I think they're TOTALLY cool.
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
I would *love* to stroll along the beach and see these babies churning away off in the distance. How could you look at them and see anything other than a complete triumph of environment-PRESERVING technology? Those wind turbines glimmering in the sunlight would be keeping fucking oil-spilling barges like the one that soiled my grandmother's beach last month away, and maybe making our next middle-east war 1% less likely. They will help keep the rest of the Cape cleaner - cleaner air, cleaner water - anybody with NIMBY syndrome about such things is a total fucking hypocrite.
The article said Cronkite suggested building them inland in the state. I'm inland in the state, and I'd be all for it - bring them on. Only problem is, we're in a fucking valley and there isn't much wind. On the open sea there's wind all the time. It would be stupid not to put them there.
Personally, I'd like to see them on every hilltop on the horizon. Give us cheap, clean power and I'll be happy.
I remember seeing that gigantic eggbeater one up in Montreal somewhere, on a high hill/mountain. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Who owns stolen property? The original owner, or the thief? If "fair use" privilege travels with ownership of the original media, then the RIAA loses either way.
You buy a CD, and rip it to mp3. This is legal, right? You own the CD.
I then steal your CD.
So: who owns it now? Who has the "fair use" privilege?
If I own it because I stole it (more precisely: you NO LONGER own it because you don't have it anymore), then I can rip it to mp3 legally even though I got the CD through illegal means. What you and I would do in this case is rob each other. You steal all my CDs and rip them, and I'll steal all your CDs and rip them, and aside from the crime of theft (and neither of us press charges, and "accidentally" leave our crates of stolen CDs at each other's houses next time we visit), no laws have been broken.
If you still own it even though I stole it, then you still have all your fair use rights, including making a new CD to replace the one I stole.
We can still rob each other.
How would the RIAA answer that?
My hunch is the only way out for them would be to claim that there is no "fair use" rights on stolen property, and that everybody loses their rights and has to buy new copies. (Which of course works out wonderfully for them.) I guess at that point your recourse is to consider my theft of your CD a "loan" so you can burn a new CD, claiming to still own it. So the theft victim's claiming ownership of the stolen property is the only way to retain their "fair use" rights.
One Billionth Chip is not a proper noun (last I checked)
See the article, which (gasp) makes neither of these mistakes.
Ostensibly, this is supposed to be a website for smart people. Sixth-grade grammar really shouldn't exceed our grasp. I've got otherwise-useless karma piled to the moon, maybe it's time to start burning it.
Remember, people, George Orwell said that sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought leads to exploitable, oppressible people.
For fzzck's sake, learn your basic grammar. At least the editors, if not the submitters. It's REALLY not that difficult. Or at least have one capable proofreader on the staff to look things over before you post glaring, stupid mistakes in front of millions of people (some of whom are learning English), and just leave them hanging there.
(Note to fellow grammar nazis: I know stylistic things like beginning a sentence with "Or" or omitting an implied verb could be construed as inappropriately colloquial and ungrammatical. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about heavyweight concepts like knowing the difference between the plural and possessive cases, and proper use of capitalization.)
And I'm not even talking about cursive. I mean ordinary printing. I type virtually everything, and have for about 15 years now - and shortly after I learned Palm Graffiti for my III in '98 or so, I found I started making my printed letters like Palm graffiti - and now, I can really barely read my own writing. Writing legibly takes TREMENDOUS effort, and it's so gawdawfully slow.
I look back at high school papers I wrote by hand, and I can barely believe how far I've fallen in 20 years. Handwriting is a long-lost art, for me.
I appreciate the thought, but my emacs keys are wired into my brain (and fingers) with about 17 years of use now, and I can do C-x C-f with about one braincell's worth of reflex directive. I'd just like the friggin' control key in the corner like it is on every other keyboard on earth.
Why on earth can't someone make a powerbook keyboard with the control key in the right place? I defy anybody to type a ctrl-a with their left hand, with the ctrl key one key to the RIGHT of the fn key in the corner, without either rotating their entire hand from the wrist, or inflicting major tendon damage. Don't even TRY ctrl-q.
Apple's own full-sized keyboards put the control key in the lower left corner where it belongs, although it should REALLY go where caps lock is. Why must they have it out of place on the powerbooks?
Yes, I know about the software mapping utilities such as uControl, which I use, but they all have quirks and have a nasty tendency to cause kernel panics on system upgrades. If someone comes up with a "programmers's keyboard," I've got a nice pile of money to throw at them.
My hope is that someday a noticeable fraction of the supposedly educated populace figures out the (immense) difference between "its" and "it's". Then maybe we can move on to more advanced usage.
C|Net is reporting that Microsoft has updated it's Software Assurance licensing program
For all of you crying that SMTP will never die because everybody uses it even though it's broken, RTFA.
The Tripoli environment visualizes a "parallel" e-mail system that could operate alongside the existing SMTP e-mail environment for the indefinite future.
Just because SMTP can't be fixed (it can't) doesn't mean it has to die - just that a better alternative has to emerge. I'll keep my SMTP servers running indefinitely and I'll keep SMTP mail, but as better systems emerge I'll be telling people that the more reliable way to contact me is with methods that I know aren't going to give me the experience of picking through the trash when I check my mail. I'll still check my SMTP mail, but probably with decreasing frequency as time passes.
For those of you saying "just improve your filters," (1) give me a filter that can parse an HTML message containing only an image to determine whether it's spam or not (no, you can't reject all HTML mail or mail with attachments, if my brother drags-n-drops a picture of my nephew and clicks "send," I want to receive it), and (2) figure a way to keep the message from being delivered until that determination is made. Post-delivery filtering doesn't solve the bandwidth/cost/traffic problems.
Be courageous, people. Nobody screamed that we didn't need the telephone because the telegraph worked fine. Protocols emerge from changing circumstances. SMTP had its use over the last 30 years, but its time is waning with the onset of the global public internet full of untrusted senders seeking to abuse the system. It's time for a better protocol, and I applaud everyone involved in making a serious effort at developing one instead of trying to fix the unfixable.
Urban Outfitters has a nice one here (site uses stupid frames, this link is to the item out of its enclosing frame). Mine is dark blue, and the yellow Atari logo is fuzzy like those blacklight posters of the 70s. Perfect.
I'm back and forth a lot between two places, and often miss my Cube while away. I carried it around for a while, but it got old.
At $99, I'd be tempted to just buy another one for the second place, and as a backup. I put my discs in little 8cm jewel boxes with cover printouts, so they're a cinch to take around. That would be pretty nice!
I'd love to get the complete run of C&H, as there are MANY great strips that never made the collections.
What I'm wondering is: is there a way to browse the archives somehow once you're a subscriber? Let's say I started in six months rather than today - woudl I be able to access the prior six months of Bloom County? Can you get all the way back to the beginning of Calvin & Hobbes? Or do you just get what they oink out on any given day, starting whenever you subscribe?
How can I be a part of this? How can I be involved in making it happen? I probably have no skills that would be relevant (unless they need a database backend designed and some Perl kung-fu for some reason), but I'll do anything. I'll sweep up at night. I'll make coffee and donut runs for the engineers. Anything. Just let me be involved somehow. I'll quit my job right now and move to Australia or wherever and live on bread and water and raw dreams.
Safari Enhancer does this and a few other things, and also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers other than IE (I just imported my Moz/Chimera bookmarks with it).
Assuming and hoping my basic math isn't off here, and the article meant to say 100,000m, not 100,000km. Given that the Earth's diameter is less than 13,000km, that would be one hell of an elevator - imagine an orange with a string the length of your forearm coming off it.
100,000km would be almost a third of the way to the moon, right?
Maybe the plan is much more ambitious than I thought...
I did this, it took ten minutes, and it runs absolutely flawlessly.
Order a replacement 72-pin connector from MCM electronics. Go ahead and slashdot them, but BUY ONE. If enough people buy them, hopefully they'll keep making them.
If you don't have one, order one of these tookits too. You'll need some of the bits to open your NES without destroying it, and it's got lots of insanely useful other bits too.
Take your NES apart, carefully, and replace the connector. It's all screws once you're past the cover. Take a few digital photos along the way so you can back up if you get lost. It's not hard.
Be happy.
I'd invite you over to Nintendo Hockey, but that game as a fatal flaw: I can't be beaten at it. Oh well.
OK, right. The string "2" will never appear in your example either, since it's defined by a pattern that omits 2s. Is "transcendental" the correct term for what I was referring to, then?
If we stumble upon a 500x500 base 11 encoding of a circle, it's a lucky break (assuming we care about it at all). For any place in the sequence, we have a 500x500 block of something, identifiable or not.
Sure. The question is: how big is the set of things we'd be able to find that would lead us to think there's something significant about it? All 25000-digit strings are obviously equally probable, so it's more a question of naming. What do you call significant?
Yes, fantastically improbable things happen all the time. Your suggestion of the perfect bridge hand as an analogue, I suspect, is off by many many many orders of magnitude. A perfect bridge hand might be a lucky break. A hundred consecutive perfect bridge hands, or a million or a billion, is almost certainly evidence that there's something else at work than just a freak series of random numbers. That, I think, is more along the lines of what Sagan was getting at.
I'd bet all the nickels in my pocket that (for example) the 1.25 trillion digits we already do have probably have some 3x3 or 5x5 "circles" in them, depending on how you interpret them and so forth. Probably quite a few patterns that we would recognize and the superstitious among us might find odd. Anything as statistically astounding as a particular 25,000 digit string that you could name? I really doubt it.
Correct my math if I'm wrong here, I may very well be. Let's use simpler numbers and say there are 1,000,000,000,000 strings of 25k digits in what we have so far. Your odds of picking one and having it be in there would be, it would seem to me, roughly 10^(25,000 - 12) to 1 against. Let's say there are a billion strings we would find significant as evidence of some kind of God voodoo. Now we're at 10^(24,979) to 1 against. Still pretty dang unlikely. A billion billion billion strings that would make us go "hmmm"? OK, make it 10^(24,961). Etc. Such an occurrence should make any scientist worth his salt go "Whoa. What the f*ck?"
This is all airy conjecture, of course. The point I'm getting at, I suppose, is that there's a level of freak randomness, many many many orders of magnitude above the numbers we toss around here, that is so hideously improbable that it's worth revisiting the notion that all freaky improbable things are equally freaky improbable. If we found a 500x500 circle in the digits of Pi, a fork lift wouldn't be able to budge my jaw off the floor.
(Then again, of course, it depends what you want to call a "circle." Chances are that any 500x500 block could be interepreted by some loony as a "circle," or something else significant. I do get that point, and at this point I surrender and acknowledge that the math is way over my head.)
while it's true (I think) that any fininte sequence of digits will eventually appear in a non-repeating, infinite sequence, I think the point in the book was that the odds of our being able to find it, given the tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny portion of the number space we're able to search with our extremely finite computing power, would be evidence that it was placed there if we ever did manage to find it.
Put another way, it would have to be hanging in easy reach for us to be able to find such an insanely improbable thing as (say) a 500x500 block of pre-arranged digits. In base 11, that would be 11^(25,000), a number too hideous to contemplate, and think of the size of the space you'd need to search before such a number would be found just based on probability. So if we found such a thing, we either beat bazillion^bazillion-to-one odds, or we found something that was left there for us. Interesting.
If you're going to talk about new Switch ads, I'd personally rather listen to Yo-Yo Ma than Will Ferrell. He's new up there too. Might be worth a teeny mention.
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I would *love* to stroll along the beach and see these babies churning away off in the distance. How could you look at them and see anything other than a complete triumph of environment-PRESERVING technology? Those wind turbines glimmering in the sunlight would be keeping fucking oil-spilling barges like the one that soiled my grandmother's beach last month away, and maybe making our next middle-east war 1% less likely. They will help keep the rest of the Cape cleaner - cleaner air, cleaner water - anybody with NIMBY syndrome about such things is a total fucking hypocrite.
The article said Cronkite suggested building them inland in the state. I'm inland in the state, and I'd be all for it - bring them on. Only problem is, we're in a fucking valley and there isn't much wind. On the open sea there's wind all the time. It would be stupid not to put them there.
Personally, I'd like to see them on every hilltop on the horizon. Give us cheap, clean power and I'll be happy.
I remember seeing that gigantic eggbeater one up in Montreal somewhere, on a high hill/mountain. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Who owns stolen property? The original owner, or the thief? If "fair use" privilege travels with ownership of the original media, then the RIAA loses either way.
You buy a CD, and rip it to mp3. This is legal, right? You own the CD.
I then steal your CD.
So: who owns it now? Who has the "fair use" privilege?
If I own it because I stole it (more precisely: you NO LONGER own it because you don't have it anymore), then I can rip it to mp3 legally even though I got the CD through illegal means. What you and I would do in this case is rob each other. You steal all my CDs and rip them, and I'll steal all your CDs and rip them, and aside from the crime of theft (and neither of us press charges, and "accidentally" leave our crates of stolen CDs at each other's houses next time we visit), no laws have been broken.
If you still own it even though I stole it, then you still have all your fair use rights, including making a new CD to replace the one I stole.
We can still rob each other.
How would the RIAA answer that?
My hunch is the only way out for them would be to claim that there is no "fair use" rights on stolen property, and that everybody loses their rights and has to buy new copies. (Which of course works out wonderfully for them.) I guess at that point your recourse is to consider my theft of your CD a "loan" so you can burn a new CD, claiming to still own it. So the theft victim's claiming ownership of the stolen property is the only way to retain their "fair use" rights.
Isn't this astonishingly stupid?
Take your hood off if you want to talk, AC.
- "it's" wrong again, wrong wrong wrong, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong
- One Billionth Chip is not a proper noun (last I checked)
See the article, which (gasp) makes neither of these mistakes.Ostensibly, this is supposed to be a website for smart people. Sixth-grade grammar really shouldn't exceed our grasp. I've got otherwise-useless karma piled to the moon, maybe it's time to start burning it.
Remember, people, George Orwell said that sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought leads to exploitable, oppressible people.
For fzzck's sake, learn your basic grammar. At least the editors, if not the submitters. It's REALLY not that difficult. Or at least have one capable proofreader on the staff to look things over before you post glaring, stupid mistakes in front of millions of people (some of whom are learning English), and just leave them hanging there.
(Note to fellow grammar nazis: I know stylistic things like beginning a sentence with "Or" or omitting an implied verb could be construed as inappropriately colloquial and ungrammatical. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about heavyweight concepts like knowing the difference between the plural and possessive cases, and proper use of capitalization.)
And I'm not even talking about cursive. I mean ordinary printing. I type virtually everything, and have for about 15 years now - and shortly after I learned Palm Graffiti for my III in '98 or so, I found I started making my printed letters like Palm graffiti - and now, I can really barely read my own writing. Writing legibly takes TREMENDOUS effort, and it's so gawdawfully slow.
I look back at high school papers I wrote by hand, and I can barely believe how far I've fallen in 20 years. Handwriting is a long-lost art, for me.
moot point? :)
I appreciate the thought, but my emacs keys are wired into my brain (and fingers) with about 17 years of use now, and I can do C-x C-f with about one braincell's worth of reflex directive. I'd just like the friggin' control key in the corner like it is on every other keyboard on earth.
Note this is primarily a gripe at Apple, not you.
Why on earth can't someone make a powerbook keyboard with the control key in the right place? I defy anybody to type a ctrl-a with their left hand, with the ctrl key one key to the RIGHT of the fn key in the corner, without either rotating their entire hand from the wrist, or inflicting major tendon damage. Don't even TRY ctrl-q.
Apple's own full-sized keyboards put the control key in the lower left corner where it belongs, although it should REALLY go where caps lock is. Why must they have it out of place on the powerbooks?
Yes, I know about the software mapping utilities such as uControl, which I use, but they all have quirks and have a nasty tendency to cause kernel panics on system upgrades. If someone comes up with a "programmers's keyboard," I've got a nice pile of money to throw at them.
My hope is that someday a noticeable fraction of the supposedly educated populace figures out the (immense) difference between "its" and "it's". Then maybe we can move on to more advanced usage.
C|Net is reporting that Microsoft has updated it's Software Assurance licensing program
*sigh*
Just because SMTP can't be fixed (it can't) doesn't mean it has to die - just that a better alternative has to emerge. I'll keep my SMTP servers running indefinitely and I'll keep SMTP mail, but as better systems emerge I'll be telling people that the more reliable way to contact me is with methods that I know aren't going to give me the experience of picking through the trash when I check my mail. I'll still check my SMTP mail, but probably with decreasing frequency as time passes.
For those of you saying "just improve your filters," (1) give me a filter that can parse an HTML message containing only an image to determine whether it's spam or not (no, you can't reject all HTML mail or mail with attachments, if my brother drags-n-drops a picture of my nephew and clicks "send," I want to receive it), and (2) figure a way to keep the message from being delivered until that determination is made. Post-delivery filtering doesn't solve the bandwidth/cost/traffic problems.
Be courageous, people. Nobody screamed that we didn't need the telephone because the telegraph worked fine. Protocols emerge from changing circumstances. SMTP had its use over the last 30 years, but its time is waning with the onset of the global public internet full of untrusted senders seeking to abuse the system. It's time for a better protocol, and I applaud everyone involved in making a serious effort at developing one instead of trying to fix the unfixable.
Urban Outfitters has a nice one here (site uses stupid frames, this link is to the item out of its enclosing frame). Mine is dark blue, and the yellow Atari logo is fuzzy like those blacklight posters of the 70s. Perfect.
I'm back and forth a lot between two places, and often miss my Cube while away. I carried it around for a while, but it got old.
At $99, I'd be tempted to just buy another one for the second place, and as a backup. I put my discs in little 8cm jewel boxes with cover printouts, so they're a cinch to take around. That would be pretty nice!
Although that option exists, it won't let you change the format of "protected" files. Dang. Looks like we still need "m4p2mp3".
I'd love to get the complete run of C&H, as there are MANY great strips that never made the collections.
What I'm wondering is: is there a way to browse the archives somehow once you're a subscriber? Let's say I started in six months rather than today - woudl I be able to access the prior six months of Bloom County? Can you get all the way back to the beginning of Calvin & Hobbes? Or do you just get what they oink out on any given day, starting whenever you subscribe?
How can I be a part of this? How can I be involved in making it happen? I probably have no skills that would be relevant (unless they need a database backend designed and some Perl kung-fu for some reason), but I'll do anything. I'll sweep up at night. I'll make coffee and donut runs for the engineers. Anything. Just let me be involved somehow. I'll quit my job right now and move to Australia or wherever and live on bread and water and raw dreams.
Safari Enhancer does this and a few other things, and also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers other than IE (I just imported my Moz/Chimera bookmarks with it).
Yeesh. It really IS that big?
I always thought this thing was going to just tickle the atmosphere. I was off by a factor of 1000.
Wow.
When can I get a ride?
Assuming and hoping my basic math isn't off here, and the article meant to say 100,000m, not 100,000km. Given that the Earth's diameter is less than 13,000km, that would be one hell of an elevator - imagine an orange with a string the length of your forearm coming off it.
100,000km would be almost a third of the way to the moon, right?
Maybe the plan is much more ambitious than I thought...
- Order a replacement 72-pin connector from MCM electronics. Go ahead and slashdot them, but BUY ONE. If enough people buy them, hopefully they'll keep making them.
- If you don't have one, order one of these tookits too. You'll need some of the bits to open your NES without destroying it, and it's got lots of insanely useful other bits too.
- Take your NES apart, carefully, and replace the connector. It's all screws once you're past the cover. Take a few digital photos along the way so you can back up if you get lost. It's not hard.
- Be happy.
I'd invite you over to Nintendo Hockey, but that game as a fatal flaw: I can't be beaten at it. Oh well.OK, right. The string "2" will never appear in your example either, since it's defined by a pattern that omits 2s. Is "transcendental" the correct term for what I was referring to, then?
If we stumble upon a 500x500 base 11 encoding of a circle, it's a lucky break (assuming we care about it at all). For any place in the sequence, we have a 500x500 block of something, identifiable or not.
Sure. The question is: how big is the set of things we'd be able to find that would lead us to think there's something significant about it? All 25000-digit strings are obviously equally probable, so it's more a question of naming. What do you call significant?
Yes, fantastically improbable things happen all the time. Your suggestion of the perfect bridge hand as an analogue, I suspect, is off by many many many orders of magnitude. A perfect bridge hand might be a lucky break. A hundred consecutive perfect bridge hands, or a million or a billion, is almost certainly evidence that there's something else at work than just a freak series of random numbers. That, I think, is more along the lines of what Sagan was getting at.
I'd bet all the nickels in my pocket that (for example) the 1.25 trillion digits we already do have probably have some 3x3 or 5x5 "circles" in them, depending on how you interpret them and so forth. Probably quite a few patterns that we would recognize and the superstitious among us might find odd. Anything as statistically astounding as a particular 25,000 digit string that you could name? I really doubt it.
Correct my math if I'm wrong here, I may very well be. Let's use simpler numbers and say there are 1,000,000,000,000 strings of 25k digits in what we have so far. Your odds of picking one and having it be in there would be, it would seem to me, roughly 10^(25,000 - 12) to 1 against. Let's say there are a billion strings we would find significant as evidence of some kind of God voodoo. Now we're at 10^(24,979) to 1 against. Still pretty dang unlikely. A billion billion billion strings that would make us go "hmmm"? OK, make it 10^(24,961). Etc. Such an occurrence should make any scientist worth his salt go "Whoa. What the f*ck?"
This is all airy conjecture, of course. The point I'm getting at, I suppose, is that there's a level of freak randomness, many many many orders of magnitude above the numbers we toss around here, that is so hideously improbable that it's worth revisiting the notion that all freaky improbable things are equally freaky improbable. If we found a 500x500 circle in the digits of Pi, a fork lift wouldn't be able to budge my jaw off the floor.
(Then again, of course, it depends what you want to call a "circle." Chances are that any 500x500 block could be interepreted by some loony as a "circle," or something else significant. I do get that point, and at this point I surrender and acknowledge that the math is way over my head.)
while it's true (I think) that any fininte sequence of digits will eventually appear in a non-repeating, infinite sequence, I think the point in the book was that the odds of our being able to find it, given the tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny portion of the number space we're able to search with our extremely finite computing power, would be evidence that it was placed there if we ever did manage to find it.
Put another way, it would have to be hanging in easy reach for us to be able to find such an insanely improbable thing as (say) a 500x500 block of pre-arranged digits. In base 11, that would be 11^(25,000), a number too hideous to contemplate, and think of the size of the space you'd need to search before such a number would be found just based on probability. So if we found such a thing, we either beat bazillion^bazillion-to-one odds, or we found something that was left there for us. Interesting.
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/yoyoma.html
If you're going to talk about new Switch ads, I'd personally rather listen to Yo-Yo Ma than Will Ferrell. He's new up there too. Might be worth a teeny mention.
Stay away from Janie! She's mine!! MINE, I TELL YOU!!!
Ah, I see. Right, I do have to log in to the imap server with Pine from the same box.
I'm running the plain 4.44 RPM from Red Hat 7.3, and only run an IMAP server on my machine. Pine works fine.
/etc/pine.conf, set inbox-path to "Maildir"
1. In [S]setup/[C]onfig, set inbox-path to "{yourimapserver.com}INBOX"
2. In
Maybe I don't understand the problem you're having, but pine works fine for me with Maildir. Love it.