Slashdot Mirror

Warm Leatherette in the HindenCar!

Warm leatherette
Melts on your burning flesh
You can see your reflection
In the luminescent dash

I use a SanDisk ReadyBoost USB Drive, either a 2 or 4 GB one to run the entire operating system.
(In the link, I have a readme with the details)
So, here we have a setup where "you and your machine" can be various PC's and laptops that you have access to. You just plug the USB drive into the PC you want to work with.

Although the livecd linux operating system discussed in the readme is "in the cd", and not really upgradeable, I do have one application that is upgradeable, as long as the system is set up with a persistent home directory, knoppix style.
It is the "Station Selector for XMMS", a graphical front end with car-radio style buttons for some popular internet radio stations. Here is a screenshot.

The hard-coded radio station internet addresses in the Station Selector could go bad, if the radio station went off the air, so to speak. So, I fixed it up so the user can easily download an up-to-date copy, and have it each time the operating system is booted up, as long as a persistent home directory is being used.
The update portion of the application takes care of everything for you, and keeps you informed as to what is going on. (You don't have to know any code)
The success of this depends on me keeping the Station Selector up-to-date, so it can be downloaded by users. You can get your own copy here.

Here is a screenshot of the application running on Ubuntu 7.10. (One has to install xmms and tcl-tk in Ubuntu so it'll run)

So, I really need the ability to "blend" the "internet" with my own PC, just like Microsoft and Mozilla need to do that, to keep their applications up-to-date on your machine. For me, it is handy to use the Sandisk drive setup, because I only have to update one PC, so the speak, as I can just plug the little drive into another computer or laptop to get the benefit of the updated downloads. No tight "integration" web/PC here, however.

Sure, I can move lots of data onto the web, my rapidweather.com server, if I want to, and I suppose an entire "persistent home directory" with all of my stuff could be zipped and put up there, and then downloaded onto a new computer's hard drive, or a fresh, just formatted USB drive, and unzipped into place in the "persistent home directory filesystem. The emelFM dual-pane file manager I have in my Knoppix Remaster makes that very easy to do.
That's easier I suppose than plugging

I couldn't visit the website in your sig to find out what your beef is

Try:

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm

Thanks for letting me know about the spelling error.

I assume that you're also against affirmative action for non-rednecks.

I am just making a comparison. Whether its a good thing or not is another topic.

As a former Eudora user, I don't care for graphics that would make Thunderbird look like Eudora. What I miss is a lot of Eudora functionality, not it's (rather ugly) looks.

- Powerful and easy search
- Powerful and easy filtering
- Automatic "detachment" of attachments
- Mailbox windows kept inside the program window
- Primitive (but good for me) multi-language spell check (it just aggregates the installed dictionaries, so there is no annoying need to change the language, and you can mix languages in a single email)

And as an IT person:

- No install (you can copy the program folder to anywhere and just double-click the .exe; add a folder argument, and the mails and settings are in that folder)

- The x-eudora-option:... system: clickable configuration changes which I can send to people and keep a collection of for new installs. (see http://www.geocities.com/x_eudora_options/)

There was a song in The Meaning of Life that mentioned the diameter of the galaxy. "The Galaxy Song" I think is what the song is titled.

Yes, the "Galaxy Song". Look here now for the lyrics before GeoCities melts. Second verse: "It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick." etc.

I do wish Opera would take this update opportunity to fix their toolbar so it looks similar to IE and Firefox, in that the blank space, where Opera used to have their advertisement bar, is removed, and filled with browser controls like the others have. To me, the greatest thing is Firefox having the toolbar editor, so the user can set it up like they want.

So let me get this straight. You were once near a research program, but not actually a part of it, and the head of a department, but apparently not the head of the department doing the research, dismissed it out of hand, before the research was published, implying to you the data was noisy? Your ass just fell off. Let me hand it to you, so you can re-attach it.

Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?

Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.

Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
(Also available in this HTML version if you prefer.)
Overconfidence


Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.

The Fundamentals of Signal Analysis
Extrasolar Planets

Its amazing that so many people on the internet don't get that.

This is just waiting for someone to build a file system which stores information within file and directory names only. Depending on how they count data storage usage, this might allow one to have large amounts of storage without using any at all.

See: http://www.geocities.com/patchnpuki/other/compression.htm

Woops, I forgot all about that.
But you're right I didn't have problems with that one either.
or with this one for that matter:
http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/

A couple such comparisons already exist. They may be a year or two out of date however.

That may be the "official" reason, but the real reason is that he found an error in the Flawless Undisputed Work of God.

A quote:

In 1614 a Dominican priest filed charges at the Office of the Inquisition. Galileo was to respond by writing extraordinarily long letters which were circulated and became subject of debate. The most influential churchman of his age, Cardinal Bellamarine was to say of Galileo's theories: "a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also likely to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false".

His actual crime was noticing that The Book has A Problem.

If you'd like to see an even better example of this, check out Giordano Bruno. His crimes were:

• Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
• Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass.
• Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity.
• Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
• Dealing in magics and divination.
• Denying the Virginity of Mary.

What did he say? Basically the same thing as Galileo - that the "heavens" are simply other stars like our sun, the comets weren't messengers from God, etc. Read it here.

Oh yeah, they burned his ass at the stake for that.

This thread needs more Christian Furries.

According to the Myers-Briggs personality theory, people can very roughly be defined on four points. Introverted/Extroverted, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Perceiving/Judging. This means you can very roughly rate someone with a four letter code, such as ESTJ or INFP, with the letters corresponding to where the person leans.

The middle two parts, Sensing/Intuitive and Thinking/Feeling are the core component of how people process information. NTs are called Rationalists, NFs are called Idealists, STs are called Guardians, and SFs are called Artisans.

NT's tend to become scientists, engineers, researchers, mathmaticians, and programmers. Sounds like the group we are talking about doesn't it? The thing is that NT's are only about 5% of the population, NFs tend to be religious leaders, teachers, and social worker types. NFs are only 10% of the population. The other 85% are STs and SFs. That means that the vast majority of humanity falls into the 'S' vs. the 'N' camp.

The NT and NF combinations are rare. Focusing on NTs however, since that is the group that tends to be what the article references (engineers, scientists, medical professionals, and programmers for that matter), they are very heavily represented among generals, CEO's of corporations, and revolutionary leaders. Steve Jobs is typically labeled as an ENTJ while Bill Gates is an INTJ.

Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were NTs, as were all of our generals turned president. Abe Lincoln and Reagon were NFs. Do you see a pattern? Most of our more controversial or revolutionary presidents were almost all Intuitives. I think that might be where the correlation is really taking place.

Looking at the flaws in IQ testing is an interesting hobby

I'll put the elitist condescending tone aside for just a moment. It's not a hobby to call something that pretends to be science a pseudo-science.

but nevertheless the results of IQ tests are predictive of success

Prophecies can be self fulfilling. Treat your students like they're incapable of greatness, give them fewer opportunities and talk down to them and pretty soon they're giving you the mediocre results you expect.

It's not perfect, but it is a tool with statistical value.

It's not perfect in the same way that horoscopes aren't perfect. In other words it is based on unscientific rubbish and its useless.

For example Einstein had an IQ that was estimated to be low given he was a genius (140 to 180).

http://www.geocities.com/einstein_library/iq.htm
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_IQ_of_albert_einstein

That is of course just one example of a scientist that didn't fit well. In any case if you were his teacher would you have recognised his potential as an unremarkable student early on? Some people need more help early on and get a lot better at what they do. Using an IQ test as a predictor to write off certain students is bone headed, lazy and destructive. You should help all your students be what they can be.

Books are just excellent.

Another more suggestion:

Take your iPod, and use the ipod e-book formatter to put some nice books on your iPod, for reading while you listen to some great music. You can even make playlists that go with the story line!

You can convert e-books here: http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php

Some great books here: http://www.craphound.com/index.php?cat=5

and here: http://www.geocities.com/davidbainaa/

and here: http://www.baen.com/library/

Free, or better Creative Commons books, are regularly mentioned on Boing Boing as well.

The US also leads the world in patent development.

But on the other hand - what is to be expected from a country ruled by the legal departments of companies.

Some Unused and Probably Unusable references to lawyers by Heinlein. Another more interesting is Mass-murder of all lawyers in 1965 in one of his timelines as it appeared in the book Number of the Beast (p.378).

Proof is here..

http://www.geocities.com/quadaudio/page6CD-4.html
"CD-4
This is the "odd man out" in the quad world. Extremely 'fine' grooves were etched onto the vinyl record to provide frequencies between 35,000 and 50,000 hertz. The CD-4 demodulator sensed these high frequencies then converted them to a range of around 100 to 15,000 hertz.


Care to try to record and playback a 35-50KHZ analog signal on a CD? It was done on LP's.

Does toying with var'aq count?

As has been said and resaid by many,

If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart.
If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.

You know, almost all of those astronomical images are artificially colored and enhanced to maximize their ascetic appeal. Have a look at some of the various images of the cat's eye nebula to see. A quick Google turns up 5 different colorings:

http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula.jpg
http://www.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~panders/Images/AstroImages/03_CatEyeNebula.jpg
http://www.spacetoday.org/images/Hubble/HubbleBeauty/CatsEyeNebulaNASA.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/NGC6543.jpg
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula_2.jpg

The interpretation of the horsehead nebula is at least consistent (most of the time), but there is still plenty of artistic license being taken.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/52238main_MM_image_feature_89_jw4.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/45506main_MM_Image_Feature_73_rs4.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/scott_metz/alternity/graphics/horsehead_nebula.jpg
http://www.sidewalk-astronomy-club.com/img/horsehead-nebula.jpg
http://www.fourthdimensionastroimaging.com/sitebuilder/images/horsehead-712x571.jpg

I was sort of disappointed when I found that out...

AI needs a way of interpreting video input into 3d objects and environment. Once a computer can represent objects in a 3d environment, it can then perform operations on them. Technically you could make AI without this tool, but you'd have to do extremely precise and patient CAD inputs that would take most of your life. With a tool to convert video into 3d objects, you can just start cataloging all the objects out there. Add in a 3d physics simulator, and you're halfway to true AI. I have a quick overview on how to do AI, and as you'll note on the very beginning of the page: the reason I haven't worked on AI myself is that I can't code a video->3d object converter myself.

The problem however is that no matter what system, we are voting for politicians.

Even if you weren't voting for a politician you would still be voting for someone that you have to trust to implement their promised platform. There is virtually no means by which an ineffective (or down right duplicitous) office holder (I guess that's nearly a definition of a politician!) can be removed from office under any of the available systems. Looking at your country's description of the voting system certainly doesn't seem to indicate it, and the only instances which I can think of in N.America was a brief movement by the left-wing CCF in Canada in the 1930s and then by the right-wing Reform Party in the 1990s.

Really, the idea that we have to trust some professional sleazebag to do what they promise even when we know they won't -- so much so that it's almost a cliche -- makes me wonder how anyone can rationalize voting to themselves. Still, I guess MTV told us to "rock the vote" or something.

Anyone want to bet that in a cringeworthy display of how we just don't get it that Barrack Obama becomes the next president and keeps on implementing the agenda of the wealthy coterie that runs politics?

Libertarian is the only vote that makes sense.

I think what you say is absolutely true, there is something which is is concentrating the voids and the galaxies just form like a soap bubble around the void. I think this is because the "aether", being the most dense substance in the universe is gravitationally pulling it together into a bubble.

see: http://www.geocities.com/franklinhu/dark.html

Well, except that there seems to be some disagreement about whether representational republics fall under the umbrella of democracy. I contest that they do not. A true democracy would be along the lines of 'one person, one vote, on every single issue or decision' and that simply isn't what we have here. The founding fathers of our country were not too keen on democracy.
Here is a link which illustrates this point: Link.
We may have devolved into a democracy, but that is in NO WAY what was intended. Democracy is mob rule.

If you don't have an agreement in writing, you don't really have an agreement.

Because of the loss of trust, handshake deals are all but dead. :(

Anyway, when I go on job interviews I assume I am being Googled. Only a stupid employer would not do so, and most of the places I want to work at do not have stupid Compliance Officers. If they are Googling me, I'd prefer to control the results thank you very much. It doesn't hurt that I have a cool past, an industry relevant TV appearance [I'm NOT famous], past interesting magazine appearances [or rich], tons of posts in various news groups (alt.html or comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html anyone?), and a public history of a good life. I feel I not only have nothing to hide, but am proud of my life. Go on look me up and get jealous.

Take the proposed budget for Orion and the current operating cost of the shuttle and use that cash to bid for commercial manned spaceflight. Change the missions to better utilize the ISS if necessary.

Sorry for you - tons of proof... http://www.geocities.com/mw0440/earth.html

New power generation facility receives Plasmatic injection at its main energy dome. Technicians wearing specially fitted xray spex oversaw the fueling of the power station.

-FL

If you had to import these things from other countries (unless you want a hunting rifle) that wouldn't be nearly as easy.

Right, because that would be terribly difficult. Do you have any idea of how many thousands of cargo containers come in and out of the U.S. each day, totally uninspected?

We can't stop the flow of people across our borders, and people require food, water, air, and dislike being kept outside of a fairly narrow temperature range for very long. Guns can be disassembled into parts, stored indefinitely, and don't care about temperature or moisture if they're packed right. They're even easier to transport than drugs! And unlike drugs, they're not products that are quickly consumed.

Besides, once you start actually importing them illegally, then you might as well stop bringing in pissant semi-autos and go for real weapons, full-autos, SMGs and the like.

We've seen from the "war on drugs" how stupendously ineffective import controls are when you're trying to restrict a good that there's a demand for. That's exactly what you'd have with guns, if you ever tried to ban them. And beyond the import problem, making a gun (even a fairly sophisticated one) isn't terribly hard. Anyone with a basement machine shop could do it -- we're talking about 19th and very early 20th century technology here. (I can't find it at the moment but there's a region of Afghanistan that's renowned for its home-grown weapons; armorers there can reportedly reverse-engineer, repair, and even clone most types of modern firearms, using extremely primitive equipment.) Here's a guy who scratchbuilt an AR-15 receiver (that'd be the part that's legally regulated) at home. Here's a book on manufacturing and storing your own ammunition. I could go on.

It's beyond stupid to even consider.

And, I decided to put it in my knoppix remaster, replacing version 2.0.0.9.
Yes, I skipped over 2.0.0.10, since Slashdot did not tell me about it. I did test it for a while before I put it in the CD.

Of all the scientists who are working in this area, however, Dr. Delgado appears to be the only one using radio to stimulate animals' brains, with special attention to effects on social behavior. He also makes use of telemetry in studying physiological activity in brains and other organs.

"I do not know why more work of this sort isn't done," he remarked recently, "because it is so economical and easy." Essentially, Dr. Delgado's system for studying social behavior consists of constant time-lapse photography of animal colonies, the analysis of those films and recording of of all the animals, details in the behavior patterns.

This permits not just qualitative assessment of the animals' social interactions but also the quantification of each one's behavioral profile, Dr. Delgado said. This is particularly important when analyzing the modifications in social behavior of the group produced by radio stimulation of a particular response in one or more of the animals.

For example, stimulation of several specific regions of the brain can induce aggressiveness in a monkey. Having quantatative data on that animal's behavior, as well as on that of others in the colony can reveal more precisely the magnitude, of various, sometimes subtle, effects of electrical stimulation on individual and collective social behavior.

-FL

Here's George's take on the Ten Commandments

You can install a completely FOSS stack by running VistA on http://www.geocities.com/kdtop3/GT.M on top of Linux. The only issue is that GUI part, i.e. CPRS only runs on Windows. Modifying it to run on Wine is still incomplete.

You're technically correct ("the best kind of correct").

However, we are extended all sorts of credit, yet we wouldn't define it as debt until the payment is late. Just because you haven't yet paid for your meal or your gas doesn't mean you're in debt. It just means you have yet to pay.

I press my own snake oil, here.

-FL

Meanwhile Lisi, unifies gravity into the SM, in a very odd route, a single gravi-electric-weak model with a SO(7,1) group. Now gravity is supposed to be described by symmetries of space-time, while the electroweak force is supposed to be an internal symmetries of particles, and as Motls describes, a theorem called the Coleman-Mandula theorem proves that never the twain shall met.

So what Lisi's work thus, is add up all the apples and all the oranges in known physics, put them in the same container, but not say anything about, why one thingy is an apple and the other is a orange.

And of course, Lisi model has space left over, all the apples and oranges together don't full E8, instead they's space for another 20 particles, which he fills in on the diagrams, but says nothing about what they might do in practice, (these extra particles are colored, so i immediately worry if the're going to cause proton decay.)

So far, Lisi's model doesn't seem to make any testible predictions, but its early days, and working through from a group and how particles fit in it, to actually physical predictions is a very long trek.

In fact for some-one with a bit of knowledge of group theory, its not a deficult game to play, to take a group from mathematics and try and fill the known elementary particles in on it. In fact its so easy to do, i've done one myself, http://www.geocities.com/ch1rality/E8-E7-E6-F4.html starting from E8, and forming with 3 generations, some extra quark states, and just one extra neutrino.

Why E8? E8 is every mathematians favourite group, there a lots of group that can have any size, just 5 special ones with unique sizes, E8, E7,E6,F4 and G2. And E8 is the biggest baddest group of the special lot.

You stated we are not capable of mega engineering. This is false. We are capable of scaling our energy collection out as far as we need with technology that is over 30 years old, and with that capacity, we can pursue whatever mega engineering projects we want.

The problem is that we can't feasibly remove the CO2 and other greenhouse gases, GHGs, we have already released no matter how much the energy capacity is expanded. We could try to scrub the atmosphere but how much energy would it require to reduce GHGs?

Our biggest threats are population control and wasteful use of our non-renewable resources.

A way to reduce, er control, the population is to increase education, equality, and economic opportunities. As education and gender equality improve people's economic opportunities improve as well and the more people earn the less they reproduce, ie the birth rate declines. In the "Western World" or First World if it wasn't for immigration the population would be declining.

Quote:------------

She didn't take the easy road so why should others be allowed to ride her coat tails? Rowlings got lucky with the success of the series but I'm thrilled for her. She's not part of the evil empire she's a little person that made good and crossed over. She should be an axample to everyone not some one to villify when she tries to protect her creation

UnQuote:----------- ????????

What do you mean she did not take the easy road. Harry Potter was copied from several sources. When I was a kid a book that had a title called "Larry Potter" published in 1984 time frame. Also Harry Potter is used in 1986 Movie Called "Troll." Very few people remember the book Larry Potter. Or even the movie. Harry Potter is exact copy of Larry Potter in ideas. Harry Potter is derived from previous works. Of course if your are Rowlings who have Millions can buy any US courts and squash all previous works, she is Great example of how you can buy your way out of copyright infringement.

References:

http://www.geocities.com/versetrue/rowling.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/UK/09/19/rowling.court/index.html

Are there no stories about boy wizards with currious pasts? The wonderful thing about JKR's writing is that there is nothing new. Absolutely everything in there is borrowed. However she is an execellent plagiarist in that she weaves all these things together in an entertaining fashion. And there is well marketted hype.

How many stories use latin or faux latin for spells?
How many stories have trolls, goblins, werewolves, and griffins?
How many stories have cloaks of invisibility (or rings)?

http://www.geocities.com/versetrue/rowling.htm

Reminds me of the setup I use with my Knoppix Remaster where the ~/.mozilla, ~/.opera and ~/.flock are not loaded into ramdisk until the user wants to start the browser. Then a "default, but preconfigured set up" ~/.mozilla etc is loaded before the browser itself starts. (no, these are not libraries)
So, if you don't want to take up ramdisk space with browser files that you won't need today, that's what you get.
Then, when the browser is closed, ~/.mozilla etc is deleted entirely. No trace. No cookies, no history, even though the browser zero's these out on close if you want, deletion is the only way to "be sure".
For a livecd linux that just might be run without a "persistent home directory partition", this is one way to go to preserve memory on systems that might only have 128 MB of RAM, for instance.

Don't throw those old boxes away, they will still run Firefox 2.0.0.9!

Oh, and what Hard Drive? I'm using a SanDisk 2 GB USB drive to run the OS with FF now. (4 partitions)
The hard drives have been "put to sleep". File is here, help yourself, it's fully commented.

Rapidweather

If you just don't feeling like replaying your game to get back to where you were, you can often find saved games from somewhere else. That's especially true for linear games, like FPS's. Just for example, here's a collection of Half-Life 2 saved games. With some work, you could probably also find (for example) Oblivion saved games that might at least put you near where you want to be.

Depending on time and culture, most attractive looks can vary from

• rail-thin (today's model standard) to
• pleasantly curvatious (20s-60's model standard) to
• juicy plump ("Rubenesque") to
• downright obese (some arab cultures)

Just because you're used to it, doesn't mean that it's been (and will remain) the standard for all time.

"Would pronouncing it 'give-a-byte' help?"

SEDAGIVE!?!?

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/4159/sedagive.wav

--
BMO