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2276

Living Room / GLaDOS explains fission and fusion for NASA's IRelevant Astronomy podcast

« Last post by 40hz on February 27, 2014, 06:09 PM »

Be sure to watch the ending...

2277

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on February 27, 2014, 05:50 PM »

After the Japanese middle school girls singing crushing metal, I had to swing the other direction for a bit.
Ah, CandyRat records, you never fail me... 

I am not normally a "pianer-lissenin'" type of guy, but this is pretty darn cool.  Very Vince Guaraldi vibe to it, which I like very much.

-Edvard (February 01, 2014, 11:41 AM)

@Edvard - good catch. Pleasant listening. And you're right - it does have a Vince Guraldi (or possibly classic prog-rock) vibe to it. Some interesting harmonic and chord changes in there.



Makes me want to haul out the upright and play along.

2278

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on February 27, 2014, 05:36 PM »

@ Curt - Lovely woman, both sonically and visually. I generally don't care too much for Emo, but she's certainly talented. (FWIW I liked her song Like the Sunrise too.) Wish her success for me!

2279

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 27, 2014, 10:18 AM »

^Oy! The spirit of Cotton Mather is heard throughout the forum!

2280

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 05:07 PM »

Probably a bad comparison. The world would be a better place without the UN.

-Renegade (February 26, 2014, 02:42 PM)

No. I think a public forum where an idea can be presented, or an argument entertained, is better than no public forum at all.

As far as the UN goes, the world would be a better place without a lot of things political. Unfortunately, most proposals I've heard are 'solutions' that are worse than the problems they hope to address.

 

2281

Living Room / Re: Netflix Mocks Amazon's Drone Delivery with Video!

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 04:32 PM »

^Well...it might not be extortion so much as it's mutual accommodation, to wit: let's you and me make it look like I'm caving when we're actually setting up an arrangement that helps squeeze out the competition for paid streaming media without giving the Feds grounds to get involved.

Truth is, I don't quite trust Netflix about this... Especially when you consider how suddenly they shut up and dropped their whole throttling argument. And they haven't been too vocal on neutrality either.

With the net "neutrality" issue still up for grabs (and not likely to be resolved one way or another for at least another year) why cut such a deal now? Although the outcome is fairly predictable (with this government) - it's still not a completely done deal.

Methinks a deeper game's afoot.

2282

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 11:52 AM »

^  +1

(and without a funny picture! )

-wraith808 (February 26, 2014, 10:27 AM)

It's fixed now. 

2283

Living Room / Re: My pop/imap Android experience

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 11:32 AM »

@SB- I've never mixed using POP and IMAP protocols for the same email account. I don't think it should make a difference (other than anything sent from POP won't replicate on the email server since POP is essentially a one-way street) ...but again I've never done that.



FWIW, the settings I'm using for GMail are as follows. They're pretty generic.:


ID & password same as always. (i.e. {name}@gmail.com)

Inbound server   = imap.googlemail.com | SSL/TLS | Authentication=Normal Password | Port = 993
Outbound server = smtp.googlemail.com | SSL/TLS | Authentication=Normal Password / Port = 465

I understand imap.gmail.com & smtp.gmail.com also work as the server names.

See anything different from your settings?

2284

Living Room / Re: Netflix Mocks Amazon's Drone Delivery with Video!

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 08:57 AM »

Can't wait to see the comeback where Netflix gets ridiculed for voluntarily paying off Comcast for what amounts to a network shortcut to stream Netflix to Comcast customers. (This even though Comcast denies it ever throttled Netflix - and furthermore, insists this deal doesn't get Netflix any preferential treatment from them. Yeah right! :/) )

2285

Living Room / Re: My pop/imap Android experience

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 08:39 AM »

Just curious, since it seems you've already got your mail in gmail, what does the gmail client app lack that K9 is giving you?

-CWuestefeld (February 25, 2014, 03:44 PM)

Local message folder storage and offline capabilities.

Of the two, local data storage is probably the most important considering Google's record for abrupt terminations of product offerings and the frequent changes made to their TOS.

I doubt Google would play games with something as established and major as GMail. But you never know when it comes to Google.

2286

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 26, 2014, 05:40 AM »

I'm sure TED instils a feeling of inadequacy in many people. It does me sometimes.  



But if that inspires or motivates more people (like me!) to start thinking and doing, that can hardly be a bad thing.  

Most real lessons life teaches us aren't very pleasant. Or even comfortable to learn.  

I often come away from TED thinking, "Wow! Why not me?"  

And that's an important question only I can answer: Yeah...why not me?  



----------------------------------------------------

BTW, I actually did go over and talk to that little red-haired girl  back when I was a freshman in high school.
It worked out well. We've been together ever since. )

2287

Living Room / Re: Stephen Wolfram's Long Demo of the Wolfram Language

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 09:39 PM »

Hoo boy! I'm not sure what to make of this one...

One thing for certain. It's not a programming language in the sense we usually use the term. It's more of an environment or framework. Sorta like Smalltalk and Lisp got wedded to EMACS, put on steroids, and then sent into the world with two lines of coke up its nose.

I see a couple of potential problems with some of the paradigms. And the vast lexicon it appears to have violates every principle of language design I was ever taught. But maybe with today's hardware (and the ubiquitous presence of the web) some of those design concepts need revisiting...

Yeah. I'm definitely going to be watching and playing with this one even though I'm somewhat sceptical about what its long-term prospects are going to be.

But like the saying goes: "Theory be damned. If it works - go for it."

2288

Living Room / Re: The Voynich Manuscript -- Serious Progress Decoding it

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 05:36 PM »

@tomos - Thx. Got it. Had to do a reset on my DSL or some odd reason. After that, all was well.

2289

Living Room / Re: The Voynich Manuscript -- Serious Progress Decoding it

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 03:26 PM »

Has anybody successfully downloaded the Bax PDF here? I can only get to about 91% before the download hangs no matter how I try to pull it over.

2290

Living Room / Re: My pop/imap Android experience

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 02:27 PM »

Imap@gmail has too much room for improvement in ease of use and configuration on various devices. Good luck making it work on your dad's windows phone, by giving him directions over the phone.

-eleman (February 25, 2014, 12:19 PM)

I didn't run into that on my iPhone. I told it to provision a new email account, selected GMail from the list presented, entered my existing address and password, and it defaulted to an IMAP set-up without being told. Apparently if you've set your GMail account up to use IMAP, the iPhone mail client is smart enough to figure it out.

2291

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 02:04 PM »

Hardly unexpected. Where there's money, there's games being played. It was only a matter of time before one of the big players stumbled. It happens to banks. It happens to businesses. It happens to governments. Why should BItcoin exchanges be any different?

BTC robs the authoritarians of the possibility of knowing what people have, and further robs the kleptocrats of the possibility of stealing people's money.[/b][/size] (Oh certainly they create laws to call their theft "legal", but it's still theft.)

-Renegade (March 26, 2013, 08:41 PM)

Got news! It ain't just the authoritarians and kleptocrats that rob people blind. Surprise!

Y'know, I just had a thought: if the powers that be really wanted to hurt Bitcoin, right now all they'd need to do is shrug and say "Oh well!" about the theft - and decline to get involved or open an investigation...Looks like Japan has already decided to do exactly that.



Consider: It's private and anonymous by design. There's no transaction trails. No provable ownership of accounts. No direct path of responsibility. No insurance or regulatory requirements in place. No laws broken...so where could the regulators or police possibly step in to assist? AMF-YOYO!

And lacking any sort of official status, how do you even establish a legally recognized monetary value for the claimed loss? It's only what the Bitcoin community has chosen to say it's worth. So an argument could be made that despite the claimed value, bitcoins have no real monetary value. Which raises an interesting question as to whether a theft has even been committed.

Such are the risks of going off on your own and insisting on complete independence from any established societal frameworks.

2292

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 01:36 PM »

There's a lesson to be learned there, I think...

-wraith808 (February 25, 2014, 01:10 PM)

Couldn't agree more. Everything has it's Golden Age. TED, originally organized as a one-off event, is certainly past its. But, like the UN, I still think (in the absence of anything better to take its place) it's important that a gathering like TED continue to be around.

2293

Living Room / Re: My pop/imap Android experience

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 10:22 AM »

I'm running K9 using an IMAP setup for access to a general purpose GMail account from a Nook without incident or problems.

This same account gets accessed under IOS, Linux and Windows by at least three different (and ever changing) email clients. No problems so far. Wonder if the problem you're experiencing originates with your provider's mailserver...

2294

General Software Discussion / Re: Book Tracking

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 08:19 AM »

The only real challenge is having an app to grab book data and artwork from Amazon (or other sources) via an API. Once that data is pulled over and put in a tab-delimited file, it can be easily imported into almost anything.

If it's just a locally hosted Windows-native tracking database that's wanted, there's easily a half dozen DBMS apps (i.e. Access, et al) that will let you set one up very easily.

2295

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by 40hz on February 25, 2014, 07:29 AM »

I've found some gems among the junk. Mostly the names of people or things I wanted to do my own research on.

Not to defend TED (even though it's become 'the thing' to diss it lately), but IMHO it's an easy thing to adopt a habitual stance of being "above it all" or "tolerantly amused" by almost everything. It's the hipster attitude. And it's a dangerous one that encourages knee-jerk cynicism and makes those who would innovate, or dare to dream, wonder "why even bother?"



Funny how for every TED presentation there are a hundred Reddit habitués all sitting around smirking and tossing out catty comments, secure in their absolute belief they could do it SO much better if only they could get off their asses and actually DO something (for once) instead of merely talk about it.

Or so I'm thinkin'  

2296

Living Room / Re: The Voynich Manuscript -- Serious Progress Decoding it

« Last post by 40hz on February 24, 2014, 11:13 AM »

@Mouser- Thx! Looks like I've got 48 mins of viewing time blocked out for this evening...

2297

Living Room / Re: Jazz Recommendation Thread

« Last post by 40hz on February 23, 2014, 06:54 PM »

Just spotted this on YT. Every time I hear this performance I end up sitting, shaking my head, wondering how anybody could ever come up with a piece like this one...

2298

General Software Discussion / Re: The Best Security Suites (2013/2014)

« Last post by 40hz on February 23, 2014, 06:50 PM »

After uninstalling it and re-installing Avast! things seem to be back to normal. So, yes, my mileage varied, though it's a bit of a mystery to me what exactly was going on.

-dr_andus (February 23, 2014, 05:04 PM)

Yes indeed. Similar things have happened to me as well. Can't really say "why" or "what" that much these days. All most of us can really say is what works for us this week.

Sad state of affairs, but there you have it.

2299

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by 40hz on February 19, 2014, 03:57 PM »

+1! Go Ath!

2300

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by 40hz on February 18, 2014, 02:31 PM »

"Discovery" Channel. Yeah right! First it was Pharaohs and mummies. Then it was the Shroud of Turin. Then it was the Mayans. Now it's Vikings....

Is anybody else sick of hearing about the Vikings? (Joe Cartoon is.)