I used to work at Jamba Juice as a shift lead for $crap.50 an hour. They teach you the basics of spin selling, never admitting anything nutritionally bad about the smoothies, etc.
I mean, every company on the PLANET teaches their employees how to not fuck over the company with their mouth. MS would NEVER let this guy do a/. interview if he wasn't a pro.
Just remember. Anyone with an IQ greater than or equal to their shoe size is going to realize that when some exec guy like this starts dodging questions, it means the questions probably got at a significant point that he had no counterpoint for. So he still tripped on his dick.
In this case, MS would have been better off teaching their employee how to answer questions like a human being, rather than like a marketroid with a CS degree. But that kind of inclination doesn't come naturally to people like his boss; so they didn't.
Unfortunately the exact rules that govern chargebacks in MasterCard and Visa are kept secret, even from merchants.
What do you mean, exactly? How could you define one universal set of rules that would predict the chargeback decision in every case?
It seems to me that even Visa and MasterCard probably don't have an exact, defined set of rules anywhere, but rather have people that evaluate each case individually on the legal, customer, merchant, and internal axes, all seperate from each other, and render a decision based on their findings.
Of course, this would have to be almost a gut-feeling for them in a lot of cases.
I hate it when that happens - I post something sarcastic, get a response that seems to take it seriously, am halfway into typing out an explanation that I was being sarcastic, then realize the response was likely sarcasm too... I always fall for that one.
I do hate that.
I was actually being serious, because I can see people reading your post and believing it; I thought you might have been sarcastic when you wrote it, but you left no real way to tell. You have to be careful doing that - I mean what would you think of someone who posted what you wrote in all seriousness? I figured if you were being sarcastic, it's always fun to take sarcasm/slap-stick-ism and try to prove it and explore it as if it were cold fact.
Just to be clear, sarcasm or not, I intend no hard feelings or aggrevation.
Well, Google(TM)'s lawyers would prefer you to capitalize Google(TM) to protect their trademark, and Firefox(TM) works closely with Google(TM). (Though that doesn't explain the 'googol' error.)
Some things for you to think about.
1. Do you suppose that microsoft always capitalizes itself in Word for the same reasons?
2. Could you not explain this phenomenon by contentioning that Google and Firefox hate each other, and therefore Firefox makes sure that Google is in their spellcheck so as not to distract anyone wishing to post Google flames on Slashdot?
3. By contrast, do you think that Microsoft engineers their word processor with the notion that their customers have never once heard the word "Linux", and if the word "Linux" shows up in a Word document, it must have been a typo?
4. Don't you suppose Firefox recognizes only the capital version of any name it knows about because they're proper names? Like "Peter" or "Lucifer" (rather than only those with lawyers and trademarks)?
I would say anybody writing a spellcheck is going to get the best overall rating for their product if it recognizes every single proper name, with the exception being some lawsuit about including a particular proper name in a spell check product. I can think of no example. If I can type "linux" into Microsoft Word and it capitalizes it for me, or any other MS competitor, it means I'm impressed with Microsoft Word. I don't own Word... does it do that?
Correct. I go to a state college and have free access to all that stuff for as long as I'm a student and for one year after graduating, all tied into our library's website.
Since I'm in school now and I believe our school campus is a great example of a modern, online campus with a very pleasing computing experience, I'll throw in some ideas:
- First make sure the obvious stuff is covered. Do your computer science students have computers to work on? Are there other classes which could benefit from computer power? Even if it means putting your existing servers in classrooms and using the new stuff for servers. For example, do you have any 3D animation classes? Do they have some machines that can render fast?
- My school offers online classes. They're not only always full, but not enough classes IMO are offered online. What's the situation at your school? I realize this also depends on faculty availability for online stuff, and other factors, but it can make freshman composition & related type classes easier for both students to get into and on-site facility planning.
- We have WiFi in every building on campus; this is EXCELLENT. We do have shell accounts, but nobody uses them/knows what they are... But, every section of every class at the college has a website with a forum, group e-mail, a files section (so the instructor can post slides, syllabi, follow-up info, etc.), and I believe a chat room. We also get class announcements here (i.e. test postponed, class canceled, etc.)
- Our registration & scheduling, tuition payment, financial aid setup, grade listings, and other facilities are all online. This makes registering & managing your account with the institution a piece of cake.
- If you REALLY have a lot of spare equipment, clustering would be something to consider, but a standalone system that gets used for mundane day-to-day stuff is going to be more valuable than a real nice cluster that one class uses for a couple of weeks a semester simply because it happens to be there.
- Make sure to get your students' feedback (and faculty feedback) before making a final decision. They're your customers, and your team.
But libcaca isn't end user software, it's a library. Further, it's probably not something that most end users will ever even hear about (as opposed to GTK or something). How about Casal? ASCII Dope? I dunno, it's not my product. Certainly, libcaca doesn't have the professional appeal that a name like Firefox has.
Incidentally, while pondering the whole GIMP name idea, I started wondering if Mozilla Gimp would've made it as a web browser (if there wasn't a GIMP graphics program, that is). Then I thought about the name Mozilla Downs Syndrome... and then Mozilla Happy Pants for some reason.
Firefox is a great name. GIMP isn't. CACA is worse; quite literally, they may as well have called it "libshit". At least for English speakers who know the slang "Caca", it makes it sound like immature young teenagers are writing FOSS.
Funny how I didn't even have an opinion about libcaca until this morning.:)
ADD started out being kinda rare, and only those kids with the obvious behavior problems were diagnosed with ADD; Ritilin seemed effective for them.
Ten or so years later, any kid who tapped their foot during breakfast got a mouthful of Ritilin on their way out the door. EVERYBODY had ADD (and the former behavior issue became known as ADHD).
Now, finally, ADD is more common than brown eyes (in the US anyway), but thankfully kiddy speed (Ritilin) is only generally prescribed for ADHD. That's good; it keeps the high schoolers from chopping it up and snorting it (seen it done by numerous people). ADD is now a disease of convenience; it's actually normal to have ten projects going at once, each of which is 1/3 done. It's also normal to finish one before you move on to the next. Neither behaviors are affected by Ritilin at all, trust me. But if you need an excuse for your bad grades, your kid's bad grades, your excessive passion and/or ambition for anything, by all means, get yourself some ADD.
Ten years ago, Autistic kids were incredibly rare. They were almost like Albino's - that rare. They were kids who were horribly sensitive to noise (you talking quietly sounds like a scream); they were generally mute; very emotionally sensitive; and in many cases, very gifted & talented (my mom's doctor's kid is REALLY Autistic... despite sensitivity to sound, he can play the piano like George Gershwin, no shit).
Today, if you seem shy on some days, you are Autistic. Now I can't really see excessive TV under (or over) the age of 3 resulting in shyness (I'm actually lying).
You see, TV doesn't cause Autism, medical professionals constitute Autism with the severity of the symptoms they choose to interpret as Autism. If you're 3, and you're ever so mildly reluctant to smile at the doc that day, and loud noise makes you cry (still makes me cry & I'm 24), you're probably running the word Autism through his brain, if not asking for a "referral to a specialist" (and hence a statistic as an Autistic case). I mean, I'm sure it's a little more involved, but that's the impression that I get at least.
I mean Cornell University, okay, I suppose. This kind of news IMMEDIATELY makes me suspicious of the drug companies. It's like they want everyone to expect their kid to become autistic in five years when their new Autism pez comes out. But, Cornell ain't a drug company, right, so I dunno...
Colour AsCii Art library. I mean, they had to WORK to get "caca" out of that. They couldn't have just called it CASCAL or even CAAL...
How about BitchX? It used to be the premiere Linux IRC client, back around RedHat 4ish or 5ish. It even worked on WinNT.
Then of course, on every school computer in the country in the late 90s and many still today, was Nesticle. Soon, tomorrow's computer programmer's will be rushing home from school to "play with their Wii".
For that matter, you could actually describe a sexual encounter with nothing but UNIX commands; I've seen it done on multiple occasions.
It's not the only example, but in my opinion, The GIMP needs a name change; it's always bothered me that the author didn't care enough about it not to give it a very mockable name. And no, I don't believe that GIMP is the unfortunate acronym of a perfectly legit name... get a thesarus already.
It's also in the far left wing of GNOME UI-think... not very approachable for a Windows user, perhaps less so by a long-time Mac user (as it relies heavily on the right mouse button). This, perhaps, is a more important reason people are reluctant to use it regularly.
BTW, I love The GIMP; it stands out in my mind as one of the very finest examples of open source software (not kidding). Apache and the Linux Kernel are great and all... Blender's nice & glitzy but its release was so political, and was not originally OSS... GIMP is just a good, clean, fun (and, most importantly, expensive looking) software package.
Since QT4 is now available under an open source license for windows, they very well might start competing with OpenOffice.
Right, but Qt is only half the battle. Qt was originally designed to work on Windows and Linux. While I've seen screenshots of KDE software running on Windows, I don't think it's in the same ballpark as Qt in terms of compatibility; KDE (as the name implies) isn't just middleware like Qt is.
I think the latest KDE on Windows is 3.1.4; once they get to be in parallel with each other (so the same release comes out on both platforms at/around the same time), then I suppose as KOffice matured more it could become an alternative to OO on Win32. KOffice is kind of a KDE poster-app; you would need to install a good bit of the core KDE packages to run KOffice. This is a fair bit of work to go through vs. setting up OO. I'm not saying it wouldn't be worth it if KOffice (and KDE/Win32) really got smoothed out; but it's still a factor.
Personally, I like not having KDE stuff on Windows. It gives me a reason to suggest using Linux.:)
Really, I thought KOffice was great until I started using it heavily... it's not what I would call "reliable" yet. There's a lot of kinda goofy bugs & occasional crashes. I thought maybe it was "Gentooism", but I had similar experiences on my laptop running Kubuntu.
how long....before computer generated music becomes better than anything that could possibly be created by a person?
Could you imagine a digital device, maybe like an iPod, that composed music on the fly, which intelligently complemented your mood? I could see this being addictive for certain people and causing them to lose touch with human music. I mean, in my reality, not yours.
Anyway... if you could write a program that simulated heroin or acid (or even just pot), it would probably write some pretty cool stuff. But it wouldn't remember to save it and would get the munchies and fall asleep for half a day... and would still be an improvement on current mainstream music, most of which is just the results of marketing formulas anyway. But, no robot could fuzz down a guitar like Jimi Hendrix, or yelp like Kurt Cobain, or offend like Frank Zappa (or name your gangster rap artist).
Here's a question: what happens when you start jamming with two of these robots, and then you stop playing? Do they just duet until you unplug one of them or what?
So, I'm thinking that "dog balls" aren't that visible on radar.
He said it would stick out like dog balls. Sure, this could be interpreted to mean that the drone had the same radar signature as a pair of dog balls. But that doesn't make any sense because, as you mention, dog balls are small and probably have no radar signature on that scale. So I took his comment to mean that it drew the radar operator's attention as if the screen had rendered a picture of dog balls right where the drone was. Clearly, this would be very noticeable. If you didn't notice that, you shouldn't be a radar operator.
I'm sure terrorists are not the ONLY thing these would be used for. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if terrorists actually started using technology like this. It's small, manageable, and already designed.
Even if they do have a strong radar signature, so what? Send hundreds of them in at the same time. Depending on their formation it would be very difficult to prevent ALL of them from gaining access to the target; but even if they pick off every last one of them, though possibly expensive, they didn't get a single human... meanwhile, we get dozens of images and/or video, hopefully some of the intended target(s).
What we need is a widely adopted FOSS alternative to Flash. I think anymore, Flash is the new GIF.
Truecolor animation is either ginormous or compressed using some kind of patented lossy compression, right? What we really need is a widely adopted FOSS graphics/animated version of Ogg Vorbis, I think. PNG works, but it's not animated.
These may already exist, but if they do I am unaware... there are already SOOO many graphics formats out there it's ridiculous. Most software developers who intend to use graphics get to choose from BMP, PCX, Targa, PICT, JPEG, GIF, XBM/XPM, PNG, plus others... the license gets considered just like any other "feature", and finally a good one or two end up being the right ones for your program.
Here's a question for all you IANAL's out there... if MS used a GNU GPL'd graphics format in Internet Explorer, would they have to release code? If so, that wouldn't be the next JPEG or GIF for that reason alone, right? Can the format just be totally free while any supplied/example library would be FOSS, or... how does that work?
If a format truly superior (for the purposes of being used on a web page) to JPEG & GIF came along and Mozilla & Konqueror (and Apple) all got behind it, MS would be forced to at least consider it, or develop/support an open source plugin for IE or something.
When I referred to watching every other government simultaneously, I meant that trusting our ability to simply stop those with bad intentions is not going to work alone because nobody really knows what the intentions of another country are; with nukes, there's the chance you won't get what you intended to have happen.
Consider Mexico. If they all-of-a-sudden contracted sixteen nuclear power plants, each with the ability to also produce nuclear weapons, it would be obligatory to stop them. The Mexican government is corrupt, although we have no reason to believe they're very mad at anyone or have some kind of death fetish. They certainly don't need nuke-producing power plants!
You haven't really thought about it much, have you?:) I'll take your points, one at a time.
We had some grete iscoveries 100+ years ago that gave us an edge, the internakl combustion engine. The edge it gives us allowed to create many other industries that grew fast.
You're exactly right. I don't think you realize how very true your statement is. Think about how recently the printing press, electricity, the aircraft, the antibiotic, etc. have all been well researched and documented and how far these simple things have taken us in only a couple of hundred years, if that.
Unless some other discovery is made that propels us to create more industries never imagined before, the curve will flatten.
Did I miss something about scientists having already observed 100% of the empirical evidence? That's not happening anytime soon! We haven't even set foot on Mars yet, let alone another solar system... we're still pissing morals about stem cells... and we have yet to see the Einstein of quantum mechanics.
When I say new industries, I mean Brand New industries, not modifications of existining industries.
Yes, because a modern laptop with WiFi and 3D graphics is really just a clever arrangement of transistors, right? Talk about exponential... the first transistors were about the size of the last section of your pinky finger. These are now printed by the billion on a die the size of your pinky fingernail and sold as commodities. You could count the width of the smallest transistors in atoms on your fingers & toes.
For example, the car has not increased it's technology expotentialy of the last 100 years.
Have you ever SEEN a fighter jet? Planes couldn't have come before the car, could they? About a hundred years ago, the Wright brothers were just taking off for the first time. Show them a fighter jet. Even better, show them the space shuttle.
Do you know which human-made object is furthest away from Earth? Do you know how recently it was constructed? Show Voyager 1 to the Wright brothers, and watch the Wright brothers head straight for the saloon!
Before history, we had wheels. 2000 years ago, we had animal- and people-driven carriages. 200 years ago, we had those with little bimney tops on them. A little over a hundred years ago, we had horseless carriages which could go 20 - 30 MPH if you were a maniac. Now we have multiple-mach fighters, a space station, Dodge Vipers and RC cars/robots driving around Mars examining the chemical makeup of the dirt and sending pretty pictures back. Think about it.
You may want to revise your philosophy a bit. We were in the dark ages for SO long... much information is owned by the masses now; there's no going back without a massive catastrophic event; even then, we're at the point where we can preserve our knowledge quite well. It wouldn't take the next humans nearly as long to catch up...
The answer isn't less nuclear weapons, per se -- we'll always find a new way to kill each other.
Really? The way I see it, this is kind of a new thing for humanity.
Life in 1900 was, technologically, probably closer to the year 100 than life today is, at least for our species as a whole. Looking at the increase in technological level as an exponential curve, we are approaching the vertical slope.
Take your favorite weapon from or before the year 1900; bombs, grenades, poison gas, whatever. No country had the capacity to produce such a large number of that type of weapon to truly demolish the species. Sure trillions of hand grenades could at least make a dent, but what country has the ability to produce trillions of hand grenades? What country did 100 years ago?
This is not the case with nuclear weapons, or many other well researched and refined weapons (certain toxic chemicals & biological weapons, etc.) Today, wiping out humans (meaning every human) really is a matter of producing the right weapons, and detonating them in the right areas at the right times.
We will always find new ways to kill each other; but only VERY recently in our timeline as a species have we had the capacity to kill everyone.
Stopping weapons of this capacity has to be part of the solution. Putting world leaders and people in power on the honor system alone isn't going to work any more than telling a four year old to stay away from the cookie jar when nobody's looking. No single country can accurately monitor the activites of every government and world leader at once.
I think you misunderstood. The parent said that at some given bitrate, AAC beat MP3 in terms of sound quality. And my point is that the Q factor has the ability to make MP3's sound better or worse at any given bitrate without changing the file size.
Therefore, if you have a low-Q MP3 @ 160kbps and you compare it to a 160Kbps AAC file, it will most likely sound worse (the AAC file will sound better). At the same time, an MP3 recorded @ 160Kbps, while similar in file size to its low Q cousin, will sound better when encoded with a higher Q factor.
The point is, if you have two 160Kbps MP3's of the same song which are very close in file size, one may sound watery and one may sound crystal clear, given the same source media (CD, for example). Saying that a 160Kbps MP3 sounds worse than an AAC file of equivelant bitrate alone is a naive statement.
I went to the trouble to do some blind listening tests to determine whether, to my ears, AAC was any better than MP3 at identical encoding rates
And which MP3 encoder did you use? If you used lame, where was your Q factor set?
If you rip a CD track to 128Kbps MP3 with a very high Q factor (like 9) you will get a surprisingly decent sounding MP3. Conversely, if you rip a 224Kbps MP3 with a Q factor of 0 or 1, you may still get watery artifacts in the sound.
The thing about the Q factor is that it doesn't change the size of the file; only the time it takes to encode it. You can rip a CD pretty damn quickly to 128Kbps with a low Q factor. The higher the Kbps, the faster it gets (as it is doing less processing). But if you set the Q to 9, it takes FAR longer, even at large bitrates.
A 128Kbps MP3 isn't just a 128Kbps MP3 any way you cut it.
Now, if you intent to tell me that AAC @ 160Kbps sounded better than a Q9 160Kbps MP3, I'm highly inclined not to believe you. Otherwise, I'd check out lame - then do your blind listening tests again.
LOL reusing garbage is a human thing. But do these countries mine their landfills for reusable plastic or for commodities? Or do they have the technology to produce mass amounts of electrical current with it? The US has trash yards and junk yards too.
For one thing, if we're so short on raw materials, we're probably toast as it is.
We are, however, going through natural energies like fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc.) in a hurry. These are resources that we need to keep an eye on today.
So a more logical use of the landfill material is to use it for energy, instead of using these precious natural resources. That said, I have faith in technology to enable us to easily reuse raw waste materials as well; it isn't ALL going to be turned into electricity.
I don't know anything about waste management, but if people care about recycling plastics, shouldn't they be doing that before they throw it in the trash? I think once it's in the landfill, it's "gone"; that means even if we wanted to, there's no way to harvest it out of a landfill that's remotely profitable. I mean, how much would they have to pay you to start digging through landfills for eight hours a day? And that's just the cost of mining the plastic out of the landfill.
People need to worry about recycling these materials (plastic, aluminum, paper, etc.) before they toss them into the trash. Many people (myself included) have signed up for seperate services for recycling stuff like this, and put out a recycling bin once a week with the trash.
When you purchase standard solder at the hardware store, it says something like "This product contains formaldehyde, a substance which is known to the state of California to cause cancer."
So are these routers going to have little labels in front of the power connector that say "The state of California strongly advises you to take these steps to ensure your network is secure. The other forty-nine states and the manufacturer advise you need only plug and play."
Or will it be like on tobacco and liquor products:
"CA NSA ADVISORY: INSECURE NETWORKS MAY CAUSE CREDIT CARD FRAUD AND/OR THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY."
I love California to death, really. I wish to live their someday. But I think it's illegal to be Conservative(R) in public there...
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I used to work at Jamba Juice as a shift lead for $crap.50 an hour. They teach you the basics of spin selling, never admitting anything nutritionally bad about the smoothies, etc.
/. interview if he wasn't a pro.
I mean, every company on the PLANET teaches their employees how to not fuck over the company with their mouth. MS would NEVER let this guy do a
Just remember. Anyone with an IQ greater than or equal to their shoe size is going to realize that when some exec guy like this starts dodging questions, it means the questions probably got at a significant point that he had no counterpoint for. So he still tripped on his dick.
In this case, MS would have been better off teaching their employee how to answer questions like a human being, rather than like a marketroid with a CS degree. But that kind of inclination doesn't come naturally to people like his boss; so they didn't.
What do you mean, exactly? How could you define one universal set of rules that would predict the chargeback decision in every case?
It seems to me that even Visa and MasterCard probably don't have an exact, defined set of rules anywhere, but rather have people that evaluate each case individually on the legal, customer, merchant, and internal axes, all seperate from each other, and render a decision based on their findings.
Of course, this would have to be almost a gut-feeling for them in a lot of cases.
We need one less programming language, that's for certain.
I do hate that.
I was actually being serious, because I can see people reading your post and believing it; I thought you might have been sarcastic when you wrote it, but you left no real way to tell. You have to be careful doing that - I mean what would you think of someone who posted what you wrote in all seriousness? I figured if you were being sarcastic, it's always fun to take sarcasm/slap-stick-ism and try to prove it and explore it as if it were cold fact.
Just to be clear, sarcasm or not, I intend no hard feelings or aggrevation.
1. Do you suppose that microsoft always capitalizes itself in Word for the same reasons?
2. Could you not explain this phenomenon by contentioning that Google and Firefox hate each other, and therefore Firefox makes sure that Google is in their spellcheck so as not to distract anyone wishing to post Google flames on Slashdot?
3. By contrast, do you think that Microsoft engineers their word processor with the notion that their customers have never once heard the word "Linux", and if the word "Linux" shows up in a Word document, it must have been a typo?
4. Don't you suppose Firefox recognizes only the capital version of any name it knows about because they're proper names? Like "Peter" or "Lucifer" (rather than only those with lawyers and trademarks)?
I would say anybody writing a spellcheck is going to get the best overall rating for their product if it recognizes every single proper name, with the exception being some lawsuit about including a particular proper name in a spell check product. I can think of no example. If I can type "linux" into Microsoft Word and it capitalizes it for me, or any other MS competitor, it means I'm impressed with Microsoft Word. I don't own Word... does it do that?
If they offered a $100 PS3 that simply ran on a crank rather than a power brick, I'd buy that thing so fast...
I can make it crank by itself, I wouldn't mind for saving something like half a grand...
Correct. I go to a state college and have free access to all that stuff for as long as I'm a student and for one year after graduating, all tied into our library's website.
Since I'm in school now and I believe our school campus is a great example of a modern, online campus with a very pleasing computing experience, I'll throw in some ideas:
- First make sure the obvious stuff is covered. Do your computer science students have computers to work on? Are there other classes which could benefit from computer power? Even if it means putting your existing servers in classrooms and using the new stuff for servers. For example, do you have any 3D animation classes? Do they have some machines that can render fast?
- My school offers online classes. They're not only always full, but not enough classes IMO are offered online. What's the situation at your school? I realize this also depends on faculty availability for online stuff, and other factors, but it can make freshman composition & related type classes easier for both students to get into and on-site facility planning.
- We have WiFi in every building on campus; this is EXCELLENT. We do have shell accounts, but nobody uses them/knows what they are... But, every section of every class at the college has a website with a forum, group e-mail, a files section (so the instructor can post slides, syllabi, follow-up info, etc.), and I believe a chat room. We also get class announcements here (i.e. test postponed, class canceled, etc.)
- Our registration & scheduling, tuition payment, financial aid setup, grade listings, and other facilities are all online. This makes registering & managing your account with the institution a piece of cake.
- If you REALLY have a lot of spare equipment, clustering would be something to consider, but a standalone system that gets used for mundane day-to-day stuff is going to be more valuable than a real nice cluster that one class uses for a couple of weeks a semester simply because it happens to be there.
- Make sure to get your students' feedback (and faculty feedback) before making a final decision. They're your customers, and your team.
But libcaca isn't end user software, it's a library. Further, it's probably not something that most end users will ever even hear about (as opposed to GTK or something). How about Casal? ASCII Dope? I dunno, it's not my product. Certainly, libcaca doesn't have the professional appeal that a name like Firefox has.
:)
Incidentally, while pondering the whole GIMP name idea, I started wondering if Mozilla Gimp would've made it as a web browser (if there wasn't a GIMP graphics program, that is). Then I thought about the name Mozilla Downs Syndrome... and then Mozilla Happy Pants for some reason.
Firefox is a great name. GIMP isn't. CACA is worse; quite literally, they may as well have called it "libshit". At least for English speakers who know the slang "Caca", it makes it sound like immature young teenagers are writing FOSS.
Funny how I didn't even have an opinion about libcaca until this morning.
Autism is the next ADD.
Here's how I see it:
ADD started out being kinda rare, and only those kids with the obvious behavior problems were diagnosed with ADD; Ritilin seemed effective for them.
Ten or so years later, any kid who tapped their foot during breakfast got a mouthful of Ritilin on their way out the door. EVERYBODY had ADD (and the former behavior issue became known as ADHD).
Now, finally, ADD is more common than brown eyes (in the US anyway), but thankfully kiddy speed (Ritilin) is only generally prescribed for ADHD. That's good; it keeps the high schoolers from chopping it up and snorting it (seen it done by numerous people). ADD is now a disease of convenience; it's actually normal to have ten projects going at once, each of which is 1/3 done. It's also normal to finish one before you move on to the next. Neither behaviors are affected by Ritilin at all, trust me. But if you need an excuse for your bad grades, your kid's bad grades, your excessive passion and/or ambition for anything, by all means, get yourself some ADD.
Ten years ago, Autistic kids were incredibly rare. They were almost like Albino's - that rare. They were kids who were horribly sensitive to noise (you talking quietly sounds like a scream); they were generally mute; very emotionally sensitive; and in many cases, very gifted & talented (my mom's doctor's kid is REALLY Autistic... despite sensitivity to sound, he can play the piano like George Gershwin, no shit).
Today, if you seem shy on some days, you are Autistic. Now I can't really see excessive TV under (or over) the age of 3 resulting in shyness (I'm actually lying).
You see, TV doesn't cause Autism, medical professionals constitute Autism with the severity of the symptoms they choose to interpret as Autism. If you're 3, and you're ever so mildly reluctant to smile at the doc that day, and loud noise makes you cry (still makes me cry & I'm 24), you're probably running the word Autism through his brain, if not asking for a "referral to a specialist" (and hence a statistic as an Autistic case). I mean, I'm sure it's a little more involved, but that's the impression that I get at least.
I mean Cornell University, okay, I suppose. This kind of news IMMEDIATELY makes me suspicious of the drug companies. It's like they want everyone to expect their kid to become autistic in five years when their new Autism pez comes out. But, Cornell ain't a drug company, right, so I dunno...
Colour AsCii Art library. I mean, they had to WORK to get "caca" out of that. They couldn't have just called it CASCAL or even CAAL...
How about BitchX? It used to be the premiere Linux IRC client, back around RedHat 4ish or 5ish. It even worked on WinNT.
Then of course, on every school computer in the country in the late 90s and many still today, was Nesticle. Soon, tomorrow's computer programmer's will be rushing home from school to "play with their Wii".
For that matter, you could actually describe a sexual encounter with nothing but UNIX commands; I've seen it done on multiple occasions.
It's not the only example, but in my opinion, The GIMP needs a name change; it's always bothered me that the author didn't care enough about it not to give it a very mockable name. And no, I don't believe that GIMP is the unfortunate acronym of a perfectly legit name... get a thesarus already.
It's also in the far left wing of GNOME UI-think... not very approachable for a Windows user, perhaps less so by a long-time Mac user (as it relies heavily on the right mouse button). This, perhaps, is a more important reason people are reluctant to use it regularly.
BTW, I love The GIMP; it stands out in my mind as one of the very finest examples of open source software (not kidding). Apache and the Linux Kernel are great and all... Blender's nice & glitzy but its release was so political, and was not originally OSS... GIMP is just a good, clean, fun (and, most importantly, expensive looking) software package.
Right, but Qt is only half the battle. Qt was originally designed to work on Windows and Linux. While I've seen screenshots of KDE software running on Windows, I don't think it's in the same ballpark as Qt in terms of compatibility; KDE (as the name implies) isn't just middleware like Qt is.
I think the latest KDE on Windows is 3.1.4; once they get to be in parallel with each other (so the same release comes out on both platforms at/around the same time), then I suppose as KOffice matured more it could become an alternative to OO on Win32. KOffice is kind of a KDE poster-app; you would need to install a good bit of the core KDE packages to run KOffice. This is a fair bit of work to go through vs. setting up OO. I'm not saying it wouldn't be worth it if KOffice (and KDE/Win32) really got smoothed out; but it's still a factor.
Personally, I like not having KDE stuff on Windows. It gives me a reason to suggest using Linux.
Really, I thought KOffice was great until I started using it heavily... it's not what I would call "reliable" yet. There's a lot of kinda goofy bugs & occasional crashes. I thought maybe it was "Gentooism", but I had similar experiences on my laptop running Kubuntu.
Maybe I'll give this version a shot?
Could you imagine a digital device, maybe like an iPod, that composed music on the fly, which intelligently complemented your mood? I could see this being addictive for certain people and causing them to lose touch with human music. I mean, in my reality, not yours.
Anyway... if you could write a program that simulated heroin or acid (or even just pot), it would probably write some pretty cool stuff. But it wouldn't remember to save it and would get the munchies and fall asleep for half a day... and would still be an improvement on current mainstream music, most of which is just the results of marketing formulas anyway. But, no robot could fuzz down a guitar like Jimi Hendrix, or yelp like Kurt Cobain, or offend like Frank Zappa (or name your gangster rap artist).
Here's a question: what happens when you start jamming with two of these robots, and then you stop playing? Do they just duet until you unplug one of them or what?
He said it would stick out like dog balls. Sure, this could be interpreted to mean that the drone had the same radar signature as a pair of dog balls. But that doesn't make any sense because, as you mention, dog balls are small and probably have no radar signature on that scale. So I took his comment to mean that it drew the radar operator's attention as if the screen had rendered a picture of dog balls right where the drone was. Clearly, this would be very noticeable. If you didn't notice that, you shouldn't be a radar operator.
I'm sure terrorists are not the ONLY thing these would be used for. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if terrorists actually started using technology like this. It's small, manageable, and already designed.
Even if they do have a strong radar signature, so what? Send hundreds of them in at the same time. Depending on their formation it would be very difficult to prevent ALL of them from gaining access to the target; but even if they pick off every last one of them, though possibly expensive, they didn't get a single human... meanwhile, we get dozens of images and/or video, hopefully some of the intended target(s).
What we need is a widely adopted FOSS alternative to Flash. I think anymore, Flash is the new GIF.
Truecolor animation is either ginormous or compressed using some kind of patented lossy compression, right? What we really need is a widely adopted FOSS graphics/animated version of Ogg Vorbis, I think. PNG works, but it's not animated.
These may already exist, but if they do I am unaware... there are already SOOO many graphics formats out there it's ridiculous. Most software developers who intend to use graphics get to choose from BMP, PCX, Targa, PICT, JPEG, GIF, XBM/XPM, PNG, plus others... the license gets considered just like any other "feature", and finally a good one or two end up being the right ones for your program.
Here's a question for all you IANAL's out there... if MS used a GNU GPL'd graphics format in Internet Explorer, would they have to release code? If so, that wouldn't be the next JPEG or GIF for that reason alone, right? Can the format just be totally free while any supplied/example library would be FOSS, or... how does that work?
If a format truly superior (for the purposes of being used on a web page) to JPEG & GIF came along and Mozilla & Konqueror (and Apple) all got behind it, MS would be forced to at least consider it, or develop/support an open source plugin for IE or something.
You're right, that was confusing, I apologize.
When I referred to watching every other government simultaneously, I meant that trusting our ability to simply stop those with bad intentions is not going to work alone because nobody really knows what the intentions of another country are; with nukes, there's the chance you won't get what you intended to have happen.
Consider Mexico. If they all-of-a-sudden contracted sixteen nuclear power plants, each with the ability to also produce nuclear weapons, it would be obligatory to stop them. The Mexican government is corrupt, although we have no reason to believe they're very mad at anyone or have some kind of death fetish. They certainly don't need nuke-producing power plants!
You're exactly right. I don't think you realize how very true your statement is. Think about how recently the printing press, electricity, the aircraft, the antibiotic, etc. have all been well researched and documented and how far these simple things have taken us in only a couple of hundred years, if that.
Did I miss something about scientists having already observed 100% of the empirical evidence? That's not happening anytime soon! We haven't even set foot on Mars yet, let alone another solar system... we're still pissing morals about stem cells... and we have yet to see the Einstein of quantum mechanics.
Yes, because a modern laptop with WiFi and 3D graphics is really just a clever arrangement of transistors, right? Talk about exponential... the first transistors were about the size of the last section of your pinky finger. These are now printed by the billion on a die the size of your pinky fingernail and sold as commodities. You could count the width of the smallest transistors in atoms on your fingers & toes.
Have you ever SEEN a fighter jet? Planes couldn't have come before the car, could they? About a hundred years ago, the Wright brothers were just taking off for the first time. Show them a fighter jet. Even better, show them the space shuttle.
Do you know which human-made object is furthest away from Earth? Do you know how recently it was constructed? Show Voyager 1 to the Wright brothers, and watch the Wright brothers head straight for the saloon!
Before history, we had wheels. 2000 years ago, we had animal- and people-driven carriages. 200 years ago, we had those with little bimney tops on them. A little over a hundred years ago, we had horseless carriages which could go 20 - 30 MPH if you were a maniac. Now we have multiple-mach fighters, a space station, Dodge Vipers and RC cars/robots driving around Mars examining the chemical makeup of the dirt and sending pretty pictures back. Think about it.
You may want to revise your philosophy a bit. We were in the dark ages for SO long... much information is owned by the masses now; there's no going back without a massive catastrophic event; even then, we're at the point where we can preserve our knowledge quite well. It wouldn't take the next humans nearly as long to catch up...
The answer isn't less nuclear weapons, per se -- we'll always find a new way to kill each other.
Really? The way I see it, this is kind of a new thing for humanity.
Life in 1900 was, technologically, probably closer to the year 100 than life today is, at least for our species as a whole. Looking at the increase in technological level as an exponential curve, we are approaching the vertical slope.
Take your favorite weapon from or before the year 1900; bombs, grenades, poison gas, whatever. No country had the capacity to produce such a large number of that type of weapon to truly demolish the species. Sure trillions of hand grenades could at least make a dent, but what country has the ability to produce trillions of hand grenades? What country did 100 years ago?
This is not the case with nuclear weapons, or many other well researched and refined weapons (certain toxic chemicals & biological weapons, etc.) Today, wiping out humans (meaning every human) really is a matter of producing the right weapons, and detonating them in the right areas at the right times.
We will always find new ways to kill each other; but only VERY recently in our timeline as a species have we had the capacity to kill everyone.
Stopping weapons of this capacity has to be part of the solution. Putting world leaders and people in power on the honor system alone isn't going to work any more than telling a four year old to stay away from the cookie jar when nobody's looking. No single country can accurately monitor the activites of every government and world leader at once.
I think you misunderstood. The parent said that at some given bitrate, AAC beat MP3 in terms of sound quality. And my point is that the Q factor has the ability to make MP3's sound better or worse at any given bitrate without changing the file size.
Therefore, if you have a low-Q MP3 @ 160kbps and you compare it to a 160Kbps AAC file, it will most likely sound worse (the AAC file will sound better). At the same time, an MP3 recorded @ 160Kbps, while similar in file size to its low Q cousin, will sound better when encoded with a higher Q factor.
The point is, if you have two 160Kbps MP3's of the same song which are very close in file size, one may sound watery and one may sound crystal clear, given the same source media (CD, for example). Saying that a 160Kbps MP3 sounds worse than an AAC file of equivelant bitrate alone is a naive statement.
I went to the trouble to do some blind listening tests to determine whether, to my ears, AAC was any better than MP3 at identical encoding rates
And which MP3 encoder did you use? If you used lame, where was your Q factor set?
If you rip a CD track to 128Kbps MP3 with a very high Q factor (like 9) you will get a surprisingly decent sounding MP3. Conversely, if you rip a 224Kbps MP3 with a Q factor of 0 or 1, you may still get watery artifacts in the sound.
The thing about the Q factor is that it doesn't change the size of the file; only the time it takes to encode it. You can rip a CD pretty damn quickly to 128Kbps with a low Q factor. The higher the Kbps, the faster it gets (as it is doing less processing). But if you set the Q to 9, it takes FAR longer, even at large bitrates.
A 128Kbps MP3 isn't just a 128Kbps MP3 any way you cut it.
Now, if you intent to tell me that AAC @ 160Kbps sounded better than a Q9 160Kbps MP3, I'm highly inclined not to believe you. Otherwise, I'd check out lame - then do your blind listening tests again.
LOL reusing garbage is a human thing. But do these countries mine their landfills for reusable plastic or for commodities? Or do they have the technology to produce mass amounts of electrical current with it? The US has trash yards and junk yards too.
For one thing, if we're so short on raw materials, we're probably toast as it is.
We are, however, going through natural energies like fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc.) in a hurry. These are resources that we need to keep an eye on today.
So a more logical use of the landfill material is to use it for energy, instead of using these precious natural resources. That said, I have faith in technology to enable us to easily reuse raw waste materials as well; it isn't ALL going to be turned into electricity.
Why would we go to the trouble of shipping it to them when they can just dig a really deep hole and get it themselves...
I don't know anything about waste management, but if people care about recycling plastics, shouldn't they be doing that before they throw it in the trash? I think once it's in the landfill, it's "gone"; that means even if we wanted to, there's no way to harvest it out of a landfill that's remotely profitable. I mean, how much would they have to pay you to start digging through landfills for eight hours a day? And that's just the cost of mining the plastic out of the landfill.
People need to worry about recycling these materials (plastic, aluminum, paper, etc.) before they toss them into the trash. Many people (myself included) have signed up for seperate services for recycling stuff like this, and put out a recycling bin once a week with the trash.
I don't think the hardwood floor would like that very much... plus it's bad to lick anything that people walk on OR has floorshine on it.
When you purchase standard solder at the hardware store, it says something like "This product contains formaldehyde, a substance which is known to the state of California to cause cancer."
So are these routers going to have little labels in front of the power connector that say "The state of California strongly advises you to take these steps to ensure your network is secure. The other forty-nine states and the manufacturer advise you need only plug and play."
Or will it be like on tobacco and liquor products:
"CA NSA ADVISORY: INSECURE NETWORKS MAY CAUSE CREDIT CARD FRAUD AND/OR THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY."
I love California to death, really. I wish to live their someday. But I think it's illegal to be Conservative(R) in public there...