Well, increased temperature in the Arctic doesn't actually translate into rising sea levels, Yahoo's fine journalists notwithstanding. Carefully watch the level of Coke in your glass as the ice melts...
Science doesn't work by consensus. It only took one Einstein to introduce relativity; once he proved his thesis, you either disproved it or accepted it. This talk of "scientific consensus" is basically a smokescreen for the fact that there is no proof for the assertions made by the climate change advocates. There are simply too many variables, too much bad data and bad science, to take on something as potentially damaging as Kyoto. If the computer models are so great, why can't they predict the weather for more than a few days out? Yet you want us to believe they can predict what the temperature will be in a few decades? Come on!
Well, the word "intifida" is used by Arab terrorists to describe their murder of innocent civilians, so one would have thought that anyone *truly* dedicated to forwarding a non-violent agenda in the Middle East would have avoided that loaded word. Besides, since when do you judge an organisation by what they say about themselves? Do you believe what SCO or Microsoft say about themselves on their website?
Also, since media bias is in general in favour of those who claim to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians, it's difficult to understand why media activism would be required (see another perspective)
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly.
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.
I thought the Slashdot crowd would see through the Real handwaving and doublespeak. I guess the old anti-Apple prejudice is just too strong.
Real CREATED this problem THEMSELVES by backing the wrong horse: Microsoft DRM. Now that Apple looks to be winning the race, they want to switch. Apple says no thanks, that's not how we do things. Real says fuck you, we'll make it so our crappy, overly-restricted DRM works on your customers' players. Apple should be happy about this? After creating minimally-restrictive, easily-circumvented DRM and selling it to the labels, you want them just to say "Great, happy for you to pollute our customers' user experience with your crap"?
The clues are even in the language. Real talks about "consumer choice winning over proprietary formats". That's already happened. Real and Microsoft are the ones selling a proprietary format, not Apple, and consumers have already made their choice: Apple. Anyone with half a brain can see through this crap. The pity is I thought there were more people with half a brain on slashdot.
This is not about Apple telling you what to do with your iPod. You can already put anything you want onto the iPod except WAVs and Microsoft's DRM crap. If you for some insane reason want to do that, figure out how to do it and go right ahead. No-one will stop you. But there's a slight difference between doing that, and trying to mislead iPod owners into thinking that somehow you are doing them a favour, when all you really want is to take advantage of the iPod market success to sell your crappy product that no-one wants. Don't expect Apple to lie back and take it.
While probably not conforming to Stallman's definition of open-source, Open Firmware is at least non-proprietary, and is used by Sun and Apple on their computers. Maybe Palladium et al will trigger a move by the techno-elite to Apple and Sun hardware?
Not even sure whether to dignify this with a response, but regarding your absurd claim that only one method of murdering inmates was allowed per camp: if the camp commandants needed to exterminate millions of people, wouldn't they use whatever methods they could? Machine guns were used until it was realised the ammunition was costing too much, and was needed in the war effort. In typical German fashion, more efficient methods were developed. Anyone who has worked in an organisation would recognise that procedures tend to develop in an ad-hoc way in response to new events and new constraints.
BTW, instead of reading Holocaust criticism and forming ever-darker opinions of Jews, why not try to talk to some? Especially Holocaust survivors, of which there are few left. It's easy to hate people in the abstract. Challenge yourself humanly, if you have any humanity left, that is.
A 3D version of Windows XP? So it has to have...
on
Sphere XP Makes GUI 3D
·
· Score: 2, Funny
If you had you would know the answer to this. MusicMatch told me my iPod was "full" after loading about 100 songs. When adding a directory of songs to the library it doesn't check whether any of the songs are already in the library, it simply adds them all again. Making a playlist is a royal pain in the butt compared with iTunes. Apple doesn't need to force people to use iTunes. (And it doesn't anyway: as a previous poster pointed out, disabling access to the iPod by MusicMatch is logical to prevent the chaos caused by two programs independently syncing one iPod.)
is to be avoided. Thank God Apple released iTunes for Windows, so I don't have to use MMJB any more; dumb, painfully unintuitive, annoying and just plain incompetent (told me my iPod was "full" after loading about a hundred songs!)
Because here in Europe people use Bluetooth all the time. I use it to connect my laptop to my mobile phone to dial up when on the move and to send business cards to other mobile phones (much less fiddly than infrared). My Mac friends use their Bluetooth phones to control their Macs (iTunes, Powerpoint clicker, even to lock the screen when they (ie their phone) moves out of Bluetooth range). When DWY becomes illegal in England in December I plan on buying a Bluetooth headset: no fiddly wires, the phone can be in my briefcase when I answer a call. So no sign of Bluetooth death here.
Re:For how long?
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Reading the article it seems that the light frequency is altered for only a short time, the time during which the shock wave passes through the crystal
No, the shock wave passing through the crystal causes the "hall of mirrors" effect with a moving mirror (the compressed/uncompressed interface) which produces a Doppler shift.
So I don't think it's some magic filter where you can shine a green light in one end and get red light out the other
That's exactly what it is.
In the long term the number of peaks and troughs you put in at one end must equal the number seen at the other, so you can't consistently alter the frequency of a light beam in this way.
Number is not frequency: you could still see the same number at a lower or higher frequency, the total observation would just take a longer or shorter time. The red shift of the light of galaxies apparently receding from us at a high fraction of c is a consistent feature, caused by exactly the same Doppler effect.
So let me get this straight... Microsoft is the world's most profitable company because it gives huge wads of cash to other companies? Doesn't quite sound right to me...
The racism example was particularly egregious; nowhere is it explained why ignoring the effect of income distribution, access to jobs, the actions of the government, etc on where people lived was valid.
No explanation is necessary: if the model accurately predicts how real-world societies work, without using the factors you seem to need to be taken into account, ipso facto those factors are irrelevant. You seem to think the function of research is to support pre-decided goals; thus you have things backwards. In any event, the interesting thing illustrated was that non-racist behaviour by the atoms (even an atom simply wanting to be next to one other of its racial group) still gave rise to racist-seeming patterns. Not "inscrutable preferences" at all.
You're missing the point of the article (if you even read it). There is no "conjecture" and no raw data is used. Rather, very simple agent constructs are allowed to interact according to a set of very simple rules, and some amazingly complex behaviour results, some of which bears a striking resemblance to real-world observations.
I have to agree. When I was at Disneyworld Orlando in August I bought a picture of myself and my son on one of the rides, for the exorbitant sum of $12. Since I wanted him to keep the original, but wanted a copy for myself, I took the pic into the local Walgreens in downtown Kissimmee, where they had a color photocopier, and asked them to copy it. They refused, citing copyright. WDW obviously polices these guys pretty heavily. Still, I have a decent scanner at work, and a color laser...
Paper seems to be disappearing from your life, and you're young, so therefore the future holds less paper? Did you ever think that maybe you use less paper because you're in a job where that is possible (no collaboration, no building relationships with suppliers) and that therefore you are not relevant to the article, rather than the article being wrong? I know who I think has set himself up for a round of ridicule.
Re:South Effrica
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
No I've never met a nice South African
Which is not suprising, man.
'cos they're a load of racist bastards
You're the racist, for assuming all South Africans are white.
The Polaris Foundation today announced an award of $1 million to Polaris, in recognition of his occasional postings to Slashdot discussions. A total of $1 has been raised so far, and donations to make up the difference can be made at the Foundation's website.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, increased temperature in the Arctic doesn't actually translate into rising sea levels, Yahoo's fine journalists notwithstanding. Carefully watch the level of Coke in your glass as the ice melts...
Science doesn't work by consensus. It only took one Einstein to introduce relativity; once he proved his thesis, you either disproved it or accepted it. This talk of "scientific consensus" is basically a smokescreen for the fact that there is no proof for the assertions made by the climate change advocates. There are simply too many variables, too much bad data and bad science, to take on something as potentially damaging as Kyoto. If the computer models are so great, why can't they predict the weather for more than a few days out? Yet you want us to believe they can predict what the temperature will be in a few decades? Come on!
Global warming is the new religion.
Daring Fireball's take: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_kon fabulator
When's it coming out on PC, for that matter? It's not even an X-Box title, you can ONLY play it on PS2
Also, since media bias is in general in favour of those who claim to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians, it's difficult to understand why media activism would be required (see another perspective)
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.
I thought the Slashdot crowd would see through the Real handwaving and doublespeak. I guess the old anti-Apple prejudice is just too strong.
Real CREATED this problem THEMSELVES by backing the wrong horse: Microsoft DRM. Now that Apple looks to be winning the race, they want to switch. Apple says no thanks, that's not how we do things. Real says fuck you, we'll make it so our crappy, overly-restricted DRM works on your customers' players. Apple should be happy about this? After creating minimally-restrictive, easily-circumvented DRM and selling it to the labels, you want them just to say "Great, happy for you to pollute our customers' user experience with your crap"?
The clues are even in the language. Real talks about "consumer choice winning over proprietary formats". That's already happened. Real and Microsoft are the ones selling a proprietary format, not Apple, and consumers have already made their choice: Apple. Anyone with half a brain can see through this crap. The pity is I thought there were more people with half a brain on slashdot.
This is not about Apple telling you what to do with your iPod. You can already put anything you want onto the iPod except WAVs and Microsoft's DRM crap. If you for some insane reason want to do that, figure out how to do it and go right ahead. No-one will stop you. But there's a slight difference between doing that, and trying to mislead iPod owners into thinking that somehow you are doing them a favour, when all you really want is to take advantage of the iPod market success to sell your crappy product that no-one wants. Don't expect Apple to lie back and take it.
While probably not conforming to Stallman's definition of open-source, Open Firmware is at least non-proprietary, and is used by Sun and Apple on their computers. Maybe Palladium et al will trigger a move by the techno-elite to Apple and Sun hardware?
Not even sure whether to dignify this with a response, but regarding your absurd claim that only one method of murdering inmates was allowed per camp: if the camp commandants needed to exterminate millions of people, wouldn't they use whatever methods they could? Machine guns were used until it was realised the ammunition was costing too much, and was needed in the war effort. In typical German fashion, more efficient methods were developed. Anyone who has worked in an organisation would recognise that procedures tend to develop in an ad-hoc way in response to new events and new constraints.
BTW, instead of reading Holocaust criticism and forming ever-darker opinions of Jews, why not try to talk to some? Especially Holocaust survivors, of which there are few left. It's easy to hate people in the abstract. Challenge yourself humanly, if you have any humanity left, that is.
The BSOD: Blue Sphere Of Death
If you had you would know the answer to this. MusicMatch told me my iPod was "full" after loading about 100 songs. When adding a directory of songs to the library it doesn't check whether any of the songs are already in the library, it simply adds them all again. Making a playlist is a royal pain in the butt compared with iTunes. Apple doesn't need to force people to use iTunes. (And it doesn't anyway: as a previous poster pointed out, disabling access to the iPod by MusicMatch is logical to prevent the chaos caused by two programs independently syncing one iPod.)
is to be avoided. Thank God Apple released iTunes for Windows, so I don't have to use MMJB any more; dumb, painfully unintuitive, annoying and just plain incompetent (told me my iPod was "full" after loading about a hundred songs!)
"We invented personal computing". What did Hitler say about the Big Lie?
Because here in Europe people use Bluetooth all the time. I use it to connect my laptop to my mobile phone to dial up when on the move and to send business cards to other mobile phones (much less fiddly than infrared). My Mac friends use their Bluetooth phones to control their Macs (iTunes, Powerpoint clicker, even to lock the screen when they (ie their phone) moves out of Bluetooth range). When DWY becomes illegal in England in December I plan on buying a Bluetooth headset: no fiddly wires, the phone can be in my briefcase when I answer a call. So no sign of Bluetooth death here.
Reading the article it seems that the light frequency is altered for only a short time, the time during which the shock wave passes through the crystal
No, the shock wave passing through the crystal causes the "hall of mirrors" effect with a moving mirror (the compressed/uncompressed interface) which produces a Doppler shift.
So I don't think it's some magic filter where you can shine a green light in one end and get red light out the other
That's exactly what it is.
In the long term the number of peaks and troughs you put in at one end must equal the number seen at the other, so you can't consistently alter the frequency of a light beam in this way.
Number is not frequency: you could still see the same number at a lower or higher frequency, the total observation would just take a longer or shorter time. The red shift of the light of galaxies apparently receding from us at a high fraction of c is a consistent feature, caused by exactly the same Doppler effect.
So let me get this straight... Microsoft is the world's most profitable company because it gives huge wads of cash to other companies? Doesn't quite sound right to me...
Looks like the company has been reading Slashdot, and has posted replies to a lot of the questions raised here.
Michael Swanwick is one of the truly incredible new writers, unfortunately not very prolific: try Vacuum Flowers or Stations of the Tide
The racism example was particularly egregious; nowhere is it explained why ignoring the effect of income distribution, access to jobs, the actions of the government, etc on where people lived was valid.
No explanation is necessary: if the model accurately predicts how real-world societies work, without using the factors you seem to need to be taken into account, ipso facto those factors are irrelevant. You seem to think the function of research is to support pre-decided goals; thus you have things backwards. In any event, the interesting thing illustrated was that non-racist behaviour by the atoms (even an atom simply wanting to be next to one other of its racial group) still gave rise to racist-seeming patterns. Not "inscrutable preferences" at all.
You're missing the point of the article (if you even read it). There is no "conjecture" and no raw data is used. Rather, very simple agent constructs are allowed to interact according to a set of very simple rules, and some amazingly complex behaviour results, some of which bears a striking resemblance to real-world observations.
I have to agree. When I was at Disneyworld Orlando in August I bought a picture of myself and my son on one of the rides, for the exorbitant sum of $12. Since I wanted him to keep the original, but wanted a copy for myself, I took the pic into the local Walgreens in downtown Kissimmee, where they had a color photocopier, and asked them to copy it. They refused, citing copyright. WDW obviously polices these guys pretty heavily. Still, I have a decent scanner at work, and a color laser...
Paper seems to be disappearing from your life, and you're young, so therefore the future holds less paper? Did you ever think that maybe you use less paper because you're in a job where that is possible (no collaboration, no building relationships with suppliers) and that therefore you are not relevant to the article, rather than the article being wrong? I know who I think has set himself up for a round of ridicule.
No I've never met a nice South African Which is not suprising, man. 'cos they're a load of racist bastards
You're the racist, for assuming all South Africans are white.
The Polaris Foundation today announced an award of $1 million to Polaris, in recognition of his occasional postings to Slashdot discussions. A total of $1 has been raised so far, and donations to make up the difference can be made at the Foundation's website.