sarcasm. text doesn't carry it.

My history is a little rusty, but isn't yahweh of the old testament and allah the same god?

Once you hear it, you will realize it's far superior to any other listening experience. Of course, you might not be a prosumer audiphile with the refinement and experience required to properly enjoy it. Maybe you can just stick with your beats by dr dre and ipod shuffle like the rest of the plebes.

run along now. my highly acute audio perception wants to enjoy the miracle of hi-res audio as it was meant to be heard, devoid of the racket of the unwashed masses.

that IS a good point.

still, there are, apparently, legions of people who are maintaining annonymity online while engaging not just in research, but outright hostile attacks. It would seem that it's possible to keep a low profile while researching sensitive subjects.

Why can't they just be anonymous? anonymous is anonymous. if legions of script kiddies can remain hidden under all this surveillance, it must be possible for a writer who isn't ddosing to do it. I doubt it's even that difficult.

1. get yourself some laptop.
2. run some linux distro.
3. never connect it to the interwebs.
4. write.

transfer your writing across sneaker net in some seedy cyber cafe and you are publishing your subversive thoughts to the chagrin of governments everywhere! you could even wear a fedora to make you feel clandestine and important, and match your OS.

idk, these results seem more similar to how humans see than they do different. When people don't know exactly what they are looking at, the brain just puts in it's best guess. people certainly see faces and other familiar objects in tv static. They see bigfoot in a collection of shadows or a strange angle on a bear. i even feel like i did sort of see a peacock in the one random image labeled peacock. it's sort of like the computer vision version of a rorschach test.

i have long wondered if the result of global warming should really be less extreme weather. my (admittedly limited) understanding of storms is that they are the result of masses of air of different temperatures combining. if everything is warmer, it seems like the percentage differences between various parcels of air in the atmosphere would be going down. ie: if it's 90 at the equator and 20 at the poles. thats a 78% difference. now if the global temps raise by 10 degrees, that's only a 70% difference, and that's assuming that somehow everything goes up by 10 degrees. it's probably more likely that the colder parts would get warmer faster than the already warm parts.

obviously still bad for polar bears though.

Who get's to simply claim a public street as their own? I live on a street. Cars drive down the street. They have every right to. Either move to a gated community or campaign for telecommuting or something. This isn't the fault of waze or any other navigation system. There are simply too many people. they have to go somewhere. They can't all keep fitting down the same pipe. The navigation systems are likely helping traffic on the whole.

there are plenty of used cars with physical knobs in need of good homes. http://www.carmax.com/

well, there is one component that is pretty standard and easilly upgradable, the stereo. I just purchased a used car (2008 miata). The stereo came with a 30 pin ipod connector tucked in the glovebox. Ive outfitted it with the required lighting adapter to work with my phone, but i wouldn't mind having a modern stereo that can do bluetooth. The upgrade might be painless, but there's one big issue: THIEVES. The big selling point of the kind of crummy factory stereo is it's good enough and nobody is going to want to steal it.

thanks for taking it into consideration. and i don't want to be misconstrued. i don't think a chimpanzee or orangutang should have rights in our society. They aren't us. They can't be a functioning member of our society, nor would they desire that.

Like you say, We already have laws about cruelty to animals, and AFAIK they take into account the requirements for the animal in question. I'm good with that.

Personally, I think the differences between our minds and the minds of many animals is not as great as we like to fool ourselves into thinking. Our minds come up with great narritives about why we love and hate and fear. They are undoubtedly far more intricate than what a chimpanzee is experiencing, but i'm of the belief that it's not the emotion that separates us from them, just the story we tell ourselves. In a sense, it's an illusion that makes us think we are different.

I'm no PETA member though. I'm ok with eating animals. I'm ok with using animals. The world worked that way long before us. All i',m looking for is doing these things with an understanding of what the true impact is.

Many animals tend to display all kinds of abnormal behaviors that seem to be brought on by the stress of confinement. it shows up as pacing and various weird tick like behaviors. it's not uncommon to see that kind of thing in caged humans as well. Obviously we can't ask them, but the behavior seems similar enough to me that i believe they are feeling something similar to what we feel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I worked in the pet industry for a long time and saw this kind of thing in all kinds of animals all the way down to reptiles and fish. It is not uncommon for animals to refuse to eat in captivity either. I also believe that the stress of confinement is also reduced by simply ensuring the environment is large and varried enough. Heck, that even obviously applies to people. Nobody likes to be locked in their room. House arrest is considered punishment. But many people spend their whole lives in the same 10 square mile area and are happy. really, we are all kind of imprisoned on a big rock floating in space, but it doesn't feel like it. unless you think about it, then it oddly does start to feel confining.

It's interesting in how stereotypically engineery the woz is. Most people see the fact that they were in a garage as really important to the apple story. The woz doesn't care about that cruft (and likely a lot of the slashdot community agrees). It's touchy feely and to him obviously you are going to be living somewhere. to him, lots of people spent time in garages. He cares about his eureka moments in breadboarding the first prototypes.

you probably would be. i'm thinking of times i walk into the breakroom at work. WHOA! THERES PIZZA THERE! even if it's cold and of questionable age, it's like finding a $20 bill in an old coat. it doesn't matter what kind it is. everyone seems to react this way.

I think it sounds like a pretty good use of technology. It's a pizza. It's not like it's some important life decision.

Most of the time we are just happy with whatever pizza we happen to find. Incongruently the decision on what pizza to order often seems to be one of the most paralyzing decisions anyone ever faces. I think we tend to overthink it pretty often. This seems like it could actually streamline the process. it doesn't seem to require any kind of commitment to the result. it shows you the pizza and if you don't like it, you can probably just abort and go back to engineering your perfect pizza.

i'd be kind of curious to try out a pure bayesian pizza ordering system where it literally just had a pizza for me based on my past orders. Of course that implies that pizza hut has to know me and all my orders, and it wouldn't hurt to correlate that with some other data about what i'm doing. This whole idea of basing it simply off what i appear to be looking at sounds non intrusive and perfectly reasonable. for a pizza.