The graduate of Solid State is getting a kick out the original reply, and the Quantum State grad may or may not be getting a kick out of that. The String State guy is theorizing about humor, which the graduate from Quaker State thinks is quite slick. The Drunken State grad doesn't quite follow all this but seems happy enough. Some might say this has all reached a sad state of affairs, but the gentleman from Over State begs to differ.
Me? I'm a Re State graduate, but you probably already guessed that.
Wait, wait... they "bottomed out" at 7.5 miles? Somebody's not telling us something. Did they hit the table on which the earth sits? Or perhaps the impervious shell of a turtle?
Let's figure out how much money the RIAA is owed due to file sharing, based on this verdict. I'll have to make some estimates.
$9250/song
10% of Americans using file sharing = 30 million criminals
300 songs shared by the average file sharer (real number is probably much higher)
The RIAA is owed over 83 TRILLION DOLLARS! Just be glad that they didn't get the full $150,000 per song, or they would be owed 1.35 QUADRILLION DOLLARS!
Unfortunately the US GDP is only around 13-14 trillion dollars, so we're going to have to pay this in installments. Also, it's going to be hard to pay since what they're asking for may be more than the total amount of money on the entire planet.
Do you think that maybe their demands are a bit unreasonable?
That is just insane. Budweiser's products are causing more accidents than cannabis. McDonald's products are causing more health troubles. And yet this guy can get his whole life taken away from him, for breaking US laws when he doesn't even live in the country? I don't care much about cannabis, but stupid and arbitrary laws are extremely frustrating. I'd like to beat our legislators with a big old common sense stick.
This is only one piece of a larger problem - why are phones ever tied to a specific carrier? Imagine if we had to buy specific models of computers based on which company we chose as an internet provider. That would be ridiculous, and so is the phone situation.
Ideally, cell providers should offer a data stream, and charge you based on traffic. They wouldn't care what type of phone you were using, or what service you were connecting to. They'd simply be a connector between your phone and various web addresses. (They'd also still provide voice service, priced separately. They wouldn't try to stop you from running Skype on your cell phone, but you wouldn't because you'd probably pay more for a lower quality service.)
The internet started primarily as a place for open science research. Cell phones started primarily as a business. See the difference?
The police came up to him and grabbed him. They never asked him politely to step back or to walk with them. They never accused him of any crime or told him why he was being detained. I think he was legitimately shocked and freaked out. I agree that he should not have physically resisted arrest, but it was perfectly reasonable for him to ask what was happening.
The police could have stopped for two seconds and asked him calmly to follow them, or said anything to him. Instead of treating him like a person, they treated him like an animal. They acted like his words were meaningless or inaudible. I would have been yelling as well. Perhaps they weren't legally required to say anything to him, but they did a rotten job of helping to defuse the situation.
I found the whole episode despicable. I didn't really like the guy, but he sure didn't deserve to be treated that way. Why did they jump immediately to arrest? I don't think we live in a country where asking too many questions is supposed to lead to arrest. Why not walk up to him and calmly say, "Sir, we have to ask you to leave the building."? And if they were going to arrest him, why not talk to him and explain things calmly? Instead they took the course of action most likely to induce panic.
The guy's attempts at resisting were not putting anyone in any significant danger. He was obviously already overpowered with ease. The taser was a serious abuse of power. ALL they had to do was hold him down until he agreed to stop squirming. I'm sure once the sense of panic passed he would have stopped resisting.
If anyone was trying to cause a violent confrontation, it was the police. (By the way, not following all of Gandhi's principles is also not a crime.)
This story is progressing nicely across the net. Thank you for taking the bait and supplying us with the free advertisement. We couldn't have bought this much coverage for a million dollars.
Wow. So it's not the bestiality that's offensive, it's the file sharing?
It's best to use the latest Windows Media Player for such videos. That way you can be assured you have a legitimate license to view what that giraffe is doing to that woman.
The trouble is, big corporations are entrenched with the two parties as much as they are with individual candidates. Even with short term limits, a candidate still needs to get chosen by one of the two parties to have a good shot at winning an election. And in order to get rubber stamped by either party, you have to first show you can play ball and suck up to the right special interests.
The really dumb thing about all this is the fact that there is a "ringtone market" in the first place. There's no technical reason that you can't just supply a sound from your own mp3 library, or use a simple tool to extract a clip from a CD that you own. However, the cell phone industry is carefully constructed to extract as much money from people as possible.
Why anyone would want a 15 second song clip to play when they get a phone call is a separate question. It annoys the people around them, and it's a good way to turn an enjoyable song into a pestering sound.
Intel labs is in a sense a precursor to what the Singularity could be. If you consider the organization (people and computers) as a machine, they are continually upgrading the silicon component of the machine, and then using those upgrades to design an even more advanced machine.
However, this is not the same as the Singularity, due to the human bottleneck. The human part of the machine is not (as of now) upgradable. In fact, it is not even understood. It was not designed, it was merely plugged into the system. It also has great baggage such as the need to sleep, eat, vacation, mate, play corporate politics, etc.
But once the machines start approaching a human level of sophistication, they can start taking over more of the human tasks. In time, there might not be any tasks for the humans, and suddenly you have a designer that doesn't forget anything, makes few mistakes, works 24/7, computes trillions of things per second, etc. Look out.
Good points! On the flip side, here's what I consider reasonable. (Reasonable = I won't stop using your website)
1. Ads that don't overlay other content (even if I accidentally move the mouse over them) 2. Ads that don't slow down page loading and viewing significantly 3. Ads that don't mess up the page flow so badly that I'm searching for the next paragraph of real content 4. Video ads, if used at all, should only start playing if I click a clearly marked play button 5. Flash ads, if used at all, should only have moving content/changing colors if I hover over them 6. No sound ever unless I press a very clear play or unmute button
Keeping up with the sun isn't feasible, but it is possible to squeeze more hours of daylight out of every day. Just follow the sun until you lose it, then turn 180 degrees and go catch it coming the other way.
Say that by flying in circles you would experience a 24 hour clock with 12 hours of daylight. By chasing the sun you might get something like a 28 hour clock with 18 hours of daylight.
Sure, there are plenty of examples of poor practices. Sure, there are stick-in-the-mud projects that refuse to upgrade. But that doesn't mean you have to code that way or use those projects. I guess I should have said "nobody doing high quality, modern PHP development is using the mysql_* functions."
The important question is whether a competent developer can choose to write good, secure PHP code. Does PHP provide the tools? The answer is yes. The actions of 100 other idiots don't change that fact.
I just look at some of the half-brained pseudo-coders I've had to work with and I think, as long as they can still get work I should be set for life. That's kind of funny, but I think it's really true.
One of the troubles with the programming profession is that it's too easy to get into, and too easy to fake enough ability to get hired. Noone plays with aircraft engines in their spare time, then goes to Boeing and lands a job as a mechanical engineer.
Imagine the social implications of the $50 5TB thumb drive...
"I was over at Jimmy's house yesterday and asked him to put some good stuff on my thumb drive. He gave me HD copies of the top 80 movies released in the past two years, plus 2000 of his favorite albums.
Meanwhile, a second thumb drive I keep clipped to my belt has been keeping an audio/video recording of the last 17 months of my life, nonstop."
You go to Microsoft, and they have a whole 'SP2 is great!' page which extols the virtues of installing it, suggesting that the best way to get it is via Windows update.. So, you go to Windows update, and it says.. "Hey, you need SP2! You should check out this page which explains why it's great, and how to get it!", and links back to the first page. Took me a few hours to figure out how to bypass that one.
Want to know a faster way to install SP2? Watch for the reply to this post!
PHP used to stand for "Personal Home Page". It used to be someone's little hobby project, filled with lots of security holes and bad decisions. But with PHP 4.2 it started becoming more serious, and with PHP 5 it is very solid and well-considered. Don't think of it as a seedy background, think of it as a rags-to-riches story about the little language that could.
Nobody uses the mysql_* functions anymore. Use database abstraction. PDO is the most common, though I really like the database stuff built into the new Zend Framework myself.
Criticisms of PHP based on how it used to be 5-10 years ago are becoming very tiresome.
I haven't tried Django, but I have tried a couple other frameworks with similar setups. They also had great promise and nice slogans. Reading the home pages of competing frameworks is a bit like browsing through vacation brochures.
The one thing I've learned is that when I see a framework with code generation scripts, I run screaming. It's just a bad way to build code in my opinion. You end up with too many things going on behind the scenes. I was always fighting these frameworks and unsure of what to do when I wanted to make a simple change or reconfigure something I had already generated.
The one framework I've actually enjoyed using is the Zend Framework. It doesn't have mysterious code generating scripts. The best part of it is that it's so nicely modularized. You can easily use one or two pieces of it in a project without buying in to the whole thing. Unfortunately, I wasn't too happy with their MVC implementation, so I rolled my own while still using other components of the framework.
Slashdot Mirror
But how would fake photos from a make-believe moon probe prove anything? :)
The graduate of Solid State is getting a kick out the original reply, and the Quantum State grad may or may not be getting a kick out of that. The String State guy is theorizing about humor, which the graduate from Quaker State thinks is quite slick. The Drunken State grad doesn't quite follow all this but seems happy enough. Some might say this has all reached a sad state of affairs, but the gentleman from Over State begs to differ.
Me? I'm a Re State graduate, but you probably already guessed that.
Wait, wait... they "bottomed out" at 7.5 miles? Somebody's not telling us something. Did they hit the table on which the earth sits? Or perhaps the impervious shell of a turtle?
The RIAA is owed over 83 TRILLION DOLLARS! Just be glad that they didn't get the full $150,000 per song, or they would be owed 1.35 QUADRILLION DOLLARS!
Unfortunately the US GDP is only around 13-14 trillion dollars, so we're going to have to pay this in installments. Also, it's going to be hard to pay since what they're asking for may be more than the total amount of money on the entire planet.
Do you think that maybe their demands are a bit unreasonable?
That is just insane. Budweiser's products are causing more accidents than cannabis. McDonald's products are causing more health troubles. And yet this guy can get his whole life taken away from him, for breaking US laws when he doesn't even live in the country? I don't care much about cannabis, but stupid and arbitrary laws are extremely frustrating. I'd like to beat our legislators with a big old common sense stick.
This is only one piece of a larger problem - why are phones ever tied to a specific carrier? Imagine if we had to buy specific models of computers based on which company we chose as an internet provider. That would be ridiculous, and so is the phone situation.
Ideally, cell providers should offer a data stream, and charge you based on traffic. They wouldn't care what type of phone you were using, or what service you were connecting to. They'd simply be a connector between your phone and various web addresses. (They'd also still provide voice service, priced separately. They wouldn't try to stop you from running Skype on your cell phone, but you wouldn't because you'd probably pay more for a lower quality service.)
The internet started primarily as a place for open science research. Cell phones started primarily as a business. See the difference?
I won't call you when this is ready, I'll wurzle you. You don't know what that means yet, but you will, trust me.
The police came up to him and grabbed him. They never asked him politely to step back or to walk with them. They never accused him of any crime or told him why he was being detained. I think he was legitimately shocked and freaked out. I agree that he should not have physically resisted arrest, but it was perfectly reasonable for him to ask what was happening.
The police could have stopped for two seconds and asked him calmly to follow them, or said anything to him. Instead of treating him like a person, they treated him like an animal. They acted like his words were meaningless or inaudible. I would have been yelling as well. Perhaps they weren't legally required to say anything to him, but they did a rotten job of helping to defuse the situation.
I found the whole episode despicable. I didn't really like the guy, but he sure didn't deserve to be treated that way. Why did they jump immediately to arrest? I don't think we live in a country where asking too many questions is supposed to lead to arrest. Why not walk up to him and calmly say, "Sir, we have to ask you to leave the building."? And if they were going to arrest him, why not talk to him and explain things calmly? Instead they took the course of action most likely to induce panic.
The guy's attempts at resisting were not putting anyone in any significant danger. He was obviously already overpowered with ease. The taser was a serious abuse of power. ALL they had to do was hold him down until he agreed to stop squirming. I'm sure once the sense of panic passed he would have stopped resisting.
If anyone was trying to cause a violent confrontation, it was the police. (By the way, not following all of Gandhi's principles is also not a crime.)
You must be a rocket scientist... of humor!
Dear Jack,
This story is progressing nicely across the net. Thank you for taking the bait and supplying us with the free advertisement. We couldn't have bought this much coverage for a million dollars.
Sincerely,
Take Two Entertainment
Wow. So it's not the bestiality that's offensive, it's the file sharing?
It's best to use the latest Windows Media Player for such videos. That way you can be assured you have a legitimate license to view what that giraffe is doing to that woman.
Sick!
The trouble is, big corporations are entrenched with the two parties as much as they are with individual candidates. Even with short term limits, a candidate still needs to get chosen by one of the two parties to have a good shot at winning an election. And in order to get rubber stamped by either party, you have to first show you can play ball and suck up to the right special interests.
The really dumb thing about all this is the fact that there is a "ringtone market" in the first place. There's no technical reason that you can't just supply a sound from your own mp3 library, or use a simple tool to extract a clip from a CD that you own. However, the cell phone industry is carefully constructed to extract as much money from people as possible.
Why anyone would want a 15 second song clip to play when they get a phone call is a separate question. It annoys the people around them, and it's a good way to turn an enjoyable song into a pestering sound.
Intel labs is in a sense a precursor to what the Singularity could be. If you consider the organization (people and computers) as a machine, they are continually upgrading the silicon component of the machine, and then using those upgrades to design an even more advanced machine.
However, this is not the same as the Singularity, due to the human bottleneck. The human part of the machine is not (as of now) upgradable. In fact, it is not even understood. It was not designed, it was merely plugged into the system. It also has great baggage such as the need to sleep, eat, vacation, mate, play corporate politics, etc.
But once the machines start approaching a human level of sophistication, they can start taking over more of the human tasks. In time, there might not be any tasks for the humans, and suddenly you have a designer that doesn't forget anything, makes few mistakes, works 24/7, computes trillions of things per second, etc. Look out.
Good points! On the flip side, here's what I consider reasonable. (Reasonable = I won't stop using your website)
1. Ads that don't overlay other content (even if I accidentally move the mouse over them)
2. Ads that don't slow down page loading and viewing significantly
3. Ads that don't mess up the page flow so badly that I'm searching for the next paragraph of real content
4. Video ads, if used at all, should only start playing if I click a clearly marked play button
5. Flash ads, if used at all, should only have moving content/changing colors if I hover over them
6. No sound ever unless I press a very clear play or unmute button
Keeping up with the sun isn't feasible, but it is possible to squeeze more hours of daylight out of every day. Just follow the sun until you lose it, then turn 180 degrees and go catch it coming the other way.
Say that by flying in circles you would experience a 24 hour clock with 12 hours of daylight. By chasing the sun you might get something like a 28 hour clock with 18 hours of daylight.
Ew, that's what Victoria's "Secret" is?
Sure, there are plenty of examples of poor practices. Sure, there are stick-in-the-mud projects that refuse to upgrade. But that doesn't mean you have to code that way or use those projects. I guess I should have said "nobody doing high quality, modern PHP development is using the mysql_* functions."
The important question is whether a competent developer can choose to write good, secure PHP code. Does PHP provide the tools? The answer is yes. The actions of 100 other idiots don't change that fact.
I just look at some of the half-brained pseudo-coders I've had to work with and I think, as long as they can still get work I should be set for life. That's kind of funny, but I think it's really true.
One of the troubles with the programming profession is that it's too easy to get into, and too easy to fake enough ability to get hired. Noone plays with aircraft engines in their spare time, then goes to Boeing and lands a job as a mechanical engineer.
Imagine the social implications of the $50 5TB thumb drive...
"I was over at Jimmy's house yesterday and asked him to put some good stuff on my thumb drive. He gave me HD copies of the top 80 movies released in the past two years, plus 2000 of his favorite albums.
Meanwhile, a second thumb drive I keep clipped to my belt has been keeping an audio/video recording of the last 17 months of my life, nonstop."
Want to know a faster way to install SP2? See the parent post!
One more time, of course. Always one more time.
PHP used to stand for "Personal Home Page". It used to be someone's little hobby project, filled with lots of security holes and bad decisions. But with PHP 4.2 it started becoming more serious, and with PHP 5 it is very solid and well-considered. Don't think of it as a seedy background, think of it as a rags-to-riches story about the little language that could.
Nobody uses the mysql_* functions anymore. Use database abstraction. PDO is the most common, though I really like the database stuff built into the new Zend Framework myself.
Criticisms of PHP based on how it used to be 5-10 years ago are becoming very tiresome.
I haven't tried Django, but I have tried a couple other frameworks with similar setups. They also had great promise and nice slogans. Reading the home pages of competing frameworks is a bit like browsing through vacation brochures.
The one thing I've learned is that when I see a framework with code generation scripts, I run screaming. It's just a bad way to build code in my opinion. You end up with too many things going on behind the scenes. I was always fighting these frameworks and unsure of what to do when I wanted to make a simple change or reconfigure something I had already generated.
The one framework I've actually enjoyed using is the Zend Framework. It doesn't have mysterious code generating scripts. The best part of it is that it's so nicely modularized. You can easily use one or two pieces of it in a project without buying in to the whole thing. Unfortunately, I wasn't too happy with their MVC implementation, so I rolled my own while still using other components of the framework.