Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species? Surely that we do in any way is just a trait of humanity. We could be like viruses, causing disease and death with no other intent than to reproduce. We could be the ultimate disease, destroying everything in our own self interest if that was our innate desire. The whole concept that we should care about other species or our impact on our environment is entirely of our own creation. To ascribe it to some higher goal is still to ascribe it to some higher human goal. To act like the reasons for preserving the environment and life on this planet are anything other than selfish is misguided. We want to preserve life on the earth for our own self interests: because we depend on it (and because we think it is cute). We want to preserve the environment because we depend on it (and because we think it is pretty). These are the only reasons to protect the world that make sense: because we want to protect ourselves and our children. This is a desire that has kept us going throughout millenia.
Not everyone has the same balance of these desires, and hence not everyone is as concerned about protecting the environment as they are about having shiny toys. They may like the taste of fishes a bit more than seeing them swim. This leads to some inevitable conflict, and the large debates, and a lot of hair pulling from the people who have strong opinions (probably because of strong desires) on each side who find it unbelievable that everyone doesn't prioritise things in the same way they do.
The attitude that we have some 'higher purpose' or that everything else is somehow more sacred than us is a strange to me. It's like people feel guilty about their own existence. I think that is has some of the same overtones of religion - that you are imperfect, you are inferior, you are sinful and therefore you should feel bad, and worship this, and promise not to do this list of things, promise to do this other list of things. The original sin becomes the carbon footprint. The objects of worship are trees and rocks and animals. You should forgo warmth and meat and convenience because they are an affront to your belief. And if you really get upset you should forget all respect for your fellow men and go and cause destruction in the name of your beliefs. Like all religions there are great benefits for many involved. And there is also the way it is used to control people, and to justify actions against fellow human beings, and often against everything you claim to stand for. The attitude of 'humans are the nastiest bunch of bastards on the planet, we should hate ourselves' is the first step of the crazy thinking towards things starting to get blown up (and peoples grandparents being exhumed). Destroy the infidel, for he does not share our beliefs as we are told to believe them.
Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe. We are not here for some higher purpose. We exist, like all life, simply to exist. That we are conscious of this, that we can analyse it in this way makes us one the most fascinating creatures on the planet. But we are what we are, and if we fuck it up and destroy ourselves, we will know who to blame. It would be a great shame, but you're not going to get me to start hating myself because I accept my own and others fallibility. We may be able to achieve much more, but we may not. What will be will be, so live your life because you can, simply live, that is all.
I sometimes wonder if it's the very public nature of Linux (and much open source) development that gives that creates this impression of everyone acting like children. I've heard plenty of people describing working environments (no matter the expertise) that sound exactly the same as this, it's just that no one outside the company will ever see it. It's kind of a software development soap opera...
I was going to say that you missed the GP's point, as he said 'at least' twice a day. But then I realised that if the clock ran forwards and fast it may only be right once. And if the clock always ran an hour fast, but in time and with a +-30 minutes random error then it would never be right. I haven't yet worked out how to make the clock right a negative number of times in the day, or how to make the clock more right than a clock that is always right.
Depending on how far you want to go it may be worth building a fixed input module with a few standard features. We used something at uni called the digital test bed which provided a load of useful functions to save some legwork (debouncing switches and wiring up displays etc.) to let you get on with your design.
I'd suggest something like: - 5V supply (or 3.3 maybe, depends on what logic you are using) - A 556 IC to generate two clocks, one at (say) 10 MHz and the other variable (possibly a socket to plug in some Rs and Cs to change it). - Use the 10 MHz clock to provide debounced inputs from some buttons, switches, rotary switches etc. - A load of LEDs, some seven segment hex displays - Some divided down clock outputs (just using a binary counter) to provide some much slower clocks (say down to 1 Hz so you can see things happen)
This will probably swallow a reasonable amount of budget, but then all you need for a wide variety of projects is a bunch of 74 series ttl chips and a breadboard. You can start building counters, timers, adders, traffic light controllers etc.
Keeping to the $5 budget would be tricky with this though, for that you're probably limited to a few, simpler designs.
Also if you're doing digital logic teach them a bit about debugging it, the number of people I've seen who just ripped out all the wires and started again when their circuit wouldn't work, rather than just hooking up a scope (or LED or something) at different points to see if they were getting the result they expected
We did one at a university intro course that was a very simple AM radio receiver. Battery, small coil, variable cap, few transistors and passives and a headphone socket. The variable cap is probably the most expensive bit, alongside headphones. If you're making loads then you could probably get a bunch of PCBs made up. Something like: http://www.zen22142.zen.co.uk/Circuits/rf/amrec.html
Teletext subtitles for the old analogue broadcasts, and I'm guessing some equivalent is embedded in the DVB stream that Satellite and Terrestrial digital TV uses
As a not so naive Brit, we have our much superior 3 second rule for the same thing.
I'd like to know what the GP has on the floors in his house that is so toxic that the tiny amount that will rub off on food is detrimental for your health? How on earth do people survive in places without nice sealed floors and cleaning chemicals? You'd think we'd have evolved some method of protecting our bodies against stuff like that.
There's no good reason for the system software to require "maintenance" to deal with bit rot.
Did you read what he said? I know car analogies are a route to certain doom, but I think you may be avoiding his point. When I write a piece of software that's it done. I don't expect to come back a week, or a month or even years later and find that it's seized up. It should work exactly the same as it did the last time. I have performed the same tasks on my PC at work day in day out for years, so why has it gone from me using the startup time to put the kettle on and the time to login and check my emails to brew my tea in the morning to the startup time being longer than all that and my tea being cold by the time it's ready? There is no reason. I don't download tonnes of crap, I don't visit porn sites. As far as I can tell there is no malware or virusses on my PC so why has it slowed down? Contrast my Linux PC and laptop at home which have operated in a consistent and reliable fashion for years, across entire distribution upgrades etc. There is no good reason for this behaviour, which is what the GP was stating.
And before you make any further ill thought out comments consider this: There are many systems that have run 24x7, processing vast quantities of data, and have done so for years on end with next to no problems. Whilst having the redundancy and quality of hardware used to provide high availability computing is unnecessary for most users, it does show that software that is capable of performing these feats can be developed. The issue then is why Windows is so very far from providing anything like that level of stability
I concur, surely it is optimistic to believe that things can be better: that the current situation is terrible. The truly pessimistic wouldn't recognize it as bad, because they would have no concept of anything better to contrast it with.
Calling it the 20th century just because the numbers start 20 seems obvious, but then what century was covered by the years 0-99? This is a computer geek website, we all understand arrays that start from zero, and hence that the 20th item in the array of centuries will cover years 1900-1999. The 'non-computery' approach would probably start at one and have the first two digits as the number, but that would make the 20th century 2001-2100, which makes even less sense
There are a few cases where machines like this have escaped into the wild and caused problems. I'm sure I read one recently where a fairly strong radioactive source used for radiotherapy had been left in a disused hospital and taken by someone. See also people selling bits of RTGs for scrap, people dumping industrial radiation sources in scrapyards (hey, that was on House!) etc. etc. Lots of nasty nukular material out there without any need to go near a nuclear 'facility'
But if you're not rolling - say you get dumped on your back or side - then you need to take a lot of the energy out of the impact.
As far as the 'causing more injury to the limbs than the torso' goes: I have done thousands of breakfalls, the majority landing on one side, and a lot of them pretty damn hard. My arms are fine, my head hasn't hit the floor in ages, and I don't get the wind knocked out of me that often. I know that if I throw someone hard and they don't breakfall properly (which is a combination of posture, timing and hitting the floor as hard as possible with your arm(s)) then they will be staying down on the floor for a while, even though we have soft mats etc.
I agree. There are two things I would change to massively improve our road system (in the UK) at busy times: 1 - HGVs are not allowed to overtake when travelling at > 50 MPH (they're all meant to be limited to 56). When one truck that's doing.5 mph more than the other decides to overtake another during the morning rush this instantly causes all sorts of silly buggers with the remaining traffic. I know they need to get where they're going just like the rest of us, but unless one truck is really struggling on a hill (hence the 50mph+) I can't see that the tiny difference in speed will get them there any quicker. 2 - Some traffic cops that actually observe and have a word with people that are holding up traffic, change lanes suddenly and without indicating, brake for no reason, people who decide they need to pull out to overtake a truck that is 1/2 a mile in the distance when they're only travelling a fraction faster than it, people who have clearly not taken into account the speed of traffic behind them before moving out a lane and however many other things that go on on the road.
Rather than the focus on speed, how about a couple of words and an explanation of why your stupid driving is making everyone else's time miserable and dangerous. I find it ludicrous that there is no formal training required for motorway driving, and that there is no maintenance of standards. Equally people who drive at 40 MPH on the national speed limit roads (60MPH) should be forced to retake their tests - because if you don't get up to a speed for 'reasonable progress' e.g. the speed limit (where it is appropriate of course) you fail the test and hence you shouldn't be on the damn road.
Finally the over-emphasis on speed as the key problem needs to be lost. The prevalence of speed limits means that people assume that it is safe to drive at that speed regardless of conditions or the road. I've heard of people crashing on national speed limit roads at 60 because 'that was the speed limit so I thought it was safe to do it'. These morons are why they are planning to reduce the limit to 50 - those of us who are actually capable were already slowing down for the bits where it is necessary, but soon we will all be forced to slow down all the time because of these incompetents.
You're suggesting that we have somehow set off a chain of events that will result in the entire planet being inhospitable to humans, and it will occur in as small a timescale as 50 years?
There certainly is a risk. I can't see it being much greater than the risk that a solar storm is about to wipe out all our electronics, or that a large meteor will land in my garden next week and the resulting dust cloud will block out the sun (hey it wasn't my garden but this has actually happened - we should definitely be more worried about meteors than climate change).
The reason I got an IRiver IHP140 (and replaced it at nearly the same price from ebay after I blew my first one up) was because they have proper support for Vorbis (and with rockbox they support a whole lot more). It's a shame that they stopped making decent sized HDD Players (everything they do is 20GB or less now) but I presume competing with crApple iPoods isn't a particularly sensible business choice. That said when it came out it was a better price, better performance (sound,battery life etc.), and better price (and price/GB storage) than the iPod. I presume it didn't have the marketing or instant cult appeal that the iPod.
I'm dreading having to upgrade or replace it as I haven't seen anything that has quite the same level of simple functionality. Perhaps I'll have to get an iPod video (and stick rockbox on it).
Yeah, but the hot water has likely been sitting in a tank for a while. Plus many houses in the UK have a header tank for cold water, since it wasn't pumped 24/7. This is usually an open topped tank in the loft and used for pretty much everything except the cold water in the kitchen (which is for consumption). These tanks are often a bit nasty, and usually contain at least a few dead spiders, if not occasionally a dead rodent. So whilst the source is the same (it all comes from the sky at some point after all) it's what happens during the meantime that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species? Surely that we do in any way is just a trait of humanity. We could be like viruses, causing disease and death with no other intent than to reproduce. We could be the ultimate disease, destroying everything in our own self interest if that was our innate desire. The whole concept that we should care about other species or our impact on our environment is entirely of our own creation. To ascribe it to some higher goal is still to ascribe it to some higher human goal. To act like the reasons for preserving the environment and life on this planet are anything other than selfish is misguided. We want to preserve life on the earth for our own self interests: because we depend on it (and because we think it is cute). We want to preserve the environment because we depend on it (and because we think it is pretty). These are the only reasons to protect the world that make sense: because we want to protect ourselves and our children. This is a desire that has kept us going throughout millenia.
Not everyone has the same balance of these desires, and hence not everyone is as concerned about protecting the environment as they are about having shiny toys. They may like the taste of fishes a bit more than seeing them swim. This leads to some inevitable conflict, and the large debates, and a lot of hair pulling from the people who have strong opinions (probably because of strong desires) on each side who find it unbelievable that everyone doesn't prioritise things in the same way they do.
The attitude that we have some 'higher purpose' or that everything else is somehow more sacred than us is a strange to me. It's like people feel guilty about their own existence. I think that is has some of the same overtones of religion - that you are imperfect, you are inferior, you are sinful and therefore you should feel bad, and worship this, and promise not to do this list of things, promise to do this other list of things. The original sin becomes the carbon footprint. The objects of worship are trees and rocks and animals. You should forgo warmth and meat and convenience because they are an affront to your belief. And if you really get upset you should forget all respect for your fellow men and go and cause destruction in the name of your beliefs. Like all religions there are great benefits for many involved. And there is also the way it is used to control people, and to justify actions against fellow human beings, and often against everything you claim to stand for. The attitude of 'humans are the nastiest bunch of bastards on the planet, we should hate ourselves' is the first step of the crazy thinking towards things starting to get blown up (and peoples grandparents being exhumed). Destroy the infidel, for he does not share our beliefs as we are told to believe them.
Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe. We are not here for some higher purpose. We exist, like all life, simply to exist. That we are conscious of this, that we can analyse it in this way makes us one the most fascinating creatures on the planet. But we are what we are, and if we fuck it up and destroy ourselves, we will know who to blame. It would be a great shame, but you're not going to get me to start hating myself because I accept my own and others fallibility. We may be able to achieve much more, but we may not. What will be will be, so live your life because you can, simply live, that is all.
Well of course. You didn't think the government would be able to get a project like that done on time did you?
I sometimes wonder if it's the very public nature of Linux (and much open source) development that gives that creates this impression of everyone acting like children. I've heard plenty of people describing working environments (no matter the expertise) that sound exactly the same as this, it's just that no one outside the company will ever see it. It's kind of a software development soap opera...
Reminds me of the exam for income tax form designers, specifically question 11:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/old89/test.830.html
11. POLITICAL SCIENCE
Pick up the phone on the desk beside you and start World War III. Report at length on its socio-political effects, if any.
I was going to say that you missed the GP's point, as he said 'at least' twice a day. But then I realised that if the clock ran forwards and fast it may only be right once. And if the clock always ran an hour fast, but in time and with a +-30 minutes random error then it would never be right. I haven't yet worked out how to make the clock right a negative number of times in the day, or how to make the clock more right than a clock that is always right.
Uranium is basically harmless, radiation-wise (any radioactive material that has been around since the Earth formed is not meaningfully radioactive).
Ask the people of Cornwall in the UK (and some parts of the US, I can't remember which) about Radon. Here's a handy map:
http://www.hpa.org.uk/webw/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1197636998945?p=1158934607683
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon#Radon_concentration_guidelines
How the danger of Radon building up in houses to the general public was discovered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_environment#Radon_in_houses
Depending on how far you want to go it may be worth building a fixed input module with a few standard features. We used something at uni called the digital test bed which provided a load of useful functions to save some legwork (debouncing switches and wiring up displays etc.) to let you get on with your design.
I'd suggest something like:
- 5V supply (or 3.3 maybe, depends on what logic you are using)
- A 556 IC to generate two clocks, one at (say) 10 MHz and the other variable (possibly a socket to plug in some Rs and Cs to change it).
- Use the 10 MHz clock to provide debounced inputs from some buttons, switches, rotary switches etc.
- A load of LEDs, some seven segment hex displays
- Some divided down clock outputs (just using a binary counter) to provide some much slower clocks (say down to 1 Hz so you can see things happen)
This will probably swallow a reasonable amount of budget, but then all you need for a wide variety of projects is a bunch of 74 series ttl chips and a breadboard. You can start building counters, timers, adders, traffic light controllers etc.
Keeping to the $5 budget would be tricky with this though, for that you're probably limited to a few, simpler designs.
Also if you're doing digital logic teach them a bit about debugging it, the number of people I've seen who just ripped out all the wires and started again when their circuit wouldn't work, rather than just hooking up a scope (or LED or something) at different points to see if they were getting the result they expected
We did one at a university intro course that was a very simple AM radio receiver. Battery, small coil, variable cap, few transistors and passives and a headphone socket. The variable cap is probably the most expensive bit, alongside headphones. If you're making loads then you could probably get a bunch of PCBs made up. Something like: http://www.zen22142.zen.co.uk/Circuits/rf/amrec.html
http://www.elecfree.com/electronic/fm-receiver-4-transistor-by-bf184/ has a similarly uncomplicated FM receiver. Bit more complex but probably more likely to pick something up you will recognise.
I thought Mr Patel was the guy who has kept very quiet his monopoly on every corner shop everywhere.
Teletext subtitles for the old analogue broadcasts, and I'm guessing some equivalent is embedded in the DVB stream that Satellite and Terrestrial digital TV uses
As a not so naive Brit, we have our much superior 3 second rule for the same thing.
I'd like to know what the GP has on the floors in his house that is so toxic that the tiny amount that will rub off on food is detrimental for your health? How on earth do people survive in places without nice sealed floors and cleaning chemicals? You'd think we'd have evolved some method of protecting our bodies against stuff like that.
There's no good reason for the system software to require "maintenance"
to deal with bit rot.
Did you read what he said? I know car analogies are a route to certain doom, but I think you may be avoiding his point. When I write a piece of software that's it done. I don't expect to come back a week, or a month or even years later and find that it's seized up. It should work exactly the same as it did the last time. I have performed the same tasks on my PC at work day in day out for years, so why has it gone from me using the startup time to put the kettle on and the time to login and check my emails to brew my tea in the morning to the startup time being longer than all that and my tea being cold by the time it's ready? There is no reason. I don't download tonnes of crap, I don't visit porn sites. As far as I can tell there is no malware or virusses on my PC so why has it slowed down? Contrast my Linux PC and laptop at home which have operated in a consistent and reliable fashion for years, across entire distribution upgrades etc. There is no good reason for this behaviour, which is what the GP was stating.
And before you make any further ill thought out comments consider this: There are many systems that have run 24x7, processing vast quantities of data, and have done so for years on end with next to no problems. Whilst having the redundancy and quality of hardware used to provide high availability computing is unnecessary for most users, it does show that software that is capable of performing these feats can be developed. The issue then is why Windows is so very far from providing anything like that level of stability
You forgot elephants. Elephants come in pints.
Who is this 'Anonymous Cowardon' who keeps posting? Somewhere behind my computer a small pile of spaces seems to have leaked out...
I concur, surely it is optimistic to believe that things can be better: that the current situation is terrible. The truly pessimistic wouldn't recognize it as bad, because they would have no concept of anything better to contrast it with.
Calling it the 20th century just because the numbers start 20 seems obvious, but then what century was covered by the years 0-99? This is a computer geek website, we all understand arrays that start from zero, and hence that the 20th item in the array of centuries will cover years 1900-1999. The 'non-computery' approach would probably start at one and have the first two digits as the number, but that would make the 20th century 2001-2100, which makes even less sense
Reminds me of the rule that 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the remaining 10% of the work takes the remaining 90% of the time.
There are a few cases where machines like this have escaped into the wild and caused problems. I'm sure I read one recently where a fairly strong radioactive source used for radiotherapy had been left in a disused hospital and taken by someone. See also people selling bits of RTGs for scrap, people dumping industrial radiation sources in scrapyards (hey, that was on House!) etc. etc. Lots of nasty nukular material out there without any need to go near a nuclear 'facility'
But if you're not rolling - say you get dumped on your back or side - then you need to take a lot of the energy out of the impact.
As far as the 'causing more injury to the limbs than the torso' goes: I have done thousands of breakfalls, the majority landing on one side, and a lot of them pretty damn hard. My arms are fine, my head hasn't hit the floor in ages, and I don't get the wind knocked out of me that often. I know that if I throw someone hard and they don't breakfall properly (which is a combination of posture, timing and hitting the floor as hard as possible with your arm(s)) then they will be staying down on the floor for a while, even though we have soft mats etc.
I agree. There are two things I would change to massively improve our road system (in the UK) at busy times: .5 mph more than the other decides to overtake another during the morning rush this instantly causes all sorts of silly buggers with the remaining traffic. I know they need to get where they're going just like the rest of us, but unless one truck is really struggling on a hill (hence the 50mph+) I can't see that the tiny difference in speed will get them there any quicker.
1 - HGVs are not allowed to overtake when travelling at > 50 MPH (they're all meant to be limited to 56). When one truck that's doing
2 - Some traffic cops that actually observe and have a word with people that are holding up traffic, change lanes suddenly and without indicating, brake for no reason, people who decide they need to pull out to overtake a truck that is 1/2 a mile in the distance when they're only travelling a fraction faster than it, people who have clearly not taken into account the speed of traffic behind them before moving out a lane and however many other things that go on on the road.
Rather than the focus on speed, how about a couple of words and an explanation of why your stupid driving is making everyone else's time miserable and dangerous. I find it ludicrous that there is no formal training required for motorway driving, and that there is no maintenance of standards. Equally people who drive at 40 MPH on the national speed limit roads (60MPH) should be forced to retake their tests - because if you don't get up to a speed for 'reasonable progress' e.g. the speed limit (where it is appropriate of course) you fail the test and hence you shouldn't be on the damn road.
Finally the over-emphasis on speed as the key problem needs to be lost. The prevalence of speed limits means that people assume that it is safe to drive at that speed regardless of conditions or the road. I've heard of people crashing on national speed limit roads at 60 because 'that was the speed limit so I thought it was safe to do it'. These morons are why they are planning to reduce the limit to 50 - those of us who are actually capable were already slowing down for the bits where it is necessary, but soon we will all be forced to slow down all the time because of these incompetents.
You're suggesting that we have somehow set off a chain of events that will result in the entire planet being inhospitable to humans, and it will occur in as small a timescale as 50 years?
There certainly is a risk. I can't see it being much greater than the risk that a solar storm is about to wipe out all our electronics, or that a large meteor will land in my garden next week and the resulting dust cloud will block out the sun (hey it wasn't my garden but this has actually happened - we should definitely be more worried about meteors than climate change).
Go and look up the process used by the guys that write software for the space shuttle.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html
I get the impression people there aren't just building up their resumes.
The reason I got an IRiver IHP140 (and replaced it at nearly the same price from ebay after I blew my first one up) was because they have proper support for Vorbis (and with rockbox they support a whole lot more). It's a shame that they stopped making decent sized HDD Players (everything they do is 20GB or less now) but I presume competing with crApple iPoods isn't a particularly sensible business choice. That said when it came out it was a better price, better performance (sound,battery life etc.), and better price (and price/GB storage) than the iPod. I presume it didn't have the marketing or instant cult appeal that the iPod.
I'm dreading having to upgrade or replace it as I haven't seen anything that has quite the same level of simple functionality. Perhaps I'll have to get an iPod video (and stick rockbox on it).
Yeah, but the hot water has likely been sitting in a tank for a while. Plus many houses in the UK have a header tank for cold water, since it wasn't pumped 24/7. This is usually an open topped tank in the loft and used for pretty much everything except the cold water in the kitchen (which is for consumption). These tanks are often a bit nasty, and usually contain at least a few dead spiders, if not occasionally a dead rodent. So whilst the source is the same (it all comes from the sky at some point after all) it's what happens during the meantime that matters.
You think dynamic page generation occurs on YOUR computer?