It's a second order defense. Declan isn't saying DMCA is good, he's just saying it isn't quite as bad as some make it out to be. But still bad. There's broad agreement here on the sign of the net effect - negative - but a little minor quibbling about the magnitude.
My favorite quote: "not all execrable laws are equally loathsome."
Don't buy Beat The Dealer for the strategy
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Thorpe's book referenced in the/. header is only interesting for historical purposes; The card-counting systems developed since then are much easier to use, more accurate and more relevant to the game as it's now played.
A good blackjack discussion website for serious players is Sanford Wong's bj21.com.
The Wired article is surprisingly accurate; usually the media makes a hash of articles about card-counting.
P.S. to any Griffin employees out there: I don't know anything about blackjack. Please remove me from your files. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. These aren't the droids you're looking for.:-)
Two words: "bungie jump" :-)
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
This project would be a godsend for the extreme sports crowd!
Cue "girl from ipanema" on vibes through a tinny musak speaker and imagine a bored nasal-voiced elevator operator:
"First floor: first-time jumpers please exit here..."
"Second floor: hanggliders, extreme bungie jumpers, observation deck..."
"Third floor: parachutists..."
"Fourth floor: extreme parachutists. Watch that first step; it's a lulu!"
"Fifth floor: atmospheric scientists. Please hold onto the railing and remember: water ballons are strictly prohibited..."
"Sixth floor: astronauts, colonists, satellite personnel. Everybody out!"
You Said:
Except that you're assuming this effect is negative
He Said:
We are affecting things, for good or bad we don't even know.
Did you just get tired of reading and decided to reply? So typical/.
The anonymous posting to which I replied is here and says nothing of the sort. Rather, the poster makes two value judgements. (1) he says Hydrogen is much better than gas; (2) he says this is one more reason to get off the fossil fuel habit. And that's it: the context I quoted was all there was to read.
Since the posting to which I replied has since dropped to a 0 rating, perhaps it was below your reading threshold and you assumed I was responding to something else? Anyway, I stand by my original statement. If perhaps the same guy said "for good or bad we don't even know" in some other posting, I have no way to connect the two - that's the trouble with his (or her) being an anonymous poster.
It's the condensation seeds that cause this, the gazillions of small soot particles coming out of a kerosene-burning engine.
Remedy? Stop burning hydrocarbons up there. Hydrogen is much better: produces mere water vapour, having no catalytic effect on condensation.
On more reason to get off the fossil fuel habit.
Except that you're assuming this effect is negative, which is by no means clear. If global warming turns out to be a significant problem, increasing the impact of airplane contrails is one of the more interesting technical hacks that has been proposed to fix the problem.
But for a frog, this is just a few months. How are you going to keep cells alive for decades without "feeding" them?
The colder it is, the fewer chemical reactions take place in the cell. A cell whose molecules aren't bouncing around doing anything doesn't need food to maintain its current state.
I believe the Internet core routing protocols use Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, whereas RTS games probably use the A* algorithm to find approximate shortest paths.
In that case, RTS players owe their debt more directly to Danny Bobrow, Nils Nilsson and my dad Bertram Raphael, who invented the A* algorithm while working on Shakey the Robot at SRI. (And those three in turn owe debts to Dijkstra, Minsky and others. Isn't science grand?)
Finally a Palm with a button layout that can be useful for games! This has taken too long!
That's like someone bemoaning the fact that a GameBoy does not ship with good software for organizing business contacts.
Ericsson actually funded a company in late 1999 around the idea of making a better Gameboy that was also a decent personal information management device. With great 3-d graphics, Bluetooth connectivity, a notepad, datebook, etcetera. The company was called Red Jade, and I was the guy they hired to write the PIM functionality.
Red Jade lost funding and died in the big crash of 2000, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
the newton division was losing money, a lot of money.
The newton division spent a lot of money developing the product, but it was not losing a lot of money at the end. As a separate company, Newton Inc was well on track to profitability. Steve chose to roll the company back into Apple a month after it was separated. There were interested buyers. If the financial situation was that bad the right thing to do would have been to sell the rest of Apple's interest in it.
One of the developers doing the handwriting recognition had recently thrown up his hands and decided that it would never be transparent (I thought it was great, but..).
Speaking as the guy who was testing the handwriting recognition, I challenge that statement. Rosetta's recognition was fantastic and getting better all the time. Just before the company was split off, the recognition development team was justifiably proud of their work and was already thinking about extending the same engine to do continuous recognition, to do voice recognition, and so forth. Newton recognition came a long, long way between 1.0 and 2.0. So unless you can tell us which of the developers had "thrown up his hands" I'm inclined to believe you're just blowing smoke.
Sometimes I look at things like this and wonder, "Wouldn't it be great if I could board a maglev in Seattle and be in Chicago in eight hours? Wouldn't it be great if this only cost me a hundred bucks? [...]
Someimes I look at things like this and wonder "Wouldn't it be great if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon?" That's about as likely as a maglev from Seattle to Chicago showing a profit on a $100 fare.
Unfortunately this type of protection doesn't require incremental upgrades
from Anti-Virus companies and so we're stuck with something that can make
profits rather than something that works pro-actively. Thus is the basic
flaw of capitalism.
Yeah, it's a pity we don't live in a non-capitalist country. Everybody knows how much better those are at preventing computer viruses...:-)
There are restaurants in Sydney that will be made for life with the massive amounts of catering required by such a huge production. Even if Carrie Ann Moss isn't allowed to have more than a celery stick for every meal so that she still looks good in skin-tight latex as Trinity, you can bet that Bubba the gaffer and Hank the electrician want steak and potatos for every meal. Both the Wachowski brothers are big guys. I bet they don't skimp on the catering either.
When I was driving on the fake freeway they had excellent meals prepared on-site including steak and lobster every Friday. So sure, there is probably an outfit or two somewhere that is making lots of money providing food, but I doubt feeding an extra couple hundred people for a year is going to have a significant impact on the Sydney restaurant industry.
The main reason the 1.0 Newton got such a bad rep is that it shipped with a configuration mistake, which is that it only recognized words that were in the dictionary. So if you wrote "Martin" on a MessagePad 100 and that name wasn't in the common names dictionary but Martha was, you might get "Martha" instead. Simply unchecking the "only recognize dictionary words" preference item cured the worst such surprises.
When people refer to great handwriting recognition on the Newton, they are talking about the second-generation Newton OS. Newton OS 2.0 shipped with the MessagePad 130. NewtonOS 2.1( that shipped on the MessagePad 2000) had even better recognition which I'm pretty sure no other PDA has yet managed to approach or surpass.
Of course, I'm a bit biased in that I tested the 2.0 recognition engine.
Looking at the references you give, most of them only criticize recognition on the earliest models, The sole exception is the document Handwriting Tips for Newton Power Users which was a guide to how to get the best possible recognition out of OS 2.0. As the person who anonymously wrote the bulk of that guide, I'd like to say that it was not my intention to slam the general quality of 2.0 recognition. Newton handwriting recognition rocked!
My hope is that when the ARM-based PalmOS devices come out, Sony will release a Clie that has decent word-based recognition. Newton's incredible achievement wasn't just that they got get great recognition but that they did it with such a small memory footprint. Given how much cheaper ROM and RAM are today, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Palm or WinCE device with decent recognition some time in the next few years.
I've gone through a Palm Pro (screen stopped working reliably due to a loose connector being jiggled by stylus insertion), a Palm III (dropped it on the floor, the screen broke), a Handspring Visor (plugged in a camera card one day and the device just died and wouldn't wake up again), a Palm Vx (most of the buttons stopped working and the touchscreen alignment was off), and a Palm V (power button broke, two of the other buttons broke as well). Today I'm going to order a Clie.
Palm devices have a half life of about 6 months for me, but they're too damn useful to live without, so I keep buying 'em.
The buttons would probably last longer if I didn't play Galax.
I could make a small list for Spider-Man, but all it would revolve around would be how cold and wet we can make Kirsten Dunst's clothing in the next sequel.
The chief unanswered question about Spider-Man is: How the heck did he make that kick-ass spidey-suit?
Oh, and what was the Goblin/expecting/ to happen when he sent his jet thingy straight towards himself with spikes a-bristling? Did he want to skewer spidey/and/ himself?
Actually, it was the real universe without any blue in it; everything had sort of a dull greenish cast. Whereas when you "wake up" it's to a world with a whole lot of blue. They could replicate this by having the players wear appropriate sunglasses.
I wonder what they'll tast-e-wheat will taste like?
One of David Brin's observations was that we never see much public commerce in the Star Wars universe. Specifically, there seem to be no advertisements, no signs anywhere to tell you where the local restaurants are or what's on the tube tonight, or even what street you're on. That was true in all the other movies, but not this time! This time, there were three - count them, three! - moving advertisements on the wall behind where the assassin stands.
I'm still inclined to think Coruscant ought to look more like Hong Kong (or perhaps Times Square) than it does, but maybe they've got really strict zoning ordinances governing signage such that an occasional 7-foot tall ad is legal but billboard-sized ads are not.
I just spent all day as a driver on the film set of the Matrix II in Alameda. My girlfriend was signed up with an agency and somehow we
both got invitations to be drivers today.
The agency that lined up the people on this is Beau Bonneau casting. If you're in the SF Bay Area and have a flexible work schedule it's worth getting on their list; you have to pay $20 and get your picture taken to be in their database. Just last month they sent out a call for extras to work on some scenes from the forthcoming Incredible Hulk movie.
Your friend must have been called in on a Friday; they only had the lobster and filet mignon on Fridays. Not that the food was bad any other day, mind you.
There were about 50 drivers, and
basically our job was to drive alongside or in the opposite lane
while they were filming to make it look like real traffic on the
highway.
For a few scenes they called in more than a hundred drivers but 50 was about normal.
In the shot where Trinity is driving the Ducati motorbike past a wreck with lots of smoke, police cars and men in orange vests in the background, I'm pretty sure my car is on screen, but it's way on the far right of the shot, just a tiny rectangle next to a police car.
To add the appearance of "realism," there was a highway sign proclaiming, "Palo Alto 7 miles." Palo Alto's about 30 miles from San Francisco. Whatever.
They changed the signs regularly and shot at different angles such that that mile-and-a-half of freeway will look like it was shot all over the Bay Area. All the signs refer to actual places, but the distances are nonsense.
Anyway, the set was really amazing to see, and since it was right next to public property (the local skate park) you could walk out and take pictures of the set, and the various prop cars (including most of the ones in the trailer) parked in the lot around it.
The prop cars usually had the keys left in the ignition. One weekend one of the security guards took a prop car and tried to see how fast he could go, causing an actual crash on that fake freeway. Another some gusty winds caused a section of freeway wall to fall over. Since they didn't have time to fix it, they just parked a truck on the shoulder such that it blocked the camera's view through the hole and shot around it.
GM must have struck a deal with the producers. The majority of the cars shown are GM, including the new CTS (silver one, gets blown up unfortunately... I coulda gone for one of those) and the cops are Chevrolet Impalas.
All of the featured cars are GM. But there are also a lot of background cars that are pretty much whatever the people who worked as extras felt like bringing. (Me, I brought a silver civic, and I think you can actually see a tiny bit of my car at a long distance during one scene of the trailer.)
The boneyard was something to see -- they destroyed at least 40 cars making the film. They had two or three copies of every "significant" car so that if one got messed up they could just tow it away and do another take with the next one. They had about seven of the silver CTS, all with the same carefully duplicated bullet holes in each.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows error message haiku winners
Antitrust trial haiku winners
Telemarketer haiku winners
darkness grows outdoors,
your dinner cools, I waste a
moment of your time
-- Dave Demko
My favorite quote:
"not all execrable laws are equally loathsome."
Instead, I recommend people start with Snyder's Blackbelt in Blackjack or Olaf's Knock-out Blackjack.
A good blackjack discussion website for serious players is Sanford Wong's bj21.com.
The Wired article is surprisingly accurate; usually the media makes a hash of articles about card-counting.
P.S. to any Griffin employees out there: I don't know anything about blackjack. Please remove me from your files. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. These aren't the droids you're looking for. :-)
Cue "girl from ipanema" on vibes through a tinny musak speaker and imagine a bored nasal-voiced elevator operator:
"First floor: first-time jumpers please exit here..."
"Second floor: hanggliders, extreme bungie jumpers, observation deck..."
"Third floor: parachutists..."
"Fourth floor: extreme parachutists. Watch that first step; it's a lulu!"
"Fifth floor: atmospheric scientists. Please hold onto the railing and remember: water ballons are strictly prohibited..."
"Sixth floor: astronauts, colonists, satellite personnel. Everybody out!"
Since the posting to which I replied has since dropped to a 0 rating, perhaps it was below your reading threshold and you assumed I was responding to something else? Anyway, I stand by my original statement. If perhaps the same guy said "for good or bad we don't even know" in some other posting, I have no way to connect the two - that's the trouble with his (or her) being an anonymous poster.
On more reason to get off the fossil fuel habit.
Except that you're assuming this effect is negative, which is by no means clear. If global warming turns out to be a significant problem, increasing the impact of airplane contrails is one of the more interesting technical hacks that has been proposed to fix the problem.
The relevant patent can be found here: Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming.
The colder it is, the fewer chemical reactions take place in the cell. A cell whose molecules aren't bouncing around doing anything doesn't need food to maintain its current state.
'samatter, didn't you see Ice Age? :-)
In that case, RTS players owe their debt more directly to Danny Bobrow, Nils Nilsson and my dad Bertram Raphael, who invented the A* algorithm while working on Shakey the Robot at SRI. (And those three in turn owe debts to Dijkstra, Minsky and others. Isn't science grand?)
In bulk quantities, water is pennies a gallon. If gas were sold in 8 ounce bottles it would cost more than water.
How Big is the IMAX Screen?
A: The IMAX theater screen is a huge wrap around dome. We'll be able to project the games onto an image about 40' by 60'.
Red Jade lost funding and died in the big crash of 2000, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
Someimes I look at things like this and wonder "Wouldn't it be great if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon?" That's about as likely as a maglev from Seattle to Chicago showing a profit on a $100 fare.
Yeah, it's a pity we don't live in a non-capitalist country. Everybody knows how much better those are at preventing computer viruses... :-)
When I was driving on the fake freeway they had excellent meals prepared on-site including steak and lobster every Friday. So sure, there is probably an outfit or two somewhere that is making lots of money providing food, but I doubt feeding an extra couple hundred people for a year is going to have a significant impact on the Sydney restaurant industry.
That's certainly what they did when they needed a freeeway. Whole cities are probably harder to build cheaply.
(By the way, who the heck is this? She's cute.)
The main reason the 1.0 Newton got such a bad rep is that it shipped with a configuration mistake, which is that it only recognized words that were in the dictionary. So if you wrote "Martin" on a MessagePad 100 and that name wasn't in the common names dictionary but Martha was, you might get "Martha" instead. Simply unchecking the "only recognize dictionary words" preference item cured the worst such surprises.
Of course, I'm a bit biased in that I tested the 2.0 recognition engine.
Looking at the references you give, most of them only criticize recognition on the earliest models, The sole exception is the document Handwriting Tips for Newton Power Users which was a guide to how to get the best possible recognition out of OS 2.0. As the person who anonymously wrote the bulk of that guide, I'd like to say that it was not my intention to slam the general quality of 2.0 recognition. Newton handwriting recognition rocked!
My hope is that when the ARM-based PalmOS devices come out, Sony will release a Clie that has decent word-based recognition. Newton's incredible achievement wasn't just that they got get great recognition but that they did it with such a small memory footprint. Given how much cheaper ROM and RAM are today, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Palm or WinCE device with decent recognition some time in the next few years.
Cyc's corporate page has links to many recent news articles, the OpenCyc project, and other stuff of potential interest.
Palm devices have a half life of about 6 months for me, but they're too damn useful to live without, so I keep buying 'em.
The buttons would probably last longer if I didn't play Galax.
The chief unanswered question about Spider-Man is: How the heck did he make that kick-ass spidey-suit?
Oh, and what was the Goblin /expecting/ to happen when he sent his jet thingy straight towards himself with spikes a-bristling? Did he want to skewer spidey /and/ himself?
Actually, it was the real universe without any blue in it; everything had sort of a dull greenish cast. Whereas when you "wake up" it's to a world with a whole lot of blue. They could replicate this by having the players wear appropriate sunglasses.
I wonder what they'll tast-e-wheat will taste like?
I'm still inclined to think Coruscant ought to look more like Hong Kong (or perhaps Times Square) than it does, but maybe they've got really strict zoning ordinances governing signage such that an occasional 7-foot tall ad is legal but billboard-sized ads are not.
The agency that lined up the people on this is Beau Bonneau casting. If you're in the SF Bay Area and have a flexible work schedule it's worth getting on their list; you have to pay $20 and get your picture taken to be in their database. Just last month they sent out a call for extras to work on some scenes from the forthcoming Incredible Hulk movie.
Your friend must have been called in on a Friday; they only had the lobster and filet mignon on Fridays. Not that the food was bad any other day, mind you.
There were about 50 drivers, and basically our job was to drive alongside or in the opposite lane while they were filming to make it look like real traffic on the highway.
For a few scenes they called in more than a hundred drivers but 50 was about normal.
In the shot where Trinity is driving the Ducati motorbike past a wreck with lots of smoke, police cars and men in orange vests in the background, I'm pretty sure my car is on screen, but it's way on the far right of the shot, just a tiny rectangle next to a police car.
To add the appearance of "realism," there was a highway sign proclaiming, "Palo Alto 7 miles." Palo Alto's about 30 miles from San Francisco. Whatever.
They changed the signs regularly and shot at different angles such that that mile-and-a-half of freeway will look like it was shot all over the Bay Area. All the signs refer to actual places, but the distances are nonsense.
Anyway, the set was really amazing to see, and since it was right next to public property (the local skate park) you could walk out and take pictures of the set, and the various prop cars (including most of the ones in the trailer) parked in the lot around it.
The prop cars usually had the keys left in the ignition. One weekend one of the security guards took a prop car and tried to see how fast he could go, causing an actual crash on that fake freeway. Another some gusty winds caused a section of freeway wall to fall over. Since they didn't have time to fix it, they just parked a truck on the shoulder such that it blocked the camera's view through the hole and shot around it.
All of the featured cars are GM. But there are also a lot of background cars that are pretty much whatever the people who worked as extras felt like bringing. (Me, I brought a silver civic, and I think you can actually see a tiny bit of my car at a long distance during one scene of the trailer.)
The boneyard was something to see -- they destroyed at least 40 cars making the film. They had two or three copies of every "significant" car so that if one got messed up they could just tow it away and do another take with the next one. They had about seven of the silver CTS, all with the same carefully duplicated bullet holes in each.