Interesting timing/. - I have an old A22e from 2001 just after I started college. Its optical drive finally crapped out yesterday (getting a replacement) but its still very usable - no quake 4 obviously but it can handle your day to day activity with no sweat. I'll probably put DSL or Vector on it soon but it still runs xubuntu though a tad sluggish (been through 98se, xp, redhat). The stickydick (nipple) still works even. Every one of my college papers was banged out on that keyboard and its still more responsive than the piece of crap logitech I have for my desktop that I'm typing this on - the entire thing was built to last. I rather like the new color scheme and lack of red - much cleaner and I'm surprised hes whining about the Fn vs Ctrl - you kinda get used to that. I've seen my moms toshiba satellite bought later die earlier. Its going to outlive my friends lifebook. The only thing thats putting up a reasonable fight is my labmates Presario 3015 which is almost a year younger. Eventually I'll buy another thinkpad - slightly worried because I'm not sure how lenovo build quality compares to ibm proper but so far good reviews - but I can still eke out another couple of years. It was my baby and I'm not giving up on it yet! Ok
If you can excuse the hideous page layouts and occasional idiots who have 4mb images as their background myspace isn't terrible. They need to have a better directory sorted by genre>artist>title as is basically the norm right now. Right now I use their search with genre and bio or influences and take a look at the play count to find music to listen to. A lot of it is pretty darn good. If you like the social networking aspect you do have a bonus in that you can actually interact with the artist. Some of them have music to download and theres no DRM.
I don't think this will kill iTunes because there are still too many people who get their musical tastes from MTV/VH1 but if you'd like something more original and small scale and you are sick of DRM and being called a pirate then this is not a bad idea. I'd actually also be interested in the economics that will happen when myspace does this - it might go some way towards figuring out what the musical quality-price tradeoff is and I'm sure the RIAA will want to know that.
There are too many people out there who learn how to make music - and a lot of them are very talented. The net makes the distribution cost virtually zero. Recording equipment is becoming cheaper and even without the greatest setup you can do well enough for a lot of people. You have to have exposure and some way to search for music but thats what a site like myspace is doing albeit in a manner that could do with a lot of improvement. Effectively this will drive the price of music down and will probably lead to a system where theres greater musical choice but fewer large bands. If the recording biz wants to survive they have to make their money of concerts and sales of higher quality recordings to fans. They are going to shrink and they know it.
Hes running ShoZhu on his Nokia 6682 - its a nice phone and is maybe 250-300 bucks with a contract so I'd get pissed if it was stolen. I don't see why this would be a hoax - its a previously released cell phone so hes not trying to do some new product hype. There would be simpler ways of getting an upgrade for it. This is classic name-n-shame like the sidekick guy from a few months ago. Maybe he'll get it back and it doesn't hurt to wish him luck. A cell phone got stolen though - big deal. Eds why is this on/. again... I've not had my coffee yet. mutter mutter ed hitting accept button instead of reject mutter mutter
No the submitter is not jumping to conclusions - look at the bloody claims
Those areas included iTunes' menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.
A menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played - its a music player! File>Open is a damned menu! Please for a second picture a music player that doesn't allow the user to select the music to be played via a menu. mpg123 is all that comes to mind.
The ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player - wait any OS can do this - its copying files for crissakes. Again trivially File>Save As... heck your browser could then be a piece of software that can transfer tracks to a portable music player. Throw in the right plugin and it can open music files and save them to a portable music player.
This sorting by genre>artist>title is something I've done for ages with tapes and then CDs. The Creative patent was stupid and this one is too - Indeed I'm stunned they don't sue each other.
All of these patents are obvious and entirely frivolous, and really ought not to exist. So much as I dislike Apple and support underdogs I've got to side with Cupertino because this is ridiculous.
Re:er... thats a bit of a leap
on
Humanity Gene Found?
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· Score: 2, Informative
No it isn't two data points - I have the article.Magdalena C. Popesco et. al. Human Lineage-Specific Amplification, Selection, and Neuronal Expression of DUF1220 Domains. Science 1 September 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5791, pp. 1304 - 1307 I'd love to get a an opinion from a someone who works in genetics.
They do claim that taken together the data from three seperate methods (BLAT http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgBlat, aCGH and QPCR - I know what PCR is and I'm reading up on the others but this is not my field) they do claim that DUF1220 is "highly expanded in humans, reduced in African great apes, further reduced in orangutan and old world monkeys, single copy in non-primate animals, and absent in nonmamalian species." They've a graph of the the number they predict from PCR for different primate species and humans and though there is some spread it seems clear that humans have more DUF1220 domains than the other primate species tested again.
However, the point remains they do not know what DUF1220 does and so saying that it leads to human traits is not very convincing. The researchers do speculate that they "may play an important role in human-lineage specific traits." So its not entirely the reporter/submitter hype. Yes I'd agree that correlation is strong basis for further investigation and thats what I asked for when I said I'd wait for there to be more evidence. Again I do not work in genetics and don't know if this is possible but it'd be a lot stronger evidence if they could implant more copies of this gene and then see that it lead to greater brain complexity or something.
Topics like this tend to get a lot of hype and sensationalism and people jump to conclusions and I'd think it would be much better to wait until the genetics community says something strongly.
And yes I was joking about the lots of stupid people Daniel. And yes they are a lot smarter than the smartest chimp or monkey. Though ever since I saw Project X I'm ashamed that chimps are better at Flight Simulator than me;-D
In other news the more midi-chlorians in your blood, the greater the person's Force ability
TFA says that there is a gene that humans have more copies of than primates and that this gene makes a protein in the brain. They don't know what the protein does in the brain indeed they have no idea what having multiple copies of the gene does. Yet they reach the conclusion that this gene may be responsible for giving us our humanity.
All they seem to have is a weak correlation between the number of this gene and intelligence (which is arguable - I know some really dumb people) and as we've all learnt many times "Correlation does not imply causation."
IANAGS but I'd wait until there was some more evidence on offer.
I don't think these guys realize that a large number of people who buy dvds are in college or recent graduates with student loans. I can't afford a 1000 buck player and a 1500 buck minimum HDTV and then the actual discs (the electronics would be more than a months stipend right there). The prices will eventually come down and this format war will resolve itself. Even then I will think hard about paying so much for to watch TV and movies and I will probably resist and dismiss it as too much of a luxury. I spent that much after saving for around a year and a half to get a very nice gaming rig but a PC does a lot more than a HDTV and HD player. Even if I did buy the HD equipment I'm certainly not replacing my dvds - they are good enough, and if DVDs remain significantly cheaper than HD content I will probably buy the DVDs instead.
We all know the forever in DNF actually stands for how long we have to wait before we see this game. I've some hope mostly because I go back and play the original D3D and its still fun and I want more. And they did finally release Prey.
Thats also what I'm scared about - I just don't want it to be like Prey where the original claim was that there was going to be non linear gameplay and you could interact completely with your environment, destroying it or whatever. We did get portals in the end but heck I've seen that since Heretic - they just did it with a lot more style. Prey was o.k. - took about a day to get through and that was it - fun but nothing spectacular - just was not worth the wait.
the don't have enough mass to *sustain* nuclear fusion in their core - atleast thats what I remember learning. I mostly work on SNIa and RR Lyr so if theres been some new info on brown dwarfs its entirely possible I missed it. Though you are right brown dwarfs do represent a transition between giant planets and stars and you can see this in the HR diagram, but I still thought sustained fusion corresponds to some temperature/mass limit or is that totally wrong?
Yes but the previous definition of what a planet was just as sketchy. You can measure a degree of roundness but a hard limit that seperates planets and asteroids is not really very appealing. There is a clean physical limit between stars and planets - stars can sustain thermonuclear fusion and this corresponds to a clean range of physical conditions. You can argue that massive Jupiters are brown dwarfs and vive versa but we can still divide into star and not star cleanly.
There just isn't any such clean division between planets, dwarf planets and asteroids. They form a continuum of a sort, and we can draw lines on a continuum (we do for wavelength in spectroscopy for instance) but the lines are sort of arbitrary. Personally, I think its much more important that people realize that there is a continuum of objects rather than seperate classes. Theres a lot more interesting physics in how and why all these objects form rather than in lumping x of them into one category and y into another.
For the publishers its probably good to wait and watch until there is some consensus.
After posting this I skipped over to Ars and what should I see but an article on free legal Mech Commander games. Even Mechcom 2 which was from the Redmond beast! It'll be a good weekend. Seriously more companies need to be taking note. Give your loyal fans something atleast.
QUESTION: Why don't you give advanced users the ability to turn this off via a registry setting or something like that? Steve: "we're considering just that."
Yes Steve a registry setting please... HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\ShutTheFuckUp make sure that dword is set to 1
Funniest damn article I've read in a long time - seriously get to page 3 it gets good.
The guy has a great point - I've bought a lot of games in recent times, sometimes long time after they were released so that the price goes down (Valve episode 1 price down you bastards - its been out long enough) and they are games I'm rather devoted to. Half-life anything, Jedi Knight and Dark Forces, Quake, C&C, AoE, Duke, Legacy of Kain, Mechwarriors, Wing Commander anything (I want more of the last three and I still hold out hope for DNF!)... its a long list. I'll probably cae on Galactic Civilizations 2 in a bit because I've been told its the games Masters 3 ought to have been.
There are games I've pirated and deleted, the latest being Prey. Meh. Make your game worthwhile to me and I will buy a copy. I remember when I was in the midst of LoK each game cost more than the last and I still bought them - fricking Defiance was 50 bucks when it came out. It was worth it and I wanted it. The prices have gone up a fair bit so I'm not surprised that piracy has. Especially when a large chunk of your target audience is under 25s and a lot of that is still in school and college earning 6.25 an hour.
The cd protection is just annoying - fricking cd-keys are such a pain to keep and I hate that I cant legally back up so many of my cds now. I tried reinstalling Diablo last year and was heart broken when the disc had a CRC error all of sudden. I bought the damn game and now I can't play it because some money grubbing bastards at Blizzard were more bothered about their profits than my fair use. Bought it used again but I really ought not to have had to. If they have to have copy protection it'd be nice if game companies just made their games FOSS after a few years because they aren't going to sell it anymore really. Abandonware is a great idea guys!
Thats crazy - when you typed in your search term into AOL you had an expectation of privacy and you did not for one minute believe that they would release that data. All webpages are copyright and the Wayback machine is using fair use to archive copies for educational use. If you publish information (its automatically copyright) and someone reproduces it they might be able to under fair use or they might be infringing your copyright - talk to your lawyer. And yes if you posted something on the net when you were 9 that was stupid it might well follow you around for the rest of your life. Same goes if you were in a porno in college and you put it online. Sorry. Tough shit. Maybe your parents should have paid more attention to your online activities. Or you should have known better. IANAL and 9 year olds may get some protection as minors but basic point remains - you publish something online you had no expectation of privacy. This is not at all what you were doing when you sent AOl your search queries - you published zilch.
If you post something on the net then I can point my browser to it - there is no privacy, and nor was there any expectation of it. I could have used wget -r -erobots=off on your page every day and got all its content - and I'd have that archive even when you deleted it or moved it into some private archive, and it happily ignored your robots.txt. Since obeying robots.txt is volutary I simply chose not to.
News websites often want you to pay to for older content but there is nothing theoretically stopping you from saving all the content day by day. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Heres the summary - we posted evidence online that was used against us in a court of law, we lost, we sued the people who provided that evidence, and because its cheaper to settle than deal with bloody lawyers we settled with them.
On comcast - no one at home uses their email anyway. Its surprising that they blocked alum.mit.edu even for a while. Any ideas on why?
I'm surprised this is so much of a problem - how many people are going to be affected by this. At home all of us use the university email. I don't even use the comcast smtp since our department offers it. I've got Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and rediffmail. All of the above let you see what they've marked as spam atleast and you can whitelist it. They really ought to give you that option. Heck even label the damn thing ***SPAM*** and I can use a filter to dump it into a seperate folder and sort through it later. I'm all for blocking spam but you can block it intelligently and give users some control over it. I don't know any email provider that gives you a resason as to why email is marked as spam and frankly I don't care. Most of the time they are right and I can catch the rare false positives. I'd let any email provider censor as they wish if they are doing it intelligently and allowing me to whitelist. If Comcast doesn't then there are hundreds of others out there. I'd be happy to send you a Gmail invite if you really want.
This is more stupid company does stupid thing that is frustrating for a while but will get sorted out when enough people complain. Yes in an ideal world the GP would have a right to intelligent service which is basically all hes asking for. This sort of thing is not going to do any lasting damage and can be sorted out quickly. Just get a few more people to complain.
I can just see it now - in game ads like "Sensationall revoolution in medicine! E'''nlarge your p''enis up to 10 cm or up to 4 i'c'h'e's! Its h'erbal solution what hasnt side effect, but has 110% guaranted results!"
"Golden Shower Massage Escort Cervix!"
"Hot stock alert! PodunkBiz L.L.C has just discovered an oilfield! Official announcement Tuesday! Buy stock now!"
Lets home there are some mods to disable these or change them into pron or something. I wonder if the ads will be destructable. Wheres that bloody rocket launcher...
nonsense - ESA is crashing it deliberately. From the TFA
But now SMART-1 is running low on fuel. It has to come down sometime--and soon--so ESA mission scientists decided to crash it in a place where the crash can be seen from Earth and studied.
You can learn a lot from crashes - how craters form and the composition of the ejecta. Astronomy Krunk style is still useful! Krunk smash! NASA did something similar with the deep impact probe and comet tempel.
Sad thing here is they have no idea how bright its going to be - TFA says anything between 7 and 15 mag (5 mag difference is a factor of 100 in flux) so we may not see anything really.
Dear god one of them actually posted "what is user" with a frickin smiley - some of them have been running as root for 3 years and trust their firewalls and routers (I suppose atleast he does that)! Wait all this sounds familiar... oh yeah windows users who run as administrator. Hmm I wonder who Lindspire's primary target audience is - oh right windows users. This surprises you why? Why again do people want more Windows users to start using linux?
disclaimer - debian at work, xp at home (gamez) but adequately protected and not fricking running as admin
Im confused as to how this degenerated into a cola war - TFA's point was about Linux. Or GNU/Linux if you really want. No it probably wont be a problem if different schools/libraries/whatever use different linux distros - theres more than enough common, and you know most of them will go in with gnome or kde so they will look basically the same. The hardware shouldn't be a problem since a lot of it will be pretty old.
Also NYT (yes they are not reading/. but I can mail them) and poster rm999 (yes yes I know hes already been modded flamebait but I'm going to chomp)....
I'm sick of the communist bogeyman. You can mod me flamebait right now if you like but I'm going to make a point. The CPI are a communist party in that they support communist ideals but yes India is a democracy with universal sufferage even (since 1950 and you might argue it was a lot more universal than African Americans were getting in Alabama at the same time). Whether or not they actually live up to communist ideals is another story. But not a different story than a democracy that lives up to democratic ideals by wiretapping its citizens. Sure theres some pandering to the voters by bashing multi-national companies like Pepsi or Coke. Funny I thought that happens here around election time when someone gets us and announces incentives to American farming companies say. The EU certainly thinks so.
Yes the article was probably being biased by mentioning "communist" in the title but these guys aren't communist in the same way as Stalin's USSR or North Korea or *shudder* the PRC, which is quickly becoming the latest "bloc." I'm not an apologist for any of the human rights violations in those countries but please realize that any time you mention communist it does not imply human rights violations. I'll soon have to be yelling this about Islamic states too. Studying current events instead of getting your information from FOX news and actually reading some history makes it much harder to stereotype systems of government. The worst the current communists can do in Kerala are massive unannounced strikes and rallies. Its great intending to drive somewhere and getting stuck in one - you will be there a while. The noise about Pepsi and Coke will go away soon either after election time (or some money greases someones hands). Lets not point fingers so easily shall we... theres a good chap.
Theres actually a whole bunch of communist parties in the US that are not defunct though we all know in a real democracy we have only two viable parties.
Remarkably even the Wikis have a discussion page which is basically a forum for the article. Also if you had a specific tech support question which isn't dealt with in the instructions (which you could have on your wiki page) then you are going to have to resort to a forum.
The above is true even if the forums in question don't have a social aspect.
Well you know the internet is not a dump truck. Its a series of tubes. And if you put an enormous amount of material... an enormous of material those tubes will be blocked up and if my staff send me an internet yesterday it'll get stuck in the tubes. But its much worse if the tubes are leaky. Your internet may never get to you if you have leaky tubes. If your tubes leak get them tied up.
I'd actually ask them to require stricter standards especially at installation
1) Program has option to install in any directory you choose - surprise how many of them lack this even 2) Make start menu and desktop shortcuts wherever you choose - I hate ones that just add three icons to my desktop 3) Make no folders other than in the one they are installed in or that you specify - When Reader 7.0 came out I was constantly deleting that bloody myEbooks crap until I figured out how to stop it. 4) Do not add themselves to startup with windows automatically - I didn't say you could be resident just so that you can pop up your damn app at the slightest click of the mouse. Again bloody Adobe and iTunes do this. 5) Software that requires administrator privleges to install or run needlessly - I'm thinking CoD2 6) Any additional software installed without consent which is not required to run the application - iTunes and Quicktime 7) Any software that changes file associations by itself - give me the option and I will tell you what I'm going to let you open automatically. 7) Anything that does not give you a single entry in the Add Remove Programs List.
These are pretty basic and ought to be good manners as far as software is concerned.
Frankly badware should also include any software that is written poorly and is bloated and uses excessive memory and even things that give you a bloody skin without an option to change back to the default. I've worked hard to keep the classic windows interface with XP and I certainly don't want to see some stupid app like iTunes (or Winamp but there are windows skins) looking however they want without giving me the option to turn it off. I like my boring grey and I'm going to keep it that way.
Yes it is an obsolte buisness model. Mass sales via CDs and DVDs are too, forget just rental. The DRM is not going to stand up forever and all they will have if it proves resilient to attack is a bunch of pissed of consumers.
My own guess is that the only way the music industry is going to make any money are via boxoffice sales to concerts, and special collectors editions which die hard fans will buy not pirate and merchandising. It seems like technology is driving us towards smaller entertainment companies which can act more locally. So yes shrinkage, both in profits and in size. If budgets are smaller they are going to have to be more careful about what content they produce. I think its important to realize that the music industry won't die and the recording industry probably will. We've had the music industry for centuries, recording by contrast is a relatively recent invention and its becoming cheaper to do for the musicians directly. So in a sense all thats happening is that the middle man is being cut out. This will probably also mean less mega bands unless they are so good that they can get across the board popularity.
I think the movie industry will have a harder time in the long term. They are probably going to have to work hard to make the theatre experience a lot more desierable or they will just lose out to home theatre. There is still something to be said for a theatre experience with a bunch of friends. But I don't know if they can survive on box-office alone. You can stil sell DVDs but you've got to target the fans and offer more than just something I can get by downloading the Xvid. I bought the Special edition LOTR discs also for the bookends. The budgets involved are so much larger that I don't think we will see the same type of content for a while. Again if budgets are smaller they will have to become more careful about what content they produce. Until technology becomes simple enough to make blockbuster movies cheap. Funnily enough the answer might be something John Carmack was saying about video games - he thought that for the next generation of games the graphics wouldn't matter so much and the story would matter more.
A lot of the people here on/. dead opposed to piracy complain that the content will change because of it. I'd say thats probably true and so what...
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting timing /. - I have an old A22e from 2001 just after I started college. Its optical drive finally crapped out yesterday (getting a replacement) but its still very usable - no quake 4 obviously but it can handle your day to day activity with no sweat. I'll probably put DSL or Vector on it soon but it still runs xubuntu though a tad sluggish (been through 98se, xp, redhat). The stickydick (nipple) still works even. Every one of my college papers was banged out on that keyboard and its still more responsive than the piece of crap logitech I have for my desktop that I'm typing this on - the entire thing was built to last. I rather like the new color scheme and lack of red - much cleaner and I'm surprised hes whining about the Fn vs Ctrl - you kinda get used to that. I've seen my moms toshiba satellite bought later die earlier. Its going to outlive my friends lifebook. The only thing thats putting up a reasonable fight is my labmates Presario 3015 which is almost a year younger. Eventually I'll buy another thinkpad - slightly worried because I'm not sure how lenovo build quality compares to ibm proper but so far good reviews - but I can still eke out another couple of years. It was my baby and I'm not giving up on it yet! Ok
If you can excuse the hideous page layouts and occasional idiots who have 4mb images as their background myspace isn't terrible. They need to have a better directory sorted by genre>artist>title as is basically the norm right now. Right now I use their search with genre and bio or influences and take a look at the play count to find music to listen to. A lot of it is pretty darn good. If you like the social networking aspect you do have a bonus in that you can actually interact with the artist. Some of them have music to download and theres no DRM.
I don't think this will kill iTunes because there are still too many people who get their musical tastes from MTV/VH1 but if you'd like something more original and small scale and you are sick of DRM and being called a pirate then this is not a bad idea. I'd actually also be interested in the economics that will happen when myspace does this - it might go some way towards figuring out what the musical quality-price tradeoff is and I'm sure the RIAA will want to know that.
There are too many people out there who learn how to make music - and a lot of them are very talented. The net makes the distribution cost virtually zero. Recording equipment is becoming cheaper and even without the greatest setup you can do well enough for a lot of people. You have to have exposure and some way to search for music but thats what a site like myspace is doing albeit in a manner that could do with a lot of improvement. Effectively this will drive the price of music down and will probably lead to a system where theres greater musical choice but fewer large bands. If the recording biz wants to survive they have to make their money of concerts and sales of higher quality recordings to fans. They are going to shrink and they know it.
Hes running ShoZhu on his Nokia 6682 - its a nice phone and is maybe 250-300 bucks with a contract so I'd get pissed if it was stolen. I don't see why this would be a hoax - its a previously released cell phone so hes not trying to do some new product hype. There would be simpler ways of getting an upgrade for it. This is classic name-n-shame like the sidekick guy from a few months ago. Maybe he'll get it back and it doesn't hurt to wish him luck. A cell phone got stolen though - big deal. Eds why is this on /. again... I've not had my coffee yet.
mutter mutter ed hitting accept button instead of reject mutter mutter
A menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played - its a music player! File>Open is a damned menu! Please for a second picture a music player that doesn't allow the user to select the music to be played via a menu. mpg123 is all that comes to mind.
The ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player - wait any OS can do this - its copying files for crissakes. Again trivially File>Save As
This sorting by genre>artist>title is something I've done for ages with tapes and then CDs. The Creative patent was stupid and this one is too - Indeed I'm stunned they don't sue each other.
All of these patents are obvious and entirely frivolous, and really ought not to exist. So much as I dislike Apple and support underdogs I've got to side with Cupertino because this is ridiculous.
No it isn't two data points - I have the article.Magdalena C. Popesco et. al. Human Lineage-Specific Amplification, Selection, and Neuronal Expression of DUF1220 Domains. Science 1 September 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5791, pp. 1304 - 1307
;-D
I'd love to get a an opinion from a someone who works in genetics.
They do claim that taken together the data from three seperate methods (BLAT http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgBlat, aCGH and QPCR - I know what PCR is and I'm reading up on the others but this is not my field) they do claim that DUF1220 is "highly expanded in humans, reduced in African great apes, further reduced in orangutan and old world monkeys, single copy in non-primate animals, and absent in nonmamalian species." They've a graph of the the number they predict from PCR for different primate species and humans and though there is some spread it seems clear that humans have more DUF1220 domains than the other primate species tested again.
However, the point remains they do not know what DUF1220 does and so saying that it leads to human traits is not very convincing. The researchers do speculate that they "may play an important role in human-lineage specific traits." So its not entirely the reporter/submitter hype. Yes I'd agree that correlation is strong basis for further investigation and thats what I asked for when I said I'd wait for there to be more evidence. Again I do not work in genetics and don't know if this is possible but it'd be a lot stronger evidence if they could implant more copies of this gene and then see that it lead to greater brain complexity or something.
Topics like this tend to get a lot of hype and sensationalism and people jump to conclusions and I'd think it would be much better to wait until the genetics community says something strongly.
And yes I was joking about the lots of stupid people Daniel. And yes they are a lot smarter than the smartest chimp or monkey. Though ever since I saw Project X I'm ashamed that chimps are better at Flight Simulator than me
In other news the more midi-chlorians in your blood, the greater the person's Force ability
TFA says that there is a gene that humans have more copies of than primates and that this gene makes a protein in the brain. They don't know what the protein does in the brain indeed they have no idea what having multiple copies of the gene does. Yet they reach the conclusion that this gene may be responsible for giving us our humanity.
All they seem to have is a weak correlation between the number of this gene and intelligence (which is arguable - I know some really dumb people) and as we've all learnt many times "Correlation does not imply causation."
IANAGS but I'd wait until there was some more evidence on offer.
I don't think these guys realize that a large number of people who buy dvds are in college or recent graduates with student loans. I can't afford a 1000 buck player and a 1500 buck minimum HDTV and then the actual discs (the electronics would be more than a months stipend right there). The prices will eventually come down and this format war will resolve itself. Even then I will think hard about paying so much for to watch TV and movies and I will probably resist and dismiss it as too much of a luxury. I spent that much after saving for around a year and a half to get a very nice gaming rig but a PC does a lot more than a HDTV and HD player. Even if I did buy the HD equipment I'm certainly not replacing my dvds - they are good enough, and if DVDs remain significantly cheaper than HD content I will probably buy the DVDs instead.
We all know the forever in DNF actually stands for how long we have to wait before we see this game. I've some hope mostly because I go back and play the original D3D and its still fun and I want more. And they did finally release Prey.
Thats also what I'm scared about - I just don't want it to be like Prey where the original claim was that there was going to be non linear gameplay and you could interact completely with your environment, destroying it or whatever. We did get portals in the end but heck I've seen that since Heretic - they just did it with a lot more style. Prey was o.k. - took about a day to get through and that was it - fun but nothing spectacular - just was not worth the wait.
the don't have enough mass to *sustain* nuclear fusion in their core - atleast thats what I remember learning. I mostly work on SNIa and RR Lyr so if theres been some new info on brown dwarfs its entirely possible I missed it. Though you are right brown dwarfs do represent a transition between giant planets and stars and you can see this in the HR diagram, but I still thought sustained fusion corresponds to some temperature/mass limit or is that totally wrong?
Yes but the previous definition of what a planet was just as sketchy. You can measure a degree of roundness but a hard limit that seperates planets and asteroids is not really very appealing. There is a clean physical limit between stars and planets - stars can sustain thermonuclear fusion and this corresponds to a clean range of physical conditions. You can argue that massive Jupiters are brown dwarfs and vive versa but we can still divide into star and not star cleanly.
There just isn't any such clean division between planets, dwarf planets and asteroids. They form a continuum of a sort, and we can draw lines on a continuum (we do for wavelength in spectroscopy for instance) but the lines are sort of arbitrary. Personally, I think its much more important that people realize that there is a continuum of objects rather than seperate classes. Theres a lot more interesting physics in how and why all these objects form rather than in lumping x of them into one category and y into another.
For the publishers its probably good to wait and watch until there is some consensus.
After posting this I skipped over to Ars and what should I see but an article on free legal Mech Commander games. Even Mechcom 2 which was from the Redmond beast! It'll be a good weekend. Seriously more companies need to be taking note. Give your loyal fans something atleast.
I still hold out hope...
Yes Steve a registry setting please...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\ShutTheFuckUp
make sure that dword is set to 1
Funniest damn article I've read in a long time - seriously get to page 3 it gets good.
The guy has a great point - I've bought a lot of games in recent times, sometimes long time after they were released so that the price goes down (Valve episode 1 price down you bastards - its been out long enough) and they are games I'm rather devoted to. Half-life anything, Jedi Knight and Dark Forces, Quake, C&C, AoE, Duke, Legacy of Kain, Mechwarriors, Wing Commander anything (I want more of the last three and I still hold out hope for DNF!)... its a long list. I'll probably cae on Galactic Civilizations 2 in a bit because I've been told its the games Masters 3 ought to have been.
There are games I've pirated and deleted, the latest being Prey. Meh. Make your game worthwhile to me and I will buy a copy. I remember when I was in the midst of LoK each game cost more than the last and I still bought them - fricking Defiance was 50 bucks when it came out. It was worth it and I wanted it. The prices have gone up a fair bit so I'm not surprised that piracy has. Especially when a large chunk of your target audience is under 25s and a lot of that is still in school and college earning 6.25 an hour.
The cd protection is just annoying - fricking cd-keys are such a pain to keep and I hate that I cant legally back up so many of my cds now. I tried reinstalling Diablo last year and was heart broken when the disc had a CRC error all of sudden. I bought the damn game and now I can't play it because some money grubbing bastards at Blizzard were more bothered about their profits than my fair use. Bought it used again but I really ought not to have had to. If they have to have copy protection it'd be nice if game companies just made their games FOSS after a few years because they aren't going to sell it anymore really. Abandonware is a great idea guys!
Thats crazy - when you typed in your search term into AOL you had an expectation of privacy and you did not for one minute believe that they would release that data. All webpages are copyright and the Wayback machine is using fair use to archive copies for educational use. If you publish information (its automatically copyright) and someone reproduces it they might be able to under fair use or they might be infringing your copyright - talk to your lawyer. And yes if you posted something on the net when you were 9 that was stupid it might well follow you around for the rest of your life. Same goes if you were in a porno in college and you put it online. Sorry. Tough shit. Maybe your parents should have paid more attention to your online activities. Or you should have known better. IANAL and 9 year olds may get some protection as minors but basic point remains - you publish something online you had no expectation of privacy. This is not at all what you were doing when you sent AOl your search queries - you published zilch.
If you post something on the net then I can point my browser to it - there is no privacy, and nor was there any expectation of it. I could have used wget -r -erobots=off on your page every day and got all its content - and I'd have that archive even when you deleted it or moved it into some private archive, and it happily ignored your robots.txt. Since obeying robots.txt is volutary I simply chose not to.
News websites often want you to pay to for older content but there is nothing theoretically stopping you from saving all the content day by day. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Heres the summary - we posted evidence online that was used against us in a court of law, we lost, we sued the people who provided that evidence, and because its cheaper to settle than deal with bloody lawyers we settled with them.
On comcast - no one at home uses their email anyway. Its surprising that they blocked alum.mit.edu even for a while. Any ideas on why?
I'm surprised this is so much of a problem - how many people are going to be affected by this. At home all of us use the university email. I don't even use the comcast smtp since our department offers it. I've got Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and rediffmail. All of the above let you see what they've marked as spam atleast and you can whitelist it. They really ought to give you that option. Heck even label the damn thing ***SPAM*** and I can use a filter to dump it into a seperate folder and sort through it later. I'm all for blocking spam but you can block it intelligently and give users some control over it. I don't know any email provider that gives you a resason as to why email is marked as spam and frankly I don't care. Most of the time they are right and I can catch the rare false positives. I'd let any email provider censor as they wish if they are doing it intelligently and allowing me to whitelist. If Comcast doesn't then there are hundreds of others out there. I'd be happy to send you a Gmail invite if you really want.
This is more stupid company does stupid thing that is frustrating for a while but will get sorted out when enough people complain. Yes in an ideal world the GP would have a right to intelligent service which is basically all hes asking for. This sort of thing is not going to do any lasting damage and can be sorted out quickly. Just get a few more people to complain.
I can just see it now - in game ads like
"Sensationall revoolution in medicine!
E'''nlarge your p''enis up to 10 cm or up to 4 i'c'h'e's!
Its h'erbal solution what hasnt side effect, but has 110% guaranted results!"
"Golden Shower Massage Escort Cervix!"
"Hot stock alert! PodunkBiz L.L.C has just discovered an oilfield! Official announcement Tuesday! Buy stock now!"
Lets home there are some mods to disable these or change them into pron or something.
I wonder if the ads will be destructable. Wheres that bloody rocket launcher...
You can learn a lot from crashes - how craters form and the composition of the ejecta. Astronomy Krunk style is still useful! Krunk smash! NASA did something similar with the deep impact probe and comet tempel.
Sad thing here is they have no idea how bright its going to be - TFA says anything between 7 and 15 mag (5 mag difference is a factor of 100 in flux) so we may not see anything really.
Dear god one of them actually posted "what is user" with a frickin smiley - some of them have been running as root for 3 years and trust their firewalls and routers (I suppose atleast he does that)! Wait all this sounds familiar... oh yeah windows users who run as administrator. Hmm I wonder who Lindspire's primary target audience is - oh right windows users. This surprises you why? Why again do people want more Windows users to start using linux?
disclaimer - debian at work, xp at home (gamez) but adequately protected and not fricking running as admin
Im confused as to how this degenerated into a cola war - TFA's point was about Linux. Or GNU/Linux if you really want. No it probably wont be a problem if different schools/libraries/whatever use different linux distros - theres more than enough common, and you know most of them will go in with gnome or kde so they will look basically the same. The hardware shouldn't be a problem since a lot of it will be pretty old.
/. but I can mail them) and poster rm999 (yes yes I know hes already been modded flamebait but I'm going to chomp)....
Also NYT (yes they are not reading
I'm sick of the communist bogeyman. You can mod me flamebait right now if you like but I'm going to make a point. The CPI are a communist party in that they support communist ideals but yes India is a democracy with universal sufferage even (since 1950 and you might argue it was a lot more universal than African Americans were getting in Alabama at the same time). Whether or not they actually live up to communist ideals is another story. But not a different story than a democracy that lives up to democratic ideals by wiretapping its citizens. Sure theres some pandering to the voters by bashing multi-national companies like Pepsi or Coke. Funny I thought that happens here around election time when someone gets us and announces incentives to American farming companies say. The EU certainly thinks so.
Yes the article was probably being biased by mentioning "communist" in the title but these guys aren't communist in the same way as Stalin's USSR or North Korea or *shudder* the PRC, which is quickly becoming the latest "bloc." I'm not an apologist for any of the human rights violations in those countries but please realize that any time you mention communist it does not imply human rights violations. I'll soon have to be yelling this about Islamic states too. Studying current events instead of getting your information from FOX news and actually reading some history makes it much harder to stereotype systems of government. The worst the current communists can do in Kerala are massive unannounced strikes and rallies. Its great intending to drive somewhere and getting stuck in one - you will be there a while. The noise about Pepsi and Coke will go away soon either after election time (or some money greases someones hands). Lets not point fingers so easily shall we... theres a good chap.
Theres actually a whole bunch of communist parties in the US that are not defunct though we all know in a real democracy we have only two viable parties.
disclaimer: not communist just very liberal
Remarkably even the Wikis have a discussion page which is basically a forum for the article. Also if you had a specific tech support question which isn't dealt with in the instructions (which you could have on your wiki page) then you are going to have to resort to a forum.
The above is true even if the forums in question don't have a social aspect.
Sorry just a pet peeve but Hindu isn't a language.
Well you know the internet is not a dump truck. Its a series of tubes. And if you put an enormous amount of material... an enormous of material those tubes will be blocked up and if my staff send me an internet yesterday it'll get stuck in the tubes. But its much worse if the tubes are leaky. Your internet may never get to you if you have leaky tubes. If your tubes leak get them tied up.
(ducks)
'/34|-| '/34|-| 54\/\/ 17 7'/P3D 17 d1D|\|7 pR3\/13\/\/ 4|\|D 1 L1|3 pR1/\/\3 |\|U/\/\B3R5 4|\|'/\/\/4'/ :-P
I'd actually ask them to require stricter standards especially at installation
1) Program has option to install in any directory you choose - surprise how many of them lack this even
2) Make start menu and desktop shortcuts wherever you choose - I hate ones that just add three icons to my desktop
3) Make no folders other than in the one they are installed in or that you specify - When Reader 7.0 came out I was constantly deleting that bloody myEbooks crap until I figured out how to stop it.
4) Do not add themselves to startup with windows automatically - I didn't say you could be resident just so that you can pop up your damn app at the slightest click of the mouse. Again bloody Adobe and iTunes do this.
5) Software that requires administrator privleges to install or run needlessly - I'm thinking CoD2
6) Any additional software installed without consent which is not required to run the application - iTunes and Quicktime
7) Any software that changes file associations by itself - give me the option and I will tell you what I'm going to let you open automatically.
7) Anything that does not give you a single entry in the Add Remove Programs List.
These are pretty basic and ought to be good manners as far as software is concerned.
Frankly badware should also include any software that is written poorly and is bloated and uses excessive memory and even things that give you a bloody skin without an option to change back to the default. I've worked hard to keep the classic windows interface with XP and I certainly don't want to see some stupid app like iTunes (or Winamp but there are windows skins) looking however they want without giving me the option to turn it off. I like my boring grey and I'm going to keep it that way.
Yes it is an obsolte buisness model. Mass sales via CDs and DVDs are too, forget just rental. The DRM is not going to stand up forever and all they will have if it proves resilient to attack is a bunch of pissed of consumers.
/. dead opposed to piracy complain that the content will change because of it. I'd say thats probably true and so what...
My own guess is that the only way the music industry is going to make any money are via boxoffice sales to concerts, and special collectors editions which die hard fans will buy not pirate and merchandising. It seems like technology is driving us towards smaller entertainment companies which can act more locally. So yes shrinkage, both in profits and in size. If budgets are smaller they are going to have to be more careful about what content they produce. I think its important to realize that the music industry won't die and the recording industry probably will. We've had the music industry for centuries, recording by contrast is a relatively recent invention and its becoming cheaper to do for the musicians directly. So in a sense all thats happening is that the middle man is being cut out. This will probably also mean less mega bands unless they are so good that they can get across the board popularity.
I think the movie industry will have a harder time in the long term. They are probably going to have to work hard to make the theatre experience a lot more desierable or they will just lose out to home theatre. There is still something to be said for a theatre experience with a bunch of friends. But I don't know if they can survive on box-office alone. You can stil sell DVDs but you've got to target the fans and offer more than just something I can get by downloading the Xvid. I bought the Special edition LOTR discs also for the bookends. The budgets involved are so much larger that I don't think we will see the same type of content for a while. Again if budgets are smaller they will have to become more careful about what content they produce. Until technology becomes simple enough to make blockbuster movies cheap. Funnily enough the answer might be something John Carmack was saying about video games - he thought that for the next generation of games the graphics wouldn't matter so much and the story would matter more.
A lot of the people here on