If you think that there's much that even the president of the USA can do to swing the price of gas a couple bucks per gallon, then you've got no idea how the world works.
Gas prices have come down because the economy is tanking so people are buying less gas. There's two ways that Obama could cause gas prices to seriously go up over the next few years. He could either somehow magically turn our economy around, but I don't think that would upset the people all that much, even if they do have to pay more for gas afterwards. He could also do something to further destabilize the middle east, like start a war with Iran. I don't expect him to do that, but it'd be an effective way of driving up oil prices quickly.
There are a couple of other things that could happen that would push prices up, but they are outside of the control of the president of the USA, and Obama likely wouldn't take too much blame for them.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in an area that had solid public schools. I learned plenty from them, and generally had a positive experience.
And then I guess I was lucky with my high school private school experience as well. While they were certainly more strict when someone got out of line, and there were a handful of the snobbish rich kids, overall I look back pretty fondly on the experience. I had decent teachers, including some who I think really genuinely cared about me as a student and a person, students were given an amount of personal freedom well beyond anything I ever had in public school(although to be fair, I never attended a public high school, so maybe it's more about age).
I think the important point is that there are good schools and bad schools, and neither private nor public have a monopoly on any level of quality. One way or the other is not the solution.
How many people here are truly opposed to some sort of filtering in computers in school? While the idea of some sort of imposed filter on my internet connection at home is very bothersome to me, I don't have a problem with attempts to keep inappropriate material off of computers in schools.
My biggest concern about it would be that generally the filtering systems aren't that hard to work around, so hopefully the school systems won't waste money buying into a really expensive product that ends up not working any better than a cheaper alternative.
That other input stuff is certainly coming, it's just not going to displace the mouse/keyboard, it's going to be included along side them, and create new capabilities for computers.
Ten years from now, I'd expect the majority of monitors to have touch-screen capabilities built in. But for desktop use, 95% of the time those touchscreens will be ignored, because it's not efficient to use a touchscreen for a large portion of what computers are used for. Even if you mounted the screen into the desk in a way where I don't have to hold my arm up and out to use it, there's still efficiencies inherent to the mouse. The way mouse tracking/acceleration works, I can move the cursor clear across the screen while only having to move my hand/mouse an inch or so. The tip of the arrow cursor is much more precise than my fingertip. And I've also got a few buttons and a scroll wheel that I can easily operate, even while moving my hand.
A keyboard allows for so many different inputs that it's hard to imagine replacing it with an equal number of hand movements or face gestures or voice commands. And that's ignoring the fact that things like voice commands or gestures become problematic when the user is in an environment containing other people.
Yeah, his examples are pretty stupid too. Comparing writing commercial software vs. cutting yards? One's a career and the other's a way for a high school kid to make money over the summer.
That's not to say that there aren't professional landscapers who take their work seriously, or that there aren't programmers that aren't lazy beyond words. Take any job position, heck take almost any individual company, and you'll probably find a handful of relatively lazy and unmotivated people, and a handful of super-motivated, 60hours+ per week people picking up all that slack. Then in the middle is a bunch of people who put in their eight hours a day, and maybe a little overtime for the occasional deadline crunch.
The IT/software world is not particularly special or different from any other career that's ever existed. At a larger scale, it's a bunch of groups of people working together to make things, and so it ends up with all the social, political, and cultural issues that every other field has to deal with.
But where are consumers supposed to see that they want it? If I go over to my uncle's house and he shows me his fancy new on-demand internet video appliance, I'm not going to be very convinced if it stops to buffer every 90 seconds because his cable modem can't keep up.
Sure, consumers don't have any responsibility to purchase bandwidth just to please manufacturers, but at the same time the manufacturers don't have a responsibility or a sound financial incentive to create those devices if consumers don't have the infrastructure to use it.
Isn't this another 'chicken and egg' problem though (besides the one mentioned in the article about ISP's)? Those sorts of appliances aren't going to be successful and catch on unless people have the bandwidth to properly utilize them. If we wait for the devices before we provide the bandwidth, we'll just end up waiting forever, because the appliances don't work in a compelling way without an adequate connection speed.
At the end of the day, I think it (like most other things) all comes down to costs. Can this sort of scheme be developed with a cost competitive with what I'm paying monthly for my cable modem connection? Even if I don't see the need for the bandwidth, if it costs that same either way, I'd certainly take the higher bandwidth option. The fact that I'd have some partial ownership and am cutting those crappy telcos out of some of the picture is a nice bonus as well.
Yeah, but still, there's usually a pretty big disconnect. Mainly due to my motivation for playing the game vs. the character's in-game motivation.
I couldn't care less whether Princess Peach gets rescued from Bowser. But if I'm having a good time jumping around as Mario, he'll eventually save her. If I get bored, then I guess she'll just have to deal. Now Mario games aren't particularly story driven, and I have played games where I've gotten a bit emotionally invested in the characters. (KOTOR was one that comes to mind), but more often that not, I'm working my way through the storyline less because I identify with my character's motivation but more because I'm having fun and I want to see what's next. I don't particularly care if it's good or bad for my character, just as long as it's interesting.
Making all of that worse is that even in the less restrictive sandbox type games that we've seen lately, there's still a lot of limits to what you can do. Particularly in terms of socializing, which I think is a very important part of being a person, and so a character that can't freely socialize is harder to relate to. MMO's solve that problem to a large degree by replacing many of the NPC's with other real people. But not every game type and storyline is well suited to an MMO.
I'd imagine that with a little cleverness and effort, it'd be possible to come up with a rain jacket design that had a decent amount of venting in places that were adequately protected from rain. I own a jacket that has zippers under the armpits that you can open to allow some cooling. You still probably wouldn't be very comfortable running a marathon in it, but for day-to-day wear, I'm sure it could be quite comfortable. Designing in more venting wouldn't be impossible.
Much of the "original" or "natural" New Orleans is actually above sea level. Even a good portion of the lower 9th ward is above sea level. Closer to the river, there were natural levees well before the Army Corps of Engineers built any, and that gradual slope puts a decent amount of land above sea level.
There are parts of the city that are below sea level, basically reclaimed swamp. but much of the severity of the flooding had to do with the fact that the system of canals, combined with storm surge effectively raises sea level during a big storm, and so things end up worse if there's a breakdown in the system.
Every console has copy protection of some sort. If you put the defectivebydesign tag on every story that's console related, then that tag quickly becomes useless for its intended purpose, which supposedly is to make certain topics easier to find.
Instead, tags pretty much immediately became just another way of making "political" anonymous comments.
I guess my point is that tags on/. are a complete failure, and should be removed.
No, I would imagine that most religions would interpret that somewhere along the lines of the body being in a physical condition where the soul temporarily couldn't interact properly with it. A rough analogy would be sort of like saying that the operating system is the soul of a computer. If you turn the power to the computer off, then the OS can't do anything on the computer, but the OS still exists on the hard drive, waiting for the juice to start flowing again.
A religious interpretation of the soul doesn't require that it be that directly connected to the condition of the body. After all, many of those religions propose that the soul will keep existing even if the body is killed, chopped up into little pieces, and then burned. It's just that that soul no longer has the physical vehicle with which to interact with the world.
I also find this to be a really surprising assumption. I love my xbox 360, but the damn thing sounds like a mini wind tunnel when it's on. I would never leave it on if it wasn't being used, because the noise is very noticeable.
The office of the President created a contingency plan that included cutting off communications to astronauts stuck on the moon. I never claimed that that piece of trivia contained some sort of profound or even useful insight. But if you don't find that at least a little bit interesting or amusing or even humorous, then I'm not really interested in having a conversation with you.
I have no doubt that the contingency plans for invading Canada would be a fascinating read, even though I know it's entirely unlikely to happen.
What's your point? That I didn't prove that NASA had diabolical plans to strand Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and laugh while they starved to death? I'll agree that I didn't prove that. But I wasn't trying to.
Well no kidding things might not have played out like that, we'll never know because they were able to take off from the moon.
But we know for a fact that there was a documented contingency plan created by the government that included cutting off communications before the Apollo astronauts had died if they were unable to leave the moon. We don't know if the plan would've actually been followed, but we know that the Nixon administration had formed that plan. The whole idea of cutting of communications was probably pretty stupid, because the astronauts on the moon would've been able to continue broadcasting, and other outfits besides NASA would probably have been able to receive and transmit communications with them. I don't know if that plan was ever vetted through NASA, and I don't really care. I wasn't trying to prove any sort of point other than noting that this little piece of trivia existed.
Re:Those are america's problems
on
American Nerd
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· Score: 0, Troll
I agree that it's not as big of an issue as the stereotypes tend to suggest. And when there is some sort of tension, often times the "nerd" is just as much to blame as the "cool kid." I've come across many self-proclaimed geeks who will whine endlessly about how they're misunderstood by everyone else and how all the cool kids look down on them and their hobbies. And yet that same person will rant about how stupid sports are, or what a waste of time parties are. That kind of attitude isn't going to win you any respect or friends.
I went through grade school being as big of a nerd as is possible(and about a foot shorter than everyone else to boot), yet I had hardly any problems with people giving me a hard time, because I talked to everyone and treated them all decently. I wasn't best buddies with everyone, I'm not particularly skilled socially, but I showed enough self-confidence that people would leave me be. And I generally expressed enough interest in the hobbies/thoughts of other people that they enjoyed talking with me. I didn't play football, I didn't work on cars, but I wouldn't run away from any conversation that might possibly turn to a subject like that.
I guess my point is that geek are generally just as responsible for their social segregation as the jocks and the cool kids are. The 17 year old nerd that has no friends and sits in his room all weekend is making that choice for themselves. That's not to excuse bullying or anything like that, but if it's gotten to that point then it's the result of that individual making a bunch of anti-social choices previously.
If that failed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could not be rescued. Mission Control would have to ''close down communications'' and, as the world agonized, let the doomed astronauts starve to death or commit suicide.
Re:Voices from the Hellmouth
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's about some people being dicks. They don't act like that towards you because you're smarter or nerdier than them. They act like that to everyone because they're assholes.
I also agree that it's nonsense, but along those same lines, apparently part of the Apollo 11 contingency plans if the astronauts were not able to successfully take off from the moon after landing was for NASA to cut off communications and let them die "alone". The national archives has a draft copy of the speech that Nixon would have given had that happened.
Interesting analogy, but I don't think you take it far enough. Of course images on a screen won't ever actually become an apple, because images aren't trying to actually be the object, just a picture of an object.
Let's take it further. What if I hook that computer up to a 3d printer that can model an Apple? What if somewhere down the line the technology advances to the point where that 3D printer can assemble the appropriate organic molecules and shape them into an apple? What if it gets to the point where it can do so with such accuracy that you could eat that assembled apple and not be able to discern at all whether it was grown in a machine or grown on a tree? Is it an apple then?
I would agree that an AI that's functionally just a bunch of pre-programmed responses to various inputs is unlikely to be self-aware, no matter how many responses it's capable of and who it might fool. But to argue that that is the only direction in which AI can go seems to be short-sighted.
If you let go of an object while in orbit, it doesn't just hover in that exact spot over the earth and wait for you to come back around. If it did, then the shuttle/ISS would likely collide with that object at a very high speed and it'd be game over. I'm not sure if that's what you're implying, but it certainly doesn't work that way
The tool bag or whatever is orbiting the earth at the same speed as the astronaut. If I was that astronaut and I lightly pushed my tool bag away, it would mostly continue in the same orbit that it and I had before, plus it would have a small bit of momentum in whatever direction I shoved it. If I only pushed it lightly, then relative to me it would only be moving away very slowly. If it's moving away from me at one mile per hour, then after a 90 minute orbit, then it would be a mile and a half away from me, still moving away at that same speed.
I guess theoretically, if you ignore any sort of air resistance causing orbital decay, if you shoved the toolbag in a direction that didn't change the altitude of the bag in relation to the earth, then it might eventually your path again, but it's not likely to happen.
The weight on earth is actually more interesting and important than what it weighs in space. Every ounce of the ISS started here on earth and had to be pushed up into space. That's the trickiest part of this whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that there's much that even the president of the USA can do to swing the price of gas a couple bucks per gallon, then you've got no idea how the world works.
Gas prices have come down because the economy is tanking so people are buying less gas. There's two ways that Obama could cause gas prices to seriously go up over the next few years. He could either somehow magically turn our economy around, but I don't think that would upset the people all that much, even if they do have to pay more for gas afterwards. He could also do something to further destabilize the middle east, like start a war with Iran. I don't expect him to do that, but it'd be an effective way of driving up oil prices quickly.
There are a couple of other things that could happen that would push prices up, but they are outside of the control of the president of the USA, and Obama likely wouldn't take too much blame for them.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in an area that had solid public schools. I learned plenty from them, and generally had a positive experience.
And then I guess I was lucky with my high school private school experience as well. While they were certainly more strict when someone got out of line, and there were a handful of the snobbish rich kids, overall I look back pretty fondly on the experience. I had decent teachers, including some who I think really genuinely cared about me as a student and a person, students were given an amount of personal freedom well beyond anything I ever had in public school(although to be fair, I never attended a public high school, so maybe it's more about age).
I think the important point is that there are good schools and bad schools, and neither private nor public have a monopoly on any level of quality. One way or the other is not the solution.
Kids aren't that dumb. They understand that school is a different environment from home.
How many people here are truly opposed to some sort of filtering in computers in school? While the idea of some sort of imposed filter on my internet connection at home is very bothersome to me, I don't have a problem with attempts to keep inappropriate material off of computers in schools.
My biggest concern about it would be that generally the filtering systems aren't that hard to work around, so hopefully the school systems won't waste money buying into a really expensive product that ends up not working any better than a cheaper alternative.
That other input stuff is certainly coming, it's just not going to displace the mouse/keyboard, it's going to be included along side them, and create new capabilities for computers.
Ten years from now, I'd expect the majority of monitors to have touch-screen capabilities built in. But for desktop use, 95% of the time those touchscreens will be ignored, because it's not efficient to use a touchscreen for a large portion of what computers are used for. Even if you mounted the screen into the desk in a way where I don't have to hold my arm up and out to use it, there's still efficiencies inherent to the mouse. The way mouse tracking/acceleration works, I can move the cursor clear across the screen while only having to move my hand/mouse an inch or so. The tip of the arrow cursor is much more precise than my fingertip. And I've also got a few buttons and a scroll wheel that I can easily operate, even while moving my hand.
A keyboard allows for so many different inputs that it's hard to imagine replacing it with an equal number of hand movements or face gestures or voice commands. And that's ignoring the fact that things like voice commands or gestures become problematic when the user is in an environment containing other people.
Yeah, his examples are pretty stupid too. Comparing writing commercial software vs. cutting yards? One's a career and the other's a way for a high school kid to make money over the summer.
That's not to say that there aren't professional landscapers who take their work seriously, or that there aren't programmers that aren't lazy beyond words. Take any job position, heck take almost any individual company, and you'll probably find a handful of relatively lazy and unmotivated people, and a handful of super-motivated, 60hours+ per week people picking up all that slack. Then in the middle is a bunch of people who put in their eight hours a day, and maybe a little overtime for the occasional deadline crunch.
The IT/software world is not particularly special or different from any other career that's ever existed. At a larger scale, it's a bunch of groups of people working together to make things, and so it ends up with all the social, political, and cultural issues that every other field has to deal with.
But where are consumers supposed to see that they want it? If I go over to my uncle's house and he shows me his fancy new on-demand internet video appliance, I'm not going to be very convinced if it stops to buffer every 90 seconds because his cable modem can't keep up.
Sure, consumers don't have any responsibility to purchase bandwidth just to please manufacturers, but at the same time the manufacturers don't have a responsibility or a sound financial incentive to create those devices if consumers don't have the infrastructure to use it.
Isn't this another 'chicken and egg' problem though (besides the one mentioned in the article about ISP's)? Those sorts of appliances aren't going to be successful and catch on unless people have the bandwidth to properly utilize them. If we wait for the devices before we provide the bandwidth, we'll just end up waiting forever, because the appliances don't work in a compelling way without an adequate connection speed.
At the end of the day, I think it (like most other things) all comes down to costs. Can this sort of scheme be developed with a cost competitive with what I'm paying monthly for my cable modem connection? Even if I don't see the need for the bandwidth, if it costs that same either way, I'd certainly take the higher bandwidth option. The fact that I'd have some partial ownership and am cutting those crappy telcos out of some of the picture is a nice bonus as well.
Yeah, but still, there's usually a pretty big disconnect. Mainly due to my motivation for playing the game vs. the character's in-game motivation.
I couldn't care less whether Princess Peach gets rescued from Bowser. But if I'm having a good time jumping around as Mario, he'll eventually save her. If I get bored, then I guess she'll just have to deal. Now Mario games aren't particularly story driven, and I have played games where I've gotten a bit emotionally invested in the characters. (KOTOR was one that comes to mind), but more often that not, I'm working my way through the storyline less because I identify with my character's motivation but more because I'm having fun and I want to see what's next. I don't particularly care if it's good or bad for my character, just as long as it's interesting.
Making all of that worse is that even in the less restrictive sandbox type games that we've seen lately, there's still a lot of limits to what you can do. Particularly in terms of socializing, which I think is a very important part of being a person, and so a character that can't freely socialize is harder to relate to. MMO's solve that problem to a large degree by replacing many of the NPC's with other real people. But not every game type and storyline is well suited to an MMO.
I'd imagine that with a little cleverness and effort, it'd be possible to come up with a rain jacket design that had a decent amount of venting in places that were adequately protected from rain. I own a jacket that has zippers under the armpits that you can open to allow some cooling. You still probably wouldn't be very comfortable running a marathon in it, but for day-to-day wear, I'm sure it could be quite comfortable. Designing in more venting wouldn't be impossible.
Much of the "original" or "natural" New Orleans is actually above sea level. Even a good portion of the lower 9th ward is above sea level. Closer to the river, there were natural levees well before the Army Corps of Engineers built any, and that gradual slope puts a decent amount of land above sea level.
There are parts of the city that are below sea level, basically reclaimed swamp. but much of the severity of the flooding had to do with the fact that the system of canals, combined with storm surge effectively raises sea level during a big storm, and so things end up worse if there's a breakdown in the system.
Every console has copy protection of some sort. If you put the defectivebydesign tag on every story that's console related, then that tag quickly becomes useless for its intended purpose, which supposedly is to make certain topics easier to find.
Instead, tags pretty much immediately became just another way of making "political" anonymous comments.
I guess my point is that tags on /. are a complete failure, and should be removed.
No, I would imagine that most religions would interpret that somewhere along the lines of the body being in a physical condition where the soul temporarily couldn't interact properly with it. A rough analogy would be sort of like saying that the operating system is the soul of a computer. If you turn the power to the computer off, then the OS can't do anything on the computer, but the OS still exists on the hard drive, waiting for the juice to start flowing again.
A religious interpretation of the soul doesn't require that it be that directly connected to the condition of the body. After all, many of those religions propose that the soul will keep existing even if the body is killed, chopped up into little pieces, and then burned. It's just that that soul no longer has the physical vehicle with which to interact with the world.
I also find this to be a really surprising assumption. I love my xbox 360, but the damn thing sounds like a mini wind tunnel when it's on. I would never leave it on if it wasn't being used, because the noise is very noticeable.
Thanks for introducing me to a new word. Hokum.
You're kind of a dumbass.
The office of the President created a contingency plan that included cutting off communications to astronauts stuck on the moon. I never claimed that that piece of trivia contained some sort of profound or even useful insight. But if you don't find that at least a little bit interesting or amusing or even humorous, then I'm not really interested in having a conversation with you.
I have no doubt that the contingency plans for invading Canada would be a fascinating read, even though I know it's entirely unlikely to happen.
What's your point? That I didn't prove that NASA had diabolical plans to strand Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and laugh while they starved to death? I'll agree that I didn't prove that. But I wasn't trying to.
Lighten up dude.
Well no kidding things might not have played out like that, we'll never know because they were able to take off from the moon.
But we know for a fact that there was a documented contingency plan created by the government that included cutting off communications before the Apollo astronauts had died if they were unable to leave the moon. We don't know if the plan would've actually been followed, but we know that the Nixon administration had formed that plan. The whole idea of cutting of communications was probably pretty stupid, because the astronauts on the moon would've been able to continue broadcasting, and other outfits besides NASA would probably have been able to receive and transmit communications with them. I don't know if that plan was ever vetted through NASA, and I don't really care. I wasn't trying to prove any sort of point other than noting that this little piece of trivia existed.
I agree that it's not as big of an issue as the stereotypes tend to suggest. And when there is some sort of tension, often times the "nerd" is just as much to blame as the "cool kid." I've come across many self-proclaimed geeks who will whine endlessly about how they're misunderstood by everyone else and how all the cool kids look down on them and their hobbies. And yet that same person will rant about how stupid sports are, or what a waste of time parties are. That kind of attitude isn't going to win you any respect or friends.
I went through grade school being as big of a nerd as is possible(and about a foot shorter than everyone else to boot), yet I had hardly any problems with people giving me a hard time, because I talked to everyone and treated them all decently. I wasn't best buddies with everyone, I'm not particularly skilled socially, but I showed enough self-confidence that people would leave me be. And I generally expressed enough interest in the hobbies/thoughts of other people that they enjoyed talking with me. I didn't play football, I didn't work on cars, but I wouldn't run away from any conversation that might possibly turn to a subject like that.
I guess my point is that geek are generally just as responsible for their social segregation as the jocks and the cool kids are. The 17 year old nerd that has no friends and sits in his room all weekend is making that choice for themselves. That's not to excuse bullying or anything like that, but if it's gotten to that point then it's the result of that individual making a bunch of anti-social choices previously.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE2D7103CF931A25754C0A96F958260
There, written by Safire himself:
If that failed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could not be rescued. Mission Control would have to ''close down communications'' and, as the world agonized, let the doomed astronauts starve to death or commit suicide.
It's about some people being dicks. They don't act like that towards you because you're smarter or nerdier than them. They act like that to everyone because they're assholes.
I also agree that it's nonsense, but along those same lines, apparently part of the Apollo 11 contingency plans if the astronauts were not able to successfully take off from the moon after landing was for NASA to cut off communications and let them die "alone". The national archives has a draft copy of the speech that Nixon would have given had that happened.
http://www.answers.com/topic/in-event-of-moon-disaster
Answers.com isn't the most authoritative source out there, but there's plenty of other stuff online to verify this info if you care to look.
Yes, your last point about the timing is what I was thinking but didn't say.
Interesting analogy, but I don't think you take it far enough. Of course images on a screen won't ever actually become an apple, because images aren't trying to actually be the object, just a picture of an object.
Let's take it further. What if I hook that computer up to a 3d printer that can model an Apple? What if somewhere down the line the technology advances to the point where that 3D printer can assemble the appropriate organic molecules and shape them into an apple? What if it gets to the point where it can do so with such accuracy that you could eat that assembled apple and not be able to discern at all whether it was grown in a machine or grown on a tree? Is it an apple then?
I would agree that an AI that's functionally just a bunch of pre-programmed responses to various inputs is unlikely to be self-aware, no matter how many responses it's capable of and who it might fool. But to argue that that is the only direction in which AI can go seems to be short-sighted.
If you let go of an object while in orbit, it doesn't just hover in that exact spot over the earth and wait for you to come back around. If it did, then the shuttle/ISS would likely collide with that object at a very high speed and it'd be game over. I'm not sure if that's what you're implying, but it certainly doesn't work that way
The tool bag or whatever is orbiting the earth at the same speed as the astronaut. If I was that astronaut and I lightly pushed my tool bag away, it would mostly continue in the same orbit that it and I had before, plus it would have a small bit of momentum in whatever direction I shoved it. If I only pushed it lightly, then relative to me it would only be moving away very slowly. If it's moving away from me at one mile per hour, then after a 90 minute orbit, then it would be a mile and a half away from me, still moving away at that same speed.
I guess theoretically, if you ignore any sort of air resistance causing orbital decay, if you shoved the toolbag in a direction that didn't change the altitude of the bag in relation to the earth, then it might eventually your path again, but it's not likely to happen.
The weight on earth is actually more interesting and important than what it weighs in space. Every ounce of the ISS started here on earth and had to be pushed up into space. That's the trickiest part of this whole thing.