA-Slashdot-reader: So this must mean there's life on Mars!
Various blogs: Aliens found in radar scan of Mars!
Slashdot-derivative-news-site: Alien Probe from Mars performs Radar Scan of NASA
Of course, that assumes there -is- a news site derivative of Slashdot. Isn't this pretty much the endpoint of second-hand news?
That's faster than my 4x CD-ROM drive. (MPC2-compliant, baby!)
I agree that "phishing" is arcane and not helpful to people who aren't already familiar with the term and concept. But I think "Identity Theft Filter" is a bit confusing. I feel like a lot of people don't understand what identity theft is. "Malicious Websites" is OK, but it doesn't really explain how the site is malicious. (Browser exploit? Hate speech? etc.) Maybe "Deceptively Disguised Website" would be a good starting point. From there applications could guide users to explanations of why and (in simple terms) how websites are disguised, and what can happen if you're foolish enough to trust one.
The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
But the sad fact is that the situation with Intelligent Design is representative of the desires of the human beings who live here. Likewise, persecution of minorities and homosexuals is also representative of a lot of people, possibly even the majority (though I hate to accept that possibility.) I don't want the majority to rule if the majority is stupid. (Let's have the undereducated masses set the education policy to undermine education, so we'll have more undereducated masses!) There are a lot of people out there who allow their opinions to be swayed by what they hear, so there will always be someone manipulating those people. It'd be great if that weren't the case, but it ain't gonna happen. I'd just really like it if there were more companies willing to "take a stand" by doing something so radical as openly endorsing a scientific principle backed my so much evidence as to be generally accepted as fact.
I tried the PoC with FF1.0.7 and the DoS didn't NMS on any of my PCs, instead the FUHB BYKJFN MJNAJH on the NBoRX and your post is so dense with acronyms I have no idea what you're saying. I wish there were a moderation option for "-1: Unintelligible"
The "we won't promote your music if you don't let us put rootkits on your CDs" kind of leverage.
What does that have to do with this story? What does that have to do with tiered pricing? How is that an example of leverage over artists, when artists aren't the ones most likely to take issue with such measures?
I agree that there are absolutely times when you need to have access to a keyboard. However, I also feel there are times when the keyboard just gets in the way, and for those times I'd like the option of having it out of the way. I think a tablet-style mode would be great for certain circumstances, like if I were standing and holding the device, or if I were just doing something far removed from the process of typing (watching DVDs, playing games, editing graphics, etc.) and wanted the unit to be easier to handle.
I also believe in pen computing in general, being a long-time Palm user. It's not as efficient as a keyboard for data entry but it gives a nice unification to things - text entry and GUI operation aren't separate things like they tend to be on the desktop.
Whether those circumstances warrant having a swivel-capable screen, I'm not sure... That depends largely on the compromises involved in having the swivel mechanism. (Breakdown issues?) But I think a tablet mode would be nice to have, and I may look for that feature the next time I buy a new laptop. (So don't say "the rest of us" as if that includes everybody except FedEx workers...)
I'd be concerned that letting a manager program handle all of this might result in a hodge-podge of files outwith my control, then if something should happen to the organisational data, I'd have a pile of files with little, no or maybe even unintellgible organisation...
I've had the same concerns. Personally I feel that an important refinement to address these problems would be to add metadata and database functionality (in limited contexts - not every area of the filesystem needs to be or ought to have a database) to the filesystem, and integrate that functionality into the shell as well, so that applications which do this sort of organizational business can be built upon a system-wide organizational standard. This already exists to some level, but I'd like to see it become really standard. I don't think shell-control of that stuff replaces applications custom-designed for doing that work, but I feel like it'd make a great complement. Of course with today's apps you can generally go the other way - have the app manage the files, and then do queries into the app via scripting, etc. to get at the files - but I feel like having the foundation be something intrinsic to the OS's organizational structure has advantages.
As for the present - with MP3's I'm generally confident that the software I use won't screw the ID3 tags and so that information will always be available. (Of course, that can't account for your experience, where iTunes actually killed your ID3 data - I have no idea why that would happen.) I do worry about getting "locked-in" to a solution, be it iPhoto or some free alternative, or whatever - what if I spend all that time categorizing all my data, and then the new release of the commercial app is really foul, or the dev. team writing the free app decides not to work on it any more? Then I'm back where I started, and need to learn some whole new app and maybe import my data in, or else just fall back to old ways of organizing it. But I'm starting to feel it's worth the risk, for my photos at least. It's just getting too hard to usefully organize them in directories.
It'll happen eventually, but not until computers truly are pervasive. People will fully embrace online distribution only once every home has a data center of some kind, connected to the TV, and options exist for loaning, trading, transporting, etc. the data stored there.
All this technology exists already, and many of us are already there, but the key is that this has to become really common. That's going to take time.
Another factor is that "impulse buys" help to sell things - for instance, all the $10 DVDs stacked by the checkouts at Target. There's no reason that can't cooperate with the online distribution/data center model of things, but it's one reason why tangible products can be easier to sell than intangible ones.
I can certainly relate... Actually when I was a kid I never even really got past the copy protection in "Starcross"... I just didn't quite know what I was supposed to do.
I think most of the Infocom games aren't too bad in terms of the puzzles (not only how hard they are, but how well what you expect of them relates to what the programmer expected) but there are exceptions. The baseball puzzle in Zork II comes to mind, along with quite a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide (which is generally considered among the toughest, if not the toughest, of the original Infocom releases BTW). Also in contrast with many more contemporary adventure games (notably the Lucasarts games of the mid 90's) the games offered lots of potential to go far astray of where you needed to be in the game to potentially win. You could fail a certain task and keep on going - perhaps with no indication that you'd already lost the opportunity to win. (Sierra games of the mid-90s tended to kill you off pretty soon after failing something, where Lucasarts games mostly had a policy of not providing any way to lose the game)
It's neat and all that this appeared in the WSJ, but my reaction is strictly a "been there, done that, highly respect the people who made it possible." kind of thing. Like, props to the people who created Inform and reverse-engineered the Z-machine and all... I was on a kick of trying to make a Z-machine game back in '96 or so, but it's pretty much over for me at this point.
Usually the fact that a P2P network has been under some kind of central control was the exact reason it included spyware...
(Stating the obvious here, but damn..)
Mojo Jojo ... work(s) for bananas
D'ohhhhh! That is a misconception!
"Haro, genki. Haro, genki-nai."
It is a sad day indeed...
Personally I think actions have no business whatsoever inside the condition clause of an "if", "while", etc. "x = foo()" can easily go on another line. And if someone is sick enough to really want a side-effect inside of a boolean clause, they should use parens to make the order of operations easy to read.
As for the more general issue of "backwards comparisons"... The big thing I guess is that it helps people remember not to type "if (x = 3)" or whatever... not that that'll help them if both values being compared are variables.
I wouldn't want to disappoint you, so I'll mod you down as soon as I finish this post! ...Aw, crap.
C-3PO was a pussy anyway. Everybody knows that.
But KITT would probably arrive in Mos Eisley and his wheels would do that Back To The Future 2 hover-conversion thing, and he'd fly into space and blow away some TIE fighters with his hidden laser cannons and stuff. But he'd probably wind up getting swayed by the Dark Side of the Force, and become Darth Vader's personal fighter. But he'd watch Vader's back - there'd be none of that crap with the Millennium Falcon flying out of nowhere to shoot his wingman, or his other dur-head wingman running into Vader, KITT would do some evasion and blow Luke to hell, then turn around and blow away Solo and the Wookie - and then Lando, for good measure. I know Lando hadn't gotten involved in the story yet at that point but KITT would've been all over that. It's called a pre-emptive strike. AI knows how to get it done.
What's a Nubian?
Personally I don't think I could deal with Ikari Warriors without the independent aim-and-move the arcade provided with the twist-stick...
Jury: We find the defendant guilty on each of the 100 million counts of computer tampering and 2 million counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Judge: I hereby sentence you to 10 million sentences of 2 years of probation and 2 million sentences of 6 months in jail followed by 5 years probation. Due to the outrageous nature of your conduct, sentences are to be served consecutively. You should be out in time to watch the sun swallow the earth.
Yeah, but with good behavior they'll be out in 6 months...
So I guess what alot of us bought the game for to play and be apart fo Star Wars to live our Saga, (Remember the adds?) Is Gone.
:)
Words fail me. I'd say they've failed you, too.
You bought the game for to play and be apart? Fo' Star Wars to live your saga? Do I remember the additions? What is gone?
Surely on occasion you feel a twinge of guilt that you're nothing more than an electronic drug peddler, giving anyone who is willing to pony up the cash their month's worth of e-dope after you get them hooked with a free sample.
You want to go home and think about your life... And don't call me Shirley!
Since when is manga a genre? Since when is manga a style?
:)
Since people started using the word "Manga" to refer to "American comics crafted to look similar to Japanese animation or comics"...
I thought the story was a lot more interesting when I took it at face value, and thought that Japanese manga, translated obviously, was going to be serialized in US papers.
But Japanese-style? Big deal. I mean putting aside all the issues I have with this imitation (mainly that it's overdone, mostly poorly done, lacking the rigor, precision, or imagination that makes many good manga stand out from the rest, and that it often just looks like American comics with bigger eyes) this makes the story so much less interesting. Why? Because it's really just another case of "Newspaper picks up new syndicated comic strip". I do like that this could mean that newspapers are interested in revitalizing the comics page with things I'm actually likely to want to read - even imitation manga naturally holds the promise of imitating the features I enjoy - but I don't think we're quite there yet.
(Why would the story have been more significant had they been actual Japanese comics? I think the question needs to be addressed: First off, the newspapers would have less editorial control over the strips. They would be able to block certain strips, or ask for different translations, but in terms of the strips they get to work with they'd likely be at the mercy of the original Japanese source. Second, it would be representative of actual use of a piece of foreign culture, rather than an imitation of it. Given how uncommon that seems to be, I think that'd be a lot more interesting.)
I second the grandparent's suggestion that there are lots of other, perhaps more worthy American-produced comics out there. Things that are more experimental are fantastic, but naturally they're unproven, and the papers are looking for something that's a fairly safe bet. Such is life.
This whole "religion vs. science" debacle is a terrible shame. The dichotomy only exists for people who want it to exist -- not just the Christians engaging in wrongful coercion, but also those who hold tightly to evolution as a (fallacious) weapon against Christianity.
In truth, there is no conflict. Modern Western science owes its existence to Christian epistemology. The Platonism prevalent throughout the middle ages explicitly denied the possibility of a "scientific method." It was devout believers like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler who shook off the pervasive Greek influence and took to heart the notion that a rational God would make a world that can be rationally understood. Today we take that notion for granted, but it's arguably the most important development in all of science.
And yet here we are, and the two are in conflict. On one side, those who want the scientific method taught, and on the other side, those who want the teaching to be diluted with philosophies not at all subject to the scientific method, whose end brings about no advancement of scientific understanding, all for their own agenda of pleasing Christians who have misunderstood the message...
I understand your point about the church vs. the faith, and it's a good one - but the church is made up of the followers and the followers define the faith. They may not be representative of the whole of the faith but for whatever reason the faith has inspired this injustice.
Religion has nothing to contribute to the science of biology. Its inclusion into a program of biology education is therefore detrimental to that program.
I mean, somebody just needs to give the Jews the other half of the bible and then we'll all be on the same page...
kidding! kidding!
But it's hard to play roulette or craps in microgravity... I mean, you could velcro your chips to the table to place your bet, but what happens to the dice or the ball?