I'll believe that argument when patrol cops give up their guns in favor of nonlethal alternatives. In practice, what happens is people get gassed or shocked in circumstances that previously would have called for deployment of a megaphone or fire hose.
You know, a few years ago I would have been much more in favor of the idea of nonlethal weapons. These days I'm not so sure. I figure lethal incidents will always exist with such measures but be the minority... But is it worth the risk? I'm not sure. Last year in Boston when the Red Sox beat the Yankees to go onto the world series, there were a metric buttload of people celebrating in Kenmore Square... after a half hour or so they started breaking stuff, so the police marched in and fired pepper canisters into the crowd. A young woman was hit in the head with one of the pepper canisters and died. This should have been a happy occasion but the way it turned out was surely quite the opposite for people close to this woman.
I can understand why the police felt it necessary to break up that crowd - I don't see it simply as a matter of protecting property, most of those incidents of property damage could've endagered lives of crowd members, too (such as throwing a garbage can at a lighted sign).
I guess I'm not really sure what the alternative is. The police could have broken up the crowd immediately, maybe, rather than waiting for it to get out of control (that looks great in hindsight but I think it would have been very distasteful at the time.)
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
So if we have daylight savings one-hundred eighty days in the year, our energy savings for the entire country will be... 180%! I think this is a great idea!
Developer A: I just used code from this Gay Software project in my code... does that mean my code is... you know.. gay? Developer B: Yes. Yes it does. Or if it isn't, then it's going to have to be...
And could we make that an online petition? Those are my favorite kind!
I'd say the distance between infinity and the current cost of creation and the cost of creation ten years ago is exactly the same.
x = current cost y = 10-years-ago cost infinity - x = infinity infinity - y = infinity infinity / x = infinity infinity / y = infinity infinity - (x * (x/y)^k) = infinity for any k...:)
IMO, there's more wrong with anime cliches than the superficial (and not omnipresent) features you mentioned.
There's the "confession of love" scenario, with its endless (and very overused) methods of prolongation, for one. I'll take a dozen blue-haired catgirls rather than one more "zutto suki" interrupted by a passing train.
Then there's the nonchalant big-brother figure character whose emotional range goes from "dispassionate carefree" to "mildly anxious"... constantly spouting off his "yare yare" and such... Never will this man dare appear to take things seriously unless he is in a mortal struggle, and never will his aloof persona crack until he is on his death bed.
The thing I've discovered about anime is that quite a lot of it is crap. Some of it is unspeakably, abysmally bad, posessing nothing beyond the formulae established for it by more energetically-produced works. But the thing is, some of it is actually quite good. The good works are in the minority, though, swimming in a sea of garbage. In this I think it shares a lot in common with movies and TV in the US.
If it's up to the program to perform copy-protect checks, then people could modify the program code to remove the check.
Besides which, Sony's top priority with regard to copy protection is to enforce it on commercial releases - they don't care about allowing it to be bypassed on homebrew stuff, because
1: they're selling it as a game console, a toy, and not a programmable computer (and the two are not the same thing these days)
2: any level of access people have to the machine weakens the copy-protection somewhat
So the simplest solution is for them to run the copy-protect check unconditionally, any time a program is run.
As ad blocking becomes more common, mechanisms which circumvent ad blocking are simply going to become more common as well.
For instance, Adblock is based on the user's ability to turn URLs into wildcard expressions, in order to block parts of a webpage. This exploits things like the fact that ads usually come from other domains (like Google ads or doubleclick) and the fact that the webmasters in charge of ads have so far taken a rather naive view that doesn't account for regex-based ad blocking - naming directories "ads" and things like that, which are incredibly easy to block.
But that's not how it is on all websites. Comcast runs ads on their website (spoon-feeding ads to paid customers, thank you so much...) by placing ads within the same flash object which is used for site navigation. If you block the ad, you also lose the nav bar. Then there's places like Amazon, which host some ads themselves, and none of their URLs are particularly easy to chew on. And then there's also places like The Register, for which reaching the destination page usually involves watching, and then clicking, a Flash ad.
A basic problem with circumventing ad-blocking for many sites, of course, is the fact that the advertisers rely on having control over the web host in order to count hits from each site. This is where sites like Google will have an advantage: if their advertising URLs are sufficiently cryptic, users will be unable to block Google ads which appear on other sites unless they are willing to part with Google's functionality. This is in stark contrast to the situation with Doubleclick, for instance, which hosts nothing but ads. Another solution is for advertisers to simply aquire a large number of meaningless and dissimilar domain names. The more alternate hostnames they can throw at the user, the harder it'll be for the user to block. (But of course each new name won't be effective for very long...) I'm sure advertisers will come up with other accounting solutions as well.
Ad blocking isn't very sophisticated at this point, and it seems to me that advertisers are likely to have the advantage as soon as they make their anti-blocking technologies more sophisticated and do more to account for the growing segment of adblock users.
What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity?
I bet the man could've made some damn fine pinball machines, which could have led to many happy hours of pinball.
But since he didn't go with the pinball thing, he instead contributed to the development of nuclear weapons. Which do you suppose brings more joy to the world?
Call 1: Device driver trouble
We disabled our optical drive in Device Manager.
Easy fix: Uninstall the relevant device driver and reboot. Windows heals itself.
Call 2: Wi-Fi misconfiguration
We turned off TCP/IP routing for our wireless adapter, so we could connect to the router but couldn't browse the web.
Easy fix: Check the properties for the relevant adapter to make sure the correct protocols are installed. Or, uninstall the device and reboot.
Call 3: Corrupted operating system
We overwrote a critical Windows file (Explorer.exe), a problem that let Windows boot up but made all of our desktop icons and the Start menu disappear.
Easy fix: Use System Restore to revert to an earlier configuration. Or, use the operating-system CDs (if provided) to reinstall Windows without reformatting the hard drive.
Yeah, I can't help but feel these tests aren't typical of the problems most people need tech support for... How do these things happen? I mean, apart from being intentional damage caused by someone hoping to test tech support? And in cases where the OS itself does become corrupted beyond usability, is that a common enough problem that it's worth tech support walking people through it? Bear in mind that these people have to answer to hordes of people asking why applications disappear when they click on the little "X".
Reiser 3 has been stable for some time. You neglected to comment on JFS or XFS in your discussion of journaling filesystems.
And I certainly wouldn't say crashes are a regular part of my Linux experience at all. Nor "hardware failures". It's been a long time since those were the rule rather than the exception.
What happens when the write has already succeeded, the file is closed, and the data is in the cache waiting to get written -- but then you pull the USB device out before the write completes?
Slashdot Mirror
Click robot OK to make bathroom?
Hey, show some respect. Those were Mr. Ed's dying words...
I'll have to write a book myself: "Anorexic Programming" by Smart Ass. "The Ultimate in Lean and eXtreme Programming"!
If you can somehow emphasize the naturally low-carb properties of this programming technique I think you'll have a winner...
I'll believe that argument when patrol cops give up their guns in favor of nonlethal alternatives. In practice, what happens is people get gassed or shocked in circumstances that previously would have called for deployment of a megaphone or fire hose.
You know, a few years ago I would have been much more in favor of the idea of nonlethal weapons. These days I'm not so sure. I figure lethal incidents will always exist with such measures but be the minority... But is it worth the risk? I'm not sure. Last year in Boston when the Red Sox beat the Yankees to go onto the world series, there were a metric buttload of people celebrating in Kenmore Square... after a half hour or so they started breaking stuff, so the police marched in and fired pepper canisters into the crowd. A young woman was hit in the head with one of the pepper canisters and died. This should have been a happy occasion but the way it turned out was surely quite the opposite for people close to this woman.
I can understand why the police felt it necessary to break up that crowd - I don't see it simply as a matter of protecting property, most of those incidents of property damage could've endagered lives of crowd members, too (such as throwing a garbage can at a lighted sign).
I guess I'm not really sure what the alternative is. The police could have broken up the crowd immediately, maybe, rather than waiting for it to get out of control (that looks great in hindsight but I think it would have been very distasteful at the time.)
From the link...
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
So if we have daylight savings one-hundred eighty days in the year, our energy savings for the entire country will be... 180%! I think this is a great idea!
Yeah, but all the sex in the fuckin apocalypse is going to be those tentacle monsters... so it's not like we're gonna get to enjoy it.
I tried yelling "hadouken" after throwing a bowling ball wrapped in a lit kerosene-doused rag. The neighbor kid thought it was pretty cool.
Oh, right, like the neighbor kids these days even know what a hadouken is...
(Ssh!)
Developer A: I just used code from this Gay Software project in my code... does that mean my code is... you know.. gay?
Developer B: Yes. Yes it does. Or if it isn't, then it's going to have to be...
And could we make that an online petition? Those are my favorite kind!
Will the court recorder please note that the defendant has answered "Garrr!", indicating the affirmative?
I'd say the distance between infinity and the current cost of creation and the cost of creation ten years ago is exactly the same.
:)
x = current cost
y = 10-years-ago cost
infinity - x = infinity
infinity - y = infinity
infinity / x = infinity
infinity / y = infinity
infinity - (x * (x/y)^k) = infinity for any k...
IMO, there's more wrong with anime cliches than the superficial (and not omnipresent) features you mentioned.
There's the "confession of love" scenario, with its endless (and very overused) methods of prolongation, for one. I'll take a dozen blue-haired catgirls rather than one more "zutto suki" interrupted by a passing train.
Then there's the nonchalant big-brother figure character whose emotional range goes from "dispassionate carefree" to "mildly anxious"... constantly spouting off his "yare yare" and such... Never will this man dare appear to take things seriously unless he is in a mortal struggle, and never will his aloof persona crack until he is on his death bed.
The thing I've discovered about anime is that quite a lot of it is crap. Some of it is unspeakably, abysmally bad, posessing nothing beyond the formulae established for it by more energetically-produced works. But the thing is, some of it is actually quite good. The good works are in the minority, though, swimming in a sea of garbage. In this I think it shares a lot in common with movies and TV in the US.
I think "The Matrix" is at least a step in the right direction... And he said "The Matrix". He didn't say "The Matrix Trilogy".
I mean, it's not shorts and t-shirts weather, but it's not too shabby for New England...
If it's up to the program to perform copy-protect checks, then people could modify the program code to remove the check. Besides which, Sony's top priority with regard to copy protection is to enforce it on commercial releases - they don't care about allowing it to be bypassed on homebrew stuff, because 1: they're selling it as a game console, a toy, and not a programmable computer (and the two are not the same thing these days) 2: any level of access people have to the machine weakens the copy-protection somewhat So the simplest solution is for them to run the copy-protect check unconditionally, any time a program is run.
As ad blocking becomes more common, mechanisms which circumvent ad blocking are simply going to become more common as well.
For instance, Adblock is based on the user's ability to turn URLs into wildcard expressions, in order to block parts of a webpage. This exploits things like the fact that ads usually come from other domains (like Google ads or doubleclick) and the fact that the webmasters in charge of ads have so far taken a rather naive view that doesn't account for regex-based ad blocking - naming directories "ads" and things like that, which are incredibly easy to block.
But that's not how it is on all websites. Comcast runs ads on their website (spoon-feeding ads to paid customers, thank you so much...) by placing ads within the same flash object which is used for site navigation. If you block the ad, you also lose the nav bar. Then there's places like Amazon, which host some ads themselves, and none of their URLs are particularly easy to chew on. And then there's also places like The Register, for which reaching the destination page usually involves watching, and then clicking, a Flash ad.
A basic problem with circumventing ad-blocking for many sites, of course, is the fact that the advertisers rely on having control over the web host in order to count hits from each site. This is where sites like Google will have an advantage: if their advertising URLs are sufficiently cryptic, users will be unable to block Google ads which appear on other sites unless they are willing to part with Google's functionality. This is in stark contrast to the situation with Doubleclick, for instance, which hosts nothing but ads. Another solution is for advertisers to simply aquire a large number of meaningless and dissimilar domain names. The more alternate hostnames they can throw at the user, the harder it'll be for the user to block. (But of course each new name won't be effective for very long...) I'm sure advertisers will come up with other accounting solutions as well.
Ad blocking isn't very sophisticated at this point, and it seems to me that advertisers are likely to have the advantage as soon as they make their anti-blocking technologies more sophisticated and do more to account for the growing segment of adblock users.
From the iPodLinux FAQ...
"Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster...
Basically, yeah, the thought has occurred to people before. As they say, "Yes, but it's just silly."
What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity?
I bet the man could've made some damn fine pinball machines, which could have led to many happy hours of pinball.
But since he didn't go with the pinball thing, he instead contributed to the development of nuclear weapons. Which do you suppose brings more joy to the world?
And here I thought this was going to be about how to haul smugglers off to Jabba's palace...
Call 2: Wi-Fi misconfiguration We turned off TCP/IP routing for our wireless adapter, so we could connect to the router but couldn't browse the web. Easy fix: Check the properties for the relevant adapter to make sure the correct protocols are installed. Or, uninstall the device and reboot.
Call 3: Corrupted operating system We overwrote a critical Windows file (Explorer.exe), a problem that let Windows boot up but made all of our desktop icons and the Start menu disappear. Easy fix: Use System Restore to revert to an earlier configuration. Or, use the operating-system CDs (if provided) to reinstall Windows without reformatting the hard drive.
Yeah, I can't help but feel these tests aren't typical of the problems most people need tech support for... How do these things happen? I mean, apart from being intentional damage caused by someone hoping to test tech support? And in cases where the OS itself does become corrupted beyond usability, is that a common enough problem that it's worth tech support walking people through it? Bear in mind that these people have to answer to hordes of people asking why applications disappear when they click on the little "X".
Heh, that's got to be the one thing about that show that made the longest-standing impression on me... "Come on, do the Mario, it's social suicide!"
There's also the Zacktraeger...
Well, you'll notice in the opening song, they say "In the not too distant future... there was an OS called BSD." Not is, but was...
Reiser 3 has been stable for some time.
You neglected to comment on JFS or XFS in your discussion of journaling filesystems.
And I certainly wouldn't say crashes are a regular part of my Linux experience at all. Nor "hardware failures". It's been a long time since those were the rule rather than the exception.
What happens when the write has already succeeded, the file is closed, and the data is in the cache waiting to get written -- but then you pull the USB device out before the write completes?
You become your own grandpa.