Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa.
Oh I think that's putting it rather lightly. After reading about Twain's efforts to in King Leopold's Ghost, I read Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which Twain rips the Belgian King Leopold II apart (in my opinion the farce Twain made of Leopold is better than the more direct Crime of the Congo by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). We seem to think that human rights and anthropology are modern day efforts when historically artists like Twain were very politically active and quite in tune with the truths of corrupt governments (the United States notwithstanding).
I assure you that in Twain's mind at the time of his death, he had many issues that he held from his writings -- most likely because he felt we weren't ready for that level of truth yet. Really the only question for me is whether or not he still felt the need to drench these memoirs in satire and wit when a hundred years from then he can just out and out straight to your face tell you what he feels as he recounts his life. I'd imagine he knew that saying some of this stuff one hundred years ago would be career ending or life threatening... and not until those involved, lampooned and criticized are long gone would the world be ready for this. This will most likely prove to be a delicious read indeed.
Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Note: what follows is my own opinion. Many viewers that were more attentive than I were very satisfied with and emotionally moved by the ending.
I've always been bicuriously Lost as the show would sometimes give me a feeling that something more was going on that would eventually be revealed. So, having caught a number of episodes early on, I started watching Season Five religiously in order to prepare myself for the ending. But at the end of Season Five with no end in sight and only more questions and more characters (and a freaking reset button that later turned out to be a multiverse splitting mechanism), I gave up. Until I watched the last episode last night in hopes that the island would have some greater meaning. It didn't. Well, it tried to I guess but everyone's got their own interpretation of what they saw last night.
So many questions I have went completely unanswered. Questions about Walt, why Faraday never recognized Desmond (the guy that unexpectedly gave him the constants to time travel one day) when Faraday landed on the island, the properties of the multiverses (some people seem to care about the futures of the other multiverse even though they shouldn't know about it until they're dead), why the black cloud killed who it did and left others (especially now that we know more about the black cloud), the list goes on and on. The worst of it is if you take each character individually and reassemble their timelines in sequential order that the episodes slowly piecemeal it out to you -- everyone is a goddamn psychotic sociopath. No rhyme or reason to the actions of half the characters. And it's not even Lord of the Flies neurosis... just unexplainable U-turns in morality and logic.
The show started out very concrete, real and physical and slowly absolved into symbolism with last night being such pure symbolism that you cannot say for sure when they died or what the afterlife was or what the church represented or where they went at the end when the doors were opened. It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues. Problem was that none of Lost's resolutions sat well with me.
I sympathize with the writers as they had no idea how many seasons they would get but in the end I must admit I found the writing to be more or less utter drivel. Designed only to get you to keep watching with little if any satisfactory explanations. Everyone was a chaotic actor in the past, present and alternate multiverse. Writing that many flash sideways scenes as plot devices is -- quite frankly -- juvenile at best. Also the lead writer had refuted the theory that everyone was dead, in purgatory, in heaven or in hell. Yet, at the end they're clearly in some sort of afterlife.
The series offered closure on what happened eventually to everyone but no closure whatsoever as to what the island was and how its mechanations functioned -- even on a magical fantasy level. I was intrigued with Donnie Darko when the ending was left open to interpretation but Lost takes it to a whole new (unbearable for me) level. I hope other people enjoyed the ending but for me it was a complete indication not to devote anymore time to this series or these writers. Still better than 85% of what you'll find on TV but that isn't saying much.
They could have done a lot of neat things with tying down loose ends, explaining the island and completing their work. Instead they gave us this. And finally I see no further point in discussing it because there's no hope of ever explaining anything. Unlike a finely crafted classic novel, the grand symbolism and allusions are too abstract to nail down. So what's the point? Everyone's going to experience the series differently and for me it was just some guys writing a seria
What for? That'd just be a waste. You're thinking in terms of artificial scarcity.
There's only so many hours in the day and the US alone produces about two movies a day. Do you watch two movies a day?
I don't think of movies as some generic commodity. I think of movies as cultural pieces of art -- the same way I think of books and video games. One video game is not of the same quality as another video game nor would you argue that we should slow publishing books to one per week since that's how long it takes the average consumer to consume one. Instead, I recognize that here in the USA I have a movie collection with Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, Vasquez's Invader Zim and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. While the normal populace views this as depressing, childish and boring (respectively) I do not. And when I watch a Chinese blockbusters I can't help but wonder if there's some equivalent to this diversity of movies in China that just isn't getting translated or does it not exist at all since these things would be pirated so easily?
As it turns out, I approve of very little of the United States video production. That's why I'm kind of in favor of keeping some copyright term to make sure that the very rare and odd 1% of video I enjoy remains in a healthy system. Not the complete lack of enforcement in China and not the insane duration of the United States. I would argue for a happy medium any day of the week along these lines.
Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.
I cannot and won't dispute this. But I think a more accurate saying is that distributors make more money for doing less work and original creation than the creators do. While it's imbalanced, their distribution does put some cash via royalties back into the originator's pocket. And it's this method that really makes the money for the creators. If you take this away altogether, then you're going to see some undetermined amount less production from the creators. And it's not like the distributors don't take risks. Everyone takes risks, even the creators. A distributor cannot simply say "I'm going to release all movies ever" and try to compete with everyone else. Maybe that's part of the problem, I don't know. The contracts for distribution confuse and anger me often, especially when it comes to ad based streaming online.
I praise the Chinese government for standing up against U.S. corporations pushing their desires through their puppets.
I think you need to restrict your statement to just software. While, yes, the RIAA and MPAA are probably pressuring the US government to do this, I do not think the response to ignore it altogether for music and movies helps. There's a happy medium somewhere and it's not the abhorrent 90 to 120 years that the US has while I equally think that the Chinese government's "0 day" copyright protection would make music and movie production a near impossible profit in China (movies would be right out while musicians would need to depend on only live performances). Just think how much China's Hollywood or music scene would dwarf the United States' if they had an enforced ~20 year copyright policy. After all there are four times as many citizens there than here. Shouldn't they be producing roughly four times the amount of music and movies the United States does? I know they have more than I see but I get the feeling they see more American media due at least in some part because of this (note: not entirely).
For software, I have a similar attitude about the length of copyright but I think what you're overlooking is that a lot of companies start in software because it's copyrighted and later end up funding or contributing back to open source. There aren't a lot of Red Hats or Canonicals and even then those have their own in house code projects. I don't see licenses like the GPL or BSD as "stopgaps," I see them as a solution to coexistence and freedom to decide what your creation becomes. You want to hobble it with a copyright license of insane length proportions? Go right ahead, it is America "land of the free" after all.
What a sad day. A single book that shaped me even in college from a man who could somehow make Mathematics fun. Now I'll never know him personally but I'll always know that a collection of his puzzles put me on track to be who I am today. While writers as popular as Clarke and Sagan shaped me as well, Gardner is in the lesser known category that shaped me just as much if not more.
A near maniacal thirst to algorithmically solve puzzles was instilled in me from his mind via plain old paper.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard?
Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?
Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?
Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?
Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?
I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water.
Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?
When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know.
To edit what you wrote to correct your predictions is another. From the article (and my memory):
Gates's notion that the Internet would play a supporting role in the information highway of the future, rather than being the highway itself, was out-of-date the day The Road Ahead was published. Even Gates realized it. Shortly before his book hit the stores, Gates reorganized Microsoft to focus more on the Internet, and he made major revisions to a second edition of The Road Ahead, adding material that highlighted the significance of the Internet.
Never admitting fault or that you were wrong is one of the hallmarks of a successful businessman. You never have to acknowledge a weakness, you never have to assume responsibility, your image never falters and when your mistakes are too great, you can bail like a rat on a sinking ship instead of playing the part of the captain. It's this draconian mentality that will ensure your less intelligent employees view you as an immortal deity and flawless leader while the smarter employees exit your ship the next time it docks.
As a developer who deals daily with RESTful interfaces at his job, I found this to be rather intuitive. It may be complicated but would you be so kind as to elaborate on what is unnecessarily complicated about this interface? You might think "Oh, you're just moving data around" but add on top of that security like SSL support, scalability, namespaces and the ability to store very large hundred GB objects then... Yeah, the end result is going to be a bit more than PUT <Data>Object</Data>. It's well documented as far as I can tell. I haven't used it so I don't know if this documentation is worthless but it looks comprehensive at first glance.
So, theodp, if you were a developer you would look at this and see a set of interfaces to web services done in a RESTful manner. You would say, "Oh, my users want to use Google storage but they need more of a drag and drop interface." Then you would spend a couple weeks using Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous to make virtual folders or buckets or whatever your application calls them and using the elegance of RoR with the UI of Scriptaculous so the user can move their photos or data from your server to the cloud or vice versa. You could really use anything you want to interact with it but I would bet these two GPL compatible tools would result in the most rapid of web application development.
So three sentences with links to Google besmirching them for being smart will get you on the frontpage of Slashdot these days? Really the substance of the 'story' here is essentially "WTF?! So complicated it must Suck!"
Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API...
Here's a final hint: API stands for Application Programming Interface is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be developer-friendly. I hope I don't sound like a Google fanboy but this is a nontrivial task and I would defend the API they have produced. The documentation is far more than you would get from a CS PhD. You want me to take notice of your mindless drivel, theodp? Get off your ass, code an interface for this API and then point out how the API and documentation is lacking in a step by step post. That would be helpful and deserve a place in Slashdot's programming section. What you have here is not.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
Boy that word sure doesn't mean jackshit when it just gets thrown around and abused like that, huh? Like watching the word 'fuck' get detoothed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, there's this sort of desensitization toward 'innovation' that leaves me confused as to how I should describe people like Tesla, Turing and Shannon. If Ballmer considers all of his workers as 'innovators' and has "thousands of man hours of innovation" at his disposal then surely there must be some new word to apply to the real innovators. I guess there might be something to the theory that innovation diffuses with time but this is downright ridiculous.
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
What I found interesting was the amount: an average of about $44 million per corporation ($400M / 9). Contrast that with the profits each one made on this scheme.
What annoys me is that a lot of this stuff is so pervasive that I cannot in anyway knowingly boycott any purchases of DRAM from these companies. There's probably DRAM in any piece of electronics you buy whether it be Sony, Nintendo or an actual Samsung product.
And then what happens to the companies who take a $44 million hit? You think their CEOs just sit down and eat that? They don't take their medicine, they slightly markup their product and again the consumer loses! This sort of price fixing fixed by fining model is just not working.
What I think should happen is that all the products that were price fixed should be entered into the public domain in the country where the price fixing was conducted and the company was found guilty. Meaning all patents and designs of those products are now owned by the public. The public overpaid for them so force the companies to give something back to the public. The manufacturing processes and techniques can be kept secret but all the chip design and patents should be open for competitors to step in and make a better cheaper product. I know a lot of people will think that's overly harsh but frankly the DRAM manufacturers should have thought of that before they started price fixing. You think times were tough when you tried to turn some illegal profit? Try now when everyone knows everything about your product. Really, that's the only way to 1) make them think twice about price fixing and 2) actually give something valuable to the victim that has a positive result instead of a negative result.
If that's the way business works in Korea, Taiwan and China then I don't care. But they need to learn that price fixing is not acceptable when they do business in the US and the EU. It blows my mind but it seems to happen everywhere in the world of circuitry and electronics. Since the companies just seem to be taking these fines in step and repeating or continuing with their practices, you have only one option: up the stakes.
The thing that was disturbing to me is that the consumer lost out here and the government is pulling in $400 million. When will the actual victim (people who made DRAM purchases) receive restitution? Never.
I thought that it was being pushed for people to be able to include metadata and keywords and tags via hidden HTML attached to their articles to give a tip to search engines. Whatever happened to that part of moving forward on the web? Did it turn out that it was too easy to game search engines with spam if you could constantly update what your spam site's metadata was indexed as?
Hypothetically this would allow you to put something very clever and catchy as a headline and then insert the obvious keywords into a meta tag to help out search engines. You could even avoid all the keywords.
Also, engines like Google were designed for you to be agnostic as to what each engine was doing. Tailoring yourself to one search engine doesn't only ruin what they're trying to accomplish but also what you're trying to accomplish which is being informative to readers, not the search engine. Know, respect and cater to your audience and they will stay with you through the hard times.
No, you're wrong. On Earth, everywhere there is water, there is life. From the bottom of the Marianas Trench, to the top of the troposphere. Everywhere. Unless you don't consider bacteria life.
So you're telling me that deep within the black smokers on the ocean floor, where water comes in contact with 1200 C magma... that down in there underneath the ocean floor that water has bacteria and life living in it? Where the pressure is so great that the water can't even boil?
News to me.
And what is the deal with people moderating me over rated lately? It's non-stop. Jesus, the biologist who wrote this article was short sighted, his figure of 12% might have been off but he was not wrong about lack of life in places with water at extreme conditions.
The argument seems to be that for your statement, everywhere on Earth's surface is true. However, for everywhere above or below Earth's surface your statement does not hold.
He's an idiot.
Not quite an idiot but certainly shortsighted. The real confusing thing for me is that his "sliver" -- 12% -- would still be scientifically revolutionary if we hit up a planet and 12% of the water on it contained life. Can he produce any other chemical or indicator we can detect light years away that produces some percentage greater than that for supporting life? He can't, that's why the article wraps up with water still being our best guess and no recommendations to change anything.
So my layman's knowledge of how we gather information on the composition of a planet involves with analyzing the spectrum of light reflected by the surface of that planet from its nearby star. While molecules in the atmosphere also reflect the light and influence it, what's below the surface is based on that assumption. From there we can use other methods to determine its size and how far it is from the star it orbits to check pressure and temperatures.
We cannot measure the water beneath the surface (to my knowledge) so the example of the earth's composition of water is moot. If you were to take the surface of earth covered by water and then that amount of water that contains life, I think the percentage would be much higher. The microbes and small organisms that our oceans are teaming with alone would be a scientific goldmine on another planet. Of course the deep trenches of the Atlantic and Pacific will throw off your rates but we can't measure them anyway on another planet or even water in the mantle... so why is this even being brought up? The article even ends with the researchers agreeing that presence of water is still our best approximation and that there should be no change in strategy.
If you used the illegitimate MP3 site allofmp3.com you may want to investigate whether or not your transaction went through Chronopay as they might have retained a copy of your records *cough* *cough*. Krebs outed this guy in the first report and Vrublevsky tried to play it off like someone higher was trying to drag his name through the mud for political reasons. I don't need anymore accusations: Vrublevsky's a crook.
Well, Clojure is a functional programming (FP) language that runs on top of the extremely pervasive Java Virtual Machine
I'll pass.
While FP permits some useful constructs (like Ruby's blocks), writing everything as a FP is a pain in the ass. Combining FP with Java cranks it up from mildly interesting albeit somewhat annoying to full-blown annoying.
Well, had you read a bit more... or even read the summary... you might have noticed that you can interact between Java and Clojure. To the point that -- as is pointed out in the book -- you could isolate packages in Java that have little "side effects" (meaning they are good candidates for pure functional programming) and you could optimize them from a functional standpoint. Which is hypothetically much much easier for some tasks. You do not have to write a whole project in Clojure to take advantage of this. I hope this was clear in my review.
Posting as anonymous because it's a knee jerk reaction.
You can say that again...
I just can't stand the bloat associated with the JVM.
You might end up liking Clojure much more than you think. What if you didn't have any objects so that the garbage collector rarely (if ever) had to run? This is what Clojure could offer you with the platform pervasiveness and audience that comes with the bloated JVM.
Weight of various patterns and features. We present here a deeper look on some examples. A classic example of a sarcastic comment is: "Silly me, the Kindle and the Sony eBook can’t read these protected formats. Great!". Some of the patterns it contains are...
You know DRM is pervasive as a very serious consumer problem when statistical research papers recognize user dissatisfaction with it as a classic example of sarcasm that floods reviews.
How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives?
The key difference seems to be that you are paying for something specific to this project. In NPR, you're paying for some future costs of running it but also by and large shows that are already filmed and done. You're helping keep the access up and running. In Diaspora and Sobule's cases, you're paying for the coming work. You're really funding the creation of this project. Both are pledges for the future but in this case you are instrumental in creation, not accessing what's already created. I suppose locally produced shows may enjoy your money but you're not attached solely to that project when you contribute. And you're often rewarded with non-personal items. A duffel bag? A coffee mug? An old DVD of WWII? Old crap they have laying around? Red Green signatures? (Note: I would actually enjoy the Red Green signature)
Diaspora has to ship 4,241 CDs, 3,267 bunches of "cool disaspora stickers", 2,488 t-shirts and then all the hosting and phone support in the remaining groups which isn't anything to sneeze at either. It's all personalized to the Diaspora project and you're a part of that project now.
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
If only that was all you had to deal with. You should actually read the article, here we have an actor taking the role of the consumer and being forced to deal with: DRM, paying for a license multiple times, regioning on DVDs and distribution restrictions by country. In both his own work and others'. It was a great read, the whole time I was thinking, "Finally, now you know what it's like." I mean, come on. As a software developer if I coded something that was as shitty as all that and I sat down to use it... I don't know what else I could think of myself as except a failure. The fact that publishers in the USA love to restrict free streaming online to only the USA boggles my mind. Do they know that there are far more people outside than within? "Oh no, you'd be violating some archaic distribution deal from 1977 if a Ukrainian heard The Killers." And since we signed that away for each country a separate contract for all eternity, we're kind of out of luck. Laughably ridiculous.
So I'm afraid I simply DL'ed a pixel-clear pirate copy which arrived in seconds. My moral justification for this? I once bought the VHS.
My greatest problem with copyright abuse by the RIAA/MPAA is simply how they nickel and dime you. Every decade or so a new format comes out and they roll around in new income without even doing anything (well, remastering is very little). That bothers me. It seems like the opposite of a capitalistic system where you're supposed to be rewarded for producing something--in this case entertainment content.
So let's say I roll down to a garage sale and find the band Poison's worst songs of the 1980s on vinyl for two pence (that's two pence more than it's worth). By your logic, is it okay for me to now get online and download that?
I assume that with digital downloads, all of those archaic shenanigans will end... or perhaps that's why your employer, your publisher and your industry are fighting the final format solution. You wrote this piece as a consumer of your own product and were given a brief flash of insight yet you seem to avoid trying to reconcile this view with the view from your end, from the insider's end. And that's probably because it's irreconcilable and, as you said, you "don't understand business." More importantly, you don't understand money and the desire for more money is all that runs your industry. You've got some sort of humanity and empathy for the consumer left in you. You'd need to cast that off in order to understand the businessman who is making tons of bank on you. You'd need that to understand EMI's decision to continually restrict Hot Chip's viewership.
Good luck in your quest to utilize things like P2P for promoting, sharing and distributing as a tool to success. Your industry by and large will not assist you in the least and may even take legal action against you.
Man, they are brutal down in Melbourne. And from the original article linked at TG Daily:
The Age has been told that Assange's passport is classified "normal" on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it.
They really know how to shake people up and intimidate you. Sounds almost as bad as my trip through United States customs coming back from vacation. They abducted me for three hours as I was forced to stand in line awaiting inspection and approval. They called it standard processing but I tell you what--it was more of a death march.
Australia would have to be insane to do something like that to Assange. He would trot that out in front of the media for weeks if that was what happened. What a claim to legitimacy. And for that reason I'm guessing this is likely a natural passport process turned into a PR stunt.
So basically Australia said, "We need to renew your overly used passport and the authorities are looking into how you got a hold of a blacklist from our government." <sarcasm>The poor man! When will the persecution stop?! The only way you can only mitigate his suffering by making a tiny donation to Wikileaks.org.</sarcasm>
The real icing on the cake is (as mentioned near the end) the secondary drive doesn't require a whole lot of power so it can be run by a flywheel. Infinite torque? Frictionless? This is almost too good to be true, there has to be some catch. Like the primary input drive requires more energy than they expected but I can't see it--although I'm not a mechanical engineer.
This is the kind of thing you like to see -- I hope this man has all the capital he needs and gets that prototype up and running for demonstrations. Plus it's a small time plumber inventor... these are the kind of news stories an engineer loves to read about.
Does the physicist-turned-comedy icon have any regrets? "What I do is ultimately not similar to physics or computer science," Cohen admits. "I would like to have lived two lives, to be a scientist in one... So of course I have regrets. Science is more important than what we do, although I do get a lot of satisfaction out of my work."
Surely you must take some solace or pride in the fact that the genre of sci-fi entertainment often sparks the scientist in people? And if it doesn't get them to become scientists, it at least drives a curiosity. Were it not for the enjoyment of many sci-fi novels as a kid, I would not be so interested in science and computers. Many older engineers I've worked with have given Star Trek a lot of credit for their early intrigue with physics. Surely Cohen can consider the cult popularity of Futurama and its return as a potential to be an enduring piece of entertainment that serves as a pilot light for young minds. Even though many of the Stanislaw Lem novels I read were humor or political satire, they caused me to wonder... "what if?" Futurama makes physics entertaining and funny. Some would consider that very valuable as there's very little material out there that does that.
Slashdot Mirror
He had doubts about God ...
Indeed. See his later books like Letters from the Earth and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (claymation here).
Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa.
Oh I think that's putting it rather lightly. After reading about Twain's efforts to in King Leopold's Ghost, I read Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which Twain rips the Belgian King Leopold II apart (in my opinion the farce Twain made of Leopold is better than the more direct Crime of the Congo by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). We seem to think that human rights and anthropology are modern day efforts when historically artists like Twain were very politically active and quite in tune with the truths of corrupt governments (the United States notwithstanding).
... and not until those involved, lampooned and criticized are long gone would the world be ready for this. This will most likely prove to be a delicious read indeed.
I assure you that in Twain's mind at the time of his death, he had many issues that he held from his writings -- most likely because he felt we weren't ready for that level of truth yet. Really the only question for me is whether or not he still felt the need to drench these memoirs in satire and wit when a hundred years from then he can just out and out straight to your face tell you what he feels as he recounts his life. I'd imagine he knew that saying some of this stuff one hundred years ago would be career ending or life threatening
Note: what follows is my own opinion. Many viewers that were more attentive than I were very satisfied with and emotionally moved by the ending.
... just unexplainable U-turns in morality and logic.
I've always been bicuriously Lost as the show would sometimes give me a feeling that something more was going on that would eventually be revealed. So, having caught a number of episodes early on, I started watching Season Five religiously in order to prepare myself for the ending. But at the end of Season Five with no end in sight and only more questions and more characters (and a freaking reset button that later turned out to be a multiverse splitting mechanism), I gave up. Until I watched the last episode last night in hopes that the island would have some greater meaning. It didn't. Well, it tried to I guess but everyone's got their own interpretation of what they saw last night.
So many questions I have went completely unanswered. Questions about Walt, why Faraday never recognized Desmond (the guy that unexpectedly gave him the constants to time travel one day) when Faraday landed on the island, the properties of the multiverses (some people seem to care about the futures of the other multiverse even though they shouldn't know about it until they're dead), why the black cloud killed who it did and left others (especially now that we know more about the black cloud), the list goes on and on. The worst of it is if you take each character individually and reassemble their timelines in sequential order that the episodes slowly piecemeal it out to you -- everyone is a goddamn psychotic sociopath. No rhyme or reason to the actions of half the characters. And it's not even Lord of the Flies neurosis
The show started out very concrete, real and physical and slowly absolved into symbolism with last night being such pure symbolism that you cannot say for sure when they died or what the afterlife was or what the church represented or where they went at the end when the doors were opened. It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues. Problem was that none of Lost's resolutions sat well with me.
I sympathize with the writers as they had no idea how many seasons they would get but in the end I must admit I found the writing to be more or less utter drivel. Designed only to get you to keep watching with little if any satisfactory explanations. Everyone was a chaotic actor in the past, present and alternate multiverse. Writing that many flash sideways scenes as plot devices is -- quite frankly -- juvenile at best. Also the lead writer had refuted the theory that everyone was dead, in purgatory, in heaven or in hell. Yet, at the end they're clearly in some sort of afterlife.
The series offered closure on what happened eventually to everyone but no closure whatsoever as to what the island was and how its mechanations functioned -- even on a magical fantasy level. I was intrigued with Donnie Darko when the ending was left open to interpretation but Lost takes it to a whole new (unbearable for me) level. I hope other people enjoyed the ending but for me it was a complete indication not to devote anymore time to this series or these writers. Still better than 85% of what you'll find on TV but that isn't saying much.
They could have done a lot of neat things with tying down loose ends, explaining the island and completing their work. Instead they gave us this. And finally I see no further point in discussing it because there's no hope of ever explaining anything. Unlike a finely crafted classic novel, the grand symbolism and allusions are too abstract to nail down. So what's the point? Everyone's going to experience the series differently and for me it was just some guys writing a seria
What for? That'd just be a waste. You're thinking in terms of artificial scarcity.
There's only so many hours in the day and the US alone produces about two movies a day. Do you watch two movies a day?
I don't think of movies as some generic commodity. I think of movies as cultural pieces of art -- the same way I think of books and video games. One video game is not of the same quality as another video game nor would you argue that we should slow publishing books to one per week since that's how long it takes the average consumer to consume one. Instead, I recognize that here in the USA I have a movie collection with Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, Vasquez's Invader Zim and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. While the normal populace views this as depressing, childish and boring (respectively) I do not. And when I watch a Chinese blockbusters I can't help but wonder if there's some equivalent to this diversity of movies in China that just isn't getting translated or does it not exist at all since these things would be pirated so easily?
As it turns out, I approve of very little of the United States video production. That's why I'm kind of in favor of keeping some copyright term to make sure that the very rare and odd 1% of video I enjoy remains in a healthy system. Not the complete lack of enforcement in China and not the insane duration of the United States. I would argue for a happy medium any day of the week along these lines.
Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.
I cannot and won't dispute this. But I think a more accurate saying is that distributors make more money for doing less work and original creation than the creators do. While it's imbalanced, their distribution does put some cash via royalties back into the originator's pocket. And it's this method that really makes the money for the creators. If you take this away altogether, then you're going to see some undetermined amount less production from the creators. And it's not like the distributors don't take risks. Everyone takes risks, even the creators. A distributor cannot simply say "I'm going to release all movies ever" and try to compete with everyone else. Maybe that's part of the problem, I don't know. The contracts for distribution confuse and anger me often, especially when it comes to ad based streaming online.
I praise the Chinese government for standing up against U.S. corporations pushing their desires through their puppets.
I think you need to restrict your statement to just software. While, yes, the RIAA and MPAA are probably pressuring the US government to do this, I do not think the response to ignore it altogether for music and movies helps. There's a happy medium somewhere and it's not the abhorrent 90 to 120 years that the US has while I equally think that the Chinese government's "0 day" copyright protection would make music and movie production a near impossible profit in China (movies would be right out while musicians would need to depend on only live performances). Just think how much China's Hollywood or music scene would dwarf the United States' if they had an enforced ~20 year copyright policy. After all there are four times as many citizens there than here. Shouldn't they be producing roughly four times the amount of music and movies the United States does? I know they have more than I see but I get the feeling they see more American media due at least in some part because of this (note: not entirely).
For software, I have a similar attitude about the length of copyright but I think what you're overlooking is that a lot of companies start in software because it's copyrighted and later end up funding or contributing back to open source. There aren't a lot of Red Hats or Canonicals and even then those have their own in house code projects. I don't see licenses like the GPL or BSD as "stopgaps," I see them as a solution to coexistence and freedom to decide what your creation becomes. You want to hobble it with a copyright license of insane length proportions? Go right ahead, it is America "land of the free" after all.
What a sad day. A single book that shaped me even in college from a man who could somehow make Mathematics fun. Now I'll never know him personally but I'll always know that a collection of his puzzles put me on track to be who I am today. While writers as popular as Clarke and Sagan shaped me as well, Gardner is in the lesser known category that shaped me just as much if not more.
A near maniacal thirst to algorithmically solve puzzles was instilled in me from his mind via plain old paper.
Rest in peace, Martin Gardner.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard?
Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?
Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?
Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?
Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?
I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water.
Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?
When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know.
Gates's notion that the Internet would play a supporting role in the information highway of the future, rather than being the highway itself, was out-of-date the day The Road Ahead was published. Even Gates realized it. Shortly before his book hit the stores, Gates reorganized Microsoft to focus more on the Internet, and he made major revisions to a second edition of The Road Ahead, adding material that highlighted the significance of the Internet.
Never admitting fault or that you were wrong is one of the hallmarks of a successful businessman. You never have to acknowledge a weakness, you never have to assume responsibility, your image never falters and when your mistakes are too great, you can bail like a rat on a sinking ship instead of playing the part of the captain. It's this draconian mentality that will ensure your less intelligent employees view you as an immortal deity and flawless leader while the smarter employees exit your ship the next time it docks.
So, theodp, if you were a developer you would look at this and see a set of interfaces to web services done in a RESTful manner. You would say, "Oh, my users want to use Google storage but they need more of a drag and drop interface." Then you would spend a couple weeks using Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous to make virtual folders or buckets or whatever your application calls them and using the elegance of RoR with the UI of Scriptaculous so the user can move their photos or data from your server to the cloud or vice versa. You could really use anything you want to interact with it but I would bet these two GPL compatible tools would result in the most rapid of web application development.
So three sentences with links to Google besmirching them for being smart will get you on the frontpage of Slashdot these days? Really the substance of the 'story' here is essentially "WTF?! So complicated it must Suck!"
Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API ...
Here's a final hint: API stands for Application Programming Interface is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be developer-friendly. I hope I don't sound like a Google fanboy but this is a nontrivial task and I would defend the API they have produced. The documentation is far more than you would get from a CS PhD. You want me to take notice of your mindless drivel, theodp? Get off your ass, code an interface for this API and then point out how the API and documentation is lacking in a step by step post. That would be helpful and deserve a place in Slashdot's programming section. What you have here is not.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
Boy that word sure doesn't mean jackshit when it just gets thrown around and abused like that, huh? Like watching the word 'fuck' get detoothed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, there's this sort of desensitization toward 'innovation' that leaves me confused as to how I should describe people like Tesla, Turing and Shannon. If Ballmer considers all of his workers as 'innovators' and has "thousands of man hours of innovation" at his disposal then surely there must be some new word to apply to the real innovators. I guess there might be something to the theory that innovation diffuses with time but this is downright ridiculous.
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
What I found interesting was the amount: an average of about $44 million per corporation ($400M / 9). Contrast that with the profits each one made on this scheme.
What annoys me is that a lot of this stuff is so pervasive that I cannot in anyway knowingly boycott any purchases of DRAM from these companies. There's probably DRAM in any piece of electronics you buy whether it be Sony, Nintendo or an actual Samsung product.
And then what happens to the companies who take a $44 million hit? You think their CEOs just sit down and eat that? They don't take their medicine, they slightly markup their product and again the consumer loses! This sort of price fixing fixed by fining model is just not working.
What I think should happen is that all the products that were price fixed should be entered into the public domain in the country where the price fixing was conducted and the company was found guilty. Meaning all patents and designs of those products are now owned by the public. The public overpaid for them so force the companies to give something back to the public. The manufacturing processes and techniques can be kept secret but all the chip design and patents should be open for competitors to step in and make a better cheaper product. I know a lot of people will think that's overly harsh but frankly the DRAM manufacturers should have thought of that before they started price fixing. You think times were tough when you tried to turn some illegal profit? Try now when everyone knows everything about your product. Really, that's the only way to 1) make them think twice about price fixing and 2) actually give something valuable to the victim that has a positive result instead of a negative result.
If that's the way business works in Korea, Taiwan and China then I don't care. But they need to learn that price fixing is not acceptable when they do business in the US and the EU. It blows my mind but it seems to happen everywhere in the world of circuitry and electronics. Since the companies just seem to be taking these fines in step and repeating or continuing with their practices, you have only one option: up the stakes.
Is it the fine that is disturbing?
The thing that was disturbing to me is that the consumer lost out here and the government is pulling in $400 million. When will the actual victim (people who made DRAM purchases) receive restitution? Never.
I thought that it was being pushed for people to be able to include metadata and keywords and tags via hidden HTML attached to their articles to give a tip to search engines. Whatever happened to that part of moving forward on the web? Did it turn out that it was too easy to game search engines with spam if you could constantly update what your spam site's metadata was indexed as?
Hypothetically this would allow you to put something very clever and catchy as a headline and then insert the obvious keywords into a meta tag to help out search engines. You could even avoid all the keywords.
Also, engines like Google were designed for you to be agnostic as to what each engine was doing. Tailoring yourself to one search engine doesn't only ruin what they're trying to accomplish but also what you're trying to accomplish which is being informative to readers, not the search engine. Know, respect and cater to your audience and they will stay with you through the hard times.
No, you're wrong. On Earth, everywhere there is water, there is life. From the bottom of the Marianas Trench, to the top of the troposphere. Everywhere. Unless you don't consider bacteria life.
So you're telling me that deep within the black smokers on the ocean floor, where water comes in contact with 1200 C magma ... that down in there underneath the ocean floor that water has bacteria and life living in it? Where the pressure is so great that the water can't even boil?
News to me.
And what is the deal with people moderating me over rated lately? It's non-stop. Jesus, the biologist who wrote this article was short sighted, his figure of 12% might have been off but he was not wrong about lack of life in places with water at extreme conditions.
Everywhere on Earth we find water, we find life.
The argument seems to be that for your statement, everywhere on Earth's surface is true. However, for everywhere above or below Earth's surface your statement does not hold.
He's an idiot.
Not quite an idiot but certainly shortsighted. The real confusing thing for me is that his "sliver" -- 12% -- would still be scientifically revolutionary if we hit up a planet and 12% of the water on it contained life. Can he produce any other chemical or indicator we can detect light years away that produces some percentage greater than that for supporting life? He can't, that's why the article wraps up with water still being our best guess and no recommendations to change anything.
So my layman's knowledge of how we gather information on the composition of a planet involves with analyzing the spectrum of light reflected by the surface of that planet from its nearby star. While molecules in the atmosphere also reflect the light and influence it, what's below the surface is based on that assumption. From there we can use other methods to determine its size and how far it is from the star it orbits to check pressure and temperatures.
... so why is this even being brought up? The article even ends with the researchers agreeing that presence of water is still our best approximation and that there should be no change in strategy.
We cannot measure the water beneath the surface (to my knowledge) so the example of the earth's composition of water is moot. If you were to take the surface of earth covered by water and then that amount of water that contains life, I think the percentage would be much higher. The microbes and small organisms that our oceans are teaming with alone would be a scientific goldmine on another planet. Of course the deep trenches of the Atlantic and Pacific will throw off your rates but we can't measure them anyway on another planet or even water in the mantle
If water isn't good enough, what is better?
CEO of ChronoPay, the ultra shady payment "processor" that functioned more like an account hijacker. Looking to partner with Paypal for Russian transactions as well as online Sino-Russian transactions.
If you used the illegitimate MP3 site allofmp3.com you may want to investigate whether or not your transaction went through Chronopay as they might have retained a copy of your records *cough* *cough*. Krebs outed this guy in the first report and Vrublevsky tried to play it off like someone higher was trying to drag his name through the mud for political reasons. I don't need anymore accusations: Vrublevsky's a crook.
Well, Clojure is a functional programming (FP) language that runs on top of the extremely pervasive Java Virtual Machine
I'll pass.
While FP permits some useful constructs (like Ruby's blocks), writing everything as a FP is a pain in the ass. Combining FP with Java cranks it up from mildly interesting albeit somewhat annoying to full-blown annoying.
Well, had you read a bit more ... or even read the summary ... you might have noticed that you can interact between Java and Clojure. To the point that -- as is pointed out in the book -- you could isolate packages in Java that have little "side effects" (meaning they are good candidates for pure functional programming) and you could optimize them from a functional standpoint. Which is hypothetically much much easier for some tasks. You do not have to write a whole project in Clojure to take advantage of this. I hope this was clear in my review.
Posting as anonymous because it's a knee jerk reaction.
You can say that again ...
I just can't stand the bloat associated with the JVM.
You might end up liking Clojure much more than you think. What if you didn't have any objects so that the garbage collector rarely (if ever) had to run? This is what Clojure could offer you with the platform pervasiveness and audience that comes with the bloated JVM.
Weight of various patterns and features. We present here a deeper look on some examples. A classic example of a sarcastic comment is: "Silly me, the Kindle and the Sony eBook can’t read these protected formats. Great!". Some of the patterns it contains are ...
You know DRM is pervasive as a very serious consumer problem when statistical research papers recognize user dissatisfaction with it as a classic example of sarcasm that floods reviews.
How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives?
The key difference seems to be that you are paying for something specific to this project. In NPR, you're paying for some future costs of running it but also by and large shows that are already filmed and done. You're helping keep the access up and running. In Diaspora and Sobule's cases, you're paying for the coming work. You're really funding the creation of this project. Both are pledges for the future but in this case you are instrumental in creation, not accessing what's already created. I suppose locally produced shows may enjoy your money but you're not attached solely to that project when you contribute. And you're often rewarded with non-personal items. A duffel bag? A coffee mug? An old DVD of WWII? Old crap they have laying around? Red Green signatures? (Note: I would actually enjoy the Red Green signature)
Diaspora has to ship 4,241 CDs, 3,267 bunches of "cool disaspora stickers", 2,488 t-shirts and then all the hosting and phone support in the remaining groups which isn't anything to sneeze at either. It's all personalized to the Diaspora project and you're a part of that project now.
That's my interpretation anyway.
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
If only that was all you had to deal with. You should actually read the article, here we have an actor taking the role of the consumer and being forced to deal with: DRM, paying for a license multiple times, regioning on DVDs and distribution restrictions by country. In both his own work and others'. It was a great read, the whole time I was thinking, "Finally, now you know what it's like." I mean, come on. As a software developer if I coded something that was as shitty as all that and I sat down to use it ... I don't know what else I could think of myself as except a failure. The fact that publishers in the USA love to restrict free streaming online to only the USA boggles my mind. Do they know that there are far more people outside than within? "Oh no, you'd be violating some archaic distribution deal from 1977 if a Ukrainian heard The Killers." And since we signed that away for each country a separate contract for all eternity, we're kind of out of luck. Laughably ridiculous.
So I'm afraid I simply DL'ed a pixel-clear pirate copy which arrived in seconds. My moral justification for this? I once bought the VHS.
My greatest problem with copyright abuse by the RIAA/MPAA is simply how they nickel and dime you. Every decade or so a new format comes out and they roll around in new income without even doing anything (well, remastering is very little). That bothers me. It seems like the opposite of a capitalistic system where you're supposed to be rewarded for producing something--in this case entertainment content.
... or perhaps that's why your employer, your publisher and your industry are fighting the final format solution. You wrote this piece as a consumer of your own product and were given a brief flash of insight yet you seem to avoid trying to reconcile this view with the view from your end, from the insider's end. And that's probably because it's irreconcilable and, as you said, you "don't understand business." More importantly, you don't understand money and the desire for more money is all that runs your industry. You've got some sort of humanity and empathy for the consumer left in you. You'd need to cast that off in order to understand the businessman who is making tons of bank on you. You'd need that to understand EMI's decision to continually restrict Hot Chip's viewership.
So let's say I roll down to a garage sale and find the band Poison's worst songs of the 1980s on vinyl for two pence (that's two pence more than it's worth). By your logic, is it okay for me to now get online and download that?
I assume that with digital downloads, all of those archaic shenanigans will end
Good luck in your quest to utilize things like P2P for promoting, sharing and distributing as a tool to success. Your industry by and large will not assist you in the least and may even take legal action against you.
While it was returned 15 minutes later
Man, they are brutal down in Melbourne. And from the original article linked at TG Daily:
The Age has been told that Assange's passport is classified "normal" on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it.
They really know how to shake people up and intimidate you. Sounds almost as bad as my trip through United States customs coming back from vacation. They abducted me for three hours as I was forced to stand in line awaiting inspection and approval. They called it standard processing but I tell you what--it was more of a death march.
Australia would have to be insane to do something like that to Assange. He would trot that out in front of the media for weeks if that was what happened. What a claim to legitimacy. And for that reason I'm guessing this is likely a natural passport process turned into a PR stunt.
Assange mentioned it in an SBS Dateline interview.
So basically Australia said, "We need to renew your overly used passport and the authorities are looking into how you got a hold of a blacklist from our government." <sarcasm>The poor man! When will the persecution stop?! The only way you can only mitigate his suffering by making a tiny donation to Wikileaks.org.</sarcasm>
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
But if they shutdown Limewire, where will my sister get all her Windows viruses from?
The real icing on the cake is (as mentioned near the end) the secondary drive doesn't require a whole lot of power so it can be run by a flywheel. Infinite torque? Frictionless? This is almost too good to be true, there has to be some catch. Like the primary input drive requires more energy than they expected but I can't see it--although I'm not a mechanical engineer.
... these are the kind of news stories an engineer loves to read about.
This is the kind of thing you like to see -- I hope this man has all the capital he needs and gets that prototype up and running for demonstrations. Plus it's a small time plumber inventor
Does the physicist-turned-comedy icon have any regrets? "What I do is ultimately not similar to physics or computer science," Cohen admits. "I would like to have lived two lives, to be a scientist in one... So of course I have regrets. Science is more important than what we do, although I do get a lot of satisfaction out of my work."
Surely you must take some solace or pride in the fact that the genre of sci-fi entertainment often sparks the scientist in people? And if it doesn't get them to become scientists, it at least drives a curiosity. Were it not for the enjoyment of many sci-fi novels as a kid, I would not be so interested in science and computers. Many older engineers I've worked with have given Star Trek a lot of credit for their early intrigue with physics. Surely Cohen can consider the cult popularity of Futurama and its return as a potential to be an enduring piece of entertainment that serves as a pilot light for young minds. Even though many of the Stanislaw Lem novels I read were humor or political satire, they caused me to wonder ... "what if?" Futurama makes physics entertaining and funny. Some would consider that very valuable as there's very little material out there that does that.