Brilliant? The guy is a moron. He happens to be unbelievably good at chess, but in every other human pursuit he is a mental midget. He was barely passing his classes in high school, and it wasn't because he was bored or didn't care to do the work. He simply isn't that smart.
I am sick of the persistant "good at chess == smart" myth. Being good at chess no more translates into overall mental superiority than being good at acting translates into overall mental superiority. Sure, some chess players are geniuses just as some actors are geniuses, but the two are not interrelated.
Does anyone know more about the component outputs?
from the pictures it looked like it was an adapter that went to the svideo port, however from the small picture they had it was hard to tell.
I really don't know all that much about the video standards and wiring capacities, but I thought svideo couldn't cary hdtv signals.
You are absolutely correct that the S-Video standard does not allow for HDTV signals. Nothing, however, says that you can't transmit an HDTV signal over an S-Video connector using a non-standard method.
It's entirely possible that the port normally transmits plain-vanilla S-Video, but when you hook up the special dongle it switches into a higher-frequency mode that carries a full HDTV signal.
On any given project: if you give yourself an extra 50% more time, the project will consume those 50 and still have crunch time. It's simply phychology. When a dead line is far away people work more slowly and on less vital things. As the deadline looms, the people frantically code the essentials, hoping beyond hoep to make the deadline.
Then my team is somehow miraculously immune to this effect, as we have A) never missed a ship date, and B) never had to work twelve-hour days to meet a deadline.
Most of the credit belongs to our project manager, actually. Good project managers make a hell of a lot of difference in matters like this, and are all-to-often neglected and underappreciated.
Anyone who has ever worked as a programmer can tell you that as a deadline creeps up they usually end up working more hours. Spec's change, deadlines get moved up and back, other developers quit, etc.
...
Unless you give yourself an extra 6 months to a year of slack time, you are always going to have suicide hours near deadlines because shit always happens.
Then you plan for that and include it in the schedule. If it "always happens", then you'd better always include it in the schedule. There is no excuse for doing otherwise -- forty years of software engineering history gives us a pretty strong indication that the belief "maybe everything will go perfectly this time" is a horrible fallacy.
Things will go wrong. Specs will change. People will get sick. It happens every fucking time, and we all know it. So what the hell are we doing not building this time into the schedule? Not doing so is equivalent to jamming your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la, I'm not listening!" at the top of your lungs. It might feel good for a little while, but it's bound to bite you in the ass later.
At my company (not games, but trust me, you've heard of us) we routinely double or triple all time estimates provided by engineers, to account for unforeseen eventualities. Wonder of wonders, my team has always hit our dates and we don't have insane crunch time near launches.
Obviously, truly earthshaking events -- building burns down, lead programmer hit by a bus -- can throw even the best schedule off. But surely we can be doing better than having the schedule thrown off every single time we build something, can't we?
I can't think of many people that say "Well, in general my manager is right on all issues, and could do this development himself"... The fact is they are doing what they were told to do.
At some point, you need to take responsibility for your own actions and "...but they told me to do it!" stops being a good excuse. If your job requires you to do something horribly unethical, why are you working there?
Peering through neighbours walls (with this technology or drilling peepholes) is the offence. Would you argue that drills should be regulated because they could be used this way ?
This is a nonsense argument. Nuclear bombs don't hurt anybody until they are detonated, thus the detonation of the nuclear bomb is the problem, not the building or owning of one.
Yet it is still illegal to possess a nuclear bomb, and nobody seems to be whining about their right to own nuclear weapons being restricted.
Every technology, from drills to nuclear bombs, can be abused. Nobody is disputing that. The question isn't whether this new technology can be abused -- because we already know that every technology can -- the question is whether the resultant harm to society (from abuse) outweighs the potential benefit (from legitimate use).
For some technologies, like drills or nuclear bombs, the answer to this question is obvious. What about in this case, though? Does the benefit of having a peering-through-walls device available to everyone who wants one outweigh the harm?
I'm not sure why but I found this quite sad. It's as if, to her, the artists and even the music itself has lost any uniqueness or individuality. The songs are just a collection of different products on "my iTunes".
In addition to the store, the term iTunes also refers to the software (very similar to, say, MusicMatch) that runs on your system and functions as a music player.
I'm pretty sure that she didn't mean "I'm listening to music that I have purchased through iTunes". She just meant that she was listening to the iTunes player on her desktop.
Attention, mods: a "blind" listening test does not mean that the listeners are actually blind. It just means that they did not know which format they were listening to during the test, and therefore can give an unbiased opinion rather than one tainted by their expectations.
The cops are certainly not underfunded. They are overworked. The bulk of law enforcement efforts (in the US) goes straight to drug prohibition. The police are forced to worry about victimless crimes like using and selling drugs, instead of real crimes like theft, fraud, murder, rape which actually pose a threat to you and me.
My wife's uncle was addicted to cocaine. He became a dealer in order to support his habit and lost interest in every other part of his life. Constant drug use eventually had him suffering from hallucinations and paranoia. His family was unable to convince him to go get help; he checked into voluntary rehab facilities several times, but never stayed more than a few days.
Eventually, his own brother called the cops on him and had him arrested. Three months in the county lockup sobered him up real quick, and he has been clean for nearly a year now. His whole life has turned around, and the friends and family that he drove away with drug use are all back and helping him to work through things.
The only thing that saved his life was three months of enforced soberness and a hell of a reality trip brought to him courtesy of the state police. So, to those who say that hard drugs should be legalized and that selling and using drugs are victimless crimes, I have but one reply:
Respecting genres of music is like respecting religion. There's no point to it, and no practical value in doing so, other than if you don't, you might offend the liberals.;)
That's funny. When I say something like "I don't respect the stupid fuckers who pray to a dead carpenter and consider eating crackers and drinking wine to be a holy act", it's usually the conservatives who get offended.
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4. I'm still making piles of money.
Wrong. Advertising works on volume, plain and simple. If you see the same commercial over and over, it worms its way into your subconscious. Advertisers want you to see the same commercial fifty times, because it increases the likelihood that your purchasing decisions will be swayed compared to seeing the commercial just once.
Likewise, if you see the spam "Is your d!ck big enough?" once, it probably has no impact on you. But if you are bombarded with this message ten times a day, every day -- and maybe you were a bit insecure about things to begin with -- you'll be more likely to start worrying about the size of your package, and therefore more likely to buy their worthless herbal supplements.
Cutting spammer's email volume by 90% would drive the fuckers out of business within months.
I don't know the HDTV standard screen resolution but the standard PAL or NTSC out certainly won't be needing that many pixels per frame.
HDTV is either 1280x720 progressive (720p) or 1920x1080 interlaced (1080i). 1920x1080 progressive (1080p) will almost certainly exist at some point, but it isn't part of the current HDTV standard.
That I knew. Sure electrolysis is inefficient, but I don't really think efficiency is one of the prime factors when considering a battery charger. Mostly you're concerned about how much charge the battery takes, and the amount of time required for the recharge.
Most people care very much about cost. If it takes (say) energy comparable to running your oven for three hours just to charge your laptop battery, people are going to be wary.
A single aspirin-sized pellet of U-235 could power your laptop for 20,000 years.
I realize you're joking, but lest some of the Slashbots around here take this as insightful commentary:
1) Unlike plutonium, U-235 is not radioactive enough to be used as a heat source for a thermoelectric generator.
2) A small pellet of U-235 cannot generate electricity via nuclear processes. You need a critical mass in order to sustain fission, which is a minimum of around 15 kg in the case of U-235.
3) Nuclear reactors are really just steam-driven turbines which use nuclear fission as the heat source. You could generate power just as easily by lighting a big fire and using it to boil water (and in fact that's exactly what fossil fuel plants do). Obviously, this isn't something that can be scaled down to portable sizes.
4) You don't need anything approaching 20 pounds of lead to shield you from uranium's radioactivity. You wouldn't want to swallow it, but you could hold a bare pellet of U-235 in your hand perfectly safely, and a paper-thin layer of lead would completely block its radioactivity. The massive shielding around nuclear powerplants is primarily there to protect us from the neutrons generated during fission, which are very difficult to stop.
In addition to the difficulties already pointed out, electrolysis of water is a very inefficient process. The electricity it takes to generate a certain amount of hydrogen via electrolysis vastly exceeds the amount you get back by turning that hydrogen into water.
Did it take the grandparent poster thousands of years to learn calculus or linear algebra or about the wheel? No, it didn't. Take the same amount of time it took him to learn those things, and try to teach a dog the same things. The dog won't be raised by cavemen. You could even send it to the university of your choice.
The gp has been taught a large part of human civilization in his lifespan, which can't be done with a dog. There's your big difference.
You have missed the point.
The point is that humans are just barely smart enough to understand these things. It took us hundreds of thousands of years to develop any meaningful technology -- we're talking about a species so amazingly stupid that the wheel was a huge technological breakthrough.
If humans were just ever-so-slightly stupider, we never would have managed to invent the wheel. Calculus is amazingly difficult for the average human; even the slightly-below-average really don't have a prayer of comprehending it, let alone having invented it.
The person who invented the wheel must have been a genius comparable to Newton or Einstein. I'm not being facetious in the least. We had lived without it for tens of thousands of generations, and nobody had even considered that there might be a better way. If the person who invented the wheel hadn't been born, how many more thousands of years might have gone by before anybody thought of it?
Think about that for a second. It took a genius of our species to invent the wheel.
Given that -- given that we are a species just barely smart enough to have made it out of the caves -- I think we give ourselves far too much credit. Sure, we're smarter than other animals. I'm not disputing that. What I'm asking is, how much smarter are we, really?
I honestly don't think it's as much of a gap as you like to believe. A very bright gorilla is certainly smarter than a significantly below-average human, even if they don't develop the same language skills.
here's still a big difference between working for years to teach an animal something that most human toddlers pick up almost accidentally from exposure...and getting an animal to reason about things like religion, philosophy, infinity, the possible existance of the soul, calculus, etc..
The first dog that teachs another dog a language...I might be impressed...the first dog that teaches words to a human child, I'll be a bit more impressed.
The first dolphin that can solve a linear algebra problem or contemplate the age of the universe...*that* will impress me
this doesn't. just glorified animal tricks
Ten thousand years ago your ancestors hadn't even come up with an idea as simple as the wheel, let alone linear algebra or calculus.
The really scary thing is that those were genetically modern humans, every bit as smart as you or me, except that they didn't have access to the education that we do. If you had had their education -- if you had been raised by cavemen -- the concept of the wheel would likely be completely beyond you. If you had to move a heavy object, it would simply never occur to you that you could do something other than drag or carry it. If it's too big to drag or carry, it stays put.
It took tens of thousands of generations for humans to make those first simple steps -- fire, the wheel, agriculture. So you might want to think about that when considering just how much difference there really is between you and a really smart animal.
Hint: it's probably not as much as you like to think.
And don't forget, those that speak two languages have roughly double the vocabulary of someone that speaks only one
I don't buy that. I live in a very racially diverse area, and have a number of friends and acquaintences who learned English as a second language.
The age at which they learned English varies from early childhood to adolescence, but one thing they have in common is that their vocabulary in either language is not as good as a native speaker's. These are my friends, so don't take this as some sort of insult to people who speak English as a second language -- this is something they freely admit.
In general, their conversational vocabularies are perfect, just as large as a native speaker's. But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other. A Chinese friend of mine, for instance, told me that she has a lot of trouble talking to her Chinese-speaking friends about computers, because she only knows the technical terms in English. And Chinese is her native language. I would guess that I know as many English words as she knows of English and Chinese put together. Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person.
Obviously some bilingual speakers will have an average vocabulary in each language (and therefore double the average single-language speaker's), just as some people who only speak one language have double the average person's vocabulary. But I don't believe that that is the general case -- people can only remember so many words, and branching off into another language doesn't magically make your memory bigger.
plutonium's mainly dangerous because it's extremely poisonous chemically
That is something I have heard bandied about, but according to everything I have read there is no evidence whatsoever that plutonium has any significant chemical toxicity.
Plutonium can cause cancer, of course, but it is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles can't even penetrate a sheet of paper, so the top layers of your skin easily stop them. The top layers of your skin are dead to begin with, so they cannot become cancerous and plutonium therefore poses very little risk when outside of your body.
The only significant biological danger that I have ever seen cited with regards to plutonium is that it is extremely dangerous when small particles get into your lungs, which would of course happen whenever plutonium dust is present. Having alpha emitters lodged in your lungs means that you are almost certain to eventually develop lung cancer.
home robotics kits did not make a journey through the most hostile and unforgiving environment known -- outer space. Temperatures that would kill a human within seconds, radiation that would destroy conventional electronic components, etc.
While your general point sound, outer space is definitely not the most hostile environment known. Dig twenty or thirty miles straight down, and you will find an environment far more hostile and difficult to survive in than space. A couple thousand miles down, and no imaginable device could survive for long -- even diamond cannot stand up to the pressures and temperatures a few thousand miles under your feet. While it is of course possible that we will one day discover a substance a hundred times stronger than diamond, I don't think I have to tell you how unlikely that is. We will, in all likelihood, never be able to so much as send a probe to the core of our own planet.
And I skipped the really ridiculous environments, like the core of a star, the surface of a pulsar, or just outside the event horizon of a black hole. Hell, even the bottom of the ocean or the surface of Venus are more hostile than deep space.
There's this thing called free will, you know. If you want to stop looking at porn, stop looking at it. No need to chemically castrate yourself.
There's also this thing called a sex drive which means that your brain is hard-wired to enjoy that sort of thing and therefore (in healthy males, at least) is not interested in stopping.
For most men, not looking at naked women is about as easy as turning down food, water, or air.
When digital gets to 10MP, then try experimenting with digital SLRs, in the meantime forget it.
That's assuming that by decent size prints you mean 8x10 or larger.
I hate to be disrespectful, but what the hell are you talking about?
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots weddings using the 5.5MP Nikon D1x, and her customers have been thrilled with the quality of 20x30 prints -- which, if you do the math, are 7.5 times larger than 8x10s, using a camera with only half the resolution you say is necessary.
By the time you get to a mere 16MP digicams are no longer competing with 35mm, but with medium format.
Re:You waited until now?
on
Becoming a CLEC?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You waited until there was already established competition to do this? Why didn't you do this when the DSL market was unfulfilled?
He's trying to buy DSL service from the phone company and resell it to end users. Pray tell, how would he be able to do that before the phone company offered DSL in the first place?
Generational garbage collectors, such as the one used in the JVM, screw up swap. It seems like there is a conflict between what the OS is trying to do with swap and what the JVM is trying to do with GC. I would rather let the GC win in this so the application runs fast.
You are absolutely correct that garbage collectors play hell with swap. It's pretty easy to understand why: to determine what is garbage and what is not, the garbage collector has to check every live object and see what they hold pointers to.
Think about that one for a sec -- the garbage collector has to look at every single live object on the heap during every garbage collection pass. This means that any pages which were swapped out have to be fetched from disk, so you end up (usually) loading the entire heap back into memory during garbage collection.
The aforementioned problem is true of all accurate garbage collectors. The other problem depends on the exact sort of garbage collector, but in general live objects are moved around in order to clean up holes in the heap (think of it like compacting a database). This can give you another "scan the entire heap" situation.
The only real exception to this rule is that large data structures (such as the pixel data for an images) that do not contain pointers and thus do not have to be examined can remain swapped out if they aren't relocated during a particular garbage collection pass. The first page of the data structure must always be loaded no matter what, hence the "large" (really, multi-paged) disclaimer.
An OS based on a GCed language such as Java will probably have to come up with some really innovative tricks for managing swap, or just do without.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant? The guy is a moron. He happens to be unbelievably good at chess, but in every other human pursuit he is a mental midget. He was barely passing his classes in high school, and it wasn't because he was bored or didn't care to do the work. He simply isn't that smart.
I am sick of the persistant "good at chess == smart" myth. Being good at chess no more translates into overall mental superiority than being good at acting translates into overall mental superiority. Sure, some chess players are geniuses just as some actors are geniuses, but the two are not interrelated.
Does anyone know more about the component outputs?
from the pictures it looked like it was an adapter that went to the svideo port, however from the small picture they had it was hard to tell.
I really don't know all that much about the video standards and wiring capacities, but I thought svideo couldn't cary hdtv signals.
You are absolutely correct that the S-Video standard does not allow for HDTV signals. Nothing, however, says that you can't transmit an HDTV signal over an S-Video connector using a non-standard method.
It's entirely possible that the port normally transmits plain-vanilla S-Video, but when you hook up the special dongle it switches into a higher-frequency mode that carries a full HDTV signal.
On any given project: if you give yourself an extra 50% more time, the project will consume those 50 and still have crunch time. It's simply phychology. When a dead line is far away people work more slowly and on less vital things. As the deadline looms, the people frantically code the essentials, hoping beyond hoep to make the deadline.
Then my team is somehow miraculously immune to this effect, as we have A) never missed a ship date, and B) never had to work twelve-hour days to meet a deadline.
Most of the credit belongs to our project manager, actually. Good project managers make a hell of a lot of difference in matters like this, and are all-to-often neglected and underappreciated.
Anyone who has ever worked as a programmer can tell you that as a deadline creeps up they usually end up working more hours. Spec's change, deadlines get moved up and back, other developers quit, etc.
...
Unless you give yourself an extra 6 months to a year of slack time, you are always going to have suicide hours near deadlines because shit always happens.
Then you plan for that and include it in the schedule. If it "always happens", then you'd better always include it in the schedule. There is no excuse for doing otherwise -- forty years of software engineering history gives us a pretty strong indication that the belief "maybe everything will go perfectly this time" is a horrible fallacy.
Things will go wrong. Specs will change. People will get sick. It happens every fucking time, and we all know it. So what the hell are we doing not building this time into the schedule? Not doing so is equivalent to jamming your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la, I'm not listening!" at the top of your lungs. It might feel good for a little while, but it's bound to bite you in the ass later.
At my company (not games, but trust me, you've heard of us) we routinely double or triple all time estimates provided by engineers, to account for unforeseen eventualities. Wonder of wonders, my team has always hit our dates and we don't have insane crunch time near launches.
Obviously, truly earthshaking events -- building burns down, lead programmer hit by a bus -- can throw even the best schedule off. But surely we can be doing better than having the schedule thrown off every single time we build something, can't we?
I can't think of many people that say "Well, in general my manager is right on all issues, and could do this development himself"... The fact is they are doing what they were told to do.
At some point, you need to take responsibility for your own actions and "...but they told me to do it!" stops being a good excuse. If your job requires you to do something horribly unethical, why are you working there?
Peering through neighbours walls (with this technology or drilling peepholes) is the offence. Would you argue that drills should be regulated because they could be used this way ?
This is a nonsense argument. Nuclear bombs don't hurt anybody until they are detonated, thus the detonation of the nuclear bomb is the problem, not the building or owning of one.
Yet it is still illegal to possess a nuclear bomb, and nobody seems to be whining about their right to own nuclear weapons being restricted.
Every technology, from drills to nuclear bombs, can be abused. Nobody is disputing that. The question isn't whether this new technology can be abused -- because we already know that every technology can -- the question is whether the resultant harm to society (from abuse) outweighs the potential benefit (from legitimate use).
For some technologies, like drills or nuclear bombs, the answer to this question is obvious. What about in this case, though? Does the benefit of having a peering-through-walls device available to everyone who wants one outweigh the harm?
I'm not sure why but I found this quite sad. It's as if, to her, the artists and even the music itself has lost any uniqueness or individuality. The songs are just a collection of different products on "my iTunes".
In addition to the store, the term iTunes also refers to the software (very similar to, say, MusicMatch) that runs on your system and functions as a music player.
I'm pretty sure that she didn't mean "I'm listening to music that I have purchased through iTunes". She just meant that she was listening to the iTunes player on her desktop.
I love it when jokes get modded as "insightful".
Attention, mods: a "blind" listening test does not mean that the listeners are actually blind. It just means that they did not know which format they were listening to during the test, and therefore can give an unbiased opinion rather than one tainted by their expectations.
The cops are certainly not underfunded. They are overworked. The bulk of law enforcement efforts (in the US) goes straight to drug prohibition. The police are forced to worry about victimless crimes like using and selling drugs, instead of real crimes like theft, fraud, murder, rape which actually pose a threat to you and me.
My wife's uncle was addicted to cocaine. He became a dealer in order to support his habit and lost interest in every other part of his life. Constant drug use eventually had him suffering from hallucinations and paranoia. His family was unable to convince him to go get help; he checked into voluntary rehab facilities several times, but never stayed more than a few days.
Eventually, his own brother called the cops on him and had him arrested. Three months in the county lockup sobered him up real quick, and he has been clean for nearly a year now. His whole life has turned around, and the friends and family that he drove away with drug use are all back and helping him to work through things.
The only thing that saved his life was three months of enforced soberness and a hell of a reality trip brought to him courtesy of the state police. So, to those who say that hard drugs should be legalized and that selling and using drugs are victimless crimes, I have but one reply:
Fuck you.
Respecting genres of music is like respecting religion. There's no point to it, and no practical value in doing so, other than if you don't, you might offend the liberals. ;)
That's funny. When I say something like "I don't respect the stupid fuckers who pray to a dead carpenter and consider eating crackers and drinking wine to be a holy act", it's usually the conservatives who get offended.
Maybe it's just me.
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4. I'm still making piles of money.
Wrong. Advertising works on volume, plain and simple. If you see the same commercial over and over, it worms its way into your subconscious. Advertisers want you to see the same commercial fifty times, because it increases the likelihood that your purchasing decisions will be swayed compared to seeing the commercial just once.
Likewise, if you see the spam "Is your d!ck big enough?" once, it probably has no impact on you. But if you are bombarded with this message ten times a day, every day -- and maybe you were a bit insecure about things to begin with -- you'll be more likely to start worrying about the size of your package, and therefore more likely to buy their worthless herbal supplements.
Cutting spammer's email volume by 90% would drive the fuckers out of business within months.
I don't know the HDTV standard screen resolution but the standard PAL or NTSC out certainly won't be needing that many pixels per frame.
HDTV is either 1280x720 progressive (720p) or 1920x1080 interlaced (1080i). 1920x1080 progressive (1080p) will almost certainly exist at some point, but it isn't part of the current HDTV standard.
That I knew. Sure electrolysis is inefficient, but I don't really think efficiency is one of the prime factors when considering a battery charger. Mostly you're concerned about how much charge the battery takes, and the amount of time required for the recharge.
Most people care very much about cost. If it takes (say) energy comparable to running your oven for three hours just to charge your laptop battery, people are going to be wary.
A single aspirin-sized pellet of U-235 could power your laptop for 20,000 years.
I realize you're joking, but lest some of the Slashbots around here take this as insightful commentary:
1) Unlike plutonium, U-235 is not radioactive enough to be used as a heat source for a thermoelectric generator.
2) A small pellet of U-235 cannot generate electricity via nuclear processes. You need a critical mass in order to sustain fission, which is a minimum of around 15 kg in the case of U-235.
3) Nuclear reactors are really just steam-driven turbines which use nuclear fission as the heat source. You could generate power just as easily by lighting a big fire and using it to boil water (and in fact that's exactly what fossil fuel plants do). Obviously, this isn't something that can be scaled down to portable sizes.
4) You don't need anything approaching 20 pounds of lead to shield you from uranium's radioactivity. You wouldn't want to swallow it, but you could hold a bare pellet of U-235 in your hand perfectly safely, and a paper-thin layer of lead would completely block its radioactivity. The massive shielding around nuclear powerplants is primarily there to protect us from the neutrons generated during fission, which are very difficult to stop.
In addition to the difficulties already pointed out, electrolysis of water is a very inefficient process. The electricity it takes to generate a certain amount of hydrogen via electrolysis vastly exceeds the amount you get back by turning that hydrogen into water.
Did it take the grandparent poster thousands of years to learn calculus or linear algebra or about the wheel? No, it didn't. Take the same amount of time it took him to learn those things, and try to teach a dog the same things. The dog won't be raised by cavemen. You could even send it to the university of your choice.
The gp has been taught a large part of human civilization in his lifespan, which can't be done with a dog. There's your big difference.
You have missed the point.
The point is that humans are just barely smart enough to understand these things. It took us hundreds of thousands of years to develop any meaningful technology -- we're talking about a species so amazingly stupid that the wheel was a huge technological breakthrough.
If humans were just ever-so-slightly stupider, we never would have managed to invent the wheel. Calculus is amazingly difficult for the average human; even the slightly-below-average really don't have a prayer of comprehending it, let alone having invented it.
The person who invented the wheel must have been a genius comparable to Newton or Einstein. I'm not being facetious in the least. We had lived without it for tens of thousands of generations, and nobody had even considered that there might be a better way. If the person who invented the wheel hadn't been born, how many more thousands of years might have gone by before anybody thought of it?
Think about that for a second. It took a genius of our species to invent the wheel.
Given that -- given that we are a species just barely smart enough to have made it out of the caves -- I think we give ourselves far too much credit. Sure, we're smarter than other animals. I'm not disputing that. What I'm asking is, how much smarter are we, really?
I honestly don't think it's as much of a gap as you like to believe. A very bright gorilla is certainly smarter than a significantly below-average human, even if they don't develop the same language skills.
here's still a big difference between working for years to teach an animal something that most human toddlers pick up almost accidentally from exposure...and getting an animal to reason about things like religion, philosophy, infinity, the possible existance of the soul, calculus, etc..
The first dog that teachs another dog a language...I might be impressed...the first dog that teaches words to a human child, I'll be a bit more impressed.
The first dolphin that can solve a linear algebra problem or contemplate the age of the universe...*that* will impress me
this doesn't. just glorified animal tricks
Ten thousand years ago your ancestors hadn't even come up with an idea as simple as the wheel, let alone linear algebra or calculus.
The really scary thing is that those were genetically modern humans, every bit as smart as you or me, except that they didn't have access to the education that we do. If you had had their education -- if you had been raised by cavemen -- the concept of the wheel would likely be completely beyond you. If you had to move a heavy object, it would simply never occur to you that you could do something other than drag or carry it. If it's too big to drag or carry, it stays put.
It took tens of thousands of generations for humans to make those first simple steps -- fire, the wheel, agriculture. So you might want to think about that when considering just how much difference there really is between you and a really smart animal.
Hint: it's probably not as much as you like to think.
And don't forget, those that speak two languages have roughly double the vocabulary of someone that speaks only one
I don't buy that. I live in a very racially diverse area, and have a number of friends and acquaintences who learned English as a second language.
The age at which they learned English varies from early childhood to adolescence, but one thing they have in common is that their vocabulary in either language is not as good as a native speaker's. These are my friends, so don't take this as some sort of insult to people who speak English as a second language -- this is something they freely admit.
In general, their conversational vocabularies are perfect, just as large as a native speaker's. But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other. A Chinese friend of mine, for instance, told me that she has a lot of trouble talking to her Chinese-speaking friends about computers, because she only knows the technical terms in English. And Chinese is her native language. I would guess that I know as many English words as she knows of English and Chinese put together. Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person.
Obviously some bilingual speakers will have an average vocabulary in each language (and therefore double the average single-language speaker's), just as some people who only speak one language have double the average person's vocabulary. But I don't believe that that is the general case -- people can only remember so many words, and branching off into another language doesn't magically make your memory bigger.
I'm betting that if the model of the asian girl was shot from a low angle, she's be missing her genitals as well.
Well, you can clearly see her labia in one of the shots, so there goes that theory.
plutonium's mainly dangerous because it's extremely poisonous chemically
That is something I have heard bandied about, but according to everything I have read there is no evidence whatsoever that plutonium has any significant chemical toxicity.
Plutonium can cause cancer, of course, but it is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles can't even penetrate a sheet of paper, so the top layers of your skin easily stop them. The top layers of your skin are dead to begin with, so they cannot become cancerous and plutonium therefore poses very little risk when outside of your body.
The only significant biological danger that I have ever seen cited with regards to plutonium is that it is extremely dangerous when small particles get into your lungs, which would of course happen whenever plutonium dust is present. Having alpha emitters lodged in your lungs means that you are almost certain to eventually develop lung cancer.
home robotics kits did not make a journey through the most hostile and unforgiving environment known -- outer space. Temperatures that would kill a human within seconds, radiation that would destroy conventional electronic components, etc.
While your general point sound, outer space is definitely not the most hostile environment known. Dig twenty or thirty miles straight down, and you will find an environment far more hostile and difficult to survive in than space. A couple thousand miles down, and no imaginable device could survive for long -- even diamond cannot stand up to the pressures and temperatures a few thousand miles under your feet. While it is of course possible that we will one day discover a substance a hundred times stronger than diamond, I don't think I have to tell you how unlikely that is. We will, in all likelihood, never be able to so much as send a probe to the core of our own planet.
And I skipped the really ridiculous environments, like the core of a star, the surface of a pulsar, or just outside the event horizon of a black hole. Hell, even the bottom of the ocean or the surface of Venus are more hostile than deep space.
There's this thing called free will, you know. If you want to stop looking at porn, stop looking at it. No need to chemically castrate yourself.
There's also this thing called a sex drive which means that your brain is hard-wired to enjoy that sort of thing and therefore (in healthy males, at least) is not interested in stopping.
For most men, not looking at naked women is about as easy as turning down food, water, or air.
When digital gets to 10MP, then try experimenting with digital SLRs, in the meantime forget it.
That's assuming that by decent size prints you mean 8x10 or larger.
I hate to be disrespectful, but what the hell are you talking about?
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots weddings using the 5.5MP Nikon D1x, and her customers have been thrilled with the quality of 20x30 prints -- which, if you do the math, are 7.5 times larger than 8x10s, using a camera with only half the resolution you say is necessary.
By the time you get to a mere 16MP digicams are no longer competing with 35mm, but with medium format.
You waited until there was already established competition to do this? Why didn't you do this when the DSL market was unfulfilled?
He's trying to buy DSL service from the phone company and resell it to end users. Pray tell, how would he be able to do that before the phone company offered DSL in the first place?
That would be a pretty impressive trick.
Generational garbage collectors, such as the one used in the JVM, screw up swap. It seems like there is a conflict between what the OS is trying to do with swap and what the JVM is trying to do with GC. I would rather let the GC win in this so the application runs fast.
You are absolutely correct that garbage collectors play hell with swap. It's pretty easy to understand why: to determine what is garbage and what is not, the garbage collector has to check every live object and see what they hold pointers to.
Think about that one for a sec -- the garbage collector has to look at every single live object on the heap during every garbage collection pass. This means that any pages which were swapped out have to be fetched from disk, so you end up (usually) loading the entire heap back into memory during garbage collection.
The aforementioned problem is true of all accurate garbage collectors. The other problem depends on the exact sort of garbage collector, but in general live objects are moved around in order to clean up holes in the heap (think of it like compacting a database). This can give you another "scan the entire heap" situation.
The only real exception to this rule is that large data structures (such as the pixel data for an images) that do not contain pointers and thus do not have to be examined can remain swapped out if they aren't relocated during a particular garbage collection pass. The first page of the data structure must always be loaded no matter what, hence the "large" (really, multi-paged) disclaimer.
An OS based on a GCed language such as Java will probably have to come up with some really innovative tricks for managing swap, or just do without.