because booting takes (realistically - c'mon, now) more than ten or twenty seconds
The first thing I do in the morning at work is check my work e-mail. Going from turned off to reading mail in Outlook is really somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes (yes, it varies) with Windows XP, due to a long network login (not sure why it's so bad) and starting all the required crapware (Symantec, Entrust, Cisco Clean Agent, Altiris Client, Connected DataProtector, Spy Sweeper, plus several in-house scripts) that has to run. To avoid this long boot-up I generally leave my machine on all week and only shut down for the weekends.
Just a couple years ago, when I was in college, I would go to the computer labs to print stuff out. It would take over 2 minutes (from typing the password to being able to run a program) to log into the brand new Apples with OSX. And these are machines that were already booted! It was really frustrating when the task of printing would take less time than simply logging in.
So your home computer may boot in 10 to 20 seconds and be ready to go, but machines managed by a big IT department are generally going to be loaded down like a pack mule and waste a lot of user time.
Wow, that's a real name? I thought it was completely made up when they used it in Tropic Thunder.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
Any government that ignores its people and passes laws contrary to their desires has significant problems.
That's not true at all. In the US we have the constitution in which there are measures set up to protect the minority from the majority: representative democracy, bill of rights, etc. The majority could decide to do something terrible, like removing the civil liberties of minorities (just as people like Card wishes*), so these measures are in place to prevent the majority's will in these cases. Without it, democracy is just nasty mob rule.
Look at it with someone else's shoes on for a moment (you should always be doing this). Let's say the majority wanted to outlaw the practice of your religion (assuming here that you have one). Thankfully, the first amendment (in the US) prohibits this, but this is exactly a situation where the democratic government will (hopefully) ignore the will of the majority, and rightfully so.
*He thinks all homosexual behavior should be illegal. The man is truly a crazy person.
Unless you have a truly unique name, which is extremely unlikely, the problem with using your real name as the key is that real names represent a rather small keyspace and can probably be brute forced with little effort, especially since the keyspace for names isn't anywhere near uniformly distributed. Recovering your real name doesn't require searching the (gigantic) SHA-1 space, but just this much smaller set of possible real names. If lots of people did the SHA-1 name thing, someone could even make a Name->SHA-1 rainbow table to quickly match hashes to names.
You could either salt your name with a unique nickname, i.e., Arthur Herbert "The Fonz" Fonzarelli. Or you could use a short phrase instead of or in addition to your name.
We can argue the whole peak oil thing to death, but I really doubt we'll be out of fossil fues in 100 years.
It's not about running out. It's never been about running out. That's why it's called peak oil: it's about the peak in production. After the production peaks, it quickly becomes more expensive to extract oil and will eventually become so expensive that it requires more energy to extract the oil than you get from the oil itself. At this point, oil is no longer a resource.
Finally, as another posted pointed out, the lower the population the less likely it is to go extinct? That makes no sense whatsoever.
The parent was talking about equilibrium. If you take it to the extreme (thinking a population of one has the best chances), of course it won't make sense, just as if you take any model beyond its domain, it fails.
We are not at an equilibrium now as we are using large amounts of energy, a habit which is not sustainable. Before the industrial revolution the world population, at a mere 1 billion, was operating at a sustainable level. Humans were using only as much energy as the Earth absorbed from the sun, in the form of plants (wood and food) and weather (sails, windmills, waterwheels). As the population falls, it approaches that sustainable level and settles right in: balance is achieved.
Currently, we really don't know how the sounds we make in the water affects marine life. This includes sonar as well as all the other noise of traveling ships. There simply hasn't been enough research done. On one hand we have people in the Navy saying it doesn't do significant harm and on the other side we have environmentalists that think sonar "kills whales on contact" (Hawaii's Weekly magazine claimed this). Both are a bit off.
At Johns Hopkins University in May, I saw a lecture by Brandon L. Southall, a fisheries research biologist and director of NOAA's Ocean Acoustics Program within the NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology. Currently he is in the Bahamas studying the behavioral response of marine mammals to audio. They would put a tag containing accelerometers on a whale for about 16 hours, and use it to observe the animal's normal behavior (data was collected in the tag which was retrieved later). Then they would play different noises, including mimicking other types of marine mammals, to see how the animal responded.
So far they had found that the sounds affected the animal's behavior: the animal would adjust its dive, sit still for long periods of time, make noises back, and usually travel away from the noise. However, there was simply not enough information to determine if this was a problem for the whales.
So my point being, not that they should be ignored, but the environmentalists in this case don't really have the information they claim to have about the detrimental effects to whales. All they really have right now are some incidents of beached whales, which isn't enough to draw good conclusions. We need more study.
Faith in absolute truths accepted by a large population at some point gets called a "religion." Pascal's wager -- since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax -- implies that science provides support of faith.
It doesn't imply that at all. Pascal's wager is a complete fallacy and is recognized as such by theists and atheists alike. The fact that most human beings belong to a religion is most likely no more than the evolutionary side effect of some other beneficial biological feature (that is, beneficial to our ability to survive long enough to reproduce). A few hundred years ago, before science was as strong as it is today, people believed in even stranger things and had all kinds of superstitions, but it didn't make these things true.
Your whole post really doesn't make much sense at all.
From looking at your image, this doesn't seem like it should be very difficult to implement, unless you want extreme precision on the 10's dial. The dials themselves aren't moving, and you don't need to actually read the numbers. You just need to know where the tip of the needle is, then use that position relative to the center of the dial to get a reading. The first thing I would do is subtract the background. Use a couple different images to patch together a "background" image, where the needles are missing. Inconsistent lighting may pose an issue here, however, so controlling the lighting makes the software side much easier.
After subtracting the background and hopefully leaving you with a bunch of plain needles, apply a low-pass filter (smoothing) to remove and noise and cruft, then convert the image into a binary image. Dilate followed by an erosion to fill in holes left behind by numbers overlapping the needle (this may not be necessary). Then find the most extreme black blob (the one furthest from the center) on a dial (easy, as this is now a binary image). You now know where the point of the needle is. Convert the angle between point and center into a reading.
I'm just throwing out an idea based on the computer vision classes I took in college. It may not work at all. Other approaches may use a Harris corner detector and/or an edge detector.
The whole idea of Civilization is born out of the premise that people form groups who then decide what is right and wrong
It's not about right and wrong, or at least it shouldn't be. Laws need to be more utilitarian than that, with the goal of discouraging behavior that is detrimental for society (what is detrimental and what is valued depends on the culture).
When you have laws based on people's notions of right and wrong, you end up with bullshit like sodomy laws.
When are we getting a game where you kill Americans instead?
You could in the earlier Battlefield games: 1942 and Vietnam. In 1942, you could play on either side, axis or allies, so you could be a German, Japanese, or Italian soldier and shoot at American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers. In Vietnam you could play as Vietcong and fight the Americans.
When I was taking a writing class in college, the night before the assignments were due I would post them to Slashdot as anonymous coward, along with a flamebait post title. Sure, they were always off-topic and rightfully modded as such, but eventually some pedantic grammar nazi would come by and fix all my mistakes for me.
What gives YOU the RIGHT to something created by someone else?
No one gave me the right to use, copy, distribute, and modify someone else's ideas. It is a natural right of all human beings, just like free speech and privacy, and is acknowledged by my country's (US) constitution as such. The same constitution allows the government, if it so wishes, to grant temporary monopolies on works (section 8), which is meant solely to benefit the public by encouraging science and arts -- the social contract mentioned in the parent post.
ermmm both em-dash and hyphen are available on your keyboard btw.
I'll give you a keyboard with only two keys on it: 0 and 1. In the same sense, every type-able character is available to you.;-) It's just damn inconvenient.
You can do this over ssh (X forwarding) to open a frame on someone else's computer (or several other's computers). They get their own cursor and everything, and, if you are looking in the same buffer, you can actively see the other person/people typing away. Just don't C-x C-c or you close it for everyone!
Security note: watch out, because whoever you give a frame to can trivially get shell access in your account.
Since they are on the southern hemisphere they need to remember to turn the routers upside down before they install them, assuming the routers were produced in the northern hemisphere. Otherwise it really would be a waste of money because everyone would have to browse upside down, or at least flip their monitors over when using the Internet.
No longer is dating an activity to be pursued because one wants to find their 'one and only' but rather, dating is an investment in time.
Like any statement that involves the phrase "these days", "nowadays", and "in this day and age" it is actually the opposite of what is stated. Dating today is probably more about finding the "one and only" than ever before.
Case and point, after my grandfather died and we were sorting out his belongings I had the opportunity to look through some of his old books. I came across a book he had during his college days, the 1950's, that was about college study practices. It had what you would expect in it, good study habits, a disciplined schedule, etc. But the interesting part was that the sample schedule had set aside a few hours each week for dating. Along with that was a whole chapter on proper dating techniques where the entire emphasis was basically about efficiently finding a good mate.
This was over 50 years ago and dating was really this cold interview where you were looking for someone worth your investment. From talking to my grandmother, it was common, and expected, for a person to date many people at once and never really enter into an exclusive relationship until a proposal for marriage. She said she herself was dating several men up until the day my grandfather proposed to her.
And in the centuries before this arranged marriages were quite common, which is as far away from the "true love" thing as it gets.
In conclusion, I would say that throughout the history of civilization, human coupling has been more about pragmatism than romance. Thanks to the luxury of modern life, we don't need to be so pragmatic, so there is more romance involved than any previous time in history.
My fiance started doing this last year to get my attention when my cell phone battery dies. When my laptop starts playing sounds I didn't tell it to play it means it's time to charge my phone.
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because booting takes (realistically - c'mon, now) more than ten or twenty seconds
The first thing I do in the morning at work is check my work e-mail. Going from turned off to reading mail in Outlook is really somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes (yes, it varies) with Windows XP, due to a long network login (not sure why it's so bad) and starting all the required crapware (Symantec, Entrust, Cisco Clean Agent, Altiris Client, Connected DataProtector, Spy Sweeper, plus several in-house scripts) that has to run. To avoid this long boot-up I generally leave my machine on all week and only shut down for the weekends.
Just a couple years ago, when I was in college, I would go to the computer labs to print stuff out. It would take over 2 minutes (from typing the password to being able to run a program) to log into the brand new Apples with OSX. And these are machines that were already booted! It was really frustrating when the task of printing would take less time than simply logging in.
So your home computer may boot in 10 to 20 seconds and be ready to go, but machines managed by a big IT department are generally going to be loaded down like a pack mule and waste a lot of user time.
Wow, that's a real name? I thought it was completely made up when they used it in Tropic Thunder.
Any government that ignores its people and passes laws contrary to their desires has significant problems.
That's not true at all. In the US we have the constitution in which there are measures set up to protect the minority from the majority: representative democracy, bill of rights, etc. The majority could decide to do something terrible, like removing the civil liberties of minorities (just as people like Card wishes*), so these measures are in place to prevent the majority's will in these cases. Without it, democracy is just nasty mob rule.
Look at it with someone else's shoes on for a moment (you should always be doing this). Let's say the majority wanted to outlaw the practice of your religion (assuming here that you have one). Thankfully, the first amendment (in the US) prohibits this, but this is exactly a situation where the democratic government will (hopefully) ignore the will of the majority, and rightfully so.
*He thinks all homosexual behavior should be illegal. The man is truly a crazy person.
Unless you have a truly unique name, which is extremely unlikely, the problem with using your real name as the key is that real names represent a rather small keyspace and can probably be brute forced with little effort, especially since the keyspace for names isn't anywhere near uniformly distributed. Recovering your real name doesn't require searching the (gigantic) SHA-1 space, but just this much smaller set of possible real names. If lots of people did the SHA-1 name thing, someone could even make a Name->SHA-1 rainbow table to quickly match hashes to names.
You could either salt your name with a unique nickname, i.e., Arthur Herbert "The Fonz" Fonzarelli. Or you could use a short phrase instead of or in addition to your name.
We can argue the whole peak oil thing to death, but I really doubt we'll be out of fossil fues in 100 years.
It's not about running out. It's never been about running out. That's why it's called peak oil: it's about the peak in production. After the production peaks, it quickly becomes more expensive to extract oil and will eventually become so expensive that it requires more energy to extract the oil than you get from the oil itself. At this point, oil is no longer a resource.
Finally, as another posted pointed out, the lower the population the less likely it is to go extinct? That makes no sense whatsoever.
The parent was talking about equilibrium. If you take it to the extreme (thinking a population of one has the best chances), of course it won't make sense, just as if you take any model beyond its domain, it fails.
We are not at an equilibrium now as we are using large amounts of energy, a habit which is not sustainable. Before the industrial revolution the world population, at a mere 1 billion, was operating at a sustainable level. Humans were using only as much energy as the Earth absorbed from the sun, in the form of plants (wood and food) and weather (sails, windmills, waterwheels). As the population falls, it approaches that sustainable level and settles right in: balance is achieved.
(or ever: we will reduce our usage, and prices will increase, but we can still synthesize fossil fuels from just about anything with carbon in it).
Excuse me, the first law of thermodynamics said he would like to have a talk with you.
I think you missed the whole civil disobedience thing.
Currently, we really don't know how the sounds we make in the water affects marine life. This includes sonar as well as all the other noise of traveling ships. There simply hasn't been enough research done. On one hand we have people in the Navy saying it doesn't do significant harm and on the other side we have environmentalists that think sonar "kills whales on contact" (Hawaii's Weekly magazine claimed this). Both are a bit off.
At Johns Hopkins University in May, I saw a lecture by Brandon L. Southall, a fisheries research biologist and director of NOAA's Ocean Acoustics Program within the NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology. Currently he is in the Bahamas studying the behavioral response of marine mammals to audio. They would put a tag containing accelerometers on a whale for about 16 hours, and use it to observe the animal's normal behavior (data was collected in the tag which was retrieved later). Then they would play different noises, including mimicking other types of marine mammals, to see how the animal responded.
So far they had found that the sounds affected the animal's behavior: the animal would adjust its dive, sit still for long periods of time, make noises back, and usually travel away from the noise. However, there was simply not enough information to determine if this was a problem for the whales.
So my point being, not that they should be ignored, but the environmentalists in this case don't really have the information they claim to have about the detrimental effects to whales. All they really have right now are some incidents of beached whales, which isn't enough to draw good conclusions. We need more study.
Faith in absolute truths accepted by a large population at some point gets called a "religion." Pascal's wager -- since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax -- implies that science provides support of faith.
It doesn't imply that at all. Pascal's wager is a complete fallacy and is recognized as such by theists and atheists alike. The fact that most human beings belong to a religion is most likely no more than the evolutionary side effect of some other beneficial biological feature (that is, beneficial to our ability to survive long enough to reproduce). A few hundred years ago, before science was as strong as it is today, people believed in even stranger things and had all kinds of superstitions, but it didn't make these things true.
Your whole post really doesn't make much sense at all.
From looking at your image, this doesn't seem like it should be very difficult to implement, unless you want extreme precision on the 10's dial. The dials themselves aren't moving, and you don't need to actually read the numbers. You just need to know where the tip of the needle is, then use that position relative to the center of the dial to get a reading. The first thing I would do is subtract the background. Use a couple different images to patch together a "background" image, where the needles are missing. Inconsistent lighting may pose an issue here, however, so controlling the lighting makes the software side much easier.
After subtracting the background and hopefully leaving you with a bunch of plain needles, apply a low-pass filter (smoothing) to remove and noise and cruft, then convert the image into a binary image. Dilate followed by an erosion to fill in holes left behind by numbers overlapping the needle (this may not be necessary). Then find the most extreme black blob (the one furthest from the center) on a dial (easy, as this is now a binary image). You now know where the point of the needle is. Convert the angle between point and center into a reading.
I'm just throwing out an idea based on the computer vision classes I took in college. It may not work at all. Other approaches may use a Harris corner detector and/or an edge detector.
As I understand it, parody is fair (using the work to poke fun at the work itself) while satire is not (using the work to poke fun at something else).
The whole idea of Civilization is born out of the premise that people form groups who then decide what is right and wrong
It's not about right and wrong, or at least it shouldn't be. Laws need to be more utilitarian than that, with the goal of discouraging behavior that is detrimental for society (what is detrimental and what is valued depends on the culture).
When you have laws based on people's notions of right and wrong, you end up with bullshit like sodomy laws.
They even got sued for a kid coming in, getting a reed switch, and using it to kill his parents (true story).
I was looking for the story, but searching for it just brings up this post in the search results. Got a link?
When are we getting a game where you kill Americans instead?
You could in the earlier Battlefield games: 1942 and Vietnam. In 1942, you could play on either side, axis or allies, so you could be a German, Japanese, or Italian soldier and shoot at American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers. In Vietnam you could play as Vietcong and fight the Americans.
Before you go off and try to write your own e-mail regex, consider that, in order to get it right, it is going to have to look like this.
That's right. The regex weighs in at about 6KB. Don't write your own.
When I was taking a writing class in college, the night before the assignments were due I would post them to Slashdot as anonymous coward, along with a flamebait post title. Sure, they were always off-topic and rightfully modded as such, but eventually some pedantic grammar nazi would come by and fix all my mistakes for me.
What gives YOU the RIGHT to something created by someone else?
No one gave me the right to use, copy, distribute, and modify someone else's ideas. It is a natural right of all human beings, just like free speech and privacy, and is acknowledged by my country's (US) constitution as such. The same constitution allows the government, if it so wishes, to grant temporary monopolies on works (section 8), which is meant solely to benefit the public by encouraging science and arts -- the social contract mentioned in the parent post.
ermmm both em-dash and hyphen are available on your keyboard btw.
I'll give you a keyboard with only two keys on it: 0 and 1. In the same sense, every type-able character is available to you. ;-) It's just damn inconvenient.
Sheesh, couldn't you work people about following such a dangerous link?!
WARNING: He's using the CSS version of the blink tag! Follow link with caution!
Thanks to X, Emacs has built-in collaborative editing.
You can do this over ssh (X forwarding) to open a frame on someone else's computer (or several other's computers). They get their own cursor and everything, and, if you are looking in the same buffer, you can actively see the other person/people typing away. Just don't C-x C-c or you close it for everyone!
Security note: watch out, because whoever you give a frame to can trivially get shell access in your account.
Since they are on the southern hemisphere they need to remember to turn the routers upside down before they install them, assuming the routers were produced in the northern hemisphere. Otherwise it really would be a waste of money because everyone would have to browse upside down, or at least flip their monitors over when using the Internet.
Really? You never sounded out on this before.
In other words, your argument makes no sense.
The eighteenth amendment disagrees.
This line caught my attention in your essay,
No longer is dating an activity to be pursued because one wants to find their 'one and only' but rather, dating is an investment in time.
Like any statement that involves the phrase "these days", "nowadays", and "in this day and age" it is actually the opposite of what is stated. Dating today is probably more about finding the "one and only" than ever before.
Case and point, after my grandfather died and we were sorting out his belongings I had the opportunity to look through some of his old books. I came across a book he had during his college days, the 1950's, that was about college study practices. It had what you would expect in it, good study habits, a disciplined schedule, etc. But the interesting part was that the sample schedule had set aside a few hours each week for dating. Along with that was a whole chapter on proper dating techniques where the entire emphasis was basically about efficiently finding a good mate.
This was over 50 years ago and dating was really this cold interview where you were looking for someone worth your investment. From talking to my grandmother, it was common, and expected, for a person to date many people at once and never really enter into an exclusive relationship until a proposal for marriage. She said she herself was dating several men up until the day my grandfather proposed to her.
And in the centuries before this arranged marriages were quite common, which is as far away from the "true love" thing as it gets.
In conclusion, I would say that throughout the history of civilization, human coupling has been more about pragmatism than romance. Thanks to the luxury of modern life, we don't need to be so pragmatic, so there is more romance involved than any previous time in history.
My fiance started doing this last year to get my attention when my cell phone battery dies. When my laptop starts playing sounds I didn't tell it to play it means it's time to charge my phone.