Reading your comment, I feel a bit guilty for being modded up Ins/Int, when it turned out I was being Redundant in the first place. You're dead right - patents are for the protection of innovation to the end that innovation is encouraged. This may appear to be what's happening with gene patenting, but in the long run Crichton is right - patenting (for too long) will stifle progress.
ANY opportunity to throttle Jar-Jar with a force-grip before taking off his f*cking head with one good swipe is, in my opinion, very welcome and long overdue...
Genetic code is surely the biggest case of Prior Art going. Fine, you can patent a light-bulb, but you can't patent Electricity just because you discovered roughly what it was and how it worked!
Genes are usually discovered, not invented. Most genetic treatment involves finding out what a gene is, how it works, and how it goes wrong. That's hardly a creative invention, is it?
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I think you're blurring the line between Writing and Producing - as are artists these days!
There is skill in writing and playing good music, music that gets you, but there's just as much skill in good production. Similarly, you can take the best actors, scripts and sets in the world, but with a crap production a film will be pretty unengaging. With none of the former but great production, it can be an impressively polished but ultimately unimpacting. They'd both be poor films, but in different ways.
With music, a fantastically written piece played from the heart with skill can grate your nerves when the production is horrible - listen to a great song bootlegged from a pub-gig and you'll see what I mean. You can tell it's a good song, but the production makes it difficult to enjoy. Conversely, half of the top-ten these days seems to be well-polished talentless tripe which you can happily ignore, but won't ever grab you.
You can argue all day about which is most important, but you may as well ask whether it's your left eye or your right eye that gives you binocular vision. Without either, you can't take advantage of the additional benefits of having both, and the experience is hugely diminished.
None of the above is in disagreement with what you've said, but I think you're being a little hard on those that can make good music using non-conventional media. There are people and groups that can produce powerful, original, deeply touching music with nothing more than a couple of samples and a computer. They happily blur the line between creation and production (in the musical sense) and end up giving you something that goes up your spine - although they almost always work best in collaboration with an unsynthesised or vocal musician. Lay back and listen to a little Lamb, for example, and you may feel different.
Then again, maybe you won't. We all have our preferences, and I'd find it just as hard to part with my Lamb and Fila Brazilia albums as my Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Clannad. Different strokes, eh.
Re:The site was Dugg last night
on
Yahoo Pipes
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· Score: 2, Funny
Don't be silly. With a little effort, anyone can understand what's going on in a Perl script...
You're dead right about the sacrificial disk, but it's worth noting that ensuring positive-pressure in the case with a filtered intake should really be a standard arrangement for any PC. With the exception of some fairly exotic designs (eg sealed cases with heatpipes connecting key components to the heavily-finned case walls), air flow will always lead to dust build-up, and the effects on cooling can be surprising.
Kind of the point, surely. Foo. You know, foo. That old computing term that means "just about any file, folder or anything else" (probably acronym for "File Or Object"). It's one of the oldest metasyntactic varables. If you don't get it, you should probably be quiet. Either that, or say "I don't get it".
Alternatively, it could just be that the poster "misspelled" it, but then it is a perfectly reasonable romanised spelling of an oriental language. While not conventional, as a phonetically accurate translation it is by no means wrong.
I think Jesus put it best when he said "Don't be a dick".
Well, you could buy the really, really big concrete-refill syringes instead, but you usually get gypsum all over your hands. It's best just to trade them in at a concrete-cartridge recycling centre.
I don't disagree with your very good point about how difficult it is to stay objective when judging Microsoft. Be careful though: you seem to be blurring the distinction between objective judgment and balanced review. A balanced review will attempt to present things from both sides, whether the observer believes the facts to be balanced or not, the purpose being to allow readers/viewers to make objective (or subjective - that's their call) judgments of their own. Such a review needs to be objective in itself, but that doesn't mean that objectivity denotes balance.
Judges have to routinely be objective and judgmental at the same time - that is, in effect, their whole job. A potted definition of objective judgment might be "deciding what is meritous against a set of reasoned, independently appointed criteria" (meaning of course that the setting of criteria would have to be objective too, but such is the recursive hell of jurisprudence).
I'm not saying this guy was objective, or that anybody looking at M$ has been or will be. I'm just saying that a perfectly objective judgment that falls against M$ would be indistinguishable from a carefully penned biased judgment. If M$ is irredeemably evil to all but the most cursory scrutiny, you will never find a considered, objective, balanced judgment. As humans, we are constantly judging everything according to the facts as we understand them, and this in turn alters our perception of the facts presented to us. Ergo there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in humans. You just have to choose those authorities you believe you can trust, and keep questioning the values of anyone with a stake in the discussion - including yourself.
Just wanted to say "hear hear". It took 20 posts before somebody actually had the decency to say Thank-you-this-is-a-good-thing, most of those 20 straying into completely niche related topics. I'm not saying they weren't all relevant or interesting points, but thanks for actually saying thanks.
As far as I'm concerned: the short-term impact of this will be decent as people start getting their teeth into the source (as they have done since November), but the long-term impact will be fucking huge. I don't have a lot of personal experience, but this announcement combined with the fact that so many CS degrees start with OOP by teaching in Java means that people will routinely be encouraged to appreciate the power of FOSS from the start, before they get used to the limitations that its absence imposes.
You're right, this isn't the same tech at all. What your grandfather demonstrated was an extreme example (ie very thin) of a well-established structural technology - pre-stressed steel-reinforced concrete. Putting the steel members of a beam under strain before pouring in the magic-mix is very, very widely used in the construction industry.
The reason this allowed the beam your grandfather manufactured to be so flexible is that it was so thin - basically a steel member with a coating of concrete (probably with a heavy dose of admixture to increase the concrete's plasticity). Attempting to apply the same approach to a concreate beam of appreciable scale would result in something that basically lacked the compressive strength or tortional rigidity for which it had been manufactured (the tensile strength would be unaffected as this essentially comes from the steel reinforcements in any case). This new technology allows you to fabricate a decent-sized beam of appreciable strength which nevertheless does not crack or spall when forced into flexure, but bends a little instead.
This will make a huge difference in the construction industry where serious over-stresses are a possibility (earth-quakes, land slippage, explosion risks). The one disadvantage I envisage is that - more often than you'd like to know - miscalculations or unaccounted stress factors can lead to the failure of structures over time, and while this is usually noticed and corrected thanks to stress cracks in rigid concrete members, flexible concrete will probably not give you the same warnings before it fails. This would need to be offset by the use of stress-monitoring and displacement checks such as are used in large bridges atm.
Of course, the focus this will bring to dynamic structural calculations means that Civ Eng undergraduates are going to drop out in their first year instead of their third...
I think you may have missed the point of Borat, and the real source of the guy's humour.
He isn't making fun of Turkey, Kazakhstan or anywhere else. He's using this stereotype - which many westerners are too self-centred to realise is a stylised stereotype - to highlight just how ridiculously self-centred and unaware we are. Although the film is set in the US, Borat originally gave this treatment to the UK in the Ali G show. I clearly recall a scene he did interviewing english fox-hunters and protesters, in which he lambasted their opinions - and the hunters' total inability to admit why they were doing what they were doing - and it simply wouldn't have worked as a serious news piece. He mentioned to a protester that in his home-country, people hunted [some animal - bears, was it?] all the time. When she asked, slightly incredulously, why on Earth they committed such barbaric acts, he just looked slightly confused and replied: "Er, for fun. Yes."
A stroke of genius. It was the first time I can recall anyone actually stating it so plainly, and it completely threw everyone! Nobody else could have held up such a stark mirror to the practice of fox-hunting and cut through all the bullshit posturing about country-ways, animal rights and so on. It wasn't funny because he was being backwards. It was funny because he was throwing a fresh, embarrassingly clear light on an issue that nobody from the UK had the balls to admit to.
The fact that there are people shallow and dense enough out there to laugh at his zany throw-back pube-bartering ways instead of everyone's reactions to him tells you more about us than about Kazakhstan. Sadly.
So, your resolution is hugely limited... try RGB. Works for TV. Tellys have a pathetic resolution, but a decent colour range, so they can produce much more convincing images than would be expected (this is why B&W TV always looks shoddier, even with modern footage).
Can't imagine it'd be that hard or expensive to introduce some colour to the scheme.
The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly.
This is almost exactly the opposite to what I've seen & experienced in almost every other place - especially the public sector. This is the sign of a company that expects to succeed and grow, as they want employees with a similar attitude. In the public sector or stagnant businesses, the opposite is true. If you're over-qualified, they don't want you as you won't be satisfied just doing the job for which you're hired.
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
It may be just a Wikipedia article, but I'm running out of excuses for why I keep laughing and spraying coffee everywhere after each line. It may be the deadpan style in which the article presents the awful, awful facts, but I can't read any more or I'll be fired.
If you want a professional piece, ask Russ Sharek of the Morpheus Company, custom jeweller to the eclectic. He does completely unique piece-work and has had some fairly esoteric clients. He did this impressive fibre-optic based Green Lantern ring for Harlan Ellison.
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Of course, the following lung trauma is fatal. Still, vorsprung durch technik...
Reading your comment, I feel a bit guilty for being modded up Ins/Int, when it turned out I was being Redundant in the first place. You're dead right - patents are for the protection of innovation to the end that innovation is encouraged. This may appear to be what's happening with gene patenting, but in the long run Crichton is right - patenting (for too long) will stifle progress.
ANY opportunity to throttle Jar-Jar with a force-grip before taking off his f*cking head with one good swipe is, in my opinion, very welcome and long overdue...
Guybrush Threepwood for Emperor? But he fights like a cow!
Genes are usually discovered, not invented. Most genetic treatment involves finding out what a gene is, how it works, and how it goes wrong. That's hardly a creative invention, is it?
There is skill in writing and playing good music, music that gets you, but there's just as much skill in good production. Similarly, you can take the best actors, scripts and sets in the world, but with a crap production a film will be pretty unengaging. With none of the former but great production, it can be an impressively polished but ultimately unimpacting. They'd both be poor films, but in different ways.
With music, a fantastically written piece played from the heart with skill can grate your nerves when the production is horrible - listen to a great song bootlegged from a pub-gig and you'll see what I mean. You can tell it's a good song, but the production makes it difficult to enjoy. Conversely, half of the top-ten these days seems to be well-polished talentless tripe which you can happily ignore, but won't ever grab you.
You can argue all day about which is most important, but you may as well ask whether it's your left eye or your right eye that gives you binocular vision. Without either, you can't take advantage of the additional benefits of having both, and the experience is hugely diminished.
None of the above is in disagreement with what you've said, but I think you're being a little hard on those that can make good music using non-conventional media. There are people and groups that can produce powerful, original, deeply touching music with nothing more than a couple of samples and a computer. They happily blur the line between creation and production (in the musical sense) and end up giving you something that goes up your spine - although they almost always work best in collaboration with an unsynthesised or vocal musician. Lay back and listen to a little Lamb, for example, and you may feel different.
Then again, maybe you won't. We all have our preferences, and I'd find it just as hard to part with my Lamb and Fila Brazilia albums as my Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Clannad. Different strokes, eh.
Don't be silly. With a little effort, anyone can understand what's going on in a Perl script...
You're dead right about the sacrificial disk, but it's worth noting that ensuring positive-pressure in the case with a filtered intake should really be a standard arrangement for any PC. With the exception of some fairly exotic designs (eg sealed cases with heatpipes connecting key components to the heavily-finned case walls), air flow will always lead to dust build-up, and the effects on cooling can be surprising.
Kind of the point, surely. Foo. You know, foo. That old computing term that means "just about any file, folder or anything else" (probably acronym for "File Or Object"). It's one of the oldest metasyntactic varables. If you don't get it, you should probably be quiet. Either that, or say "I don't get it".
Alternatively, it could just be that the poster "misspelled" it, but then it is a perfectly reasonable romanised spelling of an oriental language. While not conventional, as a phonetically accurate translation it is by no means wrong.
I think Jesus put it best when he said "Don't be a dick".
Well, you could buy the really, really big concrete-refill syringes instead, but you usually get gypsum all over your hands. It's best just to trade them in at a concrete-cartridge recycling centre.
Judges have to routinely be objective and judgmental at the same time - that is, in effect, their whole job. A potted definition of objective judgment might be "deciding what is meritous against a set of reasoned, independently appointed criteria" (meaning of course that the setting of criteria would have to be objective too, but such is the recursive hell of jurisprudence).
I'm not saying this guy was objective, or that anybody looking at M$ has been or will be. I'm just saying that a perfectly objective judgment that falls against M$ would be indistinguishable from a carefully penned biased judgment. If M$ is irredeemably evil to all but the most cursory scrutiny, you will never find a considered, objective, balanced judgment. As humans, we are constantly judging everything according to the facts as we understand them, and this in turn alters our perception of the facts presented to us. Ergo there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in humans. You just have to choose those authorities you believe you can trust, and keep questioning the values of anyone with a stake in the discussion - including yourself.
If? You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot.
She was japanese.
I'd mod you up, but there's no "Fulfilling" modifier.
As far as I'm concerned: the short-term impact of this will be decent as people start getting their teeth into the source (as they have done since November), but the long-term impact will be fucking huge. I don't have a lot of personal experience, but this announcement combined with the fact that so many CS degrees start with OOP by teaching in Java means that people will routinely be encouraged to appreciate the power of FOSS from the start, before they get used to the limitations that its absence imposes.
To reiterate: This-Is-A-Good-Thing.
The reason this allowed the beam your grandfather manufactured to be so flexible is that it was so thin - basically a steel member with a coating of concrete (probably with a heavy dose of admixture to increase the concrete's plasticity). Attempting to apply the same approach to a concreate beam of appreciable scale would result in something that basically lacked the compressive strength or tortional rigidity for which it had been manufactured (the tensile strength would be unaffected as this essentially comes from the steel reinforcements in any case). This new technology allows you to fabricate a decent-sized beam of appreciable strength which nevertheless does not crack or spall when forced into flexure, but bends a little instead.
This will make a huge difference in the construction industry where serious over-stresses are a possibility (earth-quakes, land slippage, explosion risks). The one disadvantage I envisage is that - more often than you'd like to know - miscalculations or unaccounted stress factors can lead to the failure of structures over time, and while this is usually noticed and corrected thanks to stress cracks in rigid concrete members, flexible concrete will probably not give you the same warnings before it fails. This would need to be offset by the use of stress-monitoring and displacement checks such as are used in large bridges atm.
Of course, the focus this will bring to dynamic structural calculations means that Civ Eng undergraduates are going to drop out in their first year instead of their third...
He isn't making fun of Turkey, Kazakhstan or anywhere else. He's using this stereotype - which many westerners are too self-centred to realise is a stylised stereotype - to highlight just how ridiculously self-centred and unaware we are. Although the film is set in the US, Borat originally gave this treatment to the UK in the Ali G show. I clearly recall a scene he did interviewing english fox-hunters and protesters, in which he lambasted their opinions - and the hunters' total inability to admit why they were doing what they were doing - and it simply wouldn't have worked as a serious news piece. He mentioned to a protester that in his home-country, people hunted [some animal - bears, was it?] all the time. When she asked, slightly incredulously, why on Earth they committed such barbaric acts, he just looked slightly confused and replied: "Er, for fun. Yes."
A stroke of genius. It was the first time I can recall anyone actually stating it so plainly, and it completely threw everyone! Nobody else could have held up such a stark mirror to the practice of fox-hunting and cut through all the bullshit posturing about country-ways, animal rights and so on. It wasn't funny because he was being backwards. It was funny because he was throwing a fresh, embarrassingly clear light on an issue that nobody from the UK had the balls to admit to.
The fact that there are people shallow and dense enough out there to laugh at his zany throw-back pube-bartering ways instead of everyone's reactions to him tells you more about us than about Kazakhstan. Sadly.
Can't imagine it'd be that hard or expensive to introduce some colour to the scheme.
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
Word to the wise.
It may be just a Wikipedia article, but I'm running out of excuses for why I keep laughing and spraying coffee everywhere after each line. It may be the deadpan style in which the article presents the awful, awful facts, but I can't read any more or I'll be fired.
He also did my missus' engagement ring.
Is this anything like the Haars Tranform mapping thing mentioned in an earlier article? I can't tell from the linked article.
I've heard talk of book-adaptations, but that's just par for the course.