I'd start with shooting lessons at the local run range...
OK haha...
Your local police departments often have basic home security pamphlets and some can even send out community liasons to help with securing your home. I'd start here first *before* investing in cameras and all the gadgetry. If you don't secure your home first, some lucky burglar will have some shiny new cameras and alarms to pawn.
The biggest traders can use bogus trades to get an idea of what price a stock is able to bought/sold at. With sufficiently fast systems -- i.e., ones tied directly into NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.. -- they can make millions of dollars extra than if they didn't have this knowledge. And it's legal...
I live in the Southeastern US. On a recent trip to Walt Disney World there was a family whose members were literally too large to fit through the turnstiles. To top it off, they complained loudly that the entrances were too small. The children, who appeared to be around 10 or 11 years old, were also obese. I estimate that they weighed about 100 kilos each (220lbs or so). Hey, how other adults live their lives is their own business, and for the most part, how they raise their kids is also their own business. But at the point where a 10 year old kid is so overweight that his neck has disappeared and he has floppy man-boobs it's time to re-think if poor diet can be considered child abuse or neglect.
Hmm.. where do you live? It's one of the strange things, but I consider ticket prices to be very high. In my area (S. Florida, USA), it's about $10-$12 per person for the ticket. Inside the theatre, a crappy hot dog is $6, a bottle of water is $5, a pack of sugar candy is amost $5. For a family of three it makes no sense to spend $60 or more to see a movie at the theatre. Add to this the crappy seats, crappy patrons, and other horrors and I opt to watch movies on DVD or Netflix. It would be one thing if it was a cheap night out, but at those prices they can keep their movies.
Last year I had the opportunity to see a live 3D demo. The glasses had motion and tracking sensors and the image was updated based on your head position. An on screen dot determined what you were looking at and could bring any item into focus. What was neat was the ability to look under and around objects. Moving your head to the right, for example, would rotate the on-screen object. This really sold the illusion. The range of movement was very good too. There were times when I was looking down almost vertically just to see how far I could push the illusion. The target market was medical imaging, but the developers anticipate that similar technology could be used for games and maybe even implemented in the hardware itself.
It's interesting that the talks center around the responsibility of the researcher and the vendor, but often little attention is paid to the responsibility of the user. Are they as liable? For example, if a manufacturer sells a door lock with flaws but the user keeps the windows (ha) open and someone on the street shouts, "Dude, you're using a Schock Pax H23 and it can be opened with a loud scream!" who is responsible?
As primarily a Linux user, I used to think that the tools just didn't exist on Windows to see what the system is doing. On my Linux box, I can do a "netstat -tlnw" or an "iptables -L" or "fuser -n tcp xxx" and get lots of information. Using that I can disable services, lock them off with TCP Wrappers or IPTABLES, or even sandbox them very easily.
When it was necessary to use a Windows XP system in a relatively hostile network, I was worried. Then I started poking around. Netstat is available on Windows and does the same thing. There's a process listing. There's even a grep workalike ('find' of all things). With those tools it's possible to get a good picture of what's happening on the system.
The gist of this post is that though I enjoy the expanding marketshare of Linux, I am worried that it brings hordes of users that do not make the effort to know their systems. Should they? I think so. It's similar to carrying a firearm. It's great to be able to do so, but you must be responsible about it when you do carry.
Not taking any side of the issue because I don't agree with either side, but wanted to add:
I personally don't see much distinction between getting drunk and getting high. Many others feel completely differently, but to me both seem to achieve the same result. Would we have the same reaction if the teacher had been caught getting high or doing a line of coke or smoking crack? How about promiscuous sex? Cursing? Spitting on the sidewalk?
My friend has a picture of him looking much like a stereotypical urban gangster: Hands in a (faux) gang sign, firearms, cash, jewelry.. the whole deal. The backstory is that it was specifically for a role in a short film put on by his film student buddies. It's on his Facebook and MySpace and if was seen out of context he'd probably be passed over in a hiring decision.
BTW, I actually can't drink alcohol as I get ill after a few sips. Even a single of American beer gives me a headache, though I understand that's not unusual in itself. And I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
With the right hardware Linux is perfect for old hardware. You can customize and tune it quite a bit better than most other OSes. However, the caveat is that the hardware must be decently supported. For example, I have an old laptop with an ATI Mobility 7500 on which I installed Centos 5.5. Normally I'd just grab the FGLRX installer from ATI and remake a module, but in this case, the modules don't work properly. As a result, I'm using a non-accelerated video driver which is painfully slow even for non-intensive graphics such as scrolling a terminal window. I'm not conceding defeat yet. It might be a matter of putting the correct hardware ID into the source and re-compiling or it might be something else entirely. Luckily I know how to do that, but sometimes it's a chore. Not difficult to do, certainly, but a PITA.
On the other hand I have some old single-core AMD Athlons running some virtual machines via Xen and KVM. Even after years of service, they still do a very good job. On a nightly basis they run some software rebuilds in some VMs and in others run DNS, LDAP, fileservers and mail. I have imported the VMs into a newer quad-core system, but until they die, they use less power than the modern machine.
What sets science fiction apart from fantasy is at least paying lip service to real science and plausible technology. This sort of thing is more in the eye of the beholder, though.
No doubt, thus the original question:)
Someone once wrote that just about all science fiction is possible if we had the ability to manipulate mind-bogglingly vast amounts of energy. Allow this and yes, that world would have wizards.
More than a decade ago I gave a talk on using R, Octave, MuPAD and other software in the classroom environment. It's a great package. Back then I used it to get through stats courses and plot disk usage in a graph. Now I'm using it to hammer through stock market data each night. To do the same with some commercial packages would cost thousands of dollars.
BS. I hear that kind of crap all the time, but there is, surprisingly, a difference between SF and Fantasy.
Wow, a mite touchy there?? Relax, just a question I'm posing...
Yes, there is clearly a difference between pure science fiction and fantasy, but there's no hard distinction between the two. At one end there is fiction that is possible with what we know today. Maybe it's a colony on the moon (with magnetic boots) or "artificial gravity" on a space station by building on the inside of a great spinning wheel.
But if you consider science fiction to be things only present in the observable universe then we must put FTL travel, warp drive, phasers squarely in the realm of fantasy. E.g., without considering the accuracy of the science Counselor Troi's psychic ability indeed becomes SF rather than fantasy. Do we also discount Jules Verne because the science is not valid? How about Twain, Niven, Asimov? All of them have explained things with inaccurate science, even allowing for the current scientific knowledge at the time.
I would go far as to say that a pure fantasy novel, if the fantasy world is consistent, is closer to pure science fiction than what many would consider hard science fiction if the latter does not explain the SF devices.
What is science fiction? At what point does it cross the line from speculative or science fiction to fantasy?
Faster than light travel? Mind reading? Force shields? Time travel? Teleportation?
On the face of it it's not different than magic. A wizard casts a teleport spell or a cleric calls on arcane protection for his/her deity or an evil stepfather peers into a magic mirror.. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
Imagine someone from the 18th, 19th or even 20th century seeing a smart phone or a Ferarri? Heck, my standard issue Fenix flashlight would probably astound people today.
I apologize. Puns are a low form of humor. Star Trek puns doubly so.
Brings to mind another idea... You remember the episodes where warp drive would cause rips in the fabric of space time? To make a bad pun, what they needed was a "stitch in time" to repair it. It was funny when Geordi and Data designed a machine to stitch up the freak time holes. Ahh, that memorable scene when Picard tells them to start it up: Make it sew!
I am fond of the idea of using computers and modern tools to teach. To this end, I wanted to write an educational film short to help teach children about chemistry. Though I don't necessarily feel that educators should be entertainers, I do feel that "stealth learning" has its benefits. One approach is to use film and modern media to instruct:
In this screenplay, the Starship Voyager is critically low on dilithium crystals. They discover an arctic planet with Tundra-like conditions. Seven-of-Nine is dispatched to fix the extractor in an old mine near an acidic beach that contains tons of dilithium (thought to be a waste product from a previous civilization). There is an explosion and the mine collapses. Racing against time, they rush a small tunnel to Seven-of-Nine to provide air. The soils are highly acidic, however and poses a threat. The good doctor proposes that they use calcium hydroxide to counteract the dangerous acidity in the soils. Janeway demands that, as the Captain, she should do this task. They race against time because the advance welcoming party is starting to fall victim to the frozen conditions. The captain transports down to the surface to begin. One could say that Captain Janeway's on shore, all the greeters are cold, and she's liming the airway to Seven.
Would you pay $150 for a single dinner for one? I do it on a regular basis (i.e., at least bi-weekly). I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, wealthy but I enjoy the experience. In fact, I don't eat out during the week, drive an older car, live in a small house, buy clothes maybe once a year, and forego many of the other things that co-workers with similar incomes see as normal (video games, movies, smart phone) just so that I can eat out.
You can get a great meal for $10. Hell, you can get a meal for $5.
Your argument is the same as saying that it's stupid to buy bottled water, name brand clothing, "luxury" vehicles, a coffee at Starbucks, buy a CD of music from a signed band, etc..
I think you hit it on the nose.. When we're in our 40s and 50s and later, and have the resources to spend on frivolous items like cars, then we may very well buy the cars we had as kids, or wished we had as kids. For example, I loved the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4. They were priced out of my range when I was younger, and being a commodity Japanese car, they didn't exactly hold their value. There are quite a few of them still around, but most are in pretty sad shape. Problems with their transmissions and all the various gadgetry make them available for cheap, and cheap means that people beat the hell out of them. But I can see myself trying to restore one 20 years from now. It will bring back some memories and may give me something to do in my retirement..... or not.
Right now I'd pay a tidy sum for an Atari 520ST. I can't find one on eBay though. I'd love to get my hands on an Amiga 1000 or a Vic20 too... Can't find them though..
There were some reports that say that 30% - 50% of tickets were bought by brokers. They lock out fans from the best seats. They then resell those seats at a premium. Their excuse is that the open market will decide the price of the ticket. This logic falls down because the brokers artificially inflate the price of the seats that would normally go to the biggest fans.
I don't mind paying a small premium, waiting in line, hovering over the phone to get a good seat -- and I have before -- but the brokers now make even those things impossible. Now it's $2,500 a ticket for some shows with tickets of $100 face value.
Indeed.. Standard keyboards are not quite right for certain applications. I used to mock video editing keyboards until I started using one. The ability to customize the keyboard, down to the labels and repeat rate for specific keys, is very useful. Having multiple scroll wheels is incredibly useful (e.g., a dedicated wheel to advance frames and another to adjust sound). Sure, you can use the mouse pointer to adjust the on screen controls, but when you're dealing with three monitors and need to bounce between them it becomes annoying very quickly.
There's always a back story. Did anyone ask her about the frequent moves she's had to endure? First on the Third Floor, then she got moved to the Second Floor, then to the lobby, then to the basement. And no one even mentioned the payroll issues she has been having. They stopped her paychecks for some reason. The last straw was probably the stapler incident...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you gotta watch out for those core dumps.
I'd start with shooting lessons at the local run range...
OK haha...
Your local police departments often have basic home security pamphlets and some can even send out community liasons to help with securing your home. I'd start here first *before* investing in cameras and all the gadgetry. If you don't secure your home first, some lucky burglar will have some shiny new cameras and alarms to pawn.
The biggest traders can use bogus trades to get an idea of what price a stock is able to bought/sold at. With sufficiently fast systems -- i.e., ones tied directly into NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.. -- they can make millions of dollars extra than if they didn't have this knowledge. And it's legal...
I've seen that site. It is indeed scary.
I live in the Southeastern US. On a recent trip to Walt Disney World there was a family whose members were literally too large to fit through the turnstiles. To top it off, they complained loudly that the entrances were too small. The children, who appeared to be around 10 or 11 years old, were also obese. I estimate that they weighed about 100 kilos each (220lbs or so). Hey, how other adults live their lives is their own business, and for the most part, how they raise their kids is also their own business. But at the point where a 10 year old kid is so overweight that his neck has disappeared and he has floppy man-boobs it's time to re-think if poor diet can be considered child abuse or neglect.
Hmm.. where do you live? It's one of the strange things, but I consider ticket prices to be very high. In my area (S. Florida, USA), it's about $10-$12 per person for the ticket. Inside the theatre, a crappy hot dog is $6, a bottle of water is $5, a pack of sugar candy is amost $5. For a family of three it makes no sense to spend $60 or more to see a movie at the theatre. Add to this the crappy seats, crappy patrons, and other horrors and I opt to watch movies on DVD or Netflix. It would be one thing if it was a cheap night out, but at those prices they can keep their movies.
Last year I had the opportunity to see a live 3D demo. The glasses had motion and tracking sensors and the image was updated based on your head position. An on screen dot determined what you were looking at and could bring any item into focus. What was neat was the ability to look under and around objects. Moving your head to the right, for example, would rotate the on-screen object. This really sold the illusion. The range of movement was very good too. There were times when I was looking down almost vertically just to see how far I could push the illusion. The target market was medical imaging, but the developers anticipate that similar technology could be used for games and maybe even implemented in the hardware itself.
Hell, that's exactly my point. Doesn't matter a goddamn bit what OS you're on and that was the point of the post. There's no excuse.
It's interesting that the talks center around the responsibility of the researcher and the vendor, but often little attention is paid to the responsibility of the user. Are they as liable? For example, if a manufacturer sells a door lock with flaws but the user keeps the windows (ha) open and someone on the street shouts, "Dude, you're using a Schock Pax H23 and it can be opened with a loud scream!" who is responsible?
As primarily a Linux user, I used to think that the tools just didn't exist on Windows to see what the system is doing. On my Linux box, I can do a "netstat -tlnw" or an "iptables -L" or "fuser -n tcp xxx" and get lots of information. Using that I can disable services, lock them off with TCP Wrappers or IPTABLES, or even sandbox them very easily.
When it was necessary to use a Windows XP system in a relatively hostile network, I was worried. Then I started poking around. Netstat is available on Windows and does the same thing. There's a process listing. There's even a grep workalike ('find' of all things). With those tools it's possible to get a good picture of what's happening on the system.
The gist of this post is that though I enjoy the expanding marketshare of Linux, I am worried that it brings hordes of users that do not make the effort to know their systems. Should they? I think so. It's similar to carrying a firearm. It's great to be able to do so, but you must be responsible about it when you do carry.
Not taking any side of the issue because I don't agree with either side, but wanted to add:
I personally don't see much distinction between getting drunk and getting high. Many others feel completely differently, but to me both seem to achieve the same result. Would we have the same reaction if the teacher had been caught getting high or doing a line of coke or smoking crack? How about promiscuous sex? Cursing? Spitting on the sidewalk?
My friend has a picture of him looking much like a stereotypical urban gangster: Hands in a (faux) gang sign, firearms, cash, jewelry.. the whole deal. The backstory is that it was specifically for a role in a short film put on by his film student buddies. It's on his Facebook and MySpace and if was seen out of context he'd probably be passed over in a hiring decision.
BTW, I actually can't drink alcohol as I get ill after a few sips. Even a single of American beer gives me a headache, though I understand that's not unusual in itself. And I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
With the right hardware Linux is perfect for old hardware. You can customize and tune it quite a bit better than most other OSes. However, the caveat is that the hardware must be decently supported. For example, I have an old laptop with an ATI Mobility 7500 on which I installed Centos 5.5. Normally I'd just grab the FGLRX installer from ATI and remake a module, but in this case, the modules don't work properly. As a result, I'm using a non-accelerated video driver which is painfully slow even for non-intensive graphics such as scrolling a terminal window. I'm not conceding defeat yet. It might be a matter of putting the correct hardware ID into the source and re-compiling or it might be something else entirely. Luckily I know how to do that, but sometimes it's a chore. Not difficult to do, certainly, but a PITA.
On the other hand I have some old single-core AMD Athlons running some virtual machines via Xen and KVM. Even after years of service, they still do a very good job. On a nightly basis they run some software rebuilds in some VMs and in others run DNS, LDAP, fileservers and mail. I have imported the VMs into a newer quad-core system, but until they die, they use less power than the modern machine.
The vast majority of books that I buy are not hardcover, they are softcover. I'd say that I purchase 20 softbacks for every single hardback.
The Slashdot demographic may not ever see much daylight so matte screens would likely be preferred.
What sets science fiction apart from fantasy is at least paying lip service to real science and plausible technology. This sort of thing is more in the eye of the beholder, though.
No doubt, thus the original question :)
Someone once wrote that just about all science fiction is possible if we had the ability to manipulate mind-bogglingly vast amounts of energy. Allow this and yes, that world would have wizards.
More than a decade ago I gave a talk on using R, Octave, MuPAD and other software in the classroom environment. It's a great package. Back then I used it to get through stats courses and plot disk usage in a graph. Now I'm using it to hammer through stock market data each night. To do the same with some commercial packages would cost thousands of dollars.
BS. I hear that kind of crap all the time, but there is, surprisingly, a difference between SF and Fantasy.
Wow, a mite touchy there?? Relax, just a question I'm posing...
Yes, there is clearly a difference between pure science fiction and fantasy, but there's no hard distinction between the two. At one end there is fiction that is possible with what we know today. Maybe it's a colony on the moon (with magnetic boots) or "artificial gravity" on a space station by building on the inside of a great spinning wheel.
But if you consider science fiction to be things only present in the observable universe then we must put FTL travel, warp drive, phasers squarely in the realm of fantasy. E.g., without considering the accuracy of the science Counselor Troi's psychic ability indeed becomes SF rather than fantasy. Do we also discount Jules Verne because the science is not valid? How about Twain, Niven, Asimov? All of them have explained things with inaccurate science, even allowing for the current scientific knowledge at the time.
I would go far as to say that a pure fantasy novel, if the fantasy world is consistent, is closer to pure science fiction than what many would consider hard science fiction if the latter does not explain the SF devices.
What is science fiction? At what point does it cross the line from speculative or science fiction to fantasy?
Faster than light travel? Mind reading? Force shields? Time travel? Teleportation?
On the face of it it's not different than magic. A wizard casts a teleport spell or a cleric calls on arcane protection for his/her deity or an evil stepfather peers into a magic mirror.. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
Imagine someone from the 18th, 19th or even 20th century seeing a smart phone or a Ferarri? Heck, my standard issue Fenix flashlight would probably astound people today.
Was there are old lady administering the test? Did she have a little needle at your neck?
On a related note, having any weird dreams lately?
Oh crud. I hate Microsoft, but this is kinda cool.
Wonder if it'll work under Wine?
I apologize. Puns are a low form of humor. Star Trek puns doubly so.
Brings to mind another idea... You remember the episodes where warp drive would cause rips in the fabric of space time? To make a bad pun, what they needed was a "stitch in time" to repair it. It was funny when Geordi and Data designed a machine to stitch up the freak time holes. Ahh, that memorable scene when Picard tells them to start it up: Make it sew!
I am fond of the idea of using computers and modern tools to teach. To this end, I wanted to write an educational film short to help teach children about chemistry. Though I don't necessarily feel that educators should be entertainers, I do feel that "stealth learning" has its benefits. One approach is to use film and modern media to instruct:
In this screenplay, the Starship Voyager is critically low on dilithium crystals. They discover an arctic planet with Tundra-like conditions. Seven-of-Nine is dispatched to fix the extractor in an old mine near an acidic beach that contains tons of dilithium (thought to be a waste product from a previous civilization). There is an explosion and the mine collapses. Racing against time, they rush a small tunnel to Seven-of-Nine to provide air. The soils are highly acidic, however and poses a threat. The good doctor proposes that they use calcium hydroxide to counteract the dangerous acidity in the soils. Janeway demands that, as the Captain, she should do this task. They race against time because the advance welcoming party is starting to fall victim to the frozen conditions. The captain transports down to the surface to begin. One could say that Captain Janeway's on shore, all the greeters are cold, and she's liming the airway to Seven.
It's all relative.
Would you pay $150 for a single dinner for one? I do it on a regular basis (i.e., at least bi-weekly). I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, wealthy but I enjoy the experience. In fact, I don't eat out during the week, drive an older car, live in a small house, buy clothes maybe once a year, and forego many of the other things that co-workers with similar incomes see as normal (video games, movies, smart phone) just so that I can eat out.
You can get a great meal for $10. Hell, you can get a meal for $5.
Your argument is the same as saying that it's stupid to buy bottled water, name brand clothing, "luxury" vehicles, a coffee at Starbucks, buy a CD of music from a signed band, etc..
I think you hit it on the nose.. When we're in our 40s and 50s and later, and have the resources to spend on frivolous items like cars, then we may very well buy the cars we had as kids, or wished we had as kids. For example, I loved the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4. They were priced out of my range when I was younger, and being a commodity Japanese car, they didn't exactly hold their value. There are quite a few of them still around, but most are in pretty sad shape. Problems with their transmissions and all the various gadgetry make them available for cheap, and cheap means that people beat the hell out of them. But I can see myself trying to restore one 20 years from now. It will bring back some memories and may give me something to do in my retirement..... or not.
Right now I'd pay a tidy sum for an Atari 520ST. I can't find one on eBay though. I'd love to get my hands on an Amiga 1000 or a Vic20 too... Can't find them though..
There were some reports that say that 30% - 50% of tickets were bought by brokers. They lock out fans from the best seats. They then resell those seats at a premium. Their excuse is that the open market will decide the price of the ticket. This logic falls down because the brokers artificially inflate the price of the seats that would normally go to the biggest fans.
I don't mind paying a small premium, waiting in line, hovering over the phone to get a good seat -- and I have before -- but the brokers now make even those things impossible. Now it's $2,500 a ticket for some shows with tickets of $100 face value.
Indeed.. Standard keyboards are not quite right for certain applications. I used to mock video editing keyboards until I started using one. The ability to customize the keyboard, down to the labels and repeat rate for specific keys, is very useful. Having multiple scroll wheels is incredibly useful (e.g., a dedicated wheel to advance frames and another to adjust sound). Sure, you can use the mouse pointer to adjust the on screen controls, but when you're dealing with three monitors and need to bounce between them it becomes annoying very quickly.
There's always a back story. Did anyone ask her about the frequent moves she's had to endure? First on the Third Floor, then she got moved to the Second Floor, then to the lobby, then to the basement. And no one even mentioned the payroll issues she has been having. They stopped her paychecks for some reason. The last straw was probably the stapler incident...