You would benefit by reading a book on database design, especially chapters on normalization. We would benefit if you'd submit your code or your model to The Daily WTF.
Here's free advice:
In my system, each participant is a row, and each response is a column
Make two tables. One with the participants. The other you call "Response", and it contains 2 columns - a field with the unique id of the participant and a field with the value of the response. You "connect" these using a join in your SQL statement.
You won't run out of anything that way, and it'll be a hundred times faster too, since you don't have to do SELECT * FROM a thousand times. Your query will look like "SELECT * FROM responses WHERE participant_id = 1234" if you want the response for a particular participant.
To untangle that ungodly mess that is in your database right now, you could either perform more SQL wizardry, but it's probably safer if you just write a script that outputs everything to a bunch of INSERT SQL queries. Less of a chance to go wrong.
This is the one thing that sets console and computer games apart. User mods give games a much longer lifetime, and help to make them well worth their money, without the original developers having to do any extra work.
Re: console games and computer games - I'm aware that this is not exactly the same, but there are several "romhacks" out there for SNES games (Super Mario World, for instance). They usually jack up the difficulty to 11, though, and hacking roms is not for everyone.
I suspect it's more likely the inventor would be quietly encouraged to commit suicide and his invention destroyed.
The result in Damon Knight's "A for Anything" was that the inventor sent several of his inventions to random addresses. After a brief chaos, the guy with the biggest guns enslaved the rest, eventually resulting in a noble class with cloned slaves, bred for obedience and specific tasks. Non-reproducible items became very valuable.
It's an interesting, albeit somewhat depressing read, because none of the noble clans ever thought of using the duplicator (in this case it basically "stole" the object from a parallel dimension) for any scientific research.
It is worthless because the "evidence" is easily faked - you simply don't seal the envelope (completely) before sending it, so you can put in it whatever you want. If you read the link, you'll see a few methods of faking it. In fact, it's even worse than worthless because it gives the sender a false sense of legal security.
Moreover, also write the idea, go to post office and mail it (sealed) to yourself (and may be also another one to your trusted legal advisor) by registered mail.
Actually, the image is being interpreted as a sonogram and converted back to music. Metasynth for the Mac (which is most likely what Richard D. James used) and Coagula for the PC can do this. X is time, Y is frequency, and the color's intensity is the volume.
What do photographs of US military bases in the US have to do with "surprise and deception" on the battlefield?
Because with terrorism, the entire planet is a battlefield, not a designated area. Yeah, I know, this sounds stupid, obvious and paranoid:). There's no heavy machinery to move, there's no clearly defined areas to be covered or conquered. Are you perhaps familiar with training bases that have 1:1 models of certain towns or part of a city? Having a completely randomized layout each time you'd look would be nice, though.
If Google isn't permitted to publish street view, then those other things are not going to happen either.
Point taken, but those are snapshots that don't get updated in long timespans, right? Actual planned vigilance has more effect than occasional, randomized looks.
And why does the US military consider the vast bulk of the world to be its enemy?
Because military folks are paranoid, often rightfully so. Surprise and deception are powerful weapons; just read Sun Tzu.
However, the US military operates in a democracy, not a military dictatorship.
However, Google Maps is global, not local.
The people have a right to know what the military is doing, how they are treating their recruits, how they behave in battle. And that necessitates disclosure, not secrecy.
Oh, I fully agree. Thing is, pictures on Google Maps aren't going to help the people with finding those particular things out.
but why do we need a human on mars, what with the singularity so near?;)
Especially the Singularity should make this possible, as we should only dump something the size of a soda can with a computer powerful enough to run several simulations in there.
Why yes, I enjoyed Accelerando.
The problem is that most policy makers seem to follow the line of logic of "well, in 10 years we'll need 5 extra lanes, but 5 extra lanes won't be enough in 20 years and then we can do it all over again, so we'll add none at all until everyone's screaming for the successor's head".
The I-405 is already 14 lanes in central Orange County. Increasing it to 20+ lanes would cost billions and in 20 years when they are done we would need 30+ lanes...
Is this based on the belief that because more lanes cause more traffic, having less lanes should cause less traffic?
What is this world coming too when you can't get all your science lessons from Hollywood?
It might mean extra funding for NASA or whatever science labs because people finally figure out that what they see on TV isn't real and it still has to be invented or researched.
The "creating 2.4 million jobs" bit is just butter to help grease this idea into the proper ears. That's state-government speak for "This is a good thing".
Agreed.
Twenty years ago, we got all our information from books, periodicals and TV - biased, slow-moving media. I think it's safe to say that people 20 years ago possessed less useful information, on average, than people today. I know it's not a quantifiable asset, but you can't deny the casual benefits brought forth by the web and instant messaging.
Don't agree - the internet can make an even more perfect echo chamber; you can completely tune out any dissent and peer pressure on messageboards can make you go nowhere else.
If there is cruft in Photoshop, spill it. Enumerate it's weaknesses. "Bullshit" is not a very compelling argument.
Go to the Filters menu. Use Blur; while I agree that they've cleaned up the horrible "artistic" filters, there's still a lot that probably will get fixed in 4.0 - but it took them quite a while, and it wasn't there in CS2 (while it should've been). Stylize filters don't all appear in the new style menu, too. The accuracy of the Lens Flare (I am aware about the irony of applying exactly that what most movie directors and photographers try to avoid), Lighting Effects (there's interface cruft for you!) and Zoom blur filters is ridiculously low.
Transforming objects in Illustrator works differently from doing it in Photoshop: I used to copy the vector shape from Illustrator 9 to Photoshop 7 because at least Photoshop knew how to do Perspective/Distort transforms. Illustrator didn't, and its weak "Perspective warp" filter lacks all the precision you can have with the dragpoints in Photoshop. It's strange that Photoshop, which has weak vector tools (everything's done with Masks) has more power to do free transforms which are trivial with vectors.
Go to the preferences menu. You have a slider to manage your memory. W-hat? This should've been gone in 2002 already or so; operating systems manage the memory.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a very happy user of CS3 (professionally) but I recognize the bits of cruft. They are getting smaller in numbers, but they're still there.
The palette based approach to Photoshop works great. Fifteen year PS user here and the UI has only gotten better over the years. More customizable, more conscious of screen real estate. More and more efficient.
And it took 'm until CS3 to get rid of the horrible link button on top of the toolbar that opened the Adobe site in a new window:).
As for charging times, you can charge it when you're sleeping.
(not mine)
2025:
I was really tired today, so the house alarm had to shock me awake again. Same spot as last time, that scar is never gonna go away. I forgot to plug the car in so I had to carpool with Madi, my neighbor. I'm late for work because he doesn't subscribe to AutoPilot 2020, which lets you take faster routes and use the HOV lanes even when you're alone. It would almost be worth it for me to add his car to my subscription, if that was allowed. But no, he has to buy a license himself because the biometric scanner in his car won't scan MY hand for the Autopilot and then let HIM drive. Maybe in the next upgrade. At least he has a hybrid so he doesn't have to plug in... but like hell am I paying $25 a gallon.
At work they dock me a sick day for being late, and I missed this week's drug test so I have to go to a private lab on my own time if I want to get my paycheck for this month. And government health care won't cover that. Before lunch I am called into HR to go over family planning. My wife works for a subsidiary and they want to go over telecommuting costs for her while she takes her 4 weeks max leave. I wanted her to take unpaid leave because I can afford it, and they have to take her back, but she's afraid that the sour taste left by the temp they'll have to hire will hurt her when promotion time comes. And I don't blame her. We've had them on notice for 6 months that we are trying to have a child, ever since they called me to ask why she stopped filling her birth control prescription, but they still aren't prepared. So they want us to put it off. That's why they're trying to pre-bill me for the telecommuting costs.
I go to lunch with my department but I have to order from the salad bar because I had a burger this week, and I can't afford private insurance. Terry gives me the bacon from her sandwich and I crumble that on top. Pat's son is being shipped off to Syria next month. She told him not to sign up, but he wanted to fight the WOT. Some friends of his were vacationing in Boston when they hit the natural gas tanker there, that burned down half the city, and he even gave them skin for grafts... so I guess for him it's more personal. He was recruited before that, in 6th grade, but they switched him from Air Force to Marines after the Lasik surgery couldn't fully repair his astigmatism. Tough break.
Boss handed me a bunch of crap to do from home tonight. I need to do at least 10 hours a week or they dock me for undertime, so I might as well get it out of the way. Madi forgot to wait for me, so I had to take the bus. I turn my phone off, against company rules, so some kid can't ride my signal and use up my bandwidth quota. It's cheaper to get docked for not being on call than to pay their bandwidth fees for personal use. I forgot my face mask and gloves so I try not to touch anything with my hands, or breathe too deeply. All I need is to catch some superbug, the waiting lists for those specialists are the worst.
The ride is nice, but the advertising gets annoying. At least with my phone off I don't have to worry about them accidentally selling me anything. Just try to send that stuff back, they never cover the return shipping and it costs more than the product. Better to just keep it... I try to keep my hands in my pockets, but an Ad Reader must have got a glimpse, because they identify me and start trying to sell me fertility drugs. For a second I get angry then I realize that a subsidiary of my company makes that drug, so they are legally entitled to have my personal information.
When I get home, the neighborhood association leader is talking to Wendy about our car. It's 5 years old and we have to trade it in before the year is up, or we are an Eyesore. If enough of us are Eyesores, our neighborhood becomes Blighted, and can be sold to the highest bidder. We're near one of the last parcels of undeveloped national parkland, so developers
When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?
Because the computer has everything loaded up into memory (people forget past mistakes and triumphs if it suits them) and because the computer is not prejudiced. If someone hears of 5 corruption scandals at the Republicans and 2 at the Democrats, people still have a tendency to call it "both are equially corrupt" - because it saves them the hard work of thinking.
The Hillary outcome is interesting, though - so instead of a RINO (Republican in name only), she's a RONIN (Republican, only not in name);).
No idea why you have everything formatted with code tags, but here goes
Wake me up when mp3's are 4 cents a song. Then that'll be a value proposition I can go for.
This requires radio stations to be eliminated and your radio to be turned into something that does micropayments.
Why does anybody want to keep this stuff on their hard drive? It's just another thing to back up.
Harddrives are always available, bandwidth isn't.
Hell, I own every Led Zeppelin studio album. But when I want to hear a song of theirs, I just download their whole catalog off a single torrent, listen to what I want to hear, then delete the whole thing again to save disk space. No biggie.
So you choose for all the drawbacks - waiting until the entire file is in, having the luck that there is a torrent available, having the luck that it's actually the files you're looking for instead of infested, mislabeled junk, and basically painting a nice target on your behind saying "RIAA (or any other organisation of your choice/country), VIOLATE THIS".
Slashdot Mirror
Here's free advice: Make two tables. One with the participants. The other you call "Response", and it contains 2 columns - a field with the unique id of the participant and a field with the value of the response. You "connect" these using a join in your SQL statement.
You won't run out of anything that way, and it'll be a hundred times faster too, since you don't have to do SELECT * FROM a thousand times. Your query will look like "SELECT * FROM responses WHERE participant_id = 1234" if you want the response for a particular participant.
To untangle that ungodly mess that is in your database right now, you could either perform more SQL wizardry, but it's probably safer if you just write a script that outputs everything to a bunch of INSERT SQL queries. Less of a chance to go wrong.
Don't forget to back up.
Read Marshall Brain's "Manna" - at least the robot part can be done/developed/invented realistically.
Blank or random? No, no! This is a great opportunity for an epic Rickroll!
It's an interesting, albeit somewhat depressing read, because none of the noble clans ever thought of using the duplicator (in this case it basically "stole" the object from a parallel dimension) for any scientific research.
Let me get this straight... You keep the shitty food and the shitty weather and we get the Great Barrier Reef and lobsters the size of canoes?
"No, I'M Jack the Ripper!"
It is worthless because the "evidence" is easily faked - you simply don't seal the envelope (completely) before sending it, so you can put in it whatever you want. If you read the link, you'll see a few methods of faking it. In fact, it's even worse than worthless because it gives the sender a false sense of legal security.
This trick works with anything else, too, so it worthless advice.
Only if I'm allowed to assume that both are perfect, frictionless spheres...
Actually, the image is being interpreted as a sonogram and converted back to music. Metasynth for the Mac (which is most likely what Richard D. James used) and Coagula for the PC can do this. X is time, Y is frequency, and the color's intensity is the volume.
Quit channeling Stockhausen ;).
Both, and because foreign profs don't always speak/learn Dutch. Besides, since everyone learns English at age 10 or so, it's not that big of a deal.
Mod parent up, this is so correct it hurts.
Why yes, I enjoyed Accelerando.
The problem is that most policy makers seem to follow the line of logic of "well, in 10 years we'll need 5 extra lanes, but 5 extra lanes won't be enough in 20 years and then we can do it all over again, so we'll add none at all until everyone's screaming for the successor's head".
Transforming objects in Illustrator works differently from doing it in Photoshop: I used to copy the vector shape from Illustrator 9 to Photoshop 7 because at least Photoshop knew how to do Perspective/Distort transforms. Illustrator didn't, and its weak "Perspective warp" filter lacks all the precision you can have with the dragpoints in Photoshop. It's strange that Photoshop, which has weak vector tools (everything's done with Masks) has more power to do free transforms which are trivial with vectors.
Go to the preferences menu. You have a slider to manage your memory. W-hat? This should've been gone in 2002 already or so; operating systems manage the memory.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a very happy user of CS3 (professionally) but I recognize the bits of cruft. They are getting smaller in numbers, but they're still there. And it took 'm until CS3 to get rid of the horrible link button on top of the toolbar that opened the Adobe site in a new window
(not mine)
2025:
I was really tired today, so the house alarm had to shock me awake again. Same spot as last time, that scar is never gonna go away. I forgot to plug the car in so I had to carpool with Madi, my neighbor. I'm late for work because he doesn't subscribe to AutoPilot 2020, which lets you take faster routes and use the HOV lanes even when you're alone. It would almost be worth it for me to add his car to my subscription, if that was allowed. But no, he has to buy a license himself because the biometric scanner in his car won't scan MY hand for the Autopilot and then let HIM drive. Maybe in the next upgrade. At least he has a hybrid so he doesn't have to plug in... but like hell am I paying $25 a gallon.
At work they dock me a sick day for being late, and I missed this week's drug test so I have to go to a private lab on my own time if I want to get my paycheck for this month. And government health care won't cover that. Before lunch I am called into HR to go over family planning. My wife works for a subsidiary and they want to go over telecommuting costs for her while she takes her 4 weeks max leave. I wanted her to take unpaid leave because I can afford it, and they have to take her back, but she's afraid that the sour taste left by the temp they'll have to hire will hurt her when promotion time comes. And I don't blame her. We've had them on notice for 6 months that we are trying to have a child, ever since they called me to ask why she stopped filling her birth control prescription, but they still aren't prepared. So they want us to put it off. That's why they're trying to pre-bill me for the telecommuting costs.
I go to lunch with my department but I have to order from the salad bar because I had a burger this week, and I can't afford private insurance. Terry gives me the bacon from her sandwich and I crumble that on top. Pat's son is being shipped off to Syria next month. She told him not to sign up, but he wanted to fight the WOT. Some friends of his were vacationing in Boston when they hit the natural gas tanker there, that burned down half the city, and he even gave them skin for grafts... so I guess for him it's more personal. He was recruited before that, in 6th grade, but they switched him from Air Force to Marines after the Lasik surgery couldn't fully repair his astigmatism. Tough break.
Boss handed me a bunch of crap to do from home tonight. I need to do at least 10 hours a week or they dock me for undertime, so I might as well get it out of the way. Madi forgot to wait for me, so I had to take the bus. I turn my phone off, against company rules, so some kid can't ride my signal and use up my bandwidth quota. It's cheaper to get docked for not being on call than to pay their bandwidth fees for personal use. I forgot my face mask and gloves so I try not to touch anything with my hands, or breathe too deeply. All I need is to catch some superbug, the waiting lists for those specialists are the worst.
The ride is nice, but the advertising gets annoying. At least with my phone off I don't have to worry about them accidentally selling me anything. Just try to send that stuff back, they never cover the return shipping and it costs more than the product. Better to just keep it... I try to keep my hands in my pockets, but an Ad Reader must have got a glimpse, because they identify me and start trying to sell me fertility drugs. For a second I get angry then I realize that a subsidiary of my company makes that drug, so they are legally entitled to have my personal information.
When I get home, the neighborhood association leader is talking to Wendy about our car. It's 5 years old and we have to trade it in before the year is up, or we are an Eyesore. If enough of us are Eyesores, our neighborhood becomes Blighted, and can be sold to the highest bidder. We're near one of the last parcels of undeveloped national parkland, so developers
The Hillary outcome is interesting, though - so instead of a RINO (Republican in name only), she's a RONIN (Republican, only not in name)
This requires radio stations to be eliminated and your radio to be turned into something that does micropayments. Harddrives are always available, bandwidth isn't. So you choose for all the drawbacks - waiting until the entire file is in, having the luck that there is a torrent available, having the luck that it's actually the files you're looking for instead of infested, mislabeled junk, and basically painting a nice target on your behind saying "RIAA (or any other organisation of your choice/country), VIOLATE THIS".
Great idea.