Posts by Hendala

Conclusive proof of human activity causing glacier to vanish

You are preaching to the wrong people here

Here people will dispute gravity if if means they get to use their GPSes. here the liberals just dispute that climate change is man made, the conservatives deny that it exists, and the crazies try and convince the rest, until we get bored.

Even if you came up with completely watertight proof that consumer society is responsible for climate change you will be trolled out of existance before most el-reg readers will even look at your evidence. A lot of people here actually have investment in the oil industry, or in related companies (which is pretty much all industries these days), and they will absolutely refuse to consider anything that will hinder their cash cow...

Raspberry Pi Linux micro machine enters mass production

I want one...

Until now i wanted Arduino, now i want this instead. I wounder how easy it would be do to your own electronic peripherals with that. Can you attach sensors/leds/motors to it? God I feel like a kid in a toy store.

Bomb threat lobbed at Finnish anti-piracy squad

That wasn't a personal attack on you...

I am not a classical music connoisseur, though I do enjoy listening to it every once in a while...

I thought however that you did have a point, high quality recording studio costs money, and crowed funding isn't always the best solution. I googled for it and found some projects that sound really good here: http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/classical%20music?ref=live

As for your statement about pirates... well, historically some pirates were violent blood thirsty thugs, but more often then not they were actually slaves, the poor and disenfranchised taking over ships and stealing from the rich. One mythical anarchic community which in my uneducated opinion is based on some truth is Libertaria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertatia . According to the legend they used to take over ships and then give the slaves an option of going free or joining their community. this is very different to the cartoon image of a pirates. You have to question who invented the image of a violent pirates in the history books and for what purpose.

About the arts/crafts distinction... I am not sure what you mean exactly. To be a good musician you have to do more then just play the written music in perfect metronomic rate. every note can express some deep emotion, even if you just play from a sheet, the way you choose when and where to bend or stress the notes, you get some leeway. there is merit in perfect technique and no heart, but sometimes in music there is room for awful technique and emotional expression. in my eyes this seems to be more of the art then the craftsmanship. I don't know if you play any instruments, but if you do you probably have some idea what I am talking about.

Now, I sense that you patronise me a little there, you don't know what kinds of music I listen to. in truth, I don't have a favourite genre, not since I was a teenager. but I enjoy new things, I love hearing original compositions ,lyrics, melodies etc. I spend a lot of my weekends in crusty venues around town listening to musicians which you have no chance of hearing if you limit yourself to the filtered realm, and that's fine (as long as it's fine with you). But it doesn't cut it for me.

I play some instruments, but I am not a musician. I am a programmer, a craftsman if you will. I love the idea that at some point, someone will take my nicer pieces of code and reuse them. when I write commercial closed code, I always feel a little disappointed that no one will see it. no one will appreciate all the little personal touches I put in, all the elegant pieces of code which will never be read. My musician friends seem to care a lot more about people hearing their music then about making a profit out of it, and i understand it.

There is more profit in the music biz then selling albums, there's merchandise, there's concerts, there's tabulation books... I am willing to bet that there is still profit in this even without selling a single record. But the profits that big names make are ridiculous. perhaps having a private jet and a mountain of cocaine is too much for what is mostly not even art, but entertainment. large amount of the profit does not go to the people who make the music, but to suits and advertisers.

The problem i have with filtering is that it's the exact opposite of what i am looking for in music. if i want to hear original musicians, I don't want to hear all of the other musicians of the same genre which some automated recommendation mechanism finds for me. I'll be more then happy listening to new music every day scouring what is sometimes just shit but eventually getting to the music that few others have ever heard, but which often beats everything in the charts hands down.

You are right though, this isn't black and white, there is still room for the grey area, if you really love a commercial musician and have downloaded their discography, providing you are honest you would then go and buy an album or a poster as a token. For example, I love Pearl Jam, I have their discography, but I could never afford to buy all of their albums, so I have 3. I love dream theatre (And as a craftsmanship appreciator you might too). I have a few of their albums, but I only ever listen to their torrents. I also love Babar Luck, The Leano and Blakan Beat Box, but these are part of the free culture, and to buy their albums I have to meet them in person in some crummy squat party. I would be much more inclined nowadays to buy their albums then anything in the music store, they deserve the money more, and it goes a longer way for them then Pearl Jam and Dream Theatre. And yes, studio costs money which is exactly why free culture needs more support then the commercial one.

Needless to say, that bomb threats are rarely justifiable, and my right for free-tardism doesn't quite cut it...

The music industry has lost it a long time ago.

I can't remember the last time I bought copyrighted music. I only buy music from small artists who give it for free anyway. The quality of music and original creativity has long been out of the hands of the big music biz. by far the best musicians out there are out there and aren't in HMV.

I see the same thing happening to the movies industry. crowd funding projects are increasing in popularity and quality to the point that they will soon surpass the expensive Hollywood counterparts. The only way i would still listen to shitty American music and watch shitty American sitcoms is if they were free, and I probably would be a better person if I didn't at all.

also, and that's an important point. when you buy a DVD you get it stacked with adverts, the movies have sponsored products in them. if you advertised in the matrix, you only paid ones, but you get a cashflow of revenue for generations to come. I don't see why we need to be squeezed, why we should have to pay for the luxury of being marketed to. more downloading means more advertising revenue for them.

P.S. There's a bomb under your table!

Anonymous: 'We hacked cybercop's email'

Yeah,

'cause the FBI never got anyone killed.

Boffins find new 2012 glyph on 'secret' Mayan brick

You say it now

But in 2012, when we're all dying in agony, we'll be laughing at you, while suffocating from toxic alien volcano ashes. In a last grasp of the remaining air i have, just seconds before the internet goes offline, I will be posting a comment on the register, "I told you so..." as I lay dying I will have the satisfaction of proving that everyone rational was wrong and that i was right.

Than again... if December 22nd will come and go, we'll just choose another date and start all over again. You can't win, the end is nigh!

How Jobs bent reality with LSD, Apple hype

Blasphemy

Burn all copies of this book (Including digital copies)

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

Lies and slander

I refuse to believe that anyone with an IQ of above 80 does an online IQ test.

Diary of a Not-spot: The readers speak

Not sure if this helps,

I can't be arsed to look at all the comments to see if someone suggested this, or if you've read it, but...

http://wndw.net/

this book should have everything you need to know about sorting this out (Wireless networking in the developing world). even if you sort if i recommend you read it, loads of good info there.

Forget SETI, this is how you find aliens: Hefty prof speaks

My theory about intelligence,

OK, it's probably not my own but there you go, this will be a long post.

We're asking all the wrong questions and are looking in the wrong places.

In effect, what we're asking is this:

Are there other biological creatures, that evolved in complex structures, developed technology much like our own, are are speaking a language that is

translatable into English. the answer is: maybe.

however, if we look at intelligence as it's own, it might evolve in countless other ways, intelligence as we define it is simply a system of interactions that can process inputs and produce outputs much like our brains. but this does not have to be biological at all.

a series of well placed crystals for example, one receiving light beams from a nearby sun and reflecting it to the others, in a complex system of diffractions and refractions to produce a variable output at the other end could be considered intelligent, and we might even be able to communicate with it if we translated English into light signals. and this can be naturally occurring, in fact systems like these are a plenty here on earth, and some of them might be intelligent and communicate-able with. I know this sounds like a load of hippie crap, but that point is that abstract intelligence may well be naturally occurring and plentiful, it's just that we're too stubborn to discover them.

I can expand on this theory but this isn't the place for it.

EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system

Funny thing is...

They could of fired the whole top brass, from CEO, boards, and all the execs, save much more money and have NO DIFFERENCE IN QoS!

Ha!

Grenade, why not! :)