Iran has many young, bright, well-educated people who resent the government's interference in their lives. Now they have been given a strong incentive to find ways to route around this government censorship. I can only hope that they will share the methods they devise with the rest of the world; we all need help routing around censorship. (Yes, the same argument applies to the great firewall of China.) What we really have here is an arms race, and I expect the greatest strides in promoting freedom to come from the citizens of the most oppressive regimes, since they have the greatest incentive to do so.
I used to play Runescape, and routinely 10 year olds would start chatting with me for no reason. Although I try to discourage this, I feel it is rude to just refuse to reply. Am I to understand that any in-game conversations between adults and minors are no unlawful in Canada? On the other hand, if we can classify "Need free gold!" broadcasts as "grooming behavior", I think that would make many games much more enjoyable.
Look, the theater probably has a contract with the movie distributor that states "no one is to be allowed to record any part of this film", which justifies barring anyone from carrying a video camera into the theater, and they should have signage up that clearly states this restriction. Problem is, many cell phones are now also video cameras (with extremely limited storage). The manager is within his rights to 1) bar people from bringing recording equipment in, 2) kick people out with no refund for attempting to record, and 3) ask people who are recording to delete the recording. Criminal charges seems a bit harsh, but if you very politely ask someone you catch in the act of recording the movie to delete the recording and explain that your contract with the distributor requires you to do, and they refuse to comply -- well then, what choice do you have but to use the threat of arrest to force them to comply? I'm not party to exactly what went down here, but like most situations, I'm pretty sure it could have been resolved satisfactorily to all participants long before the cops got there, if both sides weren't being asshats about it.
Trust me, as long as they can snag a millionaire by bleaching their hair, bobbing their nose, and "enhancing" their breasts, women will continue to do so (and yes, the sister of one of my girlfriends did exactly that). If there was no demand, there would be no supply.
Can it be used for plastic surgery? (Mmmm... breasts! (drool)) Seriously, wouldn't this be far preferable to plastic bags full of silicone gel or salt water?
You only need to retain the information until moment you turn in the final, and not a minute longer. Everything I use in everyday life (except for programming) I had learned by highschool. 3 dimensional vector calculus? Nope, haven't had any use for that since the moment I turned in the final.
Bummer! Why can't you mom just yell down the stairs for you to come up for supper like my mom does, instead of calling you on the phone while you're trying to download ASCII porn?
Any product not designed "By Customers, For Customers" is doomed to failure. Seriously, I don't want an e-book reader that makes the publisher's life easier; I want an e-book reader that makes MY life easier! And since the customer, not the publisher, is the one purchasing this device, I don't anticipate a huge number of sales.
Agriculture made civilization possible. Hunter-gatherers must be geographically dispersed in order to have access to enough food to survive. Agriculture made possible the gathering of people into large cities. Which is not necessarily a benefit to their health; it makes it much more easy for epidemics to wipe out large segments of the population. For example, the black plague was spread largely by rats on grain ships; without large-scale agriculture, it would never have become as widespread as it did. I'm not a historian, but I believe the more "civilized" peoples were decimated by it, while traditional hunter-gatherer societies were untouched due to their isolation. So yes, evolution has equipped us well to be hunter-gatherers, but not to live in huge cities eating food grown for us by strangers.
More simply put, people were designed to graze all day on unprocessed foods. Foods that take a great deal of calories to process and digest. If you have to do a lot of work to gather a food, remove it from a shell, etc., and digest it, you get full before you get too many net calories. However, if you constantly eat something like instant pudding, which is basically pre-digested for you, nearly 100% of the abundant calories in the food are available for your system, and most of them are stored for later as fat. A related effect of this is that many modern health problems like diabetes can be lessened simply by eating more fiber, like your body is designed to do. My diet philosophy is to simply eat what your ancestors ate for the last 10,000 years; that is what natural selection has designed you to do well with. A macrobiotic diet is, coincidentally enough, simply a traditional Japanese diet. Which leads me to suspect that most of the studies showing the benefits of macrobiotic diet were done on people of Japanese descent. For people of mediterranean descent, olive oil and red wine have proven health benefits -- no big surprise.
Your obviously both studying too much, and not doing enough drugs. With the right kind of drugs, you can listen to Ernie sing Rubber Ducky 40 times in a row, and be perfectly content. (This also goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Monty Python.)
An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once. You obviously don't have children. Children who will download a movie, then watch it three times in immediate succession, then demand to do the same thing again the next day. I believe the success of the Pixar movies is due to the fact that parents don't pull their hair out and scream they'll never buy another movie again after the 12th time of being subjected to one. (Monsters Inc., surprisingly, bears repeated viewing quite well.) For my child, a movie IS just like a song and just like a music video, only longer.
Having done a tandem skydive myself, I'm fairly certain I would never have gone through the door of that airplane without somebody strapped to my back pushing me. Rationally your brain knows the difference, but I still think it's a bad idea to get into your car and drive after playing a game like Excite Truck, where you are rewarded for crashing into other vehicles. Again, bad habits are a hard thing to break. I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, but I do think he's going to have to work really hard to retrain his mind.
So I'm to believe the death of journalism is caused by the internet linking to news, and not by the trend towards "infotainment" instead of hard journalism, or by the news outlets seemingly becoming the public relations arms of the big political parties? It couldn't have anything to do with the conglomeration of independent news providers into megalithic companies like Murdoch's, with a very clear agenda -- which apparently has nothing to do with providing concise, unbiased reporting.
People whose experience comes from driving games have no fear of crashing. So, while this guy may be less afraid of taking risks, unless he re-learns his most basic driving habits, he's going to go through a lot of cars.
Create massive redundant copies of each work (with MD5 checksums), and keep copying them to new media on a staggered basis. Whenever one copy fails a checksum check, replace it with a good copy. Memory is cheap; why keep just one or a few copies of anything that important? To the RIAA, let me say this: we are just trying to insure that none of your valuable intellectual property becomes lost due to data corruption. You release it, we'll archive it for you!
That second point is a no brainer: every product offered for sale should have the anticipated cost of it's eventual disposal added into the purchase price, these fees going into a trust fund so that the inevitable disposal is free. Charging people for throwing something away just leads to people dumping refuse in the woods to "beat the system", and cleaning that up afterwards is much more expensive. The only questions are, who should administer these disposal fees, and should the fees cover the costs of hauling the waste products away? Making people pay for disposal up front also gives people an incentive to buy better quality products that last longer, or to buy from second hand stores.
Uh, no... we force Microsoft to contribute to the fund to offset all the bad code they've already written, and use it to subsidize open source, which Microsoft then surreptitiously copies into their new products. See, it's a real win-win situation for everybody!
Right, because the same people that are willing to commit outright fraud by selling "Herbal V14gra" through unsolicited email would clearly be stopped cold by a patent infringement suit! You know, if these people could be found easily enough to serve patent infringement papers on, they'd have gotten their asses kicked a long time ago for much more egregious offenses.
For this, he deserves a guest spot on The Guild. If he can spin this into a chance to meet Felicia Day in person, then he can be a winner, not just someone famous for having no life.
We've replaced the race for higher clock speeds (regardless of power consumption) with a race for more cores (regardless of whether or not the memory controllers can keep those cores fed with data). I assume this is a response to the Cell processor, which is designed to do only one thing really well: encoding and decoding of streaming video and audio (which means it processes very predictable small blocks of data really well.) I believe the current quad processors only achieve maximum performance on one core by throttling back the other cores (otherwise power consumption goes through the roof), so there is no way that 16 core chip is going to achieve anything even close to the performance of 16 times the performance of a single core.
Embarassingly parallel problems are embarassingly easy to solve (e.g. Beowulf clusters of cheap PCs). What is really needed is a technique for optimizing highly interdependent parallel processes. I believe these processes are currently frequently I/O bound. meaning the memory controllers and cache schemes still need to catch up with the CPU speed.
Enforcing cache coherence over 48 CPUs is a non-trivial problem; you run the risk of several processors constantly invalidating each other's cache. dropping your performance to the same as having no cache at all. Ultimately the hardware and software designers need to work hand in hand to acheive optimum performance.
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Iran has many young, bright, well-educated people who resent the government's interference in their lives. Now they have been given a strong incentive to find ways to route around this government censorship. I can only hope that they will share the methods they devise with the rest of the world; we all need help routing around censorship. (Yes, the same argument applies to the great firewall of China.) What we really have here is an arms race, and I expect the greatest strides in promoting freedom to come from the citizens of the most oppressive regimes, since they have the greatest incentive to do so.
I used to play Runescape, and routinely 10 year olds would start chatting with me for no reason. Although I try to discourage this, I feel it is rude to just refuse to reply. Am I to understand that any in-game conversations between adults and minors are no unlawful in Canada? On the other hand, if we can classify "Need free gold!" broadcasts as "grooming behavior", I think that would make many games much more enjoyable.
Look, the theater probably has a contract with the movie distributor that states "no one is to be allowed to record any part of this film", which justifies barring anyone from carrying a video camera into the theater, and they should have signage up that clearly states this restriction. Problem is, many cell phones are now also video cameras (with extremely limited storage). The manager is within his rights to 1) bar people from bringing recording equipment in, 2) kick people out with no refund for attempting to record, and 3) ask people who are recording to delete the recording. Criminal charges seems a bit harsh, but if you very politely ask someone you catch in the act of recording the movie to delete the recording and explain that your contract with the distributor requires you to do, and they refuse to comply -- well then, what choice do you have but to use the threat of arrest to force them to comply? I'm not party to exactly what went down here, but like most situations, I'm pretty sure it could have been resolved satisfactorily to all participants long before the cops got there, if both sides weren't being asshats about it.
Trust me, as long as they can snag a millionaire by bleaching their hair, bobbing their nose, and "enhancing" their breasts, women will continue to do so (and yes, the sister of one of my girlfriends did exactly that). If there was no demand, there would be no supply.
Can it be used for plastic surgery? (Mmmm... breasts! (drool)) Seriously, wouldn't this be far preferable to plastic bags full of silicone gel or salt water?
You only need to retain the information until moment you turn in the final, and not a minute longer. Everything I use in everyday life (except for programming) I had learned by highschool. 3 dimensional vector calculus? Nope, haven't had any use for that since the moment I turned in the final.
Sure, but I have a bitch of a time fitting those clay tablets into my DVD drive.
Bummer! Why can't you mom just yell down the stairs for you to come up for supper like my mom does, instead of calling you on the phone while you're trying to download ASCII porn?
Any product not designed "By Customers, For Customers" is doomed to failure. Seriously, I don't want an e-book reader that makes the publisher's life easier; I want an e-book reader that makes MY life easier! And since the customer, not the publisher, is the one purchasing this device, I don't anticipate a huge number of sales.
Agriculture made civilization possible. Hunter-gatherers must be geographically dispersed in order to have access to enough food to survive. Agriculture made possible the gathering of people into large cities. Which is not necessarily a benefit to their health; it makes it much more easy for epidemics to wipe out large segments of the population. For example, the black plague was spread largely by rats on grain ships; without large-scale agriculture, it would never have become as widespread as it did. I'm not a historian, but I believe the more "civilized" peoples were decimated by it, while traditional hunter-gatherer societies were untouched due to their isolation. So yes, evolution has equipped us well to be hunter-gatherers, but not to live in huge cities eating food grown for us by strangers.
More simply put, people were designed to graze all day on unprocessed foods. Foods that take a great deal of calories to process and digest. If you have to do a lot of work to gather a food, remove it from a shell, etc., and digest it, you get full before you get too many net calories. However, if you constantly eat something like instant pudding, which is basically pre-digested for you, nearly 100% of the abundant calories in the food are available for your system, and most of them are stored for later as fat. A related effect of this is that many modern health problems like diabetes can be lessened simply by eating more fiber, like your body is designed to do. My diet philosophy is to simply eat what your ancestors ate for the last 10,000 years; that is what natural selection has designed you to do well with. A macrobiotic diet is, coincidentally enough, simply a traditional Japanese diet. Which leads me to suspect that most of the studies showing the benefits of macrobiotic diet were done on people of Japanese descent. For people of mediterranean descent, olive oil and red wine have proven health benefits -- no big surprise.
Your obviously both studying too much, and not doing enough drugs. With the right kind of drugs, you can listen to Ernie sing Rubber Ducky 40 times in a row, and be perfectly content. (This also goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Monty Python.)
An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once. You obviously don't have children. Children who will download a movie, then watch it three times in immediate succession, then demand to do the same thing again the next day. I believe the success of the Pixar movies is due to the fact that parents don't pull their hair out and scream they'll never buy another movie again after the 12th time of being subjected to one. (Monsters Inc., surprisingly, bears repeated viewing quite well.) For my child, a movie IS just like a song and just like a music video, only longer.
Having done a tandem skydive myself, I'm fairly certain I would never have gone through the door of that airplane without somebody strapped to my back pushing me. Rationally your brain knows the difference, but I still think it's a bad idea to get into your car and drive after playing a game like Excite Truck, where you are rewarded for crashing into other vehicles. Again, bad habits are a hard thing to break. I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, but I do think he's going to have to work really hard to retrain his mind.
So I'm to believe the death of journalism is caused by the internet linking to news, and not by the trend towards "infotainment" instead of hard journalism, or by the news outlets seemingly becoming the public relations arms of the big political parties? It couldn't have anything to do with the conglomeration of independent news providers into megalithic companies like Murdoch's, with a very clear agenda -- which apparently has nothing to do with providing concise, unbiased reporting.
People whose experience comes from driving games have no fear of crashing. So, while this guy may be less afraid of taking risks, unless he re-learns his most basic driving habits, he's going to go through a lot of cars.
Create massive redundant copies of each work (with MD5 checksums), and keep copying them to new media on a staggered basis. Whenever one copy fails a checksum check, replace it with a good copy. Memory is cheap; why keep just one or a few copies of anything that important? To the RIAA, let me say this: we are just trying to insure that none of your valuable intellectual property becomes lost due to data corruption. You release it, we'll archive it for you!
That second point is a no brainer: every product offered for sale should have the anticipated cost of it's eventual disposal added into the purchase price, these fees going into a trust fund so that the inevitable disposal is free. Charging people for throwing something away just leads to people dumping refuse in the woods to "beat the system", and cleaning that up afterwards is much more expensive. The only questions are, who should administer these disposal fees, and should the fees cover the costs of hauling the waste products away? Making people pay for disposal up front also gives people an incentive to buy better quality products that last longer, or to buy from second hand stores.
Uh, no... we force Microsoft to contribute to the fund to offset all the bad code they've already written, and use it to subsidize open source, which Microsoft then surreptitiously copies into their new products. See, it's a real win-win situation for everybody!
Right, because the same people that are willing to commit outright fraud by selling "Herbal V14gra" through unsolicited email would clearly be stopped cold by a patent infringement suit! You know, if these people could be found easily enough to serve patent infringement papers on, they'd have gotten their asses kicked a long time ago for much more egregious offenses.
Other than discovering new sites for their spiders to crawl and index, what's in it for Google??
For this, he deserves a guest spot on The Guild. If he can spin this into a chance to meet Felicia Day in person, then he can be a winner, not just someone famous for having no life.
I'm going to go out and design a MMORPT named "Meat", just so I can someday read the slashdot headline Man Beats Meat!
We've replaced the race for higher clock speeds (regardless of power consumption) with a race for more cores (regardless of whether or not the memory controllers can keep those cores fed with data). I assume this is a response to the Cell processor, which is designed to do only one thing really well: encoding and decoding of streaming video and audio (which means it processes very predictable small blocks of data really well.) I believe the current quad processors only achieve maximum performance on one core by throttling back the other cores (otherwise power consumption goes through the roof), so there is no way that 16 core chip is going to achieve anything even close to the performance of 16 times the performance of a single core.
Embarassingly parallel problems are embarassingly easy to solve (e.g. Beowulf clusters of cheap PCs). What is really needed is a technique for optimizing highly interdependent parallel processes. I believe these processes are currently frequently I/O bound. meaning the memory controllers and cache schemes still need to catch up with the CPU speed.
Enforcing cache coherence over 48 CPUs is a non-trivial problem; you run the risk of several processors constantly invalidating each other's cache. dropping your performance to the same as having no cache at all. Ultimately the hardware and software designers need to work hand in hand to acheive optimum performance.