Regardless of whether or not it's stealing legally (I believe it's not) or ethically (Probably not), it is identical to stealing as far as Zap2it's business model is concerned. This doesn't mean you're going to get busted for scraping it without looking at the ads, nor does it mean that you should feel bad about it. All it means is Zap2it becomes more likely to go out of business every time you go around its ads. This is all the parent was saying (on this point, anyway). Don't expect Zap2it to last forever if you use it without seeing its ads.
Maybe the solution is to make the scraper fake a click-through on the ads every once in a while, so that the advertisers still pay them...'course, then you're screwing the advertisers, but there are more of them, and they probably have more money.
While it's true that condoms are perfect for tying cables out of the way so you can see what's going on inside a machine, I think it's a little hasty to say that the Bootable Business Card will just collect dust. I mean, it could come in handy sometime.
These are totally seperate issues. All this does is pattern match on a string of phonemes, it makes no claim to understand the meaning behind the sounds, which is what's necessary for a universal translator. In fact, this is actually farther from a translator than the old-style, convert-to-words-then-string-match methods, since that one cares about what the words the sounds make up. This is, however, more efficient, and more versatile, since it needs no dictionary, for this one particular application.
Phonemes are pretty much language independent. One particular sound sounds the same in different languages. It might be spelled differently, and it certainly falls into different places in different words, but it's made the same way in the mouth, and it has the same acoustic pattern (there are some variations, since some languages make distinctions between different sounds, and others don't, like [l] and [r] are the same phoneme in Japanese, but not in English, and [p] and [p^h] (aspirated [p]) are the same in English, but not in Hindi, but this mostly doesn't matter, since in a given language each form tends to be used in the same words regardless of the speaker). Converting an audio stream to a sequence of phonemes is basically a solved problem (given lack of inflection/emphasis, no background noise, etc.), this is just a new, useful application of an established technique. The problem of translation lies in finding the meaning behind the phonemic sequences.
Nonono, it took 3.5 terabytes of storage to make the movie. Remember: If the word "terabyte" can be used in conjunction with a story, it must be news for nerds.
But seriously, I'd like to see more new for hippies on slashdot...
Re:Impact on the environment (and the ground)
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
According to the article, the power source is a laser shot from the platform, aimed at collectors on the bottom of the car. There, it's converted to electricity, and drives motors with wheels on the cable. Since intertia should keep the cable perfectly straight, it seems like a really good use of laser-powered propulsion.
Re:Great, Now not only on the ground, but in the s
on
Flying Snakes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
SETI isn't proposing that we should use tech that doesn't broadcast as much as in the past. It's reporting that we already are. It's an unavoidable consequence of progress in radio communication. Just because SETI talks about it doesn't mean they think it's contributing to their cause.
They could do it that way, or they could have the student select a PIN on their admission form, just add an extra box that says "Enter PIN for online acceptance checking here." Keep in mind that this isn't *required* to find out whether or not you get in, so if someone forgot their PIN, it wouldn't be the end of the world...they'd just have to wait the extra week to get it in the mail. The online version is just for impatient students.
If you read the article, it tells you that for a full charge, you need 35 minutes of charging. 45 seconds will get you the minumum "useful" amount of charge (enough for a short call). However, the best use of this seems to be to start with it fully charged (you can plug it in to charge it up), and then whenever you make a call, or if it's been idle for a day or two, you wind it to top off the battery. That way, when you need to make your 30 minute call, you can do it immediately and pay for it later, rather than having to wind it for 20 minutes before being able to perform that emergency heart surgery...
From the second paragraph in the article: "[He will] reach a top speed of Mach 1.68 (1,680kph at that height)." As for the sonic booms, it's been mentioned in posts above that the boom takes place in a cone shape behind him, and by then he's long past it.
Maybe you should read the article before asking questions about it?
over the past 2 decades it seems that he's been trying to distance himself from his Monty Python past. None of his recent films can be considered comedies.
Umm, what? Two decades ago would be 1982. In that year, he wrote some of the sketches Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl and the year after, he directed Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Doesn't sound too distant to me. But, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant "18 years" when you said "two decades". In the last 18 years, he's done Brazil, Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You mentioned Munchausen already, but, really, if you didn't think all the rest (with the exception of Fisher King) where comedies, well, then, you didn't understand them. They may not be as outright silly as Python, but they're still comedies, and with Twelve Monkeys, it even approaches Pythonesque silliness in some places. Saying Brazil isn't a comedy is like saying Fight Club isn't a comedy. If you didn't think it was funny, you didn't get it...
Because the difference between "less than a millimetre thick" and "arbitrarily thick, and castable without needing to be machined afterwards" is huge. Also, the science behind the "making it a bit thicker" is nontrivial. The process behind the old-style, which produces films, is totally different than the process behind this new one. It's not like making a golf club is anything like making a really thick film. This is old news in that the research was done in 1992, but it's new news because it's finally beginning to be pushed in the industry, where we'll actually see any benefits from it.
If I go to the majority of my friends' houses, I see one or two computers they built themselves, and maybe a Dell their family bought after they left home for school. If I go to my family's houses, about half the time I see computers built by myself or another of the few nerds in my family. If I go into my company, which employs about 1000 people (~800 at my location), and produces a product that the vast majority of nerds have used or at least heard of (though I'm not going to say which), every desktop box, running either windows or linux, has been built at a local white box retailer. Many offices have two or three of these (each with a different OS). The only non-custom boxes in the company are Suns, SGIs, Apples, and HPs (running HPUX, so not the ones you find in stores).
Just because you don't know any nerds and don't frequent the right companies doesn't mean they don't exist.
you should never use a #define to set universal constants. if you're reasonably sure it's constant, stick in a const, but #defines are a huge bitch to debug if everyone involved (and when you're talking about the universe, that's a lot of people) uses them too freely.
It's a useless figure for other reasons, too. What they're basically saying is, "Look, viruses don't matter, since not all of them make the top ten!" Maybe viruses not on the top ten don't matter, but that says nothing about those ten. Another interpretation would be that there are more than ten bad viruses every year, so you don't even have to be on the top ten to be damaging.
Someone smart with a broad userbase, like AOL, got paid a large amount of money by the RIAA to release a FastTrack client with a little "F" button to its users, complete with instructions to press it whenever they see a copyrighted song. I think the likelihood of it working (rather than just backfiring and giving all AOL users access to stolen mp3s) is far higher than any of us would like to think...
Because larger LCDs increase cost exponentially. With two 17" displays, you get exactly twice the screen real estate for exactly twice the price. With one 18" or 19", you get a tiny amount more space (less than an inch or two, respectively, along each side), for...about twice the price. Dual-head video cards/drivers are pretty much a solved problem, so there's not really any "issue", and rotating LCDs is pretty damn easy, much easier than rotating CRTs, which have been around for many, many years. So, basically, you're getting a huge amount of display space for no emotional cost, and far less monetary cost than buying one enormous screen.
So can someone explain why this needs to be 1km tall? The windmills are at 40m, so what's the remaining 960m doing? is it just to stabilize the column up to colder air, or what?
Actually, I liked their partitioning during the 9/11 stories. I wasn't a subscriber at the time, and I could still read all the real news stories about everything. I'm not a subscriber, and I went back and read the stuff I couldn't read before, and it was mostly editorial stuff...still really interesting, because the salon writers are cool, but not actually necessary to know what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether or not it's stealing legally (I believe it's not) or ethically (Probably not), it is identical to stealing as far as Zap2it's business model is concerned. This doesn't mean you're going to get busted for scraping it without looking at the ads, nor does it mean that you should feel bad about it. All it means is Zap2it becomes more likely to go out of business every time you go around its ads. This is all the parent was saying (on this point, anyway). Don't expect Zap2it to last forever if you use it without seeing its ads.
Maybe the solution is to make the scraper fake a click-through on the ads every once in a while, so that the advertisers still pay them...'course, then you're screwing the advertisers, but there are more of them, and they probably have more money.
While it's true that condoms are perfect for tying cables out of the way so you can see what's going on inside a machine, I think it's a little hasty to say that the Bootable Business Card will just collect dust. I mean, it could come in handy sometime.
These are totally seperate issues. All this does is pattern match on a string of phonemes, it makes no claim to understand the meaning behind the sounds, which is what's necessary for a universal translator. In fact, this is actually farther from a translator than the old-style, convert-to-words-then-string-match methods, since that one cares about what the words the sounds make up. This is, however, more efficient, and more versatile, since it needs no dictionary, for this one particular application.
Phonemes are pretty much language independent. One particular sound sounds the same in different languages. It might be spelled differently, and it certainly falls into different places in different words, but it's made the same way in the mouth, and it has the same acoustic pattern (there are some variations, since some languages make distinctions between different sounds, and others don't, like [l] and [r] are the same phoneme in Japanese, but not in English, and [p] and [p^h] (aspirated [p]) are the same in English, but not in Hindi, but this mostly doesn't matter, since in a given language each form tends to be used in the same words regardless of the speaker). Converting an audio stream to a sequence of phonemes is basically a solved problem (given lack of inflection/emphasis, no background noise, etc.), this is just a new, useful application of an established technique. The problem of translation lies in finding the meaning behind the phonemic sequences.
But seriously, I'd like to see more new for hippies on slashdot...
According to the article, the power source is a laser shot from the platform, aimed at collectors on the bottom of the car. There, it's converted to electricity, and drives motors with wheels on the cable. Since intertia should keep the cable perfectly straight, it seems like a really good use of laser-powered propulsion.
At least they're not as bad as drop crocs
SETI isn't proposing that we should use tech that doesn't broadcast as much as in the past. It's reporting that we already are. It's an unavoidable consequence of progress in radio communication. Just because SETI talks about it doesn't mean they think it's contributing to their cause.
They could do it that way, or they could have the student select a PIN on their admission form, just add an extra box that says "Enter PIN for online acceptance checking here." Keep in mind that this isn't *required* to find out whether or not you get in, so if someone forgot their PIN, it wouldn't be the end of the world...they'd just have to wait the extra week to get it in the mail. The online version is just for impatient students.
Are you sure they don't just get involved in a lot of issues, and the only ones you hear about are the ones that involve publicity?
If you read the article, it tells you that for a full charge, you need 35 minutes of charging. 45 seconds will get you the minumum "useful" amount of charge (enough for a short call). However, the best use of this seems to be to start with it fully charged (you can plug it in to charge it up), and then whenever you make a call, or if it's been idle for a day or two, you wind it to top off the battery. That way, when you need to make your 30 minute call, you can do it immediately and pay for it later, rather than having to wind it for 20 minutes before being able to perform that emergency heart surgery...
From the second paragraph in the article: "[He will] reach a top speed of Mach 1.68 (1,680kph at that height)." As for the sonic booms, it's been mentioned in posts above that the boom takes place in a cone shape behind him, and by then he's long past it.
Maybe you should read the article before asking questions about it?
Umm, what? Two decades ago would be 1982. In that year, he wrote some of the sketches Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl and the year after, he directed Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Doesn't sound too distant to me. But, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant "18 years" when you said "two decades". In the last 18 years, he's done Brazil, Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You mentioned Munchausen already, but, really, if you didn't think all the rest (with the exception of Fisher King) where comedies, well, then, you didn't understand them. They may not be as outright silly as Python, but they're still comedies, and with Twelve Monkeys, it even approaches Pythonesque silliness in some places. Saying Brazil isn't a comedy is like saying Fight Club isn't a comedy. If you didn't think it was funny, you didn't get it...
Because the difference between "less than a millimetre thick" and "arbitrarily thick, and castable without needing to be machined afterwards" is huge. Also, the science behind the "making it a bit thicker" is nontrivial. The process behind the old-style, which produces films, is totally different than the process behind this new one. It's not like making a golf club is anything like making a really thick film. This is old news in that the research was done in 1992, but it's new news because it's finally beginning to be pushed in the industry, where we'll actually see any benefits from it.
If I go to the majority of my friends' houses, I see one or two computers they built themselves, and maybe a Dell their family bought after they left home for school. If I go to my family's houses, about half the time I see computers built by myself or another of the few nerds in my family. If I go into my company, which employs about 1000 people (~800 at my location), and produces a product that the vast majority of nerds have used or at least heard of (though I'm not going to say which), every desktop box, running either windows or linux, has been built at a local white box retailer. Many offices have two or three of these (each with a different OS). The only non-custom boxes in the company are Suns, SGIs, Apples, and HPs (running HPUX, so not the ones you find in stores).
Just because you don't know any nerds and don't frequent the right companies doesn't mean they don't exist.
you should never use a #define to set universal constants. if you're reasonably sure it's constant, stick in a const, but #defines are a huge bitch to debug if everyone involved (and when you're talking about the universe, that's a lot of people) uses them too freely.
anyone else notice that the '@' key in the demo produces a '&' on the screen? i wonder if that's how it works on the real keypad...
He also used LCARS-style headers, so it clearly wasn't unintentional...
It's a useless figure for other reasons, too. What they're basically saying is, "Look, viruses don't matter, since not all of them make the top ten!" Maybe viruses not on the top ten don't matter, but that says nothing about those ten. Another interpretation would be that there are more than ten bad viruses every year, so you don't even have to be on the top ten to be damaging.
Someone smart with a broad userbase, like AOL, got paid a large amount of money by the RIAA to release a FastTrack client with a little "F" button to its users, complete with instructions to press it whenever they see a copyrighted song. I think the likelihood of it working (rather than just backfiring and giving all AOL users access to stolen mp3s) is far higher than any of us would like to think...
In case anyone's wondering, 2.5 cm/s is about 1/20 mph...so it takes a while for this thing to get anywhere.
Because larger LCDs increase cost exponentially. With two 17" displays, you get exactly twice the screen real estate for exactly twice the price. With one 18" or 19", you get a tiny amount more space (less than an inch or two, respectively, along each side), for...about twice the price. Dual-head video cards/drivers are pretty much a solved problem, so there's not really any "issue", and rotating LCDs is pretty damn easy, much easier than rotating CRTs, which have been around for many, many years. So, basically, you're getting a huge amount of display space for no emotional cost, and far less monetary cost than buying one enormous screen.
Maybe it's time to start intalling windshield wipers on spacecraft?
So can someone explain why this needs to be 1km tall? The windmills are at 40m, so what's the remaining 960m doing? is it just to stabilize the column up to colder air, or what?
Actually, I liked their partitioning during the 9/11 stories. I wasn't a subscriber at the time, and I could still read all the real news stories about everything. I'm not a subscriber, and I went back and read the stuff I couldn't read before, and it was mostly editorial stuff...still really interesting, because the salon writers are cool, but not actually necessary to know what's going on.
s-vhs would be that high-definition video tape technology that failed enormously because each take cost $50. i think you just mean "s-video"