What the fuck? One scroll wheel? One? Retarded. Oh, and no Mac driver. This thing may be interesting to some gamers, but I can't see how users of the 3D apps mentioned above wouldn't much prefer a real 6DoF input device.

Wot, a person on a magazine cover touched up a bit? Unthinkable! Actually, once you realise that a few people have crazy amounts of muscle, the guy doesn't really look more surreal than the people on about every other magazine cover.

Looking at the comments, I'm glad I'm not the only one who got the impression that these robot-shaped suckers are actual robots. I'd like modding one of those with a micro-controller, sensors and locomotion, though. Or maybe I'll just trundle off into a corner and pout in disappointment.

Any NBA star can see from the picture above that the holes don't go all the way through. Maybe you should have yourself fitted with electro-occular implants before thinking about boring holes in other peoples' skulls?

Wow, what a stupid ad. I can't say I've ever liked the iPhone, but in this spot it looks so much nicer. It instantly pops up a map while the competitor is loading ... loading ... a simple menu. And the iPhone has a larger screen with a more colourful map. The Instinct just looks utterly unattractive next to it. FAIL.

OTOH, the next step (zooming in) is a little faster on the Instinct, and, hey, props to them for showing it as it is instead of fudging the demo. Still, putting it next to an iPhone makes it look bad; this will be even more so when you see them 'in person', as the Instinct has a rather modest display resolution. I'm not convinced that showing a comparison is a good way of not making it look like a me-too product.

Huh? Customize it is shape?

The wireless tech is worth 5 bucks at most. So the question is: are the earphones themselves worth 93 dollars? If not, wait for some cheaper or better Kleer stuff to come out ... or just use cheap Bluetooth ones. For dinky MP3 player earphones, Bluetooth has enough bandwidth to provide all the audio quality the phones can physically handle. You don't need 48KHz 24bit lossless when your ears can't tell the difference.

I'll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed version of the text of Little Brother

Cory, thank you so much for this! As a starving student, I prefer to read everything as TXT on my PDA and then buy the books I enjoyed the most as gifts for friends or relatives. Being able to do that without infringing copyright or having to circumvent DRM is a joy.

In all honesty, is there such a thing as being "too mean" to a convicted serial killer/multiple murderer?

Sure, but what about the other 'targets'? Were they asked whether they're OK with their private correspondence being published? Not that this is necessarily a big deal, I'd just like to know out of curiosity.

That was it, Rob. Thanks! Of course it's obvious that typing in a single word doesn't make sense with this ... it's just that back then I had no idea what this thing even does :-) Neither the original post nor this one give any indication that you're supposed to click on the Flash object, so I never did.

The only effect I noticed was that the quote's text is rendered worse than in, say, Windows 3.1. With Flash Player set to 'High Quality'. I guess this subconsciously told me to scroll on quickly instead of poking at this mysterious thing that makes my eyes hurt so much.

s/Mii Wii/Wii Mii/

This thing sucks. To me, dual SIM means that I can have two SIMs active at the same time. The "separate voice / data plans" example above makes clear why merely being able to switch is much inferior in comparison: It means that once you're online, no one can call you. This is so 20th century. And just physically swapping out SIM cards isn't that big a deal either.

And of course there's kits actually made for specific phones, which don't require you to bend and possibly break your phone's battery door. Oh, and they'll actually give you dual SIM functionality, instead of the poor ersatz feature described above.

I've noticed the 1:1 'currency conversion' more and more lately, but in my experience it's absolutely not true that this had already been happening when the dollar was actually stronger -- definitely not for devices from US companies. Let's see, we have to ship the stuff across the Atlantic, translate everything into ten different languages, localise some technical aspects too (think wireless frequencies), hire lawyers to adapt the EULAs, and at every step we're going to round up quite a bit, because, oh, Central Europeans are willing and able to pay a bit more, so it'd be stupid not to take advantage of that.

But why is that so? Well, wages are a bit higher, too, over here. So from the European perspective stuff isn't necessarily hugely expensive here, it's just cheaper in the States. Sometimes so much cheaper that it pays off to import US versions and pay the tolls and tax, but often not. It's been like that forever.

Yep, that link is great, but I'll admit it actually came from Noen ;-)

I type in my quote and nothing happens. Boo!

Despite fighting technical difficulties, we were unable to get the individual photos to align properly. This will prevent the photos from stitching together in the correct manner.

With panorama stitching software (even the free, open source stuff) you can properly align hand-held shots with sub-pixel precision. Fully automatically if you want. Solving this by fixing the robot ... well, yeah, it's a possibility ...

Neat! Let me tell you, if you like the above picture, seeing one in person is like whoa. And it's the quarter of the price some people are paying for telephones ... My dream version would have a 1024x768 screen that fills the lid, slightly larger keys that go as far to the edge of the device as possible, and a bit more storage (alternatively, a Firewire connector would also be cool). Next year, maybe?

Of course, in Britain, "not half-bad" means "completely bad."

Actually, yes, it can ... if programmed more competently ;-p

Cory, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the cancellation of your contract, please keep us updated on how it goes.

That post was kind of long, considering it just said "I have received reports of this weird error, and even though I'd been getting that error myself, I hadn't bothered talking to the people who have a clue of what to do about it." Taking users' comments and throwing them away (in a way that doesn't even let them navigate back to their comments with their browser's back button) is super bad; an update declaring the bug fixed is long overdue.

The German version really does make exactly as much sense as the original one. I think automatic translation has a good chance at pulling that off if you manage to put proper punctuation into the transcript, because then you get utterances that are quite short and have simple structure and vocabulary: "You know, I am there to help. We're here to help. My opinion is, look, you're either on board or you're not on board."

It's definitely not Babelfish, though. It would never come up with such consistently correct grammar. And of course 'Gehirnolik' is a joke. As a rule, Babelfish never ever makes anything you could call a 'translation'. It just helps you get the gist.

Off-topic rant: I just wrote a comment with lots of good suggestions, but the site did its "logging you out a second before you hit Post" thing again and when I hit 'back' the text was gone. Only this time I didn't have a copy of the text in the clip-board. Whoops.

I appreciate the little improvements I keep noticing (e.g. the preview feature now works as it should, the order of 'recent posts' on people's profile pages is now correct), but it's all stuff that should have been working properly to begin with, hence the urge to whine a little.

I see, thanks! I'm a native German speaker and didn't know that 'Panzer' is supposed to refer to this specific model. In German it just means 'tank' (actually, the literal meaning is 'armor'), as in "Der amerikanische Sherman-Panzer ist sehr gut." :-)

It's impossible not to see the Mini-Note 2133 as a spiritual successor to the 12-inch Powerbook

A machine just adequate in a sub-notebook role is obviously comparable to a small notebook that could very well serve the task as your capable main machine back when it was new? Bullshit. No, wait, I didn't quite say that right. What I mean is: BULLSHIT!

Looks like a neat competitor to the Eee, though. Considering the device is about the same size, the HP's 9" WXGA display sounds fantastic. It's nice to see that affordable subs are finally becoming a reality. I wonder if Apple are going to offer one this decade.

Can someone please explain the difference between a Panzer tank and a non-Panzer tank?

The hens that lay the eggs I buy in the supermarket have more room than the ones pictured above. Why bother keeping your own when you treat them like this? This sucks.

So, all we need to do it put up cameras everywhere, right?

So, you're saying that potential buyers of this Microsoft product are so stupid that when they compare it to the iPhone, they will see more commonalities than differences? Hmmm ... good point, actually.

Didn't have the time to read the linked article yet, but I'd like to join the ranks of people confirming that WoW is not a violent game. You see, the visual representation on the screen is not a perfect indicator of what the actual gameplay feels like to players. For example, where the uninitiated onlooker sees a brutish Orc clobbering a helpless Dwarf to death with a giant battle-axe, what actually happens in the minds of the players is very similar to rolling some dice after betting on the outcome. Your character may go through a (bloodless, somewhat cutesy) death animation, but it doesn't really die, it just gets teleported back to its hometown and loses some of its equipment.

On the other hand, there are text-based MUDs where your character might fall unconscious for some reason or other, and you could end up helplessly watching as some asshole slits her neck open just to be able to steal the 500 credits in her pocket without the danger of her waking up. And while you are horrified as you realise that you forgot to pay the rent for your clone vat and the character you spent weeks and months building up will be lost forever, to the uninitiated onlooker your screen will look as if you're administrating some web server.

In both cases, you're bound to tense up during the action. But whether you'll relax afterwards or log out completely frustrated depends on factors that aren't obvious to non-gamers at all.

Interesting argument that the elephant is just robotically copying what it sees.

As Jesse already pointed out, there was a misunderstanding here. Being able to make a good copy of what you see in such a highly stylised way would be a sign of high intelligence and tremendous skill. There is no robot (yet) that could do this, and I'm sure there is no animal that could do it. The cognitive skills of apes are roughly comparable to those of human toddlers; I guess a chimp might enjoy abstract painting and might also be able to translate the sight of a physical object into a crude painted representation. But it would never look as good as these elephant paintings; the elephants aren't copying what they see, but repeating strokes they were trained to perform, independently of what the picture is supposed to represent. It's a completely different story.

So if the elephant paints abstractly, it's a circus trick. And if the elephant paints something recognizable, it's a circus trick.

When it's a performance the elephant was explicitely trained to do for the entertainment of spectators, it's a circus trick no matter what. There's a big difference between recognizable to humans and recognizable to elephants. To the 'artist' featured here, the painting shown above is abstract.

Some animals are pretty good at recognizing stylized versions of other animals.

Which enables them to create such art themselves in about the same way in which being able to recognize water taps makes you a plumber.

Elephantastic! Fascinating how precisely and diligently the elephant is working; I hope this is due to a love for tasty treats or maybe even enjoyment of painting, rather than fear of punishment.

he/she is counting (four legs)

The video doesn't demonstrate that, just as a video of a toddler correctly singing all 32 notes of Frère Jacques doesn't demonstrate that the child can count to 32. Since the animal is just executing learned strokes rather than expressing some sort of artistic vision, I doubt it even knows what it's painting, let alone know where the individual legs would be found.

However, I guess it is possible to teach an elephant that it will get a banana when it places exactly four, no more no less, not three, not five or six, holy hand grenades into a basket. (Four shall be the number of the counting. Five thou shall not count, nor thou shall count to three unless thou shall proceed to four. Six is right out.)

Speaking of counting ... Cory, the "lots of cuts" you've seen are two small gaps in the video. May I assume you'd misplaced your eyeglasses and tried a couple of wine glasses instead? Not that I'm diagreeing, though, it is kind of hard to see what's really going on. Might be three gorillas in a rubber suit.

observing and translating images in her minds eye to the canvas

The video doesn't demonstrate that either, as others have pointed out already.

This elephant is truly self-aware and conscious in the manner we are.

Neither can this be observed. You can train an industrial robot arm to make such a picture. (Some can be programmed by grabbing the business end and moving it around, as opposed to using computer code.) And it's obvious that industrial robot arms are not self-aware, let alone conscious in the manner we are.

Elephants suck at photoshop.

They're OK as freelancers; just don't pay them by the hour. They're a bit slow. You see, they can't use most of the keyboard shortcuts.

I have a question that's not in this post. (And I'm late to the party and hoping it'll still be read by Teresa or someone even though I'm #400 or so ...)

Concerning the "lookitthat icon": is it OK to use that on comments that are perfectly fine, but contain a correction that ought to be incorporated into the relevant post? Every once in a while, I spot a post on bb that contains a blatant mistake (typically a minor one, but not always), even though it's already 12 hours old or more and the comments already have a correction. Before there were comments and moderators and stuff, I would just e-mail the bber who made that post, and often I got very friendly and grateful replies. But sometimes that poster just doesn't have time, while someone else might be willing to have a look, but I certainly don't want to spam all of you guys.

There's wonderful guidelines about how to get a story submitted and (now also) how to behave in the comments, but what's the recommended SOP for suggesting improvements? Is it OK to use the eye icon on a relevant comment for that? And, extrapolating from there, is it OK to use it on your own comment?

I think it's great how you make updates to stories in order to make them reflect the latest state of your knowledge; I'd just like to know what would be most convenient for you guys when someone wants to help out with that and push the quality of bb even a little bit further.

Sure, it's funny (if you like to laugh at people making asses of themselves in a terribly annoying way), but how is it amazing?

I was still thinking, "Do we have to call this a suicide robot? It's just a remotely triggered gun on a tripod," when I saw Fox News' headline:

Australian Man Gunned Down in Driveway by Killer Robot

OK, suicide robot seems pretty accurate to me, actually! Maybe next time link to coverage of the story on a site that isn't written for idiots?

has completely captured the ethos and spirit of the average Mac user

So what is the ethos and spirit of the average Mac user? Singing in public even though you suck at it?

There are some silly opinions in the comments above, and who cares, overall the discussion is headed in a good direction, I think you guys are getting somewhere here. But one paragraph stood out as particularly misinformed to me:

Projectors don't hit the lumen ratings they are speced for (they usually are on the order of 300-500 lumens) and even that is overkill for well designed home theater. The SMPTE standard for cinema screens is 15 lumens. That's not a typo.

Well, yeah, it's more of a thinko. You're saying that home projectors are orders of magnitude brighter than cinema projectors? Let's do some research here.

The SMPTE standard for cinema screens is so-and-so many candela per square metre (well, whatever non-metric equivalent you have in the US), i.e. it's about how much light any particular area of the screen is giving off, not about how much light is coming out of the projector. Which makes a lot of sense; having the brightest lamp in town doesn't mean much when you've got a crappy screen that swallows half of the projected light. Also, when you have a larger screen, people are (on average, at least) sitting farther away, so even though you have more square feet of illuminated area, each square foot still has to be just as bright as on a smaller screen for the same total amount of light reaching the viewer. Therefore, bigger screens require brighter projectors. A really big screen doesn't require a projector with 15 lumens, but tens of thousands of lumens.

What is Black Tech and why should we blog about it?

But seriously: what is niggaknow doing on that list?

Gorgeous! If only it wasn't so long 'til July. I want to run out, buy a DS and see if I can't homebrew something similar before then.

From Dictionary.com: peo·ple [...] 11. animals of a specified kind: the monkey people of the forest.

OK, of several different possible meanings, this is number 11 (in that particular dictionary); however, in the sentence "chimps aren't people", the meaning of 'people' is not this number 11. I.e. your citation proves nothing, and if you think it is relevant to the discussion, you're simply wrong. I don't have an opinion on how subjective semantics in general are, but in this case it's a quite obvious objective fact that this dictionary citation is irrelevant to the discussion.

Having said that, I do think it's worth considering whether a simple, binary distinction between human rights and animal rights is optimal. Apes are intelligent enough to cooperate with humans; this fact alone should make it clear that they should be treated differently than, say, small insects. But they definitely aren't equal to humans, hence not people.

Seattle! Ahahahaha! Stop it, you’re killing me!

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought "that's not a monkey."

arte makes very cool things, but as Nixar (#9) said, they are rather restricrtive when it comes to putting their videos on the web. I'm in Austria and can receive the German version of arte, but their web site locks me out of much content that is free to view for Germans. Most of the restrictions are probably not because arte themselves suck that much, but because of licensing agreements they more or less have to make. Still, I would find it better if their policy was to either provide a VOD to everyone or no one, instead of just to Windows users. Using tax-payer money to help cementing a near-monopoly is an extremely bad idea.

Secondly, I'm more than comfortable with translating between English and German. Would anyone like to make English subtitles? I don't have the time to do this by myself, but I'd like to help ... if someone has ambitions, maybe set up a project wiki and post a link here?

Lastly, Me's post #13 above is off topic, but, yeah, indeed, what's up with that vanished story? Is there some benign explanation? I don't believe the bbers are too cool for apologising for mistakes ... or are they?

The name is so weird because it is a pun on "Satellitenschüssel", which means satellite dish.

OK, so maybe theoretically this could be fake, but if I was faking it, I would make the screen span the entire width of the lid (minus the rims dictated by technical limitations of course) instead of putting in this measly 8.9" screen. This screen is a joke.

For those who don't speak German, "Ueberwachenden" is literally "hyper-attentive", the German idiom for a smothering micro-managing personality.

No, it doesn't mean that at all, and this idiom you speak of doesn't exist. It is possible to read the connotation of über=hyper and wachend=attentive into the word, and you might get this subtlety across by making the work bold, italic, larger, and red, with a hyphen in the middle, but ordinarily 'Überwachende' just means 'surveillers' and there is absolutely no connection to micro-management either way, no matter how much you try to force it.

Of course it's right that (former) citizens of East Germany would assign an inherently negative meaning to this otherwise completely neutral term, but it's nowhere near 'Big Brother' and it isn't really a euphemism. I'll try to explain this with an analogy: If strawberries were deadly traps to you because you are allergic, the term 'strawberry' wouldn't become a euphemism just because of that (even though others connect it with pleasant connotations).

I just came back to this post because I was looking something up, and I noticed this gem:

I know our Burle (commercial-grade) parking lot camera gets a blank spot with repeaters in it like the example image

The 'repeaters' are called lens flare.

when there's too much IR. I doubt an IR LED would be bright enough, though. It's usually a result of a direct reflection of sunlight off a car window.

Ooh, yeah, if you filtered out the IR light, surely you'd get a perfectly resolved mirror image of the sun; looking at the sun with a camera only produces a bright spot because there's too much IR! Thanks for explaining that! So, children, next time parts of a photograph are overexposed due to reflections from the sun, just screw on an IR filter and everything will be fine ... it's not like the sun is actually, you know, bright as fuck or anything.

There only is one tool for making photoshopped images.

At first it seems like there is no way a treadmill like this could be built, because the plane could easily roll forward. So most people at first seem to understand that the plane can't move from a symantic point of view, but don't understand how this would be possible from a physical point of view.

It only "can't move" in the sense of "oh no, it can't move, because as soon as it does, my idiotic interpretation of the question stops making any sense whatsoever and falls apart" -- as opposed to "it can't move because some physical force is holding it in place." The solution is not that you have to rewrite the laws of physics so that they conform to some moronic, err, sorry, "symantic" point of view. Rather, the solution is that your interpretation of the question is plain wrong. You can prove any statement from false axioms, but it's an exercise in senselessness.

I imagine you could argue, "oh, no, I'm not talking about the same thing everyone else is talking about, instead I'm thinking of this super treadmill, which is defined to hold everything on it stationary." But surely that's not the case; firstly this would be a magic device and wouldn't have anything to do with the laws of physics, and secondly having trouble with explaining how the plane stays in place when it is defined to do so would be quite embarrassing ;-)

Xeni, Antville is a blog hosting service (one of the best in the world, but still not responsible for the above-linked post); videos.antville.org is just one of many sites hosted there. Please correct!

Actually, made-up people are usually seen much more frequently on TV than in reality ;-p

I have heard of Auratones and other stuff that was popular in past years (e.g. AM car radios), but, as you said yourself, you check your mix on such stuff; you're never supposed to use them to do the actual work of mixing etc. What was it again that was incorrect about my post above? I can't find the part where I suggested you can't "mix to the Auratones"; I only explained exactly the statement you quoted above.

I've read about engineers who claim to mix with mp3 in mind, though I don't know of any concrete step they've taken that would actually make sense, so I can't comment on that. It hasn't got anything to do with near-field monitors anyways; there was a misconception about those and I attempted to clear that up; I hope that this time I actually succeeded at doing so :-)

If you care about the unwashed masses hearing am acceptable approximation to your intended sound, Auratone-style checks totally make sense, though; nice that you mentioned that, it's a good addendum to what I had to say.

Exactly, some interpretations don't make any sense; it is not true that with "the Boing Boing question" or "the NY Times blog question" the plane can't take off. It can always take off as long as it's possible to give an answer at all.

Also, these monitors are usually used to emulate "cheap home speakers," thus the slogan, "If Your Mixes Sound Good on These, They Sound Good on Anything."

This is utter bullshit. (I'm putting it bluntly because it's very important, not because I fancy being a prick.) Each model of low-quality speakers is inferior and defective in a different way and will screw up your mix in a different way, which will sound like shit on most speakers except for the exact same model you used. Therefore, the idea of using bad speakers in order to achieve a mix that "works everywhere" is pure stupidity; it doesn't work.

Monitors do not "emulate 'cheap home speakers'", they are designed to be as flat and transparent as possible, so you can hear as much detail as possible, which is the only way to give you all the information you need to make the perfect mix. This goal is not quite the same as making speakers that sound good, hence those for your home stereo are made a little differently.

Imagine you use crappy speakers for mixing that have zero output in the 10-30Hz range. You might include hum and floor rumble that annoys the heck out of everyone with a proper stereo, without even suspecting something might be wrong, because you never had a chance to hear the problem yourself.

"If Your Mixes Sound Good on These, They Sound Good on Anything."

Nice slogan, but it doesn't apply to cheap, low-quality speakers, and good monitors certainly don't emulate cheap speakers.

Mark, measuring the colours in CMYK space is not so good, because different combinations of CMYK values can add up to the same colour. RGB or HSB would be better, firstly because of that, and secondly because in RGB you'd see that the individual values are identical (disregarding the tiny aberrations caused by artefacts) and in HSB you'd see that saturation is 0.

Take a look at the brown tile in the center of the top face and the yellow tile in the center of the side facing slightly to the left. They're the same color.

Wot? The yellow tile ... (there's five of them ...) Oh! You mean the ORANGE tile! Well, yeah. Brown is essentially a dark orange, or, as a painter or colour theorist would say, a shade of orange (a shade is some colour mixed to some extent with black, as opposed to tints, which are colours mixed with white), which makes perfect sense when you look at the picture and see how the orange tile is in the shadow, shaded, while the brown ones are in bright light.

Wow, if this works with cycling as well, this would be one of those rare products I've been wanting so long (pretty exactly 10 years in this case) that I'd already forgotten I've been wanting it.

Err, sorry, I meant whether the CD check ever helped against piracy or not.

And is there really anyone still playing W3 after all these years who didn’t apply an unofficial no-CD crack long ago?

Yup, here. But not because I'm using CDs, but because I'm on a Mac and have always used images, like #2 has explained. I've bought WC3: RoC and TfT here in Austria and it turned out that the German voice-acting is a bit meh, so I copied images of the English version from a friend. Blizzard is really nice about this, the keys (technically serial numbers) you get with the game aren't region locked, so you can do this without a problem. Now I can enjoy better actors and am used to the original names for units and buildings, so I don't have to constantly mentally translate when playing online and chatting with my team about what's going on.

If the companies believed that the disc-checks were pointless and did nothing to prevent piracy, they'd see no reason to release the patch.

WTF? This doesn't make sense. The purpose of the patch is not to encourage piracy, right? So why can the patch only be released if unpatched installs are easier to 'pirate'?

The patch was released because unpatched installs are more of a pain in the ass. There are some reasons for releasing it later, and some reasons for releasing it earlier, and at some point in time they balance out and the patch is released -- whether it ever helped against piracy or not.

#4 is right on the money. You have to get the relative positions between the speakers and your head right, otherwise everything else is pointless. Once you've set the speakers up following the good advice above, the next thing you should probably do is hook them up properly, i.e. not to the laughable headphone jack on your notebook. Some sort of external audio interface should be right for you; FireWire is popular, but if you just want to output 2 channels and not record much, USB 2.0 should be just fine as well.

I have my doubts about whether this giant turbo-plane would ever fly, ...

Uh-oh ... ;-)

Just hopping in to reply to posts above where I was addressed directly; I'm assuming I'm not adding oil to the fire here as the discussion seems to have petered out with the correct arguments prevailing.

There is this guy Nex, who like you above says the same thing over and over again, just like what you say in the last paragraph above, but persists in providing no justification that alas, poor old me can understand.

Sorry, I hadn't seen this until now. It's already been dealt with in the meantime, but I would like to say that I've always tried to give meaningful answers to meaningful questions. But here all we have is this:

Engines provide forward motion A, transferred to wheels. A=A Conveyer moves backward. -A A-A = 0 Is A the motion of the plane, the same as A the motion of the wheels. Explain.

What could there possibly be to explain here? You've defined that the conveyor moves backwards as fast as the plane moves forward. Backwards is exactly the opposite direction as forwards, so of course the sum of these speeds is 0 and the magnitude of difference is 2A. So? This is just what we've been saying all along, what is it supposed to demonstrate? To answer the question: No, A is not the motion of the plane, it is the speed of the plane. No, A is not the motion of the wheels, it is the speed of the wheels. Yes, the speed of the wheels equals the speed of the plane. What in the world is there left to justify?

Besides, I've explained and justified every point that was challenged (except for rare occasions where I'd made a mistake, which I've always admitted openly and quickly), to the point of repeating what others and myself have said, so if there was a lack of understandable statements, it was certainly not for lack of trying. I certainly can't give a satisfying answer where I don't see a coherent question to begin with.

The planes velocity is zero. It will stay at zero velocity until the engines are turned on. Now, due to the imaginary, hypothetical conveyer belt, any forward motion generated - and that forward motion is first applied to the body of the plane, then transmitted to the wheels - is automagically negated

The wording is poorly chosen again (if the plane remains perfectly stationary, then how can forward motion be generated?), and there still is no explanation for how the belt is supposed to do the trick of holding the wheels in place. As long as it isn't shown that this could possibly work, there's no evidence that this interpretation even makes sense, hence there's no reason to pick this interpretation (belt holds plane in place) over others (e.g. belt speed matches plane speed, but in opposite direction) that certainly do make sense.

Please just please just please tell me how the premise of the question (that the wheels and treadmill spin at the same speed) can hold true if the plane takes off.

Wheels and treadmill spinning at the same speed are not the premise of the question. I'd have to say more to completely explain and justify this statement, but you can read all of that above and over on kottke.org, so I'll avoid being chided again for redundantly repeating stuff that had already been said over and over again and again and just say that natural language often has blanks you must fill in by interpolating intelligently. When you assume that the belt always has to spin just as quickly as the wheels spin, but in the opposite direction, you've filled in a blank with random nonsense, which invalidates the assumption.

Doug Rogers, you essentially said that the conveyor belt can hold the wheels in place by holding the wheels in place. That's circular reasoning, not an explanation.

> "So, does Newton's Law of Motion apply here?"
>> "Newton's Laws always apply."
> "Correct. Which one?"
All of them. They are consistent with each other and complement each other. If you examine them one at a time and manage to come to different conclusions each time, you're doing it wrong.

Splendid! I hope RoBo and his helpers will make many more bbtv episodes.

The plane on a treadmill question is [...] The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels

No! It matches the speed of the plane. That's the actual, original question, which the Mythbusters tackled.

Can you please stop saying that the treadmill cannot counteract the thrust of the engines?

It doesn't really matter, because it's wrong to assume the belt is even supposed to counteract the thrust of the engines. Of course the plane won't take off any longer if you change the experiment around enough. But why specify a real-world plane with realisticly powered engines, but below it an arbitrarily strong super-conveyor from fantasy land? You could just as well require the plane to be fitted with cement shoes.

But you have an intelligent surface here which detects motion and acts against it, negating any motion of the wheels.

How would it do that? Grab the wheels and glue them in place?

So, does Newton's Law of Motion apply here?

Newton's Laws always apply.

Actually, the important bit is "over a similar LCD TV"; take the price of such a device and add "no more than 200" to it.

(Yeah, Cpt. Obvious couldn't resist :-)

Never mind, Joel, I get it now. I've spent too much time hanging around professionals who use top-of-the-line Macs to their full potential; the E-Monitor would be a rather useless toy to them. So I was thinking, which potential E-Monitor buyer would have ever considered getting an iMac? The big mistake I made was that I forgot that entry-level iMacs are actually rather more affordable. So for those who just desire a slick, compact all-in-one desktop model ... yeah. I'm still not sure whether Apple has to be concerned about losing market share in that segment. Is the form factor of a non-portable machine really such a big deal that people will make that decision before deciding on an operating system? I'm not convinced, but I concede the basic idea is not utterly wrong.

I also quite like the E-Monitor concept (I don't want one, but I can think of many types of people for whom it could be great); it's positioned in an entirely different market than the iMac, though. The linked announcement just describes the form factor as iMac-like, which is correct, but "Asus Takes Aim at iMac" is utterly wrong.

Hmm, pretty hard to come up with a message that starts with 'forgave' or ends with 'retrieve' ... but possible, of course.

PS I couldn't read all the posts, hopefully I didn't repeat what too many others have said.

You repeated plenty of points made by those who are utterly wrong. I tend to think there are too many of those.

I love it when laypeople try to apply logic where physics is wanted.

Why would any sane person attempt to think logically when the problem is a matter of physics? How in the world could that possibly be of any help? Seriously, though, you can only get your physics knowledge to work on the solution once you've understood the problem, and if you applied some logical thinking to the problem's wording, you'd discover that it doesn't have any unambiguous meaning and the breadth of your physics knowledge doesn't really matter at all.

Also see: shipmentoffail.com.

I like how it looks like a cigarette in the preview still.

there may be a flaw in this system that I haven't seen, but that the way it looked to work when I saw it

Dman, I also thought there's something missing from the story. I noticed that the scenarios you made up involve finding an abandoned trolley. Once you have that and are at the store, it's already worth the deposit to you, just redeem it by putting the cart back where it belongs. And note that the sign doesn't forbid this, so it's actually not against being nice to the store by bringing back 'lost' carts. And why would the kids wait around for a 'buyer' before they get their coin and can go buy some candy? I think the reason is that they have found some cheap substitute token that will unlock the carts, maybe some foreign coins or just some sort of washer. By posting the sign above and wording it like that, the store does a service to shoppers by helping them avoid the scam (and maybe also to itself by lowering the rate of complaints about it), without being overly obvious, which just might give people ideas ...

The problem states that the conveyor belt matches the speed of the wheels, only in reverse.

No, it doesn't. The original problem doesn't say so at all, and the bastardised version doesn't mean anything, it's gibberish. (As I've conclusively explained before, see above.)

An important part of 'critical thinking word problems' is comprehending the meaning of the words. This is tricky when there is no sensible meaning and you're trying hard to interpret the question in a meaningful way. proper critical thinking gets you there, though.

Just two days until the mystery will be revealed once and for all, and still another discussion erupts ... I'm surprised, but I very much suspect that I shouldn't have been.

Once again, quite a few people here are confused. Maybe that's because they've never seen the actual airplane-on-a-treadmill brain-teaser, but instead the bastardised nonsense version that was previously featured on bb.

Back then, I said:

[...] Pogue is not just wrong, but so majorly confused that he disqualified himself from having an opinion about this subject. [...] [In the section I'm leaving out here I mentioned that I don't think Pogue is a complete idiot, btw.] if we rule out interpretations that don't make any sense to begin with, there are only two scenarios: The speed of the conveyor belt's upper surface, with respect to the ground the belt is sitting on, will match the speed of the plane, with respect to the same ground, in one direction or the other, so the wheels will either turn twice as fast or not at all. In either case, the conveyer belt will have only a minimal impact on the movement of the air above it. No matter in which direction it moves, the plane's airspeed will hardly change, thus [...]

If you're interested and don't mind a spoiler, go to the original bb story and read the full version of my explanation, quoted under the heading "Nex says". If you want no spoiler at all, you should have stopped reading about 10 lines above :-) If you want just a little hint: I'm quite sure my explanation is correct, because I've posted it to several lenghty forum threads chock full with people who enjoy logic puzzles, and no one ever refuted it, though some actual pilots (or so they said) did try. And lo and behold, Mr. Savage says "the pilot guessed wrong." I think that's a bit scary, actually.

Nope, BlogJet just lets you prepare posts in a way that is meant to be user-friendly (and it probably is, I just haven't tried it), and submit them to your blog. What's desired is a way of migrating from one blogging software (i.e. the server-side stuff!) to another one and have the new site behave exactly like the old one (i.e. all content, including tags and whatnot, is carried over 1:1, and even the URLs are still exactly the same, so no links are broken).

safe for work areas ;-)

If this article makes you say "this is why i like working with ", you haven't understood the article ...

"Export to Atom, import from Atom." is a good start, but not a comprehensive solution. Well, yes, import tools ... there's a problem with adding automatic conversion stuff to import/export tools: You're overcoming a sort of impedance mismatch between different systems, and that rarely works perfectly. So with each additional migration, a few small things become a wee bit more unsightly (using some 'neutral intermediate language' would add even more steps and therefore wouldn't exactly help here). And the oldest parts of your archives, which you want to keep around but not actively maintain any longer, slowly degrade. Hence the very sensible suggestion from Matt to store everything in a format that is compatible with multiple tools without such conversions.

When you present this idea to the maker of some major blogware, they'd certainly recognise that it is a good one, but they might still be wary of implementing it. Here's why: coming up with a comprehensive, all-encompassing solution takes time and effort, hence money and resources that could be spent on improving just your software. And once you've rolled it out, nothing stops your competitors from reading your lovingly crafted, detailed documentation of this new open standard and implementing only the import side of it. So now your users have the option of easily becoming their users, but not vice versa. It just seems a bit dangerous to be the first one to move.

As if people reading Boing Boing are afraid of body mod articles.

Straw-man argument.

You are hiding being phony regard for the foreskin to mask your real self.

Irrelevant ad-hominem. Well, I won't pretend that I understood that part entirely, are you using Babelfish to translate from Looney to English?

Because you know, we're the ones without the dick-cheese.

The old tactic of "if I repeat this bullshit often enough, people will start believing it sooner or later". Multiple posters already ripped this silly view apart and you're offering no counter-argument whatsoever.

Kids grow up. And have sex.

This, again, doesn't address the above arguments in the least.

WHO and others are saving lives with their projects.

Yes, by improving the quality and safety of donor blood, vaccinations etc., which helps orders of magnitude more than circumcision. And as far as circumcision goes, they actually have an intelligent, differentiated stance on that, which regards not only how much the procedure can help, but also what it won't achieve -- as opposed to the knee-jerk ramblings of some idiot who's grasping for straws because he can only be self-confident about the appearance of his Lord Helmet if he gets everyone to agree that foreskin is icky.

You couldn't argue your way out of a paper bag ...

I do think it is unproductive and silly to put male circumcision into the same pigeonhole as severe mutilation of female genitals that results in a lifetime of pain and misery. (Though I'm not assuming this was the intent of #11.) I fully agree with #2.

However, there is no good reason to do it to infants who have no way of forming their own opinion on the subject matter and give consent. The smegma argument is FUD. If you're a normal, healthy man with hygienic habits that aren't too far below average, you'd never find out smegma even exists if no one told you. Yes, if you're a filthy pig, foul smelling stuff will accumulate on parts of your body. If you're in that situation, having a bit more foreskin than strictly necessary isn't one of your major problems. It's certainly not a problem for children in developed countries, so why not at least wait and do the procedure later, with proper (local) anaesthetisation? The HIV argument is also bullshit. Infants don't have sex. Even for adults, the advice is dubious. What some organisation recommends for sub-Saharan Africa isn't necessarily true for you. And imagine you really live in an area where there's a 50% chance of you becoming infected with a disease which is a guarantee for an early, yet protracted and extremely painful death? Assuming these studies will turn out to be correct (there have been other studies saying that circumcision _increases_ the risk of becoming infected), would you really think, "oh, since I happen to be a heterosexual adult male, I'll cut the risk of acquiring HIV through sex down to a third, and then it'll be totally acceptable"? Or would you rather take proper precautions and cut the risk down to practically zero? Granted, the latter isn't always easy when your access to condoms is limited, but safer sex is the only effective solution, and when you practice it, the presence or absence of some foreskin becomes pretty much irrelevant.

Presenting these flawed arguments seems like grasping for straws to me. The allegation of religious bigotry is mean and completely unfair name-calling with no rational justification. Just because someone wishes to choose for himself which parts of his body he'd like to have cut off, that person isn't necessarily afraid of anything, and it certainly doesn't make one an anti-Semite or Muslim-hater. Stop trolling or STFU, plskthx.

the action of its motion is pure incredibly awesomeness

The awesomeness may be pure and incredible, but it's not of a quality or quantity worth 15,000 Euros ;-)

#5 POSTED BY SANTOS:

Ha ha! Those of you afraid of getting "cut" can suffer foul smelling smegma for the duration of your lives. Circumcision is saving people from AIDS in Africa. Way to spread FUD.

You better pay attention to Santos, he's an expert on spreading FUD.

Thanks, Shai! Meanwhile I've seen other sources confirming that iPhones using Skyhook evaluate signal strength; Skyhook claim an accuracy of 20m, which is quite impressive when it works.

Maybe the huge discrepancies noticed by Davy are due to nasty people like me who take their hotspot with them when they travel? However, ideally only the iPod Touch would fall into such a trap; an iPhone could do sanity checks against cell location data. *shrugs*

Are WiFi hotspots really used for triangulation? (As opposed to just compiling a list of hotspots from which you get a signal.) I have no idea where to get such info, so if someone would linkslap me, I'd be most grateful.

I don't think you're actually supposed to learn anything – at least I hope so. For example, in a real tutorial, showing the lasso technique without also mentioning the patch tool would be criminally insane. Of course you still can learn stuff – if you suck at Photoshop :-p

I won't use the Greasemonkey script because I've tried similar tools (like ignore lists in chat rooms) and they never worked, at least not to my satisfaction. They fail because very often people who you don't want to add to your shitlist will somehow react or refer to a hidden comment, so either you're halfway through their contribution when you realise that you're just wasting your time because you can't make any sense of it, or you do want to make sense of it and have to go back and disinter and read the censored comment after all.

Moderator Teresa has similar problems:

The sockpuppets were in the thick of several discussions, and I don't want to falsify the record.

I commend your ambition for preserving the record, and I also fully agree with the sock puppet rule, and am glad that you're making an effort to enforce it. However, the disemvoweling is completely inappropriate. Disemvoweling is an adequate tool for calming down flame wars between a small group of people having a frenetic back-and-forth argument. You greatly slow down the speed with which they can read the comment, and thus delay their reply, which gives everyone an opportunity to think some more before posting, instead of instantly posting a compulsive reply. This discussion does fall into that category. There are many more readers than commenters. Thus, your disemvoweling is mainly harming innocent bystanders. If I may express my frustration with the practice in such an inappropriate context: This fucking sucks. Usually I would have skimmed across Adamdma's comment and forgotten all about it quickly, but I was forced to read it deliberately and I ended up paying more attention than I should have.

Maybe you can convince the tech guys to implement a better solution? E.g. hiding the comment and only showing it to people who insist on reading it? Or maybe continue to use the disemvowelling technique, but wrap those comments in a div tag with class "ungoodthink", so we can use a Greasemonkey script to remove them completely? ;-)

So its my understanding that perpetual motion using interactions between small magnets has been shown to be impossible?

Yep. There are several kinds of perpetual motion machines that work, which is why we can run our washing machines and stoves and heating systems and cars for free. But the designs with magnets don't work. Especially not with small magnets.

It is a vast improvement over the source material by virtue of being over in 5 minutes, but gold it is not. Maybe it would help to further cut it down until nothing is left. After all, they say silence is golden.

Attempting to play the video crashed both Safari and Flock (pretty much the same as fx tech-wise, just like Camino) for me, but I had no problem downloading it and playing it in QuickTime player. (No idea when or what for I'd installed the DivX plugin for QuickTime, but typically not remembering means that it went quick and was no hassle at all. I guess if I hadn't installed that, VLC would have played the vid anyways?) The crashing was kind of not-so-nice (though by no means Joel's fault) and I would have much preferred an mp4 or something, but if the only available options for linking to are a DivX version and a YouTube version, I find it absolutely acceptable and defensible to choose the former. Pretty much anything is better than YouTube.

Bullshit, plenty of people want to program for consoles. Among the hackers I know, handhelds (e.g. Nintendo DS) are particularly attractive nowadays, as it's pretty nifty to work on a platform you can put in your pocket and take everywhere. Yes, doing something sophisticated is hard work, usually a bit harder than on platforms where amateur developers are supported very generously (e.g. GNU/Linux), but that doesn't mean that no one wants to do that. To many hackers, the added challenge is part of the fun. If hard work was only done for profit, no one would make a PC from '81 play full-screen video, write quines in Brainfuck, or solve tricky Su Dokus.

It's certainly true that for every hacker who is genuinely interested in pulling off nifty stuff on proprietary gaming hardware, there are at least hundreds or thousands of other people who use 'unlocking' code for playing backups or plain illegitimate copies. But that doesn't mean that guerilla development is but an alibi for 'piracy', and 'homebrew' is certainly not a code word for large-scale copyright infringement or profiteering. It's very common among hackers to think, "Now that I have this nifty gadget, I'd like to write my own software for it."

What's a DMCA video, and why is this one anti-Canadian? ;-p

I guess where #4 references #2, she/he means #3 ;-) I can sort of understand both standpoints. The interviews are interesting to watch, but you only get insightful conclusions if you draw them yourself. Actually they aren't so much interviews as monologues; there are no hard questions, no investigation. It's also quite one-sided; I wouldn't say there is an interview with Dan Glickman; it's rather like snippets of what he had to say were used to the end of piracy apologetics. The film explains quite lucidly and eloquently that it's impossible to stop file sharing (at least in a free society). While your typical bb reader already knows all that, of course, this is a powerful message that many people should see. But related topics that would also be interesting -- e.g. what should and shouldn't be shared, which consequences this change in culture could have, what's right and what's wrong, how policies should be changed -- are barely touched. It's a bit shallow.

One thing I found peculiar: They show one "Sebastian Lütgert" of "Pirate Cinema" (who's part of the Steal This Film team AFAICT), and less than 30 seconds after that scene, they show the exact same guy and label him "Robert Luxemburg, Artist." What gives, does he represent a different opinion when he's wearing his artist's hat and therefore must be considered a different person?

Sorry for the very long comment, I hope to clear up some misunderstandings here.

[Christopher, #21] But who the hell uses 128 bit encoding anymore, other than 8 year olds?

Their parents, and everyone else who happens to have software with modest default settings and has doesn't change them. There's a great number of such people; most users simply have no clue what bitrate, sampling rate, bit depth and quantization are exactly. Luckily some GUIs for encoders offer a slider that simply goes from "OK audio quality, small files" to "excellent audio quality, larger files", but when all you want to do is listen to your CDs on your crappy computer speakers or MP3 player, you don't have an incentive to even crank that slider up.

People who prepare rips for P2P are a different story, but I can't imagine the producers quoted in the above-linked article were thinking about P2P. At least that's the charitable explanation; the alternative is that they're idiots who really think that when some 1337 warez d00d prepares a 256kbits VBR MP3, it'll sound any worse than the original CD.

[Christopher, #21] And always always use standard stereo rather than joint, and always a static rate, not variable.

Could you please explain why? Joint stereo and VBR both are tricks to make files smaller at the same sound quality, provided your encoder is up to handling the slightly more sophisticated encoding technique. Are you saying that the developers of, say, LAME are so incompetent that they can't implement that correctly, or just that your MP3s sounded worse when you played with these settings? I suspect that you'd overlooked something and didn't do a fair comparison. For example, when you encode two separate channels at 200kbps each, you've actually got 400kbps, which may well sound superior to 200kbps joint stereo in demanding situations. But I have absolutely no idea what could have caused you to find CBR better.

[#22, Strangelow] If the technology changes and you need to revisit things, remaster it again.

Yeah, right, when the SACD format became available, all the studios remastered half of their catalogs, and all the consumers ran out to purchase SACD players and all the albums they already had ... That's nonsense, music lovers who care about audio quality mostly listen on OK systems that sound pretty much as the band/producer intended, and they expect the mastering to complement the music instead of being horribly distorted. On the other hand, the 'mastering tricks' the Rolling Stone article talks about are directed at the much larger audience of people who just want something they like playing in the background while they work, drive, play, read, jog, under suboptimal circumstances. They're meant to boost short time CD sales. In ten years, no one will say, gee, I sure wish they'd remaster that old Avril Lavigne album for holosurroundovision! And to the people with OK stereos, the stuff they're ripping to Flac right now will still sound just as good in 10 years.

[#26, Robin Hood] ugh, storage space and bandwidth have become cheap. We should be moving to flac files, not taking all the dynamics out of the mix for mp3s.

Your advice is good, but you've fallen victim to the myth that is being perpetuated here: That dynamic range compression, the main subject of the article, has got anything to do with mastering for the specific failings of the MP3 format (as opposed to the failings of the systems through which MP3s are typically heard; which don't change simply beacuse you switch to Flac). There is absolutely no relation. MP3s handle dynamic range just fine, especially the kind mentioned in the article: having different parts of a track at different volume levels. MP3 handles that perfectly.

[#33, Doctor Popular] If I was releasing an album on vinyl, cd, and online, I would definitely have three different mixes.

That is a fallacy that is widely spread, but it's still wrong. CDs and digital formats can handle any audio signal with a fidelity that is good enough for most listening purposes. Vinyl has some limitations, but they aren't all that great for a brand-new record on a good system. Mixing for a worn-out, dusty record playing on your grandparents' stereo is silly, as you're destroying the sound for all the listeners in the aforementioned situation -- and these are the ones that actually care about audio quality! What's at issue here is not the fidelity of the different storage formats, but, for example, as another poster mentioned, that you can't make out low kick drum sounds on tinny notebook speakers. You can compensate for that in the studio, but the storage format hardly enters into that equation. The fallacy is this: When producers listen to their tracks on a bass-tard car stereo or a 10$ Chinese MP3 player, they just do that to check how it sounds. However, they don't do their actual work in that manner. They use amps and speakers with the flattest possible frequency response, so they can hear what the audio actually sounds like. It is actually not possible to deliberately use crappy speakers in order to make the music sound OK on all crappy speakers. Instead, using crappy speakers to do your work means you can't hear all the details of what you're doing, and that leads to a worse sound. You make mistakes without knowing it, e.g. you'll never catch that nasty 50Hz hum that'll annoy the heck out of all owners of good systems who actually care about fidelity. But, on the other hand, not all sub-par speakers are flawed in the same way, so, apart from degrading the quality of your recording, you're doing nothing about increasing anyone's listening experience, except for the tiny minority of listeners who happen to have the same crappy system you used.

[#38, D3] In comparison to the vinyl, the CD sounded thin, insubstantial, kind of transparant, no "oomph". The record had sounded rich, solid, and more "there". We were puzzled as to why the more advanced CD with it's greater capabilities just didn't sound as good as the record. After reading the article I'm starting to understand why.

Please please believe me when I say I'm not trolling; I'd like to say that I doubt you're understanding much. A CD can reproduce anything a vinyl record can reproduce. And 'about 5 years after the introduction of CDs', the loudness wars hadn't really started yet, so nothing in the Rolling Stone article applies to your tale. So why did the record sound better to you? Maybe that particular CD really was badly made. A more likely explanation, something that has happened countless times, is that the CD was cut from the same master tape as the record, and much closer to what the engineers in the studio actually heard than any record ever was. That is, when you listened to the CD, the fidelity really was greater, all the 'failings' of the record, such as its horribly biased frequency response, and the distorsions typical of vinyl, were gone. And here's the thing: Many people are used to the 'vinyl sound' and like it. And that's fine. If you say the record sounds better to you than the digital release, then it just sounds better to you, period. However, that doesn't mean that digital sound is inherently less capable of delivering 'richness' or 'solidity'. It's just that the producers had valued 'transparency' more and, with the CD, had finally had the means to deliver that to the listeners as they intended it. These endless 'digital vs. analog' arguments in the 90s were just silly.

I've been waiting for part 2 ever since I saw the first one. From time to time I remembered to check their site, and each time I was a bit disappointed that apparently there hadn't been all that much progress. But finally it's here, and thanks to bb I didn't miss it -- thanks Cory, thanks Robbo and all the others!

Oh, one more thing, re Farmckon's comment: The Monome's aren't that cheap, the largest one costs more than a Tenori-On.

I've played a Tenori-On the same day I've tried Elektroplankton (Summer 2005), so I wouldn't call it new ... but, yeah, it's been commercially available for only a few months now :-)

The Monome is far better for musicians and hackers alike, but the Tenori-On is great for dilletantes. Anyone who enjoys making funny bleeps with this has my blessing -- as long as they use headphones ;-p

If they want to accomodate users of MP3 players, why don't they make CDs that have MP3s included -- ones that are properly encoded and just as good as the uncompressed[*] versions for all practical listening purposes? (As opposed to letting inexpert users rip the CDs themselves with desastrous results; e.g. the default MP3 encoder that comes with iTunes is far from optimal and may well produce the 'flattness' etc. Butch Vig et al. are talking about.) Now that would indeed be a damn good and realistic thing to do. Do they really believe that the MP3 format as such is that flawed? It has its failings, but it is capable of storing practically CD-equivalent audio (again: for listening purposes) in files that are small enough.

[*] 'Uncompressed', here, as in full bitrate, not as in dynamic range compression, which is actually the main point of the above linked article.

The video isn't available any longer (YouTube sucks, I'm sure you would've got permission to host the video on bbtv ...), but as far as 'remote controlled' is concerned, I'm going to say: Bullshit!

Om, I'm not sure if I understood this correctly, basically you're asking if Tor can be used to spoof your IP, so on Wikipedia people won't connect your edits with other edits that you previously made with a different IP? If that's the question: Yes, Tor can be used to achieve this.

About the exit node problem ... to me the largest issue there is that when the identity of the server isn't authenticated (and who really makes proper use of certificates on the web?), using Tor could potentially dramatically increase the likelyhood of a MITM attack. Tor is not at all meant to help with authentication, of course, but it's somewhat important to be aware of this issue.

Well, belie basically means "betray," although in the above context it's a little confusing

Actually, in the above context, 'belie' basically means the exact opposite of 'betray'. But I'll admit that it's basically obvious what you mean :-)

I'm not sure if buying the cheapest charger is such a good idea. Rechargeables pay for themselves in no time if you use them all the time, but you might find that a basic charger is a disincentive. The cheap ones don't shut off when the batteries are charged, so you need to guesstimate how long it will take and make sure that you take them out before they melt and burn down your house while you're somewhere else entirely. A smarter charging circuit might also give you more useful charge cycles in addition to being safer. Just a thought, I'm no expert on this.

Holds all of 256MB. If someone could hack it to hold 2.56TB, not that would be something. Maybe if it was filled solid with notebook drives and only spun up the one that's currently in use, this would be feasible, power consumption-wise ... and it would probably be just as robust and reliable as the original model depicted above ;-)

God forbid those Plebs discover our beautiful, nuanced oh-so-indie world, eh?

No, that's not what I meant. I don't care whether a social networking site is taken over by intellectuals who favour poetic singer-songwriters or twats who think happy hardcore is music. But here's the thing: in order to make everyone happy, you'd need a niche site for each faction, which would be a very poor solution for several reasons: Most people like multiple genres and probably wouldn't be able to find a site that is exactly their cup of tea. Fragmented user base means fewer users per site, resulting in fewer bug reports and less revenue (both leading to lower useability and quality of service), and, more importantly, fewer useable recommendations and smaller databases. Furthermore, I want to have people whose taste I dislike in my system! Firstly, the more users, the better; and secondly, a data source that reliably marks songs that I hate is just as good as a data source that reliably marks songs that I love; just assign a negative weight to the relation, and you have more data, leading to better recommendations.

But all this is only valid in an ideal system where each user gets personalised ratings. As I said, thesixtyone appears to attempt achieving objective, absolute ratings; in such a situation, bias is doom.

Hmm, Phillip, the easter European devojaneoid word has to be spelled differently ... all that Google returns is related to your user accounts on various sites :-) Easily googleable nickname ... gift or curse?

While a Weeble could in theory be balanced on its opposite, egg-shaped side, the Gomboc is only stable at a single point.

I think this is wrong, please check/correct. According to the Gömböc web site, both the Weeble and the Gömböc are stable at a single point, and both have a second point on which you could balance them, which is unstable. Thus, the difference is only in the density distribution — this isn't a 'plus' aspect, but actually the entire, err, point.

Wouldn't a cheap price betray, rather than belie, the plastic construction?

If I owned my residence, I'd put every screen I have on some sort of counter-levered arm, and perhaps keyboards and other peripherals, too.

Cool vision, that would be the sex. At least as long as it doesn't give you a constant feeling of living in a dentist's practice ;-) If I had the dough, I'd have these arms fashioned from 1st-generation Steadicam harnesses.

I did a short tour around the site and found out that the system is not as primitive as I first feared. For example, there is an incentive to listen to new, possibly not-yet-popular music in the form of a reward for using the 'random' jukebox. Of course the question is: Are these tweaks signs of sophistication, or just attempts to fix a system that fundamentally doesn't work?

On one hand, the site stands and falls with the assumption that each song/track has an objective place on a one-dimensional good/bad axis. (It isn't about helping you find music you like; instead it determines what the herd likes.) On the other hand, its mechanism is completely unsuitable for gathering objective assessments — unless you think trite mainstream pop is the pinnacle of good taste.

Collecting points increases your level and reflects your skill in picking top songs in your favorite genre!

Oh, I see, so the objective is to play a game and attempt to get a high score. This is an inviation to users to game the system, instead of giving honest, spontaneous ratings. But, oh well, it's a practical way of convincing players that the points they're collecting are a genuine reward.

Apart from the reinforcement of groupthink, I think such a system is also in danger of becoming biased. Imagine that during the next two months, an unusually high number of heavy metal fans signs up. (This is unlikely, but it's not at all implausible that something of the sort happens; remember how Brazilians took over half of Orkut?) Their ratings will tend to clump together, which earns them disproportionally many points, making them more influential. Philbert (#3) suggests a fix for this, but the segmentation method is far inferior to systems like last.fm or Pandora, where classifications evolve organically to suit individual users.

Philbert's other point is very insightful, though: A somewhat objective method of gauging mainstream taste is not without merit, considering that charts based on, say, airplay are influenced by music industry lobbyists. I think thesixtyone is a worthwhile experiment, it should be interesting to see how it develops.

I think that this approach is reasonable enough, but I'm skeptical that it will actually prevent the unauthorized posting of material to Scribd. However "fuzzy" the Scribd text-matching is, it's likely that determined pirates will figure out how to exceed its threshold and get around it.

Sure, it's possible, but I'm not sure if it would be practical. Who wants to read 'A11 Da¥ Suxx0r', or 'Da R3br4ndin' o' Bi11¥ Bai13¥', or '0wnz0red'? (Oh, wait, whoops ... ;-)

Of course you could employ more subtle tricks, such as replacing letters with different Unicode symbols that look practically identical on screen. However, it isn't prohibitively difficult to write software that can detect that kind of manipulation. (I'm very certain here, I'm a software engineer.) Plagiarism-detecting software is becoming pretty sophisticated. It can even detect instances of plagiarims in contexts where it's possible to completely rephrase and restructure a work, such as computer source code (all the variable names can be changed arbitrarily!) and technical papers (where the exact qualities of the prose are irrelevant, the essence of the work is on a level no software can possibly understand). A story or novel, on the other hand, still has to look very much like the original; I can't think of a way of introducing changes that could throw the text-matcher off and would still be tolerable to readers.

Of course that doesn't mean it can't be done; as I said, I'm just not sure.

I'd never buy from a shop with such a sign, hoping that everyone joins my boycott and the shop owners starve to death. I mean, evolution is such a nice and proven concept, let's give it a chance! This is also why I don't buy CDs from big record labels.

(I'm kidding. About the bakery.)

Pterandon, the reproduction of one of the linked set's images above is neither against bb's policies nor against the law, but the story you're proposing sounds extremely interesting. I'd like to read more about that ... the chances that a bber will have the time to investigate this are probably slim, but I'm sure if you or someone else involved in the Flickr community made an article/video, bb/bbtv would run it.

Stacey Finley is not associated with the spy agency, prosecutors said.

That's what they want us to believe.

But seriously, I can't imagine how someone who falls for this fairy tale could not be an idiot. Sure, some of the victims might have had above average IQs, but saying that they were 'educated' says as much about the U.S. education system as it says about them. Or maybe I'm just lacking imagination.

This is related to a rather specific feature of the device, it's not like you can't put any file you like on there (except it's larger than 1TB ;-) and make it accessible to anyone. Which makes this restriction all the more silly. User-hostile (read: customer-hostile) DRM would be bad enough, but this is just random crippling of usability and does nothing about 'digital rights' whatsoever. Note to self: Don't buy a Western Digital product, ever. I'm dead serious about that.

If the ring doesn't cause any additional power to be drawn in the operation of the lamps—and using my rudimentary grasp of light bulbs I don't see how it would

Right, the ring doesn't draw any additional power from anywhere, it just powers the camera by pulling power out of thin air! Congratulations, you've just invented 90% of a perpetuum mobile :-p

Maybe haptically they feel like the real thing, but 450 pounds is quite a low price for a pretty much complete kit, so either they aren't as good as the real thing at all, or they're an extremely attractive bargain. I'm guessing it's the former, but I'm not a drummer, so what do I know. (Very little, that's what.)

Thanks for the Handsonic tip, Totalforge, very interesting and much appreciated!

Maybe haptically they feel like the real thing, but 450 pounds is quite a low price for a pretty much complete kit, so either they aren't as good as the real thing at all, or they're an extremely attractive bargain. I'm guessing it's the former, but I'm not a drummer, so what do I know. (Very little, that's what.)

When will we have an option in our browsers to stop websites from resizing our dang browser windows?!!

If your browser allows websites to resize windows and has no option to turn that behaviour off, you're doing it wrong! (Read: Your browser is crap and all you should use it for is to download a better one.)

A Flash warning would be nice, though. And fixing that other mistake (see comment #3 above) would be super nice, though I'm grateful that at least the protagonist isn't called a "parkour" any longer :-)

My thoughts precisely ... considering that this is suppsed to be a fun time-waster, it may be a bit peculiar to think about the game in this way, but at least I'm not alone :-)

I dislike DSLRs (and to some extent SLRs in general) for the precise reason that generally you can't do this (view from any angle) with them. Adding this ability is a very nice enhancement to usability. On the other hand, it completely destroys the "looking through the lens" feeling, which for many is the main reason why the got an SLR in the first place. First you get a camera that cannot use its sensor to feed an EVF, unlike cheap bridge cameras (that often have flip/tilt/twist monitors for viewing from practically any angle), then you awkwardy add an additional sensor back in ...

So, I'm not quite sure yet whether I should be delighted about this idea's brilliance, or disgusted over its stupidity. Not that I wouldn't buy a product just because it's stupid :-) In order to make up my mind about whether this product is worth its price, I'd like to know what the resolution is; the linked product page doesn't say ...

Damn, Mattharvest was quicker, I was about to say the same ;-) There's another mistake: Firstly, "crossing x square metres" makes little sense; you can cover/cross a distance, not an area. I guess 50,000 square metres is the size of the area that was enclosed by the loop that Lewis (the guy in the slide show) completed; they obviously picked that size because it's the size of the mine field they aim to clear. The nitpicking aside, secondly: "all 50,000 square metres of central London" is nonsense; you get an area of 50,000 square metres by staking out, for example, a square roughly 225 metres to a side. This would be pretty much the size of a city block, certainly you can't fit central London in there. It's important to realize how small this area actually is, only then you can understand how expensive and laborious it is to clear a minefield.

The idea for this project is brilliant. Most children play games of that sort, get from A to B without touching X, so first you see something you can relate to, but then you feel the impact of this game turning deadly serious. I also like how they did the visual documentation, this hybrid of photography and video.

But that's not fair! If nobody would buy counterfeit CDs anymore, the mafiosi and terrorists would become beggars! Oh, wait, no, they wouldn't. Only record companies are that incompetent.

Boingboing is really lucky that they have such a super-good tech team that fixes each outage really quickly ... no matter how many there are per year ;-p

And everyone knows that if it appeals to the prurient interests of some, it can't possibly be high art.

Oh! I had missed the QI part myself.

Primitif's approach looks promising. The answer to the question of which Chat Noir starting conditions lead to a winnable game could actually be brute forced quite easily, as the playing field is small enough. In theory, this would lie within my abilities, but ... I don't think I'll feel like doing such a boring programming excercise anytime soon ;-/

However, I don't think it's likely that you can win every game. We know for sure that it would be impossible if there were no pre-darkened spots, and just now I had to start out with just three dark spots, all in one corner, separated only by gaps one spot wide. This situation is pretty much hopeless; however you'd have a chance if there's some flaw in the cat's pathfinding algorithm and you knew how to exploit it. *shrugs*

Tying the film to malware sites is a modern extension of the old badger con; in order to protest the invasion, you have to be willing to admit what you were doing there in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a lot of fetish sites rip off their paying customers for just such a reason.

There may well be sites that rip off unsuspecting customers, but that this isn't the case here; the 'malware sites' either don't have the video at all (just pretending instead), or show an illicit copy. The original producers aren't actively involved in that.

I feel compelled to point out that linking directly to sites distributing malware is an extremely bad idea

The only people that do that on purpose are those who set up the malicious web sites in the first place; i.e. in comments to blog posts who talk about the 'real' video. They already know what they're doing, and do it anyways, and others who propagate these links unwittingly don't even know they're linking to sites that distribute malware. So, it kind of is worth pointing out that this is bad, but there isn't really anyone to whom you can point it out ;-)

and also improves the Google PageRank scores of the sites listed (effectively increasing the likelihood that they'll appear in Google searches for the foul videos in question.)

You can link to something without increasing its PageRank; it's done by setting the 'nofollow' attribute. However, if more posts about the video would actually link to a good copy of it, then these good copies would become the top search engine hits and displace the more malicious links.

[#19] Given that the producers were so intent on shocking people, they wouldn't have cut between the "pushing out" and the eating if they didn't have to. Why would they do that?

What on earth makes you think the producers made any cuts? I'm sure the original video has no such cuts; the famous version probably is a teaser released as promotion for the entire product. Also, the assumption that they were intent on shocking anyone is not a given, but completely wrong.

[#21] As for puking, well, that was for real.. but that's not as disgusting, since the vomit goes through mouth anyway.

You're deluding yourself, bt y'd stp tht rthr qckly s smn pt bwl f fcs nd bwl f vmt n frnt f y nd tld y t pck n ;->

@Larsbars (#23): The cat can move one field per turn, so in the terminology of the interesting paper you linked to, it would be a 1-angel, whereas the player would be called the devil. The paper does mention that the devil has a winning strategy (for those who don't know: this means a strategy that will always always make you win, for all possible starting conditions and opponents) against the 1-angel, but only on boards bigger than 35x35. This finding doesn't apply to Chat Noir, as the Chat Noir board is siginificantly smaller, and it isn't made up of square tiles, but hex tiles instead. In fact, the paper doesn't mention hexagonal connectivity at all, so it's quite beside the point.

Even if you had a theory that addressed exactly the board layout and rules of Chat Noir, you wouldn't need a winning strategy for these conditions! It is easier: as you always play against a CPU opponent with a fixed AI algorithm, all you need is a winning strategy against that one AI. So, does one exist? I don't think so, but I can't quite prove that position.

Recently I'd come across a comment thread about such malware below a blog post. That post had a headline which implied you could watch the 2g1c video there, but in fact you couldn't. Below, one of the comments promised a proper link, but linked to some malware, and another comment pointed exactly that out to possibly unsuspecting readers. At the time I didn't think twice about that and just surfed on; to me such an attack is trivial and I'm usually not around people who would fall for such a trick. Most people I know don't even have an OS or apps that could possibly be affected.

But now that I consider it again, actually this is one more reason why, if you have to talk about that stuff (and I really don't care one bit whether you do), you should provide a proper link to the subject of your post. Apophasis is an asshole tactic anyways, however I didn't see it that way when Pesco and Xeni did it, because their intentions certainly were good, and if you really have to see the videos, they're easy enough to find with a simple web search. The link to the stupid reaction video was too much, however. When you google for "two girls one cup" today, you only get reaction videos and 'fake' links in the top 20 results, and you can end up downloading some malware rather quickly.

One page I'd come across was really creative: It had an Active-X applet embedded inside a screenshot of exactly the frame that is around videos on YouTube. My computer doesn't do Active-X, but I guess what this applet does is show the video with the nasty shit in the foreground and pull off some even nastier shit in the background.

So, it is bad to post about stuff without linking to it. This includes mentioning, in an unrelated post, that you're not talking about a certain video, which people should not watch. Really, why mention it at all, then? Of course, a major reason why doing this is not nice is that cencorship is not nice. Sending people on a time-consuming search is usually rather harmless, as it's their own fault, but when they end up downloading malware ... not cool.

I don't really understand the justification of the surcharge on blank media, unless it's to compensate the media companies for lost revenues due to illegal copying. Certainly it didn't mean to imply that copying CDs for your buddies is legal.

In Austria (it's similar in some other European countries), private copying is legal and the surcharge is for compensating creators, i.e. artists above all. An artist may well have a contract that leaves her with nothing of that income, I don't know. In continental Europe, we don't really have Copyright; instead it's split into creators' rights and distributors' rights, and the former always remain with the original author, they cannot be transferred with any kind of contract.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the surcharge is no longer applied to most newer blank media (like DVD-Rs), and was only ever applied to so-called "music" CD-Rs, which were really just regular CD-Rs that cost more (and perhaps worked in those stereo component CD burners?).

I was thinking that, too, but it's applied to all blank media (also hard disks). If you buy large quantities of blank disks for your company, for backing up your own data, you can get that money back by filling out a couple of forms. I don't think this is an option for individuals, though.

Anyways, many people think that the fee does impy the legality of private copying, because an action that is illegal and never should be performed in the first place cannot be taxed. That would be like having a shoplifting tax on backpacks.

So, it seems like the only thing we know for sure is that everywhere it's a legal rat's nest with large grey areas :-/

Cpt. Tim (#32) has a good point re. the SFX question: It doesn't have to be real shit. You could even embed it in a condom (which is then punctured at the side pointing towards the anus) so it'll touch the colon as little as possible. But don't say it doesn't look like real shit; there are all kinds of shit, quite a variety of different colours, consistencies, textures. Real shit absolutely can look exactly like in the video.

@Devolve (#44):

From my POV it's even more cheaper to pay them to just defecate in a cup, and then switch it out with a cup containing some fecal-looking substance.

Yes, but, remember, the speculation you quoted was under the assumption that there is a full version where you see it go from, err, well, ass to mouth in one long shot. How would you switch it out then? Nowadays, however you do it, it would most likely involve a computer, and I merely used 'CGI' as a term under which to lump together all the possibilities.

@Teapunk (#64): Oh dear, this is much more region-specific than I had thought. Currently I'm in Vienna a lot; I guess I had extrapolated from the situation here too much. (They have Häferl too, oh noes ...) So, no simple rules of thumb, alas. On second thought, yeah, when you have a paper cup (Papierbecher) and attach a little paper handle, it's still a Papierbecher. And so on. Of course all of this is completely off topic, irrelevant, and trivial. It's just too damn funny to discuss the finer details of interl