While the ex-inmate above hasn't replied so far, I'd take his story above your Google result video any day.
Some things are best left to Google ("What's the capital of Assyria" etc), but turning that into "anything should just be Googled" is pretty counter-productive.
The thing about humans is that while they're slow they tend to give context and other random details quite readily. In this case I could perhaps get information on how to get the necessary steel wire/wool in prison, how to smuggle batteries, how to make the equipment last as long as possible...
Your Googled video does show how it's done (or at least one way of doing it.) However, it's terse, it provides no background on where this information came from and it just assumes you magically have the necessary equipment but not a lighter. It's a pointless party trick story vs. a story of something that was actually useful in prison.
The nothing you drive through doesn't need broadband. At worst it needs transfer cables to get the net across it. If it's actually (sparsely) populated then that problem has been solved better in places like Finland with lower population densities.
And well, if large desolate areas were a problem there would be no way to get past the oceans.
Fiber has been pulled through much larger expanses of wilderness than those in the US successfully.
Countries with lower population density than the US have faster and better broadband.
Urban areas of equivalent size and density in other countries have faster and better broadband.
Countries with smaller per capita GDP than the US have faster and better broadband.
How about making US broadband better instead of making excuses?
Once you have reactor grade fuel, you can create plutonium. That only requires an easy chemical separation, so you won't be needing centrifuges.
I don't know if this is the case, but I'll assume it's true. Luckily plutonium is tricky: there are several isotopes in it all the time, and no one separates them. Some of the isotopes want to do things that stop the runaway nuclear reaction.
So uranium is ridiculously hard to enrich and plutonium is ridiculously hard to explode. We're very lucky this happens to be the case. North Korea's first nuclear test is widely regarded to have fizzled because they couldn't handle plutonium properly, for instance. It's doable (I seem to remember NK getting it right the second time) but it requires lots of money, which North Korea for instance only has because the rulers only concentrate on their own power.
The DSLR also gives you much finer control over aperture and shutter speed. Want to freeze the motion of a hummingbird's wings? You can do that with a D40 -- just crank the shutter speed up to about 1/1,250 of a second... with a P7000, not so much.
According to dpreview.com's database the P7000 offers shutter speeds between 60 seconds and 1/4000 second.
You can't focus accurately with current preview screens, yet this is trivial with any SLR viewfinder (since you're experienced, of course I'm talking matte screens here rather than split image).
Since I'm tired I'll comment in list form, apologies for any terseness. 1) Current LCDs are great for manual focus if they have magnified view, which they have on cameras with manual focus.
2) While manual focus SLRs are good at manual focus since they're made for it, DSLRs aren't. Top of the line DSLRs are kind of bad too (at least with the default focusing screen), but the affordable ones are horrible. The viewfinder view is much worse than probably any 35mm SLR and certainly won't have any focusing aids. To add insult to injury, I hear they never really show a thinner depth of field than f/2.8 due to the autofocus design.
3) LCDs give bad shooting posture and are suspectible so sunlight. Luckily there are now excellent electronic viewfinders: these are much larger and brighter than the optical viewfinders of most DSLRs sold today. I hear manual focus is easy by default, and if it isn't enough you get a further boost by magnifying a chosen image area.
In the last years electronic viewfinders have become much, much better. Try one of them sometime: they're available from Panasonic, Olympus and Samsung (although watch out for the budget versions.) With one million dots right in front of your eye there will be no problem with manual focus.
If Utah lives beyond its means and California doesn't, then who cares who pays the taxes? Seriously, what difference does it make to anyone?
And what the hell does anyone voting for any particular party have to do with this? Nothing, that's what: taxes in both states apply to voters of both of your big parties, so don't add any needless party politics here.
Also, they aren't discovering anything really new, even though they are squandering the limited resource of helium,
Which brings us to how efficient it is to have people conserve resources by shaming them. These people might not even have known helium is somehow scarce since the prices are so (relatively) low. Let the helium prices become market prices or even tax them and people will use less right away. At the same time we remove any unnecessary stigma from using money. The same could work for oil etc.
I'm not one of those hardcore free market believers, but even Stalinists will buy less if the prices are higher.
Within the last 24 hours I was watching some anime where someone was petrified, and I thought "Damn, it's been too long since someone mentioned a petrified Natalie Portman on Slashdot."
I started suspecting the meme had died. Thanks for proving me wrong!
Also, I have poured hot grits down my pants. Thank you.
I'm not a Mac zealot or anything (writing this from a self-assembled Linux box) but I think you're missing the point.
This is not about having USB, it's about having USB while not having serial and parallel. irDA is really small compared to the giants that are serial, parallel and USB - it matters about as much as PCMCIA.
I built my first "own" computer in 1999 and it had all the old ports. I used all kinds of parallel and serial devices and no USB at the time - had I had an iMac, I would have bought USB devices. I had a printer which ate parallel, and it's pretty obvious that I used the existing parallel port instead of buying a new one just because USB was there. Yet with an iMac I would have been forced to buy a brand new USB device.
See how this works? Hell, when I started out with that computer I used an ISA sound card I had left over from before which perceptibly slowed the entire system down with its ancient hardware communications. Good luck using such shit with the iMac even back then - it's not about having the new standard, it's about forcing it by not having what everyone used to have.
I've seen so many different numbers given by so many people on this question that I've basically stopped believing all of them. It's a complicated issue; the general opinion, however, is that APS-C digital cameras are as good or better than 35mm film cameras in practice.
I'd moderate you up if I had some points. Instead I'll reply and say that I've had the same reaction. At some point I realized that if you string together all the statements about which cameras are equivalent to which (from both film and digital people) you end up with the following: 1) 35 mm film is better than digital medium format; 2) Any pocket digital camera is the same as large format film.
While silly things like the above emerge far too easily, there does seem to be one constant: large format film still has its place. Sure it's probably fading, but it's been with us for more than a century and people still use it for work every day. My photography hobby has been primarily digital all the way, but I'll never diss large format. It's pretty much where everything started and amazingly it's still alive. I haven't heard anyone who knows what it is dare say anything bad about it. I hope it lives longer than fads like 35 mm film.:)
CowboyNeal came to my house yesterday and sat on the sofa and had a beer like it was just a basic day.
He even said I should work on my interior decoration - "Those empty white walls aren't very pretty." It sucked, so don't come telling me Slashdot hasn't violated my privacy.:)
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
Your first paragraph about this being more art than it was many other things was very good, and I almost moderated you up. But I decided to reply to this paragraph instead.
This isn't the first time I've heard someone being unimpressed when someone else fails to light a fire using only plant parts. I can see where this comes from, but since I've seen attempts myself it instantly becomes different.
There are many, many problems with doing this. A basic problem is that of most friction: how do you get the most friction? By rubbing wood against wood. However, that way you very quickly bore into the wood because you're using so much force, and then the point of most friction has no oxygen. This is of course assuming nothing else breaks from the huge stresses on all parts of the device.
Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.
So my take-away message is this: there's one disproportionately hard task involved among many others which make the point quite well too. He basically showed that if you have fire you can jump straight to the iron age. Personally I thought any kind of iron production required a sealed furnace of some sort.
I've never really understood the obsession with sexuality Christianity seems to have. Homosexuality is mentioned a few times in the Bible in the same context as the evils of eating shellfish and wearing clothes with multiple fabrics, yet religious people ignore the rest and focus all their energy on this one thing. Even adultery, which is condemned far more times, receives nowhere near this much attention.
While we both probably accept homosexuality equally much, I feel like pointing out that it's not just Leviticus (the shellfish part) which condemns homosexuality. Having read the Bible recently, I seem to remember that homosexuality was condemned several times in the old testament and at least once (explicitly) in the new testament. Jesus might even have forbidden it himself FWIW, but I can't say I remember that clearly.
Playing along with the ideas for sexual morality a bit, one should say that two wrongs don't make a right: if we were to accept the sexual morality teachings, then some committing adultery doesn't mean that others should sin through homosexuality. It's simply an instance of two different sins which are not connected.
Of course, in practice adultery doesn't get as much attention because it's always easier to make some group that isn't yourself the problem. And to avoid any misunderstandings, I should say that I hope any adults who love each other get to fuck a whole lot. If it's one guy inside another then that's fine by me.
I think the controversy has mainly been about helium prices being kept artificially low.
This fits that perfectly - until the prices become real market prices we'll keep seeing things like this.
Of course, even with sane prices someone might splurge on helium like this as a stunt. But in that case the aerostat would likely be half the size at best. I'm not a big free market fan but raising prices on something is an excellent way to make people use less of it.
Actually, the summary doesn't say anything about supporting it currently, but rather talks about which browsers will support it (read:in the future.) This there is no data on.
Given that this has been known for probably most of his life, if not longer, why are they getting an award for restating something that is known?
One common reply to this is that it used to be "known" that non-white people are sub-human. That didn't make it true.
To use a less emotional topic it is "known" by many that tapping cans of carbonated beverage before opening will make them not explode. I seem to recall someone looking into this and finding that waiting for the same amount of time as the tapping would take had the same effect.
Basically, it comes down to this: scientific knowledge and scientific trial and error aren't the same as common knowledge and common trial and error.
The source code for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory was released under the GNU GPL on August 12, 2010.
And? It's not like the code stopped existing the next day. As can see in the many replies about coding with this stuff, most people in here don't have to get any information the same day. I suspect the timing matters only if one sees it as a kind of news aggregation contest, which I fail to see the point of.
Sometimes I question calling the operating system GNU/Linux, but when people imply Linus wrote the entire OS, I see why people press for the recognition to everyone who contributed all the free code.
No one mentioned him writing the entire thing. What he did though was put the things together into something that could be successful in the real world.
There's no way of knowing whether any of the other similar projects would have been successful. All we can know is that Linux was, and that it's huge today. You could think of it this way: the idealism and contributions of others would have been for naught if there had never been any success or adoption. For whatever reason Torvalds' project met with success, and because of that RMS and many others have actually managed to change the world.
Givable credit isn't about to run out, so let's give some to everyone: RMS has done awesome work on the rights part of it all (and early coding), whereas Torvalds successfully set popularization in motion. The millions of other coders who have contributed meant they have done something good too: in no way does it mean the "superstars" suck because they didn't (stupidly) do all of it themselves. They all did good work!
I noticed that too, but I'm guessing that it refers to the amount of MEPs who got somehow involved. That would be 369 out of 736 MEPs, a significant number. Since this is EU stuff, there's always the possibility that anything you read has been hastily translated from another language, adding additional noise.
I hope someone who isn't ignorant like me can clarify the signature thing though.
Saying anyone will be "irradiated" by tritium is awfully close to fear-mongering. The radiation of tritium outside any packaging is stopped by six millimetres of air. In other words, you have to break the container in your mouth to get irradiated - the radiation cannot penetrate the dead outermost layer of your skin.
Slashdot Mirror
While the ex-inmate above hasn't replied so far, I'd take his story above your Google result video any day.
Some things are best left to Google ("What's the capital of Assyria" etc), but turning that into "anything should just be Googled" is pretty counter-productive.
The thing about humans is that while they're slow they tend to give context and other random details quite readily. In this case I could perhaps get information on how to get the necessary steel wire/wool in prison, how to smuggle batteries, how to make the equipment last as long as possible...
Your Googled video does show how it's done (or at least one way of doing it.) However, it's terse, it provides no background on where this information came from and it just assumes you magically have the necessary equipment but not a lighter. It's a pointless party trick story vs. a story of something that was actually useful in prison.
The nothing you drive through doesn't need broadband. At worst it needs transfer cables to get the net across it. If it's actually (sparsely) populated then that problem has been solved better in places like Finland with lower population densities.
And well, if large desolate areas were a problem there would be no way to get past the oceans.
Fiber has been pulled through much larger expanses of wilderness than those in the US successfully.
Countries with lower population density than the US have faster and better broadband.
Urban areas of equivalent size and density in other countries have faster and better broadband.
Countries with smaller per capita GDP than the US have faster and better broadband.
How about making US broadband better instead of making excuses?
Pine needles already sting if you touch them the wrong way so the difference won't be that great.
The platypus doesn't show us anything about "God".
This isn't a faith vs. science/anything else discussion. Learn to read the mood.
Once you have reactor grade fuel, you can create plutonium. That only requires an easy chemical separation, so you won't be needing centrifuges.
I don't know if this is the case, but I'll assume it's true. Luckily plutonium is tricky: there are several isotopes in it all the time, and no one separates them. Some of the isotopes want to do things that stop the runaway nuclear reaction.
So uranium is ridiculously hard to enrich and plutonium is ridiculously hard to explode. We're very lucky this happens to be the case. North Korea's first nuclear test is widely regarded to have fizzled because they couldn't handle plutonium properly, for instance. It's doable (I seem to remember NK getting it right the second time) but it requires lots of money, which North Korea for instance only has because the rulers only concentrate on their own power.
The DSLR also gives you much finer control over aperture and shutter speed. Want to freeze the motion of a hummingbird's wings? You can do that with a D40 -- just crank the shutter speed up to about 1/1,250 of a second ... with a P7000, not so much.
According to dpreview.com's database the P7000 offers shutter speeds between 60 seconds and 1/4000 second.
You can't focus accurately with current preview screens, yet this is trivial with any SLR viewfinder (since you're experienced, of course I'm talking matte screens here rather than split image).
Since I'm tired I'll comment in list form, apologies for any terseness.
1) Current LCDs are great for manual focus if they have magnified view, which they have on cameras with manual focus.
2) While manual focus SLRs are good at manual focus since they're made for it, DSLRs aren't. Top of the line DSLRs are kind of bad too (at least with the default focusing screen), but the affordable ones are horrible. The viewfinder view is much worse than probably any 35mm SLR and certainly won't have any focusing aids. To add insult to injury, I hear they never really show a thinner depth of field than f/2.8 due to the autofocus design.
3) LCDs give bad shooting posture and are suspectible so sunlight. Luckily there are now excellent electronic viewfinders: these are much larger and brighter than the optical viewfinders of most DSLRs sold today. I hear manual focus is easy by default, and if it isn't enough you get a further boost by magnifying a chosen image area.
In the last years electronic viewfinders have become much, much better. Try one of them sometime: they're available from Panasonic, Olympus and Samsung (although watch out for the budget versions.) With one million dots right in front of your eye there will be no problem with manual focus.
If Utah lives beyond its means and California doesn't, then who cares who pays the taxes? Seriously, what difference does it make to anyone?
And what the hell does anyone voting for any particular party have to do with this? Nothing, that's what: taxes in both states apply to voters of both of your big parties, so don't add any needless party politics here.
Seriously, you sound like the worst sort of credulous idiot.
You're obviously not completely ignorant about the science. Yet your language makes you sound really insecure. Or just really socially incompetent.
I'm proud of knowing a lot of things about a lot of things myself. I sure hope it doesn't make me the kind of asshole your post makes you look like.
Also, they aren't discovering anything really new, even though they are squandering the limited resource of helium,
Which brings us to how efficient it is to have people conserve resources by shaming them. These people might not even have known helium is somehow scarce since the prices are so (relatively) low. Let the helium prices become market prices or even tax them and people will use less right away. At the same time we remove any unnecessary stigma from using money. The same could work for oil etc.
I'm not one of those hardcore free market believers, but even Stalinists will buy less if the prices are higher.
Within the last 24 hours I was watching some anime where someone was petrified, and I thought "Damn, it's been too long since someone mentioned a petrified Natalie Portman on Slashdot."
I started suspecting the meme had died. Thanks for proving me wrong!
Also, I have poured hot grits down my pants. Thank you.
I'd mod you up if I could. GP should be a better pedant if he wants to be one at all. :)
I'm not a Mac zealot or anything (writing this from a self-assembled Linux box) but I think you're missing the point.
This is not about having USB, it's about having USB while not having serial and parallel. irDA is really small compared to the giants that are serial, parallel and USB - it matters about as much as PCMCIA.
I built my first "own" computer in 1999 and it had all the old ports. I used all kinds of parallel and serial devices and no USB at the time - had I had an iMac, I would have bought USB devices. I had a printer which ate parallel, and it's pretty obvious that I used the existing parallel port instead of buying a new one just because USB was there. Yet with an iMac I would have been forced to buy a brand new USB device.
See how this works? Hell, when I started out with that computer I used an ISA sound card I had left over from before which perceptibly slowed the entire system down with its ancient hardware communications. Good luck using such shit with the iMac even back then - it's not about having the new standard, it's about forcing it by not having what everyone used to have.
I'd moderate you up if I had some points. Instead I'll reply and say that I've had the same reaction. At some point I realized that if you string together all the statements about which cameras are equivalent to which (from both film and digital people) you end up with the following:
1) 35 mm film is better than digital medium format;
2) Any pocket digital camera is the same as large format film.
While silly things like the above emerge far too easily, there does seem to be one constant: large format film still has its place. Sure it's probably fading, but it's been with us for more than a century and people still use it for work every day. My photography hobby has been primarily digital all the way, but I'll never diss large format. It's pretty much where everything started and amazingly it's still alive. I haven't heard anyone who knows what it is dare say anything bad about it. I hope it lives longer than fads like 35 mm film. :)
CowboyNeal came to my house yesterday and sat on the sofa and had a beer like it was just a basic day.
He even said I should work on my interior decoration - "Those empty white walls aren't very pretty." It sucked, so don't come telling me Slashdot hasn't violated my privacy. :)
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
Your first paragraph about this being more art than it was many other things was very good, and I almost moderated you up. But I decided to reply to this paragraph instead.
This isn't the first time I've heard someone being unimpressed when someone else fails to light a fire using only plant parts. I can see where this comes from, but since I've seen attempts myself it instantly becomes different.
There are many, many problems with doing this. A basic problem is that of most friction: how do you get the most friction? By rubbing wood against wood. However, that way you very quickly bore into the wood because you're using so much force, and then the point of most friction has no oxygen. This is of course assuming nothing else breaks from the huge stresses on all parts of the device.
Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.
So my take-away message is this: there's one disproportionately hard task involved among many others which make the point quite well too. He basically showed that if you have fire you can jump straight to the iron age. Personally I thought any kind of iron production required a sealed furnace of some sort.
I've never really understood the obsession with sexuality Christianity seems to have. Homosexuality is mentioned a few times in the Bible in the same context as the evils of eating shellfish and wearing clothes with multiple fabrics, yet religious people ignore the rest and focus all their energy on this one thing. Even adultery, which is condemned far more times, receives nowhere near this much attention.
While we both probably accept homosexuality equally much, I feel like pointing out that it's not just Leviticus (the shellfish part) which condemns homosexuality. Having read the Bible recently, I seem to remember that homosexuality was condemned several times in the old testament and at least once (explicitly) in the new testament. Jesus might even have forbidden it himself FWIW, but I can't say I remember that clearly.
Playing along with the ideas for sexual morality a bit, one should say that two wrongs don't make a right: if we were to accept the sexual morality teachings, then some committing adultery doesn't mean that others should sin through homosexuality. It's simply an instance of two different sins which are not connected.
Of course, in practice adultery doesn't get as much attention because it's always easier to make some group that isn't yourself the problem. And to avoid any misunderstandings, I should say that I hope any adults who love each other get to fuck a whole lot. If it's one guy inside another then that's fine by me.
I think the controversy has mainly been about helium prices being kept artificially low.
This fits that perfectly - until the prices become real market prices we'll keep seeing things like this.
Of course, even with sane prices someone might splurge on helium like this as a stunt. But in that case the aerostat would likely be half the size at best. I'm not a big free market fan but raising prices on something is an excellent way to make people use less of it.
Actually, the summary doesn't say anything about supporting it currently, but rather talks about which browsers will support it (read:in the future.) This there is no data on.
Given that this has been known for probably most of his life, if not longer, why are they getting an award for restating something that is known?
One common reply to this is that it used to be "known" that non-white people are sub-human. That didn't make it true.
To use a less emotional topic it is "known" by many that tapping cans of carbonated beverage before opening will make them not explode. I seem to recall someone looking into this and finding that waiting for the same amount of time as the tapping would take had the same effect.
Basically, it comes down to this: scientific knowledge and scientific trial and error aren't the same as common knowledge and common trial and error.
The source code for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory was released under the GNU GPL on August 12, 2010.
And? It's not like the code stopped existing the next day. As can see in the many replies about coding with this stuff, most people in here don't have to get any information the same day. I suspect the timing matters only if one sees it as a kind of news aggregation contest, which I fail to see the point of.
Sometimes I question calling the operating system GNU/Linux, but when people imply Linus wrote the entire OS, I see why people press for the recognition to everyone who contributed all the free code.
No one mentioned him writing the entire thing. What he did though was put the things together into something that could be successful in the real world.
There's no way of knowing whether any of the other similar projects would have been successful. All we can know is that Linux was, and that it's huge today. You could think of it this way: the idealism and contributions of others would have been for naught if there had never been any success or adoption. For whatever reason Torvalds' project met with success, and because of that RMS and many others have actually managed to change the world.
Givable credit isn't about to run out, so let's give some to everyone: RMS has done awesome work on the rights part of it all (and early coding), whereas Torvalds successfully set popularization in motion. The millions of other coders who have contributed meant they have done something good too: in no way does it mean the "superstars" suck because they didn't (stupidly) do all of it themselves. They all did good work!
You're giving a lot of room for employee incompetence but none for employer incompetence.
Really, all it takes is one lawyer they consulted to be ignorant about computer matters and saying that he's 100% sure the guy is running the server.
To make this impossible the entire workforce anywhere would have to be in on how identity theft works. This of course isn't the case.
I noticed that too, but I'm guessing that it refers to the amount of MEPs who got somehow involved. That would be 369 out of 736 MEPs, a significant number. Since this is EU stuff, there's always the possibility that anything you read has been hastily translated from another language, adding additional noise.
I hope someone who isn't ignorant like me can clarify the signature thing though.
The most activity seems to be in making the illumination better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination if you like to be irradiated. But that is more tweaking and old idea.
Saying anyone will be "irradiated" by tritium is awfully close to fear-mongering. The radiation of tritium outside any packaging is stopped by six millimetres of air. In other words, you have to break the container in your mouth to get irradiated - the radiation cannot penetrate the dead outermost layer of your skin.
Of course, being irradiated isn't so bad. After all, our body irradiates itself 8000 times every second: http://rerowland.com/BodyActivity.htm