that I can't escape bad hip-hop blaring from every car in my city in four different languages, but now these kiddies will be able to muck up the spectrum with their playlists?
Oh joy. I can hardly wait. If this becomes a reality, I'm filing a ruggedized MP3 unit with all the Weird Al and polkas I can find and fighting back... and getting a kicker box to boot.
that give the lawyers I know acid indigestion. Not all lawyers are unthinking and avaricious like this. Most of the ones I know are pretty good at long term thinking and believe in property protection the old fashioned way, through due diligence in protecting your own IP and going after the copiers as they get caught, not trying to stifle the industry/sector in advance, which is what this would do.
Rev 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a release date; and its number is Six hundred threescore and five.
"Do you really think that's right? Shouldn't 'release date', whatever that means, be 'man'?"
"Hmmm... Yes, probably. I just had this odd vision of a curly figure and it seemed to beckon me to that number and phrase. I was probably seeing it wrong."
"And six six five doesn't seem very mystical or frightening. More like the distance down the road to the Roman garrison."
"Six six six has more of an odd sound, doesn't it? Yes, let's go with that."
I would understand the loony level of support for Google from the anti-MS crowd more if these were supported as well as Google supports everything else.
I tried the prior version of this on Windows with the appropriate drivers and it was hobbled by Windows resource contention and choppy and paused. I'd like to see a Linux version. Gnome or KDE, either way.
Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service.
The Internet is a medium of communication for individuals and groups, organizations, and companies, people and assemblies of all kinds. As a medium of communication, putting ownership and control of access to it in the hands of government is a very very bad idea that relies on a false idea that the government can be trusted because it is the government which gives us rights and therefore will protect them on any service it provides.
This nation, as with all other nations of humans, has a long history of illustrating just the opposite. Government descends from our basic rights as humans, not the other way around. We make right of our right to free will to choose to organize and co-operate under governance, not to exist at the leisure of it.
Governments inherently being creatures of our darker tendencies and mob rule, are not and never have been given inherently towards respecting or protecting our rights, but ever seek to intrude upon them and limit them.
Yet despite all the socialist alarm bells about the present president turning this nation into the bastard offspring of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the same people all too often seem to think that government should provide the conduit through which we express ourselves. If this be the case, then let us turn over all the printing presses, computers, word processors, typewriters, phones and phone service and paper supplies and all other mediums of communication right now to the government.
Anyone trust that the government will distribute these mediums as best fits our rights and needs or would they do as they more often do, limit, choke, control?
Internet service by government is to put that access in the hands of politicians and politics. Two things that should be kept as far away and have as little contact as possible with it. Putting my tax dollars on this is tantamount to forcing me to contribute to something destined to become embroiled ina civil rights clusterf*ck of all time in the near future. Let us cut to the chase and not go there in the first place.
I am seriously impressed by what they've done with bipedal robotics and can see that we may end up with having walking armored robots in the future. Very cool.
Personally, I just want something for personal use that fits one or maybe two in a cockpit, runs like an ostrich, but with the commensurately higher overland speed of something twenty feet tall. Now that would make traffic jams a thing of the past.
The description of this sounds like the voices heard in the head in horror movies, especially those involving demonic possession. So now we can have offices that sound like babbling spirits in our skulls.
No thanks, I get babbling demonic yutzes on the phone all day. At least I'm paid to listen to those voices.
In a similar vein
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
and this can be considered prior art I guess, I was fiddling with some speech and audio processing stuff when a friend handed over an article about using laser reflections off of glass for spying. We got an idea and after about four hours, came up with a little gizmo that took the input from a microphone, created an opposing cancelling wave form, and mixed it with input from a stereo and we put it to a piezo which we cemented to a window. Presto, no further spying would work.
That was years ago when experimenting with hardware more basic than a premade circuitboard was still cool and surface mount devices were still ultra high tech, I know, but I've often wished it could be done with other things. Such as make objects emit waves out of phase to those coming in to make it hard to hear anyone or anything precisely and clearly past a certain distance.
Of course, enough Jack Daniels will do the same thing...
For the older geeks...
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Can you hear me Chief?"
"What did you say?"
"Chief, do you hear me?!"
"What are you saying, Smart?!"
There. I feel better gettin that out of my system.
My cubicle is my own little world and I feel free to do whatever in it. If someone asks me to be a little less loud, I judge their request on how often they are similarly noisy. The more noisy and more often, the less attention I pay to their complaints. If I have to hear them screaming at technicians in the field, they have to hear me every so often getting a call on my cellphone.
Learning by doing is the only way you can make POV-Ray work for you. While there are modellers out there which will output POV-Ray compatible script code, the best way to be good is to learn the language and write it by hand, keeping in your mind what each thing will do when it runs.
Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on/. when you want a clear blank line between paragraphs, it becomes second nature after a while.
Start with the simplest sample scripts and step through each entry and compare it to the directions and manuals.
The more you do it, the more you learn how to rationalize in your head the simpler geometric forms that comprise more complicated objects and how voids in those objects can be represented by negative structures subtracting from the remaining positive structure. A rectangular block with a chunk taken out corresponding to an intersection with a sphere creates a simple ash tray. Add a marble texture and tweak the surface properties.
I myself put POV-Ray aside pretty much years ago when I went full-on into Caligari trueSpace. I was scripting all night until my eyes were falling out and I started to do verbal deconstructions of things in public, pointing out what simpler objects made them up. Similar to where you catch yourself thinking, "potato, instance of tuber..." after too much OOP.
The povray.org servers have always been on the slow side. I've never ever seen them as what could be called "zippy" never mind "fast".
OTOH, so too has been the renderer as the versions have changed. It seems to render on a Pentium IV 2GHz machine today as slowly as it did on a Celeron 550Mhz with the then current version.
So maybe they're using the server to render at the same time? I dunno...
My wife is on depression meds, the right ones now, which address the bipolar symptoms of what was regarded as garden variety manic depression with an accent on depression. No more violent outbursts, much more rational thought, much more mature behavior, much greater happiness.
I probably should be on meds but practice willful almost psychotic disassociation from myself and my cares and instead go right past all the stages, right past acceptance, to someplace riding the wave ahead of everything. This place is called DILLIGAF Land. It's why I don't smack people with a keyboard when they pronounce TCP/IP "tee cee pip".
There are such things as these intrusions on normal thought processes, and partly they are of our own making. The modern world as I've noted before seems hellbent on a concept that the whole world is wrong, unfair, we're screwed before we start and can never win, it's someone else's fault, boo hoo hoo. When you hear this over and over again, you can't help but be affected by it. I think this common mindset in the west, most especially that seen in America, is one of the things working to subconsciously hobble us.
Then there's the real chemical imbalance issues which people have always had, but used to have more societal back-up and reinforcement in fighting. A lot of very secretly screwed up people kept it that way largely, secret. They kept it under control. These days, society isn't helping. Now you're on your own if you want to fight those feelings. In fact, you're encouraged to let them run free and loose. And appear on Springer or Povich.
I used to think everyone was just farked and lazy and if I could go without meds and manage and behave, then so could they. I've come to realize their collectively created social environment has already gone too far round the bend for it to be easy for any one unexceptional person. My psyche's little quirks just seem to lend themselves to sitting between apathy and disinterest. I recommend to everyone that the last person they need to concern themselves with is them and yet, the first and only one. It's a matter of how. You have to cut your emotional attachments to your old sense of self and rebuild a new one based on rationality and not chaotic FUD. My world ended a long time ago and I feel fine. On with the new world.
As was pointed out in The Matrix, living creatures produce a lot of energy and can be used somewhat as batteries. With the right engineering we could probably create a plant/animal hybrid that generated energy from chemical intake in a similar fashion. Not on the level of the fictional protoculture of Robotech, but along those lines. It would of course have to be as simple a thing as a pumpkin or tomato without a nervous system or no one would go for it.
(We could of course use convicted criminals, spammers, etc.)
As energy storage and concentration devices mature, we'll be able to store enough compact energy to power a car the way gasoline does today and even more economically.
What do we do with the algae? We use it for food and use it to process our sewage and we use it as part of aquaculture/aquafarming.
Burning things is an inefficient and wasteful way of doing the same things living things do in their processing of food into energy and waste. We need to figure out more efficient ways of doing what nature does in us and how to do it on larger scales. Living machinery, biomechanics, techno-organics... that's where the future is for us if we want to marry our world of ease and leisure to environmentally enmeshed living.
Sack cloth, brown rice, bicycles instead of cars, not to mention these biomass burning cars are not the answer.
According to Starzetz report, the flaw is in the function elf_core_dump(), (...)
That writes itself. Adding in references likening this to bears and woods is optional and subliminal.
Anyhow, if there is an ELF core dump bug and no one else steps in it, does it really matter? Did it really happen?
Do we dump the kernel, insist on a grooming of all ELF involved code, and rebuild and recompile?
What is the threshold anyhow for reproducing a bug? How many people must do it? If only one person reports activating the bug, do we ignore all their documentation of the event as if it was spurious because we couldn't do it? Do we wait till a malware write manages it?
I see the/. double-standards still are going strong. The same crowd that would scream bloody murder if Linux advanced as slowly as a five year difference is whining that MS is trying to encourage upgrading from a five year old OS to one just slightly younger than that unless you count SP2 in which case it's only a year old.
For fark's sake, some of you compile new kernels more often than you change your socks and you complain about MS making you change the OS on your Win boxes. And you snap at newbies when they don't upgrage their Linux distros fast enough. "WTF?! You're still using Fedora Core 3? Why haven't you wiped it for Fedora Core 4 yet?!"
I mean really people, you're letting your irrationality show brightly here. Hatred of Microsoft over everything, especially logic.
Why don't you just whine that you have to buy a new box to use MPEG-4 with satellite? Or that you need to buy a new TV to use Cable Card? Or that Pontiac won't stick the latest and greatest model year accessories into your four year old first edition? But if Microsoft feels it too much work for too little result to backport the newest Internet Explorer, or anything on Windows for that matter, then you go ballistic.
It's hate, pure and simple. If not, then you're lying blatantly about Microsoft not mattering to you and Open Source being your mantra because you already have third-party web browsers with tabs and here you are kvetching that you can't get tabs with IE, the browser you supposedly hate, despise, and never use without a gun to your head.
Can we get real here? BTW, debian.org reminds me that tomorrow is supposedly the Sarge release. I wonder how many of you will gladly tear your hair out over upgrade issues, hose multiple boxes, and do so without the whining that you do over installing a new Microsoft OS every five years.
...in all the blather about this and other idiocy infringing on our rights and privacies... there's been studious willful ignorance of the left wing's similar tendencies. Except, they are even bigger abusers of the "for the children" FUD card.
I just wanted to point that out before a lot of anti-Bush crud started up yet again. Just remember Clinton and his cronies were no different, really. Political correctness, their own version of terrorists in the form of "right-wing hate groups", more political correctness...
I'll say it again, whoever wins, we lose. Next elections, we need to be looking to wipe out both Republicans and Democrats at the polls. Trouble is, the third parties out there are either left of Stalin, loopy wingnuts like Perot, or worse altogether than that. Sadly, the common public doesn't seem to have much interest in a party with a rights, privacy, and constitutionalist bent. In short, the only people truly belonging in government are those who really don't want to serve in their heart of hearts and the people are prone to electing whoever grubs and scrounges for it the hardest.
So I don't expect these copyright issues to change, I don't expect the undue influence of major corporations or noisy political groups to lessen. I really don't. Sadly... So now we have another reason to infringe on the civil rights of our people. Did we really need another reason? Did they need one? Do they ever?
So on the one hand we have this and on the other implanted RFID chips.
Those of you who in other news replies felt that merely having encryption and using anonymous e-mail and network services equals having something to hide, please refrain from commenting against this now. If you have nothing to hide, you won't mind be tracked everywhere you go and in everything you do, because... you have nothing to hide, right?
Low self esteem which is a long-term estimation of self and high ego which is a transitory and ephemeral estimation. You can't replace the former with the latter any more than you can replace a proper diet with nothing but Cheetos and Ding Dongs no matter how much some try. And you can't invent the former simply with empty exercises. You have to examine yourself, be honest in both directions good and bad, and accept the outcome and the options for change as needed and commit to those changes or at least the endless path to the unattainable goals.
But the usual response is the "sour grapes" one instead. These geniuses feel the world doesn't like them and regard them highly enough. They hate the world for that. They begin to respond accordingly with a haughty sneering disregard for others' accomplishments and abilities outside of their fold. Non-geeks are "lusers" and worse.
Admit they are wrong? Fark no. That would be embracing the death of their artificial self they've made of ego straw. They can't face and embrace true emptiness that comes with the finality of true understanding and acceptance. They can't because of fear. Non-geeks may be right that they deserve derision and scorn. Non-geeks may be right that technical smarts aren't as good as hot social skills. Non-geeks may be right and they may be... wrong. And if the geek is wrong, then he isn't smart. And if he isn't at least smart, then he has nothing else and consequently would be... nothing.
I went through gifted classes with kids who exemplified this thinking. Everything was about showing off their smarts. Making a calculator out of flashlight bulbs and switches. Creating new number and word games every single day. Designing new things and creating new programs and writing new reports every day. At all times, they had to be smarter. Any mistakes were not ignored as you ignore the dog barking outside while watching the football game. They were ignored in the style of a child covering their eyes with their hands and plugging their ears with their thumbs at night in the dark in fright desperately trying to ignore the things that go bump in the night.
Because if they were wrong, then they weren't as smart as all that, and if they weren't smart, then they had nothing and were nothing. This would be the same as accepting total psychic death. If you are nothing, then how can you be?
This is the mindset of most of the Linux world today. If they are wrong, then Microsoft by default is right and there is no other outcome. They cannot be wrong but learn and grow. They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy. They can't backtrack and admit mistakes and leave it to others to fix their sloppy work on the theory that at least it is free. On this score, Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on. The geek brigades besieging the MS world on the field outside never do.
Well as someone who went through gifted classes and was maxing out the scores on all the IQ tests they could throw at me in grade school, I can confidently say to them, you can be and in fact are more often than not wrong. And the courage and intelligence to admit this and learn from it is far greater an intellectual exercise than making X11 behave with a new video driver while using Vi on a Chinese keyboard when your first language is French.
I would further say to these people, let your fear go. You're wrong all the time starting with that you're wrong that being wrong means you're nothing. You are not secretly dumb because your intelligence is less than omniscience or because real world things trip you up as opposed to computer world things. And when you get older, you will get slower and you will seem less brilliant. If you insist on believing that your smarts are all you have, then when they are gone you truly will have nothing.
Stop the worrying. Save time. Embrace the death of yourself. Begin recompiling self version 2.0.
You're describing somebody who is so afraid of making a bad decision, they can't make any. TFA describes pretty much the opposite problem: being unfraid to risk a bad decision, but never being able to admit that it was bad.
I think you're mistaking the subject group with executives.
...if they implant people with RFID's then can we direct them with this mouse? Now that would be cool. "I told you to stop e-mailing the support que about what you thought of episode three. Now you'll feel the power of my force."
Or could we get even smaller ones implanted in our fingertips so we can gesture at our computers instead of using keyboards and mice? "Middle finger extended not understood, please clarify and click OK."
This is absolutely true and though I've been a geekoid sort for years, I don't have the genes for arrogant assumption of superiority based on my interests and likes versus the common world. Therefore, I get called a troll by Linux kids who weren't even alive when I was selling code I'd written.
I remember before Linux was widely accepted and only the province of masochistic Unix veterans who fervently believed there had to be some way to salvage some of their investment in skill building in that area lest their suffering have truly been for no better reason than to test their endurance come the day when it died. In that time, the biggest cry of the junior geek brigade against Microsoft was that Windows 3.11 for Workgroups wasn't integrated enough, and configuring DOS.ini files was too hard and too often.
I have not failed to notice that many of the same people are now whining about the totally integrated Windows XP is "teh suxx0r" compared to Linux because Linux has all these powerful command prompt things and all these configuration files and...
The justification for hating Microsoft is just that, a justification for hating Microsoft. And usually by people doing it because it is in and cool in their minds. If you went by most of the Linux crowd's anti-MS rhetoric, you'd swear that Windows XP was harder to use than DOS and less stable than Gary Busey with a.10 and a wobbly axle cycle. Of course, it isn't. And the ease of use and learning curve are only slightly greater than that of the AOL interface software.
Just because we geeks can do technical things, and do them well, and maybe even love them, does not mean that people who are not like us are losers and unworthy of life. Granted there's plenty of people who fit that bill, but in general our ability to twiddle bits, rewrite build scripts, and so on, does not make us super superior and the fact that it is fashionable to hate on Microsoft doesn't make it right and justified by sheer numbers.
I am angry with them from the point of view of the honor of coders and their tendency to lie regarding the quality of their code and its completion status. (MS: it's finished. Me: no, it's still barely beta as far as stability is concerned. MS: it's finished. Me: hello, is this a recording?)
With respect to India doing this, they're falling for the idea that free beats paid and that the fine points of useability and logical sense and stability will sort themselves out on the backs of the adopters. This is like assuming an endless supply of free hatchets is superior to a well built and maintained chainsaw from the heavy equipment shop. Not if you're taking down fifty trees it isn't, not even if you have five thousand peons to wield the hatchets. The problems are not irrellevant and they won't take care of themselves.
All this assumes of course that FOSS is the only solution. Hello? Megacorporation IBM failed miserably with OS/2 and we all know SCO's history and that Apple is only alive in its current state of health today because they took a monetary injection from Microsoft. Having lots of money is not a guarantee of anything any more than software being free making it inherently more pure and righteous. For fark's sake people, viruses, trojans, and adware are free.
Nevertheless, I am not holding my breath that enough people will read this with a sober mind and clear head without knee-jerk thinking "troll". Just you think that. I'll be building dual-boot Windows/Linux systems for the technically inclined while you try to scream at some more Joe Sixpacks that Linux is superior and they're stupid for using AOL and Windows' point-click simplicity over your OS choice that takes someone whose vocation technology is to install, configure, and use at the same level as their Win boxes.
Since when has anything done by the MPAA members been a driving economic force in NON pay television? Do they think showing Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark which hit the theaters in 1982 is some sort of cash cow? Or are they referring to imaginary box office hits that they are fantasizing about coming to NBC first instead of Starz?
Broadcast television still does make money and garner viewers. Plenty of cable and satellite customers turn to the networks every night. Many of them got those services not because of the pay channels but to get proper picture reception of the programming carried on local stations.
However, since long before the advent of the VCR, major motion pictures were shown, ran their run, and that was it. They never came to television.
Is the MPAA somehow thinking that NBC and the others will stop producing things like CSI, Survivor, The Bachelor, etc.? Did the existance of the VCR stop horrible mid-eighties television movies of the week? Did it stop Thirtysomething? I only wish it had.
These are the same people who were originally against cable television itself, later on HBO and other movie services, and that was long long before the advent of the VCR. Later on they were against the VCR. Then they were against DVRs.
Are cable and satellite DVR service users a threat to their bottom line? Not in the slightest. Cable DVR service users cannot open and modify their units without destroying cable company property. Dish users can open their self-owned boxes and frequently do "rip" movies and shows. However, they can only rip what was already broadcast by HBO and the others first. By the time that has happened, the movie has already been availible for rental on DVD for one or more months. And the initial pirate rip? It was done BEFORE the rental/purchase DVDs were manufactured when the movie was still in first release, BEFORE it hit the matinee discount theaters.
There's no way around it: the MPAA has their heads so far up their asses they've become living Moebius strips.
Personally, I'd like to see the other side put their money and effort where their mouth is to counter this horsehockey. IOW, the independent movie makers out here should see about getting the end-users/viewers to be the ones fronting the money in advance of the making of the picture they way big movers and shakers in Hollyweird buy into movie production bonds on spec to make money after it is finished.
Except that the movie in this case would be made entirely on the receipts paid by the viewers in advance and if anything was left over, that would be the profit. The catch? The movie goes the way of FOSS and can be distributed and copied ad nauseum any way and number of times the public likes but NO ONE can charge a cent for it: the money was already paid in. The people wouldn't be investing to make money on it, they'd be investing on taking a share of the collective IP resulting.
I'm sure that there's plent of geeks and nerds hereabouts who would damn near kill to get a proper movie about hackers and network life made as opposed to Hackers and War Games.
Slashdot Mirror
that I can't escape bad hip-hop blaring from every car in my city in four different languages, but now these kiddies will be able to muck up the spectrum with their playlists?
Oh joy. I can hardly wait. If this becomes a reality, I'm filing a ruggedized MP3 unit with all the Weird Al and polkas I can find and fighting back... and getting a kicker box to boot.
that give the lawyers I know acid indigestion. Not all lawyers are unthinking and avaricious like this. Most of the ones I know are pretty good at long term thinking and believe in property protection the old fashioned way, through due diligence in protecting your own IP and going after the copiers as they get caught, not trying to stifle the industry/sector in advance, which is what this would do.
This is just stupid hucksterism.
Fedora Core 3, Disk Druid, doesn't hose, works fine...
Rev 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a release date; and its number is Six hundred threescore and five.
"Do you really think that's right? Shouldn't 'release date', whatever that means, be 'man'?"
"Hmmm... Yes, probably. I just had this odd vision of a curly figure and it seemed to beckon me to that number and phrase. I was probably seeing it wrong."
"And six six five doesn't seem very mystical or frightening. More like the distance down the road to the Roman garrison."
"Six six six has more of an odd sound, doesn't it? Yes, let's go with that."
...support for Linux and support for OSX.
I would understand the loony level of support for Google from the anti-MS crowd more if these were supported as well as Google supports everything else.
I tried the prior version of this on Windows with the appropriate drivers and it was hobbled by Windows resource contention and choppy and paused. I'd like to see a Linux version. Gnome or KDE, either way.
Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service.
The Internet is a medium of communication for individuals and groups, organizations, and companies, people and assemblies of all kinds. As a medium of communication, putting ownership and control of access to it in the hands of government is a very very bad idea that relies on a false idea that the government can be trusted because it is the government which gives us rights and therefore will protect them on any service it provides.
This nation, as with all other nations of humans, has a long history of illustrating just the opposite. Government descends from our basic rights as humans, not the other way around. We make right of our right to free will to choose to organize and co-operate under governance, not to exist at the leisure of it.
Governments inherently being creatures of our darker tendencies and mob rule, are not and never have been given inherently towards respecting or protecting our rights, but ever seek to intrude upon them and limit them.
Yet despite all the socialist alarm bells about the present president turning this nation into the bastard offspring of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the same people all too often seem to think that government should provide the conduit through which we express ourselves. If this be the case, then let us turn over all the printing presses, computers, word processors, typewriters, phones and phone service and paper supplies and all other mediums of communication right now to the government.
Anyone trust that the government will distribute these mediums as best fits our rights and needs or would they do as they more often do, limit, choke, control?
Internet service by government is to put that access in the hands of politicians and politics. Two things that should be kept as far away and have as little contact as possible with it. Putting my tax dollars on this is tantamount to forcing me to contribute to something destined to become embroiled ina civil rights clusterf*ck of all time in the near future. Let us cut to the chase and not go there in the first place.
I am seriously impressed by what they've done with bipedal robotics and can see that we may end up with having walking armored robots in the future. Very cool.
Personally, I just want something for personal use that fits one or maybe two in a cockpit, runs like an ostrich, but with the commensurately higher overland speed of something twenty feet tall. Now that would make traffic jams a thing of the past.
Farkin wonderful. We still don't have OpenMOSIX running with FC3's kernel yet and now this.
Oh well, I'll be clearing space of drives for all of the above...
The description of this sounds like the voices heard in the head in horror movies, especially those involving demonic possession. So now we can have offices that sound like babbling spirits in our skulls.
No thanks, I get babbling demonic yutzes on the phone all day. At least I'm paid to listen to those voices.
and this can be considered prior art I guess, I was fiddling with some speech and audio processing stuff when a friend handed over an article about using laser reflections off of glass for spying. We got an idea and after about four hours, came up with a little gizmo that took the input from a microphone, created an opposing cancelling wave form, and mixed it with input from a stereo and we put it to a piezo which we cemented to a window. Presto, no further spying would work.
That was years ago when experimenting with hardware more basic than a premade circuitboard was still cool and surface mount devices were still ultra high tech, I know, but I've often wished it could be done with other things. Such as make objects emit waves out of phase to those coming in to make it hard to hear anyone or anything precisely and clearly past a certain distance.
Of course, enough Jack Daniels will do the same thing...
"Can you hear me Chief?"
"What did you say?"
"Chief, do you hear me?!"
"What are you saying, Smart?!"
There. I feel better gettin that out of my system.
My cubicle is my own little world and I feel free to do whatever in it. If someone asks me to be a little less loud, I judge their request on how often they are similarly noisy. The more noisy and more often, the less attention I pay to their complaints. If I have to hear them screaming at technicians in the field, they have to hear me every so often getting a call on my cellphone.
Learning by doing is the only way you can make POV-Ray work for you. While there are modellers out there which will output POV-Ray compatible script code, the best way to be good is to learn the language and write it by hand, keeping in your mind what each thing will do when it runs.
/. when you want a clear blank line between paragraphs, it becomes second nature after a while.
Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on
Start with the simplest sample scripts and step through each entry and compare it to the directions and manuals.
The more you do it, the more you learn how to rationalize in your head the simpler geometric forms that comprise more complicated objects and how voids in those objects can be represented by negative structures subtracting from the remaining positive structure. A rectangular block with a chunk taken out corresponding to an intersection with a sphere creates a simple ash tray. Add a marble texture and tweak the surface properties.
I myself put POV-Ray aside pretty much years ago when I went full-on into Caligari trueSpace. I was scripting all night until my eyes were falling out and I started to do verbal deconstructions of things in public, pointing out what simpler objects made them up. Similar to where you catch yourself thinking, "potato, instance of tuber..." after too much OOP.
The povray.org servers have always been on the slow side. I've never ever seen them as what could be called "zippy" never mind "fast".
OTOH, so too has been the renderer as the versions have changed. It seems to render on a Pentium IV 2GHz machine today as slowly as it did on a Celeron 550Mhz with the then current version.
So maybe they're using the server to render at the same time? I dunno...
My wife is on depression meds, the right ones now, which address the bipolar symptoms of what was regarded as garden variety manic depression with an accent on depression. No more violent outbursts, much more rational thought, much more mature behavior, much greater happiness.
I probably should be on meds but practice willful almost psychotic disassociation from myself and my cares and instead go right past all the stages, right past acceptance, to someplace riding the wave ahead of everything. This place is called DILLIGAF Land. It's why I don't smack people with a keyboard when they pronounce TCP/IP "tee cee pip".
There are such things as these intrusions on normal thought processes, and partly they are of our own making. The modern world as I've noted before seems hellbent on a concept that the whole world is wrong, unfair, we're screwed before we start and can never win, it's someone else's fault, boo hoo hoo. When you hear this over and over again, you can't help but be affected by it. I think this common mindset in the west, most especially that seen in America, is one of the things working to subconsciously hobble us.
Then there's the real chemical imbalance issues which people have always had, but used to have more societal back-up and reinforcement in fighting. A lot of very secretly screwed up people kept it that way largely, secret. They kept it under control. These days, society isn't helping. Now you're on your own if you want to fight those feelings. In fact, you're encouraged to let them run free and loose. And appear on Springer or Povich.
I used to think everyone was just farked and lazy and if I could go without meds and manage and behave, then so could they. I've come to realize their collectively created social environment has already gone too far round the bend for it to be easy for any one unexceptional person. My psyche's little quirks just seem to lend themselves to sitting between apathy and disinterest. I recommend to everyone that the last person they need to concern themselves with is them and yet, the first and only one. It's a matter of how. You have to cut your emotional attachments to your old sense of self and rebuild a new one based on rationality and not chaotic FUD. My world ended a long time ago and I feel fine. On with the new world.
As was pointed out in The Matrix, living creatures produce a lot of energy and can be used somewhat as batteries. With the right engineering we could probably create a plant/animal hybrid that generated energy from chemical intake in a similar fashion. Not on the level of the fictional protoculture of Robotech, but along those lines. It would of course have to be as simple a thing as a pumpkin or tomato without a nervous system or no one would go for it.
(We could of course use convicted criminals, spammers, etc.)
As energy storage and concentration devices mature, we'll be able to store enough compact energy to power a car the way gasoline does today and even more economically.
What do we do with the algae? We use it for food and use it to process our sewage and we use it as part of aquaculture/aquafarming.
Burning things is an inefficient and wasteful way of doing the same things living things do in their processing of food into energy and waste. We need to figure out more efficient ways of doing what nature does in us and how to do it on larger scales. Living machinery, biomechanics, techno-organics... that's where the future is for us if we want to marry our world of ease and leisure to environmentally enmeshed living.
Sack cloth, brown rice, bicycles instead of cars, not to mention these biomass burning cars are not the answer.
First, the obligatory joke to set the questions:
According to Starzetz report, the flaw is in the function elf_core_dump(), (...)
That writes itself. Adding in references likening this to bears and woods is optional and subliminal.
Anyhow, if there is an ELF core dump bug and no one else steps in it, does it really matter? Did it really happen?
Do we dump the kernel, insist on a grooming of all ELF involved code, and rebuild and recompile?
What is the threshold anyhow for reproducing a bug? How many people must do it? If only one person reports activating the bug, do we ignore all their documentation of the event as if it was spurious because we couldn't do it? Do we wait till a malware write manages it?
What is the proper level of concern here?
I see the /. double-standards still are going strong. The same crowd that would scream bloody murder if Linux advanced as slowly as a five year difference is whining that MS is trying to encourage upgrading from a five year old OS to one just slightly younger than that unless you count SP2 in which case it's only a year old.
For fark's sake, some of you compile new kernels more often than you change your socks and you complain about MS making you change the OS on your Win boxes. And you snap at newbies when they don't upgrage their Linux distros fast enough. "WTF?! You're still using Fedora Core 3? Why haven't you wiped it for Fedora Core 4 yet?!"
I mean really people, you're letting your irrationality show brightly here. Hatred of Microsoft over everything, especially logic.
Why don't you just whine that you have to buy a new box to use MPEG-4 with satellite? Or that you need to buy a new TV to use Cable Card? Or that Pontiac won't stick the latest and greatest model year accessories into your four year old first edition? But if Microsoft feels it too much work for too little result to backport the newest Internet Explorer, or anything on Windows for that matter, then you go ballistic.
It's hate, pure and simple. If not, then you're lying blatantly about Microsoft not mattering to you and Open Source being your mantra because you already have third-party web browsers with tabs and here you are kvetching that you can't get tabs with IE, the browser you supposedly hate, despise, and never use without a gun to your head.
Can we get real here? BTW, debian.org reminds me that tomorrow is supposedly the Sarge release. I wonder how many of you will gladly tear your hair out over upgrade issues, hose multiple boxes, and do so without the whining that you do over installing a new Microsoft OS every five years.
Take a picture with a digital camera, pointing it in any direction. Take the bitmap as one large binary number. Truncate at whatever size you wish.
...in all the blather about this and other idiocy infringing on our rights and privacies... there's been studious willful ignorance of the left wing's similar tendencies. Except, they are even bigger abusers of the "for the children" FUD card.
I just wanted to point that out before a lot of anti-Bush crud started up yet again. Just remember Clinton and his cronies were no different, really. Political correctness, their own version of terrorists in the form of "right-wing hate groups", more political correctness...
I'll say it again, whoever wins, we lose. Next elections, we need to be looking to wipe out both Republicans and Democrats at the polls. Trouble is, the third parties out there are either left of Stalin, loopy wingnuts like Perot, or worse altogether than that. Sadly, the common public doesn't seem to have much interest in a party with a rights, privacy, and constitutionalist bent. In short, the only people truly belonging in government are those who really don't want to serve in their heart of hearts and the people are prone to electing whoever grubs and scrounges for it the hardest.
So I don't expect these copyright issues to change, I don't expect the undue influence of major corporations or noisy political groups to lessen. I really don't. Sadly... So now we have another reason to infringe on the civil rights of our people. Did we really need another reason? Did they need one? Do they ever?
So on the one hand we have this and on the other implanted RFID chips.
Those of you who in other news replies felt that merely having encryption and using anonymous e-mail and network services equals having something to hide, please refrain from commenting against this now. If you have nothing to hide, you won't mind be tracked everywhere you go and in everything you do, because... you have nothing to hide, right?
Please ready your papers, citizens.
Low self esteem which is a long-term estimation of self and high ego which is a transitory and ephemeral estimation. You can't replace the former with the latter any more than you can replace a proper diet with nothing but Cheetos and Ding Dongs no matter how much some try. And you can't invent the former simply with empty exercises. You have to examine yourself, be honest in both directions good and bad, and accept the outcome and the options for change as needed and commit to those changes or at least the endless path to the unattainable goals.
But the usual response is the "sour grapes" one instead. These geniuses feel the world doesn't like them and regard them highly enough. They hate the world for that. They begin to respond accordingly with a haughty sneering disregard for others' accomplishments and abilities outside of their fold. Non-geeks are "lusers" and worse.
Admit they are wrong? Fark no. That would be embracing the death of their artificial self they've made of ego straw. They can't face and embrace true emptiness that comes with the finality of true understanding and acceptance. They can't because of fear. Non-geeks may be right that they deserve derision and scorn. Non-geeks may be right that technical smarts aren't as good as hot social skills. Non-geeks may be right and they may be... wrong. And if the geek is wrong, then he isn't smart. And if he isn't at least smart, then he has nothing else and consequently would be... nothing.
I went through gifted classes with kids who exemplified this thinking. Everything was about showing off their smarts. Making a calculator out of flashlight bulbs and switches. Creating new number and word games every single day. Designing new things and creating new programs and writing new reports every day. At all times, they had to be smarter. Any mistakes were not ignored as you ignore the dog barking outside while watching the football game. They were ignored in the style of a child covering their eyes with their hands and plugging their ears with their thumbs at night in the dark in fright desperately trying to ignore the things that go bump in the night.
Because if they were wrong, then they weren't as smart as all that, and if they weren't smart, then they had nothing and were nothing. This would be the same as accepting total psychic death. If you are nothing, then how can you be?
This is the mindset of most of the Linux world today. If they are wrong, then Microsoft by default is right and there is no other outcome. They cannot be wrong but learn and grow. They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy. They can't backtrack and admit mistakes and leave it to others to fix their sloppy work on the theory that at least it is free. On this score, Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on. The geek brigades besieging the MS world on the field outside never do.
Well as someone who went through gifted classes and was maxing out the scores on all the IQ tests they could throw at me in grade school, I can confidently say to them, you can be and in fact are more often than not wrong. And the courage and intelligence to admit this and learn from it is far greater an intellectual exercise than making X11 behave with a new video driver while using Vi on a Chinese keyboard when your first language is French.
I would further say to these people, let your fear go. You're wrong all the time starting with that you're wrong that being wrong means you're nothing. You are not secretly dumb because your intelligence is less than omniscience or because real world things trip you up as opposed to computer world things. And when you get older, you will get slower and you will seem less brilliant. If you insist on believing that your smarts are all you have, then when they are gone you truly will have nothing.
Stop the worrying. Save time. Embrace the death of yourself. Begin recompiling self version 2.0.
You're describing somebody who is so afraid of making a bad decision, they can't make any. TFA describes pretty much the opposite problem: being unfraid to risk a bad decision, but never being able to admit that it was bad.
I think you're mistaking the subject group with executives.
...if they implant people with RFID's then can we direct them with this mouse? Now that would be cool. "I told you to stop e-mailing the support que about what you thought of episode three. Now you'll feel the power of my force."
Or could we get even smaller ones implanted in our fingertips so we can gesture at our computers instead of using keyboards and mice? "Middle finger extended not understood, please clarify and click OK."
This is absolutely true and though I've been a geekoid sort for years, I don't have the genes for arrogant assumption of superiority based on my interests and likes versus the common world. Therefore, I get called a troll by Linux kids who weren't even alive when I was selling code I'd written.
.ini files was too hard and too often.
.10 and a wobbly axle cycle. Of course, it isn't. And the ease of use and learning curve are only slightly greater than that of the AOL interface software.
I remember before Linux was widely accepted and only the province of masochistic Unix veterans who fervently believed there had to be some way to salvage some of their investment in skill building in that area lest their suffering have truly been for no better reason than to test their endurance come the day when it died. In that time, the biggest cry of the junior geek brigade against Microsoft was that Windows 3.11 for Workgroups wasn't integrated enough, and configuring DOS
I have not failed to notice that many of the same people are now whining about the totally integrated Windows XP is "teh suxx0r" compared to Linux because Linux has all these powerful command prompt things and all these configuration files and...
The justification for hating Microsoft is just that, a justification for hating Microsoft. And usually by people doing it because it is in and cool in their minds. If you went by most of the Linux crowd's anti-MS rhetoric, you'd swear that Windows XP was harder to use than DOS and less stable than Gary Busey with a
Just because we geeks can do technical things, and do them well, and maybe even love them, does not mean that people who are not like us are losers and unworthy of life. Granted there's plenty of people who fit that bill, but in general our ability to twiddle bits, rewrite build scripts, and so on, does not make us super superior and the fact that it is fashionable to hate on Microsoft doesn't make it right and justified by sheer numbers.
I am angry with them from the point of view of the honor of coders and their tendency to lie regarding the quality of their code and its completion status. (MS: it's finished. Me: no, it's still barely beta as far as stability is concerned. MS: it's finished. Me: hello, is this a recording?)
With respect to India doing this, they're falling for the idea that free beats paid and that the fine points of useability and logical sense and stability will sort themselves out on the backs of the adopters. This is like assuming an endless supply of free hatchets is superior to a well built and maintained chainsaw from the heavy equipment shop. Not if you're taking down fifty trees it isn't, not even if you have five thousand peons to wield the hatchets. The problems are not irrellevant and they won't take care of themselves.
All this assumes of course that FOSS is the only solution. Hello? Megacorporation IBM failed miserably with OS/2 and we all know SCO's history and that Apple is only alive in its current state of health today because they took a monetary injection from Microsoft. Having lots of money is not a guarantee of anything any more than software being free making it inherently more pure and righteous. For fark's sake people, viruses, trojans, and adware are free.
Nevertheless, I am not holding my breath that enough people will read this with a sober mind and clear head without knee-jerk thinking "troll". Just you think that. I'll be building dual-boot Windows/Linux systems for the technically inclined while you try to scream at some more Joe Sixpacks that Linux is superior and they're stupid for using AOL and Windows' point-click simplicity over your OS choice that takes someone whose vocation technology is to install, configure, and use at the same level as their Win boxes.
Since when has anything done by the MPAA members been a driving economic force in NON pay television? Do they think showing Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark which hit the theaters in 1982 is some sort of cash cow? Or are they referring to imaginary box office hits that they are fantasizing about coming to NBC first instead of Starz?
Broadcast television still does make money and garner viewers. Plenty of cable and satellite customers turn to the networks every night. Many of them got those services not because of the pay channels but to get proper picture reception of the programming carried on local stations.
However, since long before the advent of the VCR, major motion pictures were shown, ran their run, and that was it. They never came to television.
Is the MPAA somehow thinking that NBC and the others will stop producing things like CSI, Survivor, The Bachelor, etc.? Did the existance of the VCR stop horrible mid-eighties television movies of the week? Did it stop Thirtysomething? I only wish it had.
These are the same people who were originally against cable television itself, later on HBO and other movie services, and that was long long before the advent of the VCR. Later on they were against the VCR. Then they were against DVRs.
Are cable and satellite DVR service users a threat to their bottom line? Not in the slightest. Cable DVR service users cannot open and modify their units without destroying cable company property. Dish users can open their self-owned boxes and frequently do "rip" movies and shows. However, they can only rip what was already broadcast by HBO and the others first. By the time that has happened, the movie has already been availible for rental on DVD for one or more months. And the initial pirate rip? It was done BEFORE the rental/purchase DVDs were manufactured when the movie was still in first release, BEFORE it hit the matinee discount theaters.
There's no way around it: the MPAA has their heads so far up their asses they've become living Moebius strips.
Personally, I'd like to see the other side put their money and effort where their mouth is to counter this horsehockey. IOW, the independent movie makers out here should see about getting the end-users/viewers to be the ones fronting the money in advance of the making of the picture they way big movers and shakers in Hollyweird buy into movie production bonds on spec to make money after it is finished.
Except that the movie in this case would be made entirely on the receipts paid by the viewers in advance and if anything was left over, that would be the profit. The catch? The movie goes the way of FOSS and can be distributed and copied ad nauseum any way and number of times the public likes but NO ONE can charge a cent for it: the money was already paid in. The people wouldn't be investing to make money on it, they'd be investing on taking a share of the collective IP resulting.
I'm sure that there's plent of geeks and nerds hereabouts who would damn near kill to get a proper movie about hackers and network life made as opposed to Hackers and War Games.