and it's wrong for a/. nutjob to argue that knowing how bees fly refutes I.D.
Especially since Intelligent Design, like any other religion, is irrefutable. Since reason is argument's only tool, any proposition not based in reason is both unassailable and indefensible at the same time.
After say, two years, why not just refuse to resolve pr0n.com sites? The two years gives the pr0n sites plenty of time to migrate over.
Oh, good. So who gets to decide what is pr0n and what isn't? I suspect Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, and China, as examples, would all give you radically different definitions. Hell, New York and Alabama would give you radically different definitions. Would there be an ICANN Decency Board? Would they "know it when they saw it," or would they spend a few years trying to define it objectively?
So what other categories of speech should be forcibly banned from the.com realm? Hmmm? Should the next discussion be about.politics or.religion?
When they tried that before, what happened was that Mac users just bought the cheaper Mac clones, cutting into Apple's profits, and PC users continued to buy PCs.:)
But it was a very different ballgame then. The pre-OS X operating systems weren't nearly as compelling as OS X. Neither was Internet use as prevalent, which has served to "equalize" OSs in the sense that, while browsing the Web or sending an e-mail, the user experience is virtually the same from Windows, to OS X, to *nix. Hell, I use Firefox and Thunderbird on all three.
Apple just needs to decide which market segment they want to go after: hardware, OS software, gadgets, or media services. Right now, they're fiddling with all four, because their old segment, "monolithic computer systems," is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Does Vorbis still have a place in the world, or would I be better off re-ripping my music to MP3 - even if I still think Vorbis is technically superior?
iRiver and Cowon's iAudio players support it, as does the new SigmaTel chip which will likely be showing up in new players in the next six months or so. There will always be someone to address the portion of the market that actually cares about the audio quality.
I buy CDs. I rip them to FLAC and then make copies in ogg-vorbis. If my Rio Karma dies and I have to get a player without Vorbis support, I just go back to the FLACs and run them through LAME. What's the big deal?
And no, I don't buy downloadable music. If I wanted pop slop in a crappy-sounding format I'd just get a $5.00 portable radio. I'll consider buying downloadable music when I can get unencumbered FLACs for half the price of the equivalent CD.
Re:I cast my vote for evolution
on
Warm-blooded Fish?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In any case, a warm-blooded fish is... well interesting though somewhat worthless trivia in the grand scheme of things. Some interesting information would be in determining how long this change required and if there is indication that this change is not yet complete in that they will continue to get warmer or develop other features to aid in their survival in that environment.
While I understand your interest in the evolutionary mechanism, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it. I don't think any creature is ever done. At best, a species achieves a relatively stable period where its configuration--for want of a better word--matches its current environmental conditions.
We like to think of species as something strictly-defined and set in stone, but they aren't, really. Not is the long term. In the long term, they're always somewhere between what they were and what they will become. At best, a species is a way of saying "from this time to that time, this organism had this configuration."
You did. Thermodynamically, extra effort is extra effort, even if that extra effort involves burning calories to produce a special behavior rather than burning calories to feed a special organ. Evolutionarily, it doesn't really matter--in fact it makes sense--that many different mechanisms evolved toward the same general end. A species that already accomplishes a particular goal in one manner probably won't evolve toward a different method unless some other advantage comes with it.
More interesting than the sharks in the article, I think, is the eye-heating organs that marlin and sailfish have evolved. The last theory I read is that helps them see more clearly, for hunting, in the deep cold water. They evolved just enough to accomplish the goal and no more. Give them a couple of centuries of much colder water, and I'm sure they'd end up heating their whole blood supply, too.
Dude, Solaris was a powerful film. Claustrophobic.
If you liked the Soderberg/Clooney version, you should watch Tarkovsky's orginal. Tarkovsky's penchant for dragging the viewer through some scenes at near-real-time adds significantly to the weight of story. It captures Stanislaw Lem's book much more effectively. Be warned, though, it doesn't mate well with modern western film sensibilities. It's too long, too slow, and you have to think too damn much.
Humm you do know the screenplay was based on previous short stories by Clarke ?
Yes, yes--loosely based on an idea from the Clarke story The Sentinel. The story involved finding something on the moon which had been left waiting for mankind to grow up enough to find it. It doesn't change the fact that what the GP said is entirely true. That idea was expanded by the two of them into a new story and screenplay which Clarke later novelized.
So why not make video games like movies, TV and magazines?
How are video games not like movies and TV now? The industry has a voluntary ratings board, just like the other two. Vendors respect those ratings voluntarily, just like the other two. Parents still can't watch everything their children do all the time, just like the other two.
Bills like this one and the one in California, if applied to movies and TV, would make a movie theater owner subject to $1,000 fine and possible jail time every single time some 15-year-old sneaks into an R-rated movie in his theater. It would make your local cable company subject to those same penalties every time some kid watches an R-rated movie at home.
Will this bill have an impact on the game development industry?
Absolutely! How willing will store owners be to risk carrying anything that might run afoul of the restrictions? It will open up whole new categories of gaming, like First-Person Daisy Pickers and Home Decorating RPGs.
Who would invest this kind of time and effort into reading a book when they can just do it the traditional way and fork out a couple of bucks and save themselves the agro?
No one is concerned about someone reading the book that way. The concern is over someone copying the book that way and then splatting the copy all over the Internet. Right now, book traders buy books, cut them out of their bindings, scan them, and put out digital versions in a variety of formats. With highly anticipated titles, this often happens within days of the book being released.
By comparison, a Google-chunk method would be a time saver.
Seriously the Just Do It type attitude will more often than not lead to an IT disaster and subsequent loss of job scenario.
A lot of the responses seem to assume that "just do it" means "just do it half-assed without any planning, testing, or forethought." While TFA was a little thin on details, I got the impression that the only thing left out of the "normal" migration process was the approval of the higher-ups. Frankly, if the guy's the IT manager and doesn't have the company's support to make technical decisions for the back end, then there's something bogus about the title, the org chart, or both.
Despite being oft (and many times unfairly) maligned by self-proclaimed computer experts Microsoft has irrevocably broken the yoke of the client-server relationship that has held computing back and is single-handedly responsible for the microcomputer revolution. The last twenty-five years would not have been impossible without them, and it's pure fantasy to suggest otherwise.
That's a bit revisionist. Microsoft rode the personal computer wave. It didn't create it. Z-80-based CP/M machines had already broken the client-server relationship and had proven that stand-alone, even portable, computers would find business users waiting with open arms. Those of us who were selling, ready-to-go with WordStar, SuperCalc, and custom dBase applications, had already seen the future. It was coming no matter which OS came down the pipe.
And if any company can be said to be single-handedly responsible for the microcomputer revolution, it would be IBM. It was the weight of that name that got the second wave of people believing that there just might be something to this "personal computer thing."
Do libraries have to get permission from every single publisher of every single piece of media they release?
In a sense, yes. They have to buy (or have donated) every book. Those books are then available to be read or checked out by one person at a time. If the library wants to loan one title to 1,000 people simultaneously, they have to have 1,000 copies on the shelf--a thousand copies that someone bought and paid for. Publishers and book distributors often have staff members whose job is to do nothing but library sales.
You're kidding, right? Have you never heard of the amazing work done by Project Gutenberg? They have something like 16,000 books and counting. All digital and all in the public domain. In many ways, it's the F/OSS equivalent of Google's project.
From their site:
We cannot publish any texts still in copyright without permission. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright FAQ explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)
And if you let search engines serve as your source for finding the location of resources you need, how is that better than DNS? It seems to me that you're just swapping one directory service for another, the second being corporately owned and changeable at their whim.
They're open to competition and they're a matter of individual choice. Don't like Google's results? Use Yahoo!'s or Teoma's or any of the hundreds that would spring up in response. Of course, you're swapping one directory service for another. That was the GP's point. DNS, while useful, is not the sine qua non of the Internet. DNS relates human concepts (domain names) to IP addresses. Search engines relate human concepts (text content) to IP addresses. My Bookmarks relate human concepts (whatever mnemonic I choose) to IP addresses. It's all the same function. If DNS got borked, the 'Net would recover with surprising speed. That's why any threat regarding "control" of the Internet is empty. Any problems would be temporary--a hassle, yes, but a short-term hassle.
Personally, I think it's pretty scary that one country that, frankly, the world doesn't find very trustworthy right now, controls it.
s/country/organization/ and the statement works equally well for the UN. As a regulatory body, the UN is a proven failure. It works as a venue for mediation and it works as a coordinator for disaster relief. That's about it.
A) How does barring minors from such games violate free speech? Last I saw free speech just allowed me to say whatever I wanted, not do whatever I wanted. B) I don't see anybody complaining about the fact that minors aren't allowed int an R[+] rated movie. In my mind games kind of fall under the same category.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that the MPAA's R rating restriction is a voluntary, industry-executed policy, not law. In fact, it was developed specifically to keep lawmakers from creating a legislative equivalent. The ESRB's system is the same thing.
The California law in question ignores the ESRB's system and creates one of its own without creating any kind of body to determine what qualifies for restrictions and what doesn't. So, as a retailer you could be subject to fines of $1,000 per incident without even being able to check ahead of time as to whether or not a particular title qualifies.
I'd like to know more about the "numerous precedents of video games being qualified as free speech in other circuit courts and states" (quoted from TFA).
Judge Robert Lasnik of the US District Court in Seattle ruled the law [HB1009] unconstitutional under the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech.
Am I the only one who thinks this could go well for IP in the long run?
No, you're not. The most interesting point comes from Judge Smith's dissent.
Judge Smith dissented, arguing that the "technological arts" standard is simply the modern lexical equivalent to the phrase "useful arts" found in the US Constitution. He then argued that Congress does not have power to pass patent laws that expand beyond those "useful arts."
This could actually force a court of appeals review. In fact, it may have been done with that as a final purpose. Let's face it, if a law or regulation has a loophole large enough to drive a car through, someone will try to drive a truck through it. If the circuit court doesn't fix this, it won't be long before it becomes a constitutional question and goes before the SCOTUS.
I've been looking for a good magazine sci-fi fix ever since. This could be just what I've been looking for since I was a teenager, if they do it right.
Was there something wrong with Asimov's or Analog or Fantasy and Science Fiction? They've been publishing the whole time and helping to keep the short sf market alive.
Granted that of these only Analog publishes science fact articles as well, but if you subscribe to those three and add Scientific American you're covered.
Okay. I'm not an economist, but "regulation will never solve anything" and "the government is evil for trying to break up this scam based on their own outlandish economic theories."
So cartel-like behavior is bad because it increases the price to consumers, eh? Does that include the cartel-like behavior that the US entered into with Japan that doubled the price of memory chips between 1986 and 1988? What about the anti-dumping laws that force prices above some arbitrary Commerce Department-set price floor? That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices. What about the enormous import tarrifs that the US charges. That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
No economic mechanism delivers better prices, better supply, or faster, fairer market response to changes in demand than a free market. Period. Regulation caused this problem in the first place. Now it's being used to try to ameliorate some of its effects. How is that an indictment of free markets?
And still other times competition might be good for the consumer on the face of it but the companies drive themselves into the ground in the process (the airline industry) and the customers/taxpayers get to pick up the pieces.
So? Even in that instance competition was good for the consumer. Those who bought cheap airline tickets got their tickets and used them. You can't blame competition for short-sighted management running the company at a loss. Nor can you blame it for vote-buying, favor-currying politicians that insist the taxpayers should pay for management's mistake. That's like trying to blame Apple because a kid got killed for his iPod.
Let's see. The page you linked to lists eleven incidents, eight of which are completely unrelated to space flight and space vehicles. The unrelated incidents include things like automobile accidents, a commercial airliner crash, a vintage airplane crash while practicing for an air show, and the crash of a stunt plane.
That leaves the Apollo I training fire and the two shuttles out of--how many manned flights? I haven't done the math, but it's starting to sound safer than automobile travel and downhill skiing. Whose software were you going to suggest?
Slashdot Mirror
Especially since Intelligent Design, like any other religion, is irrefutable. Since reason is argument's only tool, any proposition not based in reason is both unassailable and indefensible at the same time.
Oh, good. So who gets to decide what is pr0n and what isn't? I suspect Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, and China, as examples, would all give you radically different definitions. Hell, New York and Alabama would give you radically different definitions. Would there be an ICANN Decency Board? Would they "know it when they saw it," or would they spend a few years trying to define it objectively?
So what other categories of speech should be forcibly banned from the .com realm? Hmmm? Should the next discussion be about .politics or .religion?
But it was a very different ballgame then. The pre-OS X operating systems weren't nearly as compelling as OS X. Neither was Internet use as prevalent, which has served to "equalize" OSs in the sense that, while browsing the Web or sending an e-mail, the user experience is virtually the same from Windows, to OS X, to *nix. Hell, I use Firefox and Thunderbird on all three.
Apple just needs to decide which market segment they want to go after: hardware, OS software, gadgets, or media services. Right now, they're fiddling with all four, because their old segment, "monolithic computer systems," is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Clearly, elitists are a very dependable and profitable market segment as well.
iRiver and Cowon's iAudio players support it, as does the new SigmaTel chip which will likely be showing up in new players in the next six months or so. There will always be someone to address the portion of the market that actually cares about the audio quality.
I buy CDs. I rip them to FLAC and then make copies in ogg-vorbis. If my Rio Karma dies and I have to get a player without Vorbis support, I just go back to the FLACs and run them through LAME. What's the big deal?
And no, I don't buy downloadable music. If I wanted pop slop in a crappy-sounding format I'd just get a $5.00 portable radio. I'll consider buying downloadable music when I can get unencumbered FLACs for half the price of the equivalent CD.
While I understand your interest in the evolutionary mechanism, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it. I don't think any creature is ever done. At best, a species achieves a relatively stable period where its configuration--for want of a better word--matches its current environmental conditions.
We like to think of species as something strictly-defined and set in stone, but they aren't, really. Not is the long term. In the long term, they're always somewhere between what they were and what they will become. At best, a species is a way of saying "from this time to that time, this organism had this configuration."
You did. Thermodynamically, extra effort is extra effort, even if that extra effort involves burning calories to produce a special behavior rather than burning calories to feed a special organ. Evolutionarily, it doesn't really matter--in fact it makes sense--that many different mechanisms evolved toward the same general end. A species that already accomplishes a particular goal in one manner probably won't evolve toward a different method unless some other advantage comes with it.
More interesting than the sharks in the article, I think, is the eye-heating organs that marlin and sailfish have evolved. The last theory I read is that helps them see more clearly, for hunting, in the deep cold water. They evolved just enough to accomplish the goal and no more. Give them a couple of centuries of much colder water, and I'm sure they'd end up heating their whole blood supply, too.
If you liked the Soderberg/Clooney version, you should watch Tarkovsky's orginal. Tarkovsky's penchant for dragging the viewer through some scenes at near-real-time adds significantly to the weight of story. It captures Stanislaw Lem's book much more effectively. Be warned, though, it doesn't mate well with modern western film sensibilities. It's too long, too slow, and you have to think too damn much.
Yes, yes--loosely based on an idea from the Clarke story The Sentinel. The story involved finding something on the moon which had been left waiting for mankind to grow up enough to find it. It doesn't change the fact that what the GP said is entirely true. That idea was expanded by the two of them into a new story and screenplay which Clarke later novelized.
How are video games not like movies and TV now? The industry has a voluntary ratings board, just like the other two. Vendors respect those ratings voluntarily, just like the other two. Parents still can't watch everything their children do all the time, just like the other two.
Bills like this one and the one in California, if applied to movies and TV, would make a movie theater owner subject to $1,000 fine and possible jail time every single time some 15-year-old sneaks into an R-rated movie in his theater. It would make your local cable company subject to those same penalties every time some kid watches an R-rated movie at home.
Absolutely! How willing will store owners be to risk carrying anything that might run afoul of the restrictions? It will open up whole new categories of gaming, like First-Person Daisy Pickers and Home Decorating RPGs.
No one is concerned about someone reading the book that way. The concern is over someone copying the book that way and then splatting the copy all over the Internet. Right now, book traders buy books, cut them out of their bindings, scan them, and put out digital versions in a variety of formats. With highly anticipated titles, this often happens within days of the book being released.
By comparison, a Google-chunk method would be a time saver.
A lot of the responses seem to assume that "just do it" means "just do it half-assed without any planning, testing, or forethought." While TFA was a little thin on details, I got the impression that the only thing left out of the "normal" migration process was the approval of the higher-ups. Frankly, if the guy's the IT manager and doesn't have the company's support to make technical decisions for the back end, then there's something bogus about the title, the org chart, or both.
That's a bit revisionist. Microsoft rode the personal computer wave. It didn't create it. Z-80-based CP/M machines had already broken the client-server relationship and had proven that stand-alone, even portable, computers would find business users waiting with open arms. Those of us who were selling, ready-to-go with WordStar, SuperCalc, and custom dBase applications, had already seen the future. It was coming no matter which OS came down the pipe.
And if any company can be said to be single-handedly responsible for the microcomputer revolution, it would be IBM. It was the weight of that name that got the second wave of people believing that there just might be something to this "personal computer thing."
In a sense, yes. They have to buy (or have donated) every book. Those books are then available to be read or checked out by one person at a time. If the library wants to loan one title to 1,000 people simultaneously, they have to have 1,000 copies on the shelf--a thousand copies that someone bought and paid for. Publishers and book distributors often have staff members whose job is to do nothing but library sales.
You're kidding, right? Have you never heard of the amazing work done by Project Gutenberg? They have something like 16,000 books and counting. All digital and all in the public domain. In many ways, it's the F/OSS equivalent of Google's project.
From their site:
They're open to competition and they're a matter of individual choice. Don't like Google's results? Use Yahoo!'s or Teoma's or any of the hundreds that would spring up in response. Of course, you're swapping one directory service for another. That was the GP's point. DNS, while useful, is not the sine qua non of the Internet. DNS relates human concepts (domain names) to IP addresses. Search engines relate human concepts (text content) to IP addresses. My Bookmarks relate human concepts (whatever mnemonic I choose) to IP addresses. It's all the same function. If DNS got borked, the 'Net would recover with surprising speed. That's why any threat regarding "control" of the Internet is empty. Any problems would be temporary--a hassle, yes, but a short-term hassle.
s/country/organization/ and the statement works equally well for the UN. As a regulatory body, the UN is a proven failure. It works as a venue for mediation and it works as a coordinator for disaster relief. That's about it.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that the MPAA's R rating restriction is a voluntary, industry-executed policy, not law. In fact, it was developed specifically to keep lawmakers from creating a legislative equivalent. The ESRB's system is the same thing.
The California law in question ignores the ESRB's system and creates one of its own without creating any kind of body to determine what qualifies for restrictions and what doesn't. So, as a retailer you could be subject to fines of $1,000 per incident without even being able to check ahead of time as to whether or not a particular title qualifies.
Gamespot has coverage of the bill's details.
Here's one example (via Gamespot): Washington state
No, you're not. The most interesting point comes from Judge Smith's dissent.
This could actually force a court of appeals review. In fact, it may have been done with that as a final purpose. Let's face it, if a law or regulation has a loophole large enough to drive a car through, someone will try to drive a truck through it. If the circuit court doesn't fix this, it won't be long before it becomes a constitutional question and goes before the SCOTUS.
Was there something wrong with Asimov's or Analog or Fantasy and Science Fiction? They've been publishing the whole time and helping to keep the short sf market alive.
Granted that of these only Analog publishes science fact articles as well, but if you subscribe to those three and add Scientific American you're covered.
Blame Heisenberg. At any given time every key is either pressed or not until you hit "submit" and find out for sure.
Okay. I'm not an economist, but "regulation will never solve anything" and "the government is evil for trying to break up this scam based on their own outlandish economic theories."
So cartel-like behavior is bad because it increases the price to consumers, eh? Does that include the cartel-like behavior that the US entered into with Japan that doubled the price of memory chips between 1986 and 1988? What about the anti-dumping laws that force prices above some arbitrary Commerce Department-set price floor? That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices. What about the enormous import tarrifs that the US charges. That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
No economic mechanism delivers better prices, better supply, or faster, fairer market response to changes in demand than a free market. Period. Regulation caused this problem in the first place. Now it's being used to try to ameliorate some of its effects. How is that an indictment of free markets?
Let's see. The page you linked to lists eleven incidents, eight of which are completely unrelated to space flight and space vehicles. The unrelated incidents include things like automobile accidents, a commercial airliner crash, a vintage airplane crash while practicing for an air show, and the crash of a stunt plane.
That leaves the Apollo I training fire and the two shuttles out of--how many manned flights? I haven't done the math, but it's starting to sound safer than automobile travel and downhill skiing. Whose software were you going to suggest?