Yes, indeed. The microwave oven has changed the structure of our civilization.
Do you remember how long it takes to cook without a microwave? With a microwave, you can have two full-time workers in a family and still cook dinner every night. One of the secondary consequences is the rise of full-day daycare and kindergarten.
Whether these social trends are good or bad is left as an exercise for the student.
> Does anyone care if their garage door opener > uses an IEEE standard?:-)
Well, yes, if it means (a) that I can buy a generic replacement transmitter from more than one company and (b) that I can control/monitor the door from other devices (PDA, cell phone, etc).
A few years ago, Bertrand Meyer penned a fascinating article, "The Ethics of Free Software". (Printed in Software Development magazine (reg req'd), but mirrored many places including here and here.)
Meyer criticizes the self-assumed ethical superiority of ESR, RMS, and others, and in particular notes the "gun evangelism" ESR intertwines with his open-source evangelism.
This thoughtful article should be required reading for all overly-strident geeks.
Sadly, the image quality for the first week's strips is pretty bad, and the images are small. You'd think premium content would be of higher quality...
> It sounds like the author is suggesting behaviourism (cf. Skinner) as a theory of cognition, an idea that was discarded before I was born.
Nope, the author is suggesting that complex behaviors can arise from complex interconnections of simple, identical components. He argues from his vast knowledge of neuroanatomy, and doesn't have any theoretical axe to grind.
Minsky may have ripped perceptrons to peices [sic], but that has no bearing on the elegance or correctness of Braitenberg's exposition. Perceptrons were toys.
Why should I have to pay for my neighbor to
download terabytes of music? I don't download
MP3s or movies (the kind of 'content' that makes
the RIAA break out in a cold sweat), and I'd
resent subsidizing all the people who think that
they shouldn't have to pay for their pleasures.
It's like agreeing to split the check evenly at a restaurant: you're screwed unless you order the most expensive thing on the menu.
--
"If you think I'm expensive,
wait until you hire an amateur."
It's amusing to see people who don't know the difference between "its" and "it's" arguing about the correctness of someone else's punctuation!
And some of them, who always put an extra apostrophe in the possessive "its", justify it by saying they're too lazy to type the hyphen in "e-mail"!
C'mon, folks...
So let me get this straight: I buy a tonne of tires for my vehicle, which can later be rendered down to 438 liters of crude oil (and thence to a probably similar amount of gasoline). That much gasoline will move the car about 6,000 kilometers; a tonne of tires would cost US$3,000 and last for over a million kilometers. This is supposed to solve the oil crisis?
Can't people do math?
Slashdot Mirror
...and this one needs a browser window at least 1024 pixels wide. And if you use large fonts (some of us have bad eyes) the layout breaks.
Three cheers for accessibility!
...from back in 2001 was UWE's Slugbot, which was supposed to 'live off the land' by finding and digesting agricultural pests:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156
Yes, indeed. The microwave oven has changed the structure of our civilization.
Do you remember how long it takes to cook without a microwave? With a microwave, you can have two full-time workers in a family and still cook dinner every night. One of the secondary consequences is the rise of full-day daycare and kindergarten.
Whether these social trends are good or bad is left as an exercise for the student.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
> Does anyone care if their garage door opener :-)
> uses an IEEE standard?
Well, yes, if it means (a) that I can buy a generic replacement transmitter from more than one company and (b) that I can control/monitor the door from other devices (PDA, cell phone, etc).
Meyer criticizes the self-assumed ethical superiority of ESR, RMS, and others, and in particular notes the "gun evangelism" ESR intertwines with his open-source evangelism.
This thoughtful article should be required reading for all overly-strident geeks.
Sadly, the image quality for the first week's strips is pretty bad, and the images are small. You'd think premium content would be of higher quality...
> It sounds like the author is suggesting behaviourism (cf. Skinner) as a theory of cognition, an idea that was discarded before I was born.
Nope, the author is suggesting that complex behaviors can arise from complex interconnections of simple, identical components. He argues from his vast knowledge of neuroanatomy, and doesn't have any theoretical axe to grind.
Minsky may have ripped perceptrons to peices [sic], but that has no bearing on the elegance or correctness of Braitenberg's exposition. Perceptrons were toys.
It's like agreeing to split the check evenly at a restaurant: you're screwed unless you order the most expensive thing on the menu.
--
"If you think I'm expensive, wait until you hire an amateur."
It's amusing to see people who don't know the difference between "its" and "it's" arguing about the correctness of someone else's punctuation! And some of them, who always put an extra apostrophe in the possessive "its", justify it by saying they're too lazy to type the hyphen in "e-mail"! C'mon, folks...
So let me get this straight: I buy a tonne of tires for my vehicle, which can later be rendered down to 438 liters of crude oil (and thence to a probably similar amount of gasoline). That much gasoline will move the car about 6,000 kilometers; a tonne of tires would cost US$3,000 and last for over a million kilometers. This is supposed to solve the oil crisis? Can't people do math?