Usually insightful comments include something like reason, logic, and argumentation. Said comment included none of the aforementioned. Then would it be insightful for me to point out your use of the term 'usually', then?:)
If I stuck a bottle rocket up my butt and ended up with 3rd degree burns, would you laugh?
Why, yes. Yes I would.
I'd laugh even harder if you said you didn't know you were taking that risk when you were, after all, putting a firework up your ass and lighting it. There we go. We ridicule people who do dumb things. Most people don't want to be ridiculed, so stories like this make them think twice before doing something stupid.
That's the theory anwyay. I can honestly say I've avoided doing dumb stuff because I've seen videos on youtube. I can also honestly say that if I die, and the story of my death makes it to the Darwin Awards, I really cannot demand that everybody do anything but laugh.
What kind of people are we to make fun and games about someone dying?
Even if it is a spectacular stupid way, it still is no reason to laugh at their corpse and go "Ha Ha!" nelson style. If I stuck a bottle rocket up my butt and ended up with 3rd degree burns, would you laugh?
Stuff that matters. This is not fark. Yeah cos we're so much cooler when we filter out the fun and games. I'd bet anything that it was a pointlessly nitpicky Urkel type like you that inspired the invention of the wedgie.
Keeping traffic flowing actually helps emergency vehicles get through more quickly as cars don't get backed up can move out of the way. Funny you should mention that. Just yesterday I was driving to work when an ambulance appeared behind me. I pulled over, but the guy in front of me just kept going. They got to an intersection and the ambulance nearly missed its turn because the guy was right along side of it. If he had been stopped....
There isn't a 100% satisfactory solution. I'm comfortable, however, with the opinion that stopped traffic is better than moving traffic for emergency vehicles. Part of the reason for that is you're supposed to stop and pull over.
I know some kids who are extremely bright, curious, and for lack of a better description, "like to experiment". Any one of these I think could have done the same thing, and with completely innocent (though mischievous) intent. For playing with such big toys in such a fashion there should be repercussions. But the kids I know who also could have done something like this would be much more on track with thinking about how they're moving switches than about what moving those switches implies.
I'm all for helping creativity grow, but the problem here was that he wasn't thinking about the passengers of these machines he was fucking around with.
One corrupt organization investigating another. What could possibly go wrong? Well... at least it means the RIAA has to bribe more people. Take that, suckers!
he he. Sometimes I wish I was a programmer... (only sometimes) It works in the 3d world, too. Somebody wrote a plugin for Lightwave that just creates a progress bar. You just tell it how long you want it to run for, then tell your boss you're 'rendering'!
How is revenge any worse than the arbitrary punishment decided in a courtroom or municipal office ? Three things:
1.) Everybody has differing ideas about what a punishment for revenge should be. I'll give you an extreme example. I know somebody who was pissed off at somebody else for logging into his MySpace page and wiping out a bunch of pictures. He thought a fair revenge was to call the cops and try to have the guy busted for drug use. If that had worked (and thankfully it didn't) the 'punishment' for this guy's wrong-doing could have been jail-time. Bit excessive, don'tcha think? Well, when people get 'wronged', they often act at the height of their emotional response. That's a terrible time for anybody to decide what's 'fair'.
2.) The difference between 'revenge' and 'arbitrary punishment decided in a courtroom' is that the accused has an opportunity to defend him/her-self. In the case above, the MySpace attack was actually a response to what the guy did. In theory, anyway, a judge would have considered this. Innocent until proven guilty.
3.) Revenge causes revenge. In my example above, I'm pretty sure if the dude had been nailed on the drug-use, he would have done something to get the other guy back. Maybe he knows something about the other guy he could use against him. I imagine he'd at least try. If he took a shot, the other guy would probably respond again. And so on. That's not to say the court system is immune to this, but one could argue that by-and-large it ends with what the court decides. To quote the immortal Augustus Hill: "There's one mother f'er that's right 100% of the time. He's called the Judge. Whatever he says comes true."
Remember back in the day when we were told that computers would never be able to learn how to understand human speech because it's too complicated? The arguments were compelling but now we've got voice recognition working over crappy telephone connections and dictation software is getting better all the time. As bad as the voice recognition problem was, computer vision seemed like an even harder nut to crack given how impossible it seemed to get a machine to go from a two-dimensional image to 3D. All of this stuff seems like impossibly difficult "we'll never get there" AI impossibilities and then we see a technology demonstration that nails it. I'm still astounded that DARAPA is not only asking for robot-driven cars, they're actually getting teams producing working results. That's another problem I always thought would be impossible. Hmm. Though it's not really that clear from your post, I'm concerned that you're seeing one problem where really there is two. In the case of voice recognition, getting a computer to recognize a spoken word within a certain context is far easier than getting the computer to understand a phrase like "Set up an appointment for me on the Fifth of May at 2 pm.". One is simple signal analysis, the other is context-sensitive understanding. The former is easy and has been possible for years. The latter is virtually impossible without the computer in question having 'experience'.
The same is true for image recognition. You can get a computer to recognize movement pretty easily. Heck, the ability for software to detect the 3d form of an object has been around for ages. However, getting a computer to watch Star Wars and say "I see Dennis Lawson sitting inside an X-Wing fighter." is, as I said before, difficult to do without a concept of 'experience'.
We'll get there one of these days, but right now the sorts of cool-sounding advancements we've been seeing really only work in very specific circumstances.
If I can't buy it yet, then it doesn't exist yet. Umm, yeah, let's mod this comment up for every story about an announced product. "Specs for the Playstation 4...""Yeah, but it's vapor until I can buy it. (Score 3, Interesting)"
"So, yeah, when they start doing that, you'll eventually be right. In the mean time, they're sticking their necks out."
Sorry to reply to my own post here, but I wanted to point out that I do not know the specifics of French Copyright Law. I may be wrong on my last point, there. If I am, I'd appreciate it if anybody'd be willing to cure my ignorance on that matter.
Which is so blindly obvious that MobileTatsu-NJG is clearly a troll. The demo they're sending out now has the artwork packaged into it. That is wrong and they could easily be C&D'd for it. (Not necessarily to the point of cancelling the game.)
But I'll grant you that I hadn't considered the 'grab it from the CD' option when I originally posted. You've got me there, and I accept your point. So, yeah, when they start doing that, you'll eventually be right. In the mean time, they're sticking their necks out.
Huh? How so? What part of copyright law, exactly, do you think stops them from writing a program to use Blizzard's graphics files? Heh. Are you seriously asking me what part of Copyright Law prohibits distribution of protected works?
Wanna bet?... 2. they're not actually doing anything illegal... The screengrabs pretty clearly show them using graphics from the original game. That actually is wrong. If Blizzard has a copyright to the game in France, then yes, I'd like to take that bet.
Yeah, when I call my CDW rep I can have a system built to order the next business day if I call early enough and the base system is something they have in stock. Hell if I choose right I can have a truckload of servers the next day. Imaging them takes about 4 hours for up to 32 servers (more than that and it slows down due to disk resources on the SAN that pushes the images). Of course if the crunch is bandwidth that takes a lot longer because the telcos suck, but you should be able to get a line in a couple weeks as a rush order if you are as big as MS. That's just the hardware. I've heard enough horror stories here on Slashdot alone to know that you can't just hook up boxes to the network and bidda-badda-bing you've got additional capacity.
'This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service,' said Whitten.
With all that influx of cash, couldn't you divert some of it to funding, you know, new servers and stuff like that?
People also seem to forget that 2/3s of the passengers of the Hindenburg survived, and it was the only notable airship disaster, whereas most airplane crashes that involve fatalities seem to kill a good majority (if not all) of the passengers, and seem to happen at least once or twice a year lately. While you've got a point, I just wanted to point out that there are a LOT of flights that go on every single day of the year. Statistically speaking, yes, news-worthy crashes are going to happen once or twice a year.
...plus the widescreen layout is fairly useless for any programming/web&graphics design work. If these were the DOS days where your apps always filled the screen, I might be inclined to agree. With graphic work, you have more room on the sides for palettes. (That's why I don't rotate my display for vertical stuff.) With scripting, you can have your code in one window with the documentation or the application to test the code in another side by side and it'll work reasonably well. The same is true for web development as well.
I can understand some preferring portrait mode with widescreen LCDs, but I wouldn't describe landscape is 'fairly useless'. I was actually surprised that I prefer my widescreen to the two CRTs I had, even though I had more pixel real-estate there.
Publishers are now dumping DRM and publishing on Amazon and iTunes as raw MP3's. So again, why do we need anything else aside from widely supported ubiquitous standards? A couple of publishers are experimenting with the idea and seeing what happens. If, in a year from now, a good chunk of them have permenantly switched over, drop me a message and I'll be happy to retract my statement.
"Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns."
I'm a big fan of divserity, myself. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one day a cure for cancer ended up coming from seemingly un-related research. I'll grant you that SETI isn't likely to reveal the key. But, taken to the other extreme, putting all our eggs in one basket does not guarantee faster success.
My iPod plays MP3's just fine. That's the most widely supported format their is. Why do they have to support WMA as well when they already support the most ubiquitous formats like WAV and MP3?? Just playing Devil's Advocate here: WMA supports DRM, MP3 (unless I'm sorely mistaken...) does not. This is why MP3 is NOT a publishing standard for most content producers. Don't forget that this is an industry that thinks every single one of its customers are thieves.
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Why, yes. Yes I would.
I'd laugh even harder if you said you didn't know you were taking that risk when you were, after all, putting a firework up your ass and lighting it. There we go. We ridicule people who do dumb things. Most people don't want to be ridiculed, so stories like this make them think twice before doing something stupid.
That's the theory anwyay. I can honestly say I've avoided doing dumb stuff because I've seen videos on youtube. I can also honestly say that if I die, and the story of my death makes it to the Darwin Awards, I really cannot demand that everybody do anything but laugh.
I don't get the insightfulness of this comment. Most of those guys don't realize they're jackasses, so it's insightful to them.
Even if it is a spectacular stupid way, it still is no reason to laugh at their corpse and go "Ha Ha!" nelson style. If I stuck a bottle rocket up my butt and ended up with 3rd degree burns, would you laugh?
There isn't a 100% satisfactory solution. I'm comfortable, however, with the opinion that stopped traffic is better than moving traffic for emergency vehicles. Part of the reason for that is you're supposed to stop and pull over.
I know some kids who are extremely bright, curious, and for lack of
I'm all for helping creativity grow, but the problem here was that he wasn't thinking about the passengers of these machines he was fucking around with.a better description, "like to experiment". Any one of these I think
could have done the same thing, and with completely innocent
(though mischievous) intent. For playing with such big toys in
such a fashion there should be repercussions. But the kids I know who
also could have done something like this would be much more on track
with thinking about how they're moving switches than about what moving
those switches implies.
(only sometimes) It works in the 3d world, too. Somebody wrote a plugin for Lightwave that just creates a progress bar. You just tell it how long you want it to run for, then tell your boss you're 'rendering'!
1.) Everybody has differing ideas about what a punishment for revenge should be. I'll give you an extreme example. I know somebody who was pissed off at somebody else for logging into his MySpace page and wiping out a bunch of pictures. He thought a fair revenge was to call the cops and try to have the guy busted for drug use. If that had worked (and thankfully it didn't) the 'punishment' for this guy's wrong-doing could have been jail-time. Bit excessive, don'tcha think? Well, when people get 'wronged', they often act at the height of their emotional response. That's a terrible time for anybody to decide what's 'fair'.
2.) The difference between 'revenge' and 'arbitrary punishment decided in a courtroom' is that the accused has an opportunity to defend him/her-self. In the case above, the MySpace attack was actually a response to what the guy did. In theory, anyway, a judge would have considered this. Innocent until proven guilty.
3.) Revenge causes revenge. In my example above, I'm pretty sure if the dude had been nailed on the drug-use, he would have done something to get the other guy back. Maybe he knows something about the other guy he could use against him. I imagine he'd at least try. If he took a shot, the other guy would probably respond again. And so on. That's not to say the court system is immune to this, but one could argue that by-and-large it ends with what the court decides. To quote the immortal Augustus Hill: "There's one mother f'er that's right 100% of the time. He's called the Judge. Whatever he says comes true."
The same is true for image recognition. You can get a computer to recognize movement pretty easily. Heck, the ability for software to detect the 3d form of an object has been around for ages. However, getting a computer to watch Star Wars and say "I see Dennis Lawson sitting inside an X-Wing fighter." is, as I said before, difficult to do without a concept of 'experience'.
We'll get there one of these days, but right now the sorts of cool-sounding advancements we've been seeing really only work in very specific circumstances.
Wise use of mod-points, there.
"So, yeah, when they start doing that, you'll eventually be right. In the mean time, they're sticking their necks out."
Sorry to reply to my own post here, but I wanted to point out that I do not know the specifics of French Copyright Law. I may be wrong on my last point, there. If I am, I'd appreciate it if anybody'd be willing to cure my ignorance on that matter.
But I'll grant you that I hadn't considered the 'grab it from the CD' option when I originally posted. You've got me there, and I accept your point. So, yeah, when they start doing that, you'll eventually be right. In the mean time, they're sticking their necks out.
2. they're not actually doing anything illegal
With all that influx of cash, couldn't you divert some of it to funding, you know, new servers and stuff like that?
Over the space of a couple of weeks?
...plus the widescreen layout is fairly useless for any programming/web&graphics design work. If these were the DOS days where your apps always filled the screen, I might be inclined to agree. With graphic work, you have more room on the sides for palettes. (That's why I don't rotate my display for vertical stuff.) With scripting, you can have your code in one window with the documentation or the application to test the code in another side by side and it'll work reasonably well. The same is true for web development as well.I can understand some preferring portrait mode with widescreen LCDs, but I wouldn't describe landscape is 'fairly useless'. I was actually surprised that I prefer my widescreen to the two CRTs I had, even though I had more pixel real-estate there.
"1/3 is 33 1/3%. How is that severly off of the 36% estimate?"
:)
I think he means that if 33% alone are default passwords, with another huge chunk (maybe 10% - 15%?) being among the common million.
On a more shocking note: Have you noticed that 40% of Slashdot posts made during the work week are done on Mondays and Fridays?
"Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns."
I'm a big fan of divserity, myself. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one day a cure for cancer ended up coming from seemingly un-related research. I'll grant you that SETI isn't likely to reveal the key. But, taken to the other extreme, putting all our eggs in one basket does not guarantee faster success.