>>It shouldn't be too difficult to recover metals from the landfill sites
I agree. I don't know why people think it would be so hard to mine a landfill. I mean, it's right on the surface. There are already roads to it. I'll bet you could get an average of.25-1 lb of metal per cubic foot of compacted (old) garbage. You'll have a hell of a time finding ore that rich anywhere else except maybe the Tower-Sudan mine up here in minnesota.
>>Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing
You came so close to touching on probably the most important evolutionary reason to have hearing- It's almost free. Hearing is feeling. Feeling is essential for all but the simplest microbes.
If a creature can feel at all, it can already detect very loud/low frequency sounds. It makes sense to evolve exquisitely sensitive feeling/hearing nerves using already available genetic material.
I guess what I'm saying is that hearing uses the same 'stuff' that feeling uses. Even if aliens have some kind of goofy x-ray sensitive eyes or beta-radiation sensitive sense of feel, I'm almost positive they'd be able to hear acoustic vibrations as well. There is no reason not to, as long as you already have the nervous system capability to feel anything.
>>the networks face is declining viewership as cable channels do better and better jobs at hitting more specific niches.
That's kind of interesting because to me, that's an example of the long-tail theory in action. There was a slashdot story just a few days ago about how the long tail theory didn't work.
I wonder if those people looked at cable tv in their research.
Don't forget Valley Girls? Whose bizarre inflections have spread across America? So you can't tell if a teenager is asking a question or making a statement?
Hearing it makes my brain cringe? I can't imagine what it would be like? For a non-english-speaker to parse valley girl talk? Effectively?
>>Lisa, the brain in the family, usually gets the short end of the stick. Message: Be dumb and loud and you're successful in life.
That's because homer is an anti-hero. The show (and many like it) are funny because it puts characters who should have predictable lives into situations they are unequipped or unprepared for, e.g. nuclear reactor technician.
This has been a basic tenet of comedy since 'The Prince and the Pauper' and even long, long before that.
It is unfortunate that life imitates art in such perverse ways, but I think you have your causality reversed or even pointed in the wrong direction. They are two different things:
-Sitcoms are funny. And that's it. -The religious right has been pushing anti-intellectualism for years in order to push its fundamentalist doctrine. And that's it.
Yes, folks, all these FREE public domain HITS can be YOURS!
-Camptown Races! -Amazing Grace! -She'll be comin' round the mountain! -Ain't we got fun! -Anchors Aweigh! -Hail, hail the gang's all here! -I can dance with everyone but my wife! -Mammy o'mine! -Row, row, row! -Swing low, sweet chariot!
Yes folks order now and for NO CHARGE you can sing these songs ANYWHERE! Saloons! Public squares! The telegraph office!
And if you order NOW we'll include at no extra charge: -The whiffenpoof song! -Stop yer ticklin', jock! -Nobody knows de trouble I've seen! -It's delightful to be married! -I love my wife, but oh you kid! -Everybody works but father!
Do not look at porn with remaining eye... Wait. I thought porn made you blind. Now you want porn AND lasers??? This is madness! This is like pop rocks and soda! This is like alka seltzer and seagulls! This is like vi running under emacs running under vi running under WINDOWS!
I have a question for anyone involved in the field of biometrics or just human physiology-
Are iris scans (or retina scans) useful after a person has died? If they are, how long do they remain useful?
I would imagine that, being soft tissue, they would be the first ID technique to become useless, but I wonder exactly how long investigators would have.
Do people complain that Prada makes $2000 purses? Or that Amouage makes $5000 perfume? Or that Lamborghini makes really expensive cars (don't know the price)?
Apple computers are not food or water. You don't have to buy them. If you do buy them, you are implicitly agreeing that their price is fair.
"Can you believe it? When I go to the local steakhouse, they charge me more than twice what the meat itself actually cost! I can grill porterhouses for the whole family for half of the cost of going to the restaurant, and then there's the cost of gas! WTF! Restaurants suck!"
And yet you keep going to them.
Geek squad, car mechanics, roomba accessories, batteries for power tools, printer ink cartridges, etc... the list is long of transactions that grossly favor the seller. This is business. Things are not priced according to their material cost, they are priced based on their market value. They cost what they are worth to the target market.
You could sit all day making little beaded merkins with fur trim and I won't pay you a damned cent because I don't want your damned merkins. You get paid what you're worth. Apple gets paid what their products are worth on the market. They have done the math and figured that they make more money by charging X dollars and losing a few customers than charging X to more customers.
I hate it too and when I do buy apple hardware I downgrade the memory as far as I can in order to save money by buying it elsewhere.
Think of it this way: Buying RAM at newegg or wherever is cheaper than buying it from apple, but it's also cheaper than buying it from dell. So skipping the RAM from both companies saves you money. Right?
Maybe you feel like people are getting ripped off, but that's just because you're sensitive to this area of the market. I think people are getting ripped off whenever they pay a premium for something made out of 'aircraft grade aluminum' or titanium or whatever. I work with those materials all the time and the phrase 'aircraft grade aluminum' is as useless as saying mil-spec or heavy duty. There are mil-specs for shitty things, too. 'Heavy duty' batteries are among the worst. And aircraft aluminum ranges in strength from steel down to something you can rip with your hands.
So screw people who can't open the memory access panel on their computers. Apple has free and detailed instructions on how to do that for all of their hardware. If you're paying that much for RAM, then you're also probably the kind of person who pays $45 for someone to do their oil change or $6 for someone to make their coffee for them.
I wish that using an alias was helpful but it is not. I used to have a myspace account in order to keep in touch with a certain portion of my friends (you know the type) who communicated only via myspace comments. Anyways, I used a fake name (something about pickles or cheese or something). This was all fine and dandy until my little sister posted "HI NICE PROFILE WUTS UP LOL ARE YOU COMING OVER FOR DINNER TOMORROW?"
I didn't post naked pictures of myself or write about crazy stuff. But having your family/sister on your profile is like having them sit in the living room while you're hanging out with your friends. I'm an adult and privacy is very important to me, especially privacy from my family. Maybe I'm weird like that.
Social networking sites are NETWORKS. You can post under an alias but if your online network is anything like your RL network, anyone in your online network can find you without much trouble. I could probably connect everyone I know in RL within 3 hops in myspace if I had the time or inclination.
So here we are at the base camp to another bubble in speculation and hyperinflation, this time in the market of IDEAS.
The way things used to work, advertisers tried to convince you of the utility and attractiveness of their products. Speculators predicted how much a product or resource would sell for. Now we will have ads and speculators working in the field of ideas, which are thoughts, which is a little disturbing to me.
It will happen soon that ads will be for brand names (not products); campaigns will be waged with one trademark against another; mascots engaging in mudflinging; ads proclaiming that some product has the most patents...
I see mutual-fund-like holding groups for IP that will begin paying big dividends. I see the market changing from product- and service-driven to trademark-driven.
Dammit I told myself no more posting before coffee.
The point I'm trying to make is that I foresee a huge bubble in patents and trademarks, and speculation thereof, and I'm worried that it could be the last straw for our poor economy. OK.
>>The payload capacity of the space shuttle was determined by Air Force requirements. I'm sure the payload capacity of Ares V is determined by Air Force requirements.
I am a member of the Air Force and I can confirm your prediction. Elephants, most notably african elephants, hold tremendous strategic and tactical significance to our operations. I am bound by oath to tell you no more.
My ancestors (mostly scandinavian) came here to log and work in mines, much as they did back home. They were valued for their skill (as opposed to other groups which came here looking for work but without a skilled trade, or one that was useful in the area).
Northern Minnesota looks and feels very much like scandinavia. Many within my family want to visit Finland, for example, but I really don't see the point- I'm sure the people are very nice there but if I'm going to spend that much money on a trip I don't want to look at the same pine trees, wildlife, and snow that I could see out my own window. No offense, Finland. In fact, the Finnish president was just here for Finland Days last week I believe.
So me, I'm kind of stuck here because my great-great-great grandfather and mother came here to find good work and cheap land, and now my entire extended family lives within 100 miles of my city (with a few exceptions). I could leave but I feel a sense of duty to people who love me to stick around. Besides, it's beautiful here. The air in the morning smells like perfume, the water tastes sweet, and the sunsets could blow you away. The 100 degree/99% humidity days are made up for by the -50 degree (plus windchill) days. And both of those days are outweighed by being able to have a beer on my back porch in fantastic weather and watch everything from deer to groundhogs traipse through my yard.
Well, let's not forget the huge bump from the FF download day. I support FF, but I don't think you can extrapolate the current numbers linearly. A graph of downloads would probably look like a steep hill, a spike in that hill, and then the hill slowly sloping asymptotically back to zero.
That's why I use a custom hosts file with many thousand ad, malware, etc sites directed to 127.0.0.1. Slashdot, among other websites, loads much more quickly- quickly enough that updating my hosts files every few months makes an appreciable difference in my browsing speed on commercial websites. Yes slashdot is a commercial website. I'd post a link to the hosts provider I use but to be honest I forgot exactly which one it is (I'm at work). A quick google search will find one or ten.
>>It's also why we often go to sleep working on a tough (programming etc.) problem and wake up with the >>answer - our "unconscious" brain put the answer together while we slept.
I always kind of thought that if you go to sleep thinking about a problem, it means that you're tired. If you're tired, you are capable of only a fraction of your normal brain function. When you wake up well-rested, your time spent thinking (say from waking up until 10 minutes later) is simply how long it would have taken you to come up with a solution during normal circumstances.
I guess what I mean is that 10 minutes of well-rested thought is worth an hour or two of over-tired thought. I've never been a big believer in purported levels of productivity in the sleeping brain. I base this partly on research that proved that the old theories of nocturnal subliminal suggestion (as in playing educational material to a subject as they slept) were useless.
I personally find this to be disappointing, but as with many things in life, when it comes to brains you get what you paid for ($0.00).
>>A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped >>out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
I'v heard this and similar arguments a few times already in this discussion. Your argument makes sense at first glance, but the evidence tells a different story.
There are plenty of organisms that have changed little (or not at all) for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Look at alligators and kin; cockroaches; coelocanths (sp?); many insects; and the list goes on.
The rest of your post has its merits, but it's wrong to say that we need genetic diversity just for the sake of having it. We as biochemists and pharmacologists are no longer entirely at the whims of the gradual mutations of e. coli, staph, and friends. We will always have ways to die, but I don't think we face extinction.
So it wouldn't bother you if your random license plate displayed "TIT" everywhere you went? You wouldn't get sick of taking crap for it?
Or ASS? GAY? CUM? OAF? SOB? GOD? PED-0xx?
I mean, come on- those could be generated randomly (and currently weeded out before assignment). I know that if I was assigned any one of those plates I would request another. You spend way to much time in your car for it to say "PED-0" or ASS on it.
WTF has a meaning that almost everyone younger than 30 knows, and many people older than that know it as well. Try getting a license plate with FUBAR or SNAFU on it...
Slashdot Mirror
>>It shouldn't be too difficult to recover metals from the landfill sites
I agree. I don't know why people think it would be so hard to mine a landfill. I mean, it's right on the surface. There are already roads to it. I'll bet you could get an average of .25-1 lb of metal per cubic foot of compacted (old) garbage. You'll have a hell of a time finding ore that rich anywhere else except maybe the Tower-Sudan mine up here in minnesota.
-b
>>Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing
You came so close to touching on probably the most important evolutionary reason to have hearing- It's almost free. Hearing is feeling. Feeling is essential for all but the simplest microbes.
If a creature can feel at all, it can already detect very loud/low frequency sounds. It makes sense to evolve exquisitely sensitive feeling/hearing nerves using already available genetic material.
I guess what I'm saying is that hearing uses the same 'stuff' that feeling uses. Even if aliens have some kind of goofy x-ray sensitive eyes or beta-radiation sensitive sense of feel, I'm almost positive they'd be able to hear acoustic vibrations as well. There is no reason not to, as long as you already have the nervous system capability to feel anything.
-b
>>the networks face is declining viewership as cable channels do better and better jobs at hitting more specific niches.
That's kind of interesting because to me, that's an example of the long-tail theory in action. There was a slashdot story just a few days ago about how the long tail theory didn't work.
I wonder if those people looked at cable tv in their research.
-b
Don't forget Valley Girls? Whose bizarre inflections have spread across America? So you can't tell if a teenager is asking a question or making a statement?
Hearing it makes my brain cringe? I can't imagine what it would be like? For a non-english-speaker to parse valley girl talk? Effectively?
-b?
>>Lisa, the brain in the family, usually gets the short end of the stick. Message: Be dumb and loud and you're successful in life.
That's because homer is an anti-hero. The show (and many like it) are funny because it puts characters who should have predictable lives into situations they are unequipped or unprepared for, e.g. nuclear reactor technician.
This has been a basic tenet of comedy since 'The Prince and the Pauper' and even long, long before that.
It is unfortunate that life imitates art in such perverse ways, but I think you have your causality reversed or even pointed in the wrong direction. They are two different things:
-Sitcoms are funny. And that's it.
-The religious right has been pushing anti-intellectualism for years in order to push its fundamentalist doctrine. And that's it.
IMO they are separate issues.
-b
Yes, folks, all these FREE public domain HITS can be YOURS!
-Camptown Races!
-Amazing Grace!
-She'll be comin' round the mountain!
-Ain't we got fun!
-Anchors Aweigh!
-Hail, hail the gang's all here!
-I can dance with everyone but my wife!
-Mammy o'mine!
-Row, row, row!
-Swing low, sweet chariot!
Yes folks order now and for NO CHARGE you can sing these songs ANYWHERE! Saloons! Public squares! The telegraph office!
And if you order NOW we'll include at no extra charge:
-The whiffenpoof song!
-Stop yer ticklin', jock!
-Nobody knows de trouble I've seen!
-It's delightful to be married!
-I love my wife, but oh you kid!
-Everybody works but father!
Don't wait! Call now! DO IT!
[all real songs]
[not a troll]
-b
I know you're just kidding around, but for people who don't know, 2600 hz is pretty close to E7.
That's high-pitched but not too difficult to whistle if you're naturally good with pitches.
Just for a sense of scale- I can hear tones from about 10 hz to around 19 kHz.
-b
Do not look at porn with remaining eye... Wait. I thought porn made you blind. Now you want porn AND lasers??? This is madness! This is like pop rocks and soda! This is like alka seltzer and seagulls! This is like vi running under emacs running under vi running under WINDOWS!
-b
I have a question for anyone involved in the field of biometrics or just human physiology-
Are iris scans (or retina scans) useful after a person has died? If they are, how long do they remain useful?
I would imagine that, being soft tissue, they would be the first ID technique to become useless, but I wonder exactly how long investigators would have.
-b
>>apple pays its employees LESS than its competitors
Yeah, but they make up for it in volume... ;)
-b
>> you can go to any steak house, the price of steak is set to be meat + labor, so all are relatively the same
Outback steak- $12
Ruth's Chris- $99
French Laundry- $300+
Price is based on market value, not cost.
-b
Do people complain that Prada makes $2000 purses? Or that Amouage makes $5000 perfume? Or that Lamborghini makes really expensive cars (don't know the price)?
Apple computers are not food or water. You don't have to buy them. If you do buy them, you are implicitly agreeing that their price is fair.
-b
"Can you believe it? When I go to the local steakhouse, they charge me more than twice what the meat itself actually cost! I can grill porterhouses for the whole family for half of the cost of going to the restaurant, and then there's the cost of gas! WTF! Restaurants suck!"
And yet you keep going to them.
Geek squad, car mechanics, roomba accessories, batteries for power tools, printer ink cartridges, etc... the list is long of transactions that grossly favor the seller. This is business. Things are not priced according to their material cost, they are priced based on their market value. They cost what they are worth to the target market.
You could sit all day making little beaded merkins with fur trim and I won't pay you a damned cent because I don't want your damned merkins. You get paid what you're worth. Apple gets paid what their products are worth on the market. They have done the math and figured that they make more money by charging X dollars and losing a few customers than charging X to more customers.
I hate it too and when I do buy apple hardware I downgrade the memory as far as I can in order to save money by buying it elsewhere.
Think of it this way: Buying RAM at newegg or wherever is cheaper than buying it from apple, but it's also cheaper than buying it from dell. So skipping the RAM from both companies saves you money. Right?
Maybe you feel like people are getting ripped off, but that's just because you're sensitive to this area of the market. I think people are getting ripped off whenever they pay a premium for something made out of 'aircraft grade aluminum' or titanium or whatever. I work with those materials all the time and the phrase 'aircraft grade aluminum' is as useless as saying mil-spec or heavy duty. There are mil-specs for shitty things, too. 'Heavy duty' batteries are among the worst. And aircraft aluminum ranges in strength from steel down to something you can rip with your hands.
So screw people who can't open the memory access panel on their computers. Apple has free and detailed instructions on how to do that for all of their hardware. If you're paying that much for RAM, then you're also probably the kind of person who pays $45 for someone to do their oil change or $6 for someone to make their coffee for them.
Again: Market value.
-b
I wish that using an alias was helpful but it is not. I used to have a myspace account in order to keep in touch with a certain portion of my friends (you know the type) who communicated only via myspace comments. Anyways, I used a fake name (something about pickles or cheese or something). This was all fine and dandy until my little sister posted "HI NICE PROFILE WUTS UP LOL ARE YOU COMING OVER FOR DINNER TOMORROW?"
I didn't post naked pictures of myself or write about crazy stuff. But having your family/sister on your profile is like having them sit in the living room while you're hanging out with your friends. I'm an adult and privacy is very important to me, especially privacy from my family. Maybe I'm weird like that.
Social networking sites are NETWORKS. You can post under an alias but if your online network is anything like your RL network, anyone in your online network can find you without much trouble. I could probably connect everyone I know in RL within 3 hops in myspace if I had the time or inclination.
-b
So here we are at the base camp to another bubble in speculation and hyperinflation, this time in the market of IDEAS.
The way things used to work, advertisers tried to convince you of the utility and attractiveness of their products. Speculators predicted how much a product or resource would sell for. Now we will have ads and speculators working in the field of ideas, which are thoughts, which is a little disturbing to me.
It will happen soon that ads will be for brand names (not products); campaigns will be waged with one trademark against another; mascots engaging in mudflinging; ads proclaiming that some product has the most patents...
I see mutual-fund-like holding groups for IP that will begin paying big dividends. I see the market changing from product- and service-driven to trademark-driven.
Dammit I told myself no more posting before coffee.
The point I'm trying to make is that I foresee a huge bubble in patents and trademarks, and speculation thereof, and I'm worried that it could be the last straw for our poor economy. OK.
-b
>>...stay away from computers to prevent blindness...
Wait, computers make you go blind? I thought the only thing that made you blind was masterb... OOOHHHHH I get it.
Try $600,000 in 2006 dollars.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060906_sts115_launchscrub.html
-b
>>The payload capacity of the space shuttle was determined by Air Force requirements. I'm sure the payload capacity of Ares V is determined by Air Force requirements.
I am a member of the Air Force and I can confirm your prediction. Elephants, most notably african elephants, hold tremendous strategic and tactical significance to our operations. I am bound by oath to tell you no more.
-b
Nice post.
My ancestors (mostly scandinavian) came here to log and work in mines, much as they did back home. They were valued for their skill (as opposed to other groups which came here looking for work but without a skilled trade, or one that was useful in the area).
Northern Minnesota looks and feels very much like scandinavia. Many within my family want to visit Finland, for example, but I really don't see the point- I'm sure the people are very nice there but if I'm going to spend that much money on a trip I don't want to look at the same pine trees, wildlife, and snow that I could see out my own window. No offense, Finland. In fact, the Finnish president was just here for Finland Days last week I believe.
So me, I'm kind of stuck here because my great-great-great grandfather and mother came here to find good work and cheap land, and now my entire extended family lives within 100 miles of my city (with a few exceptions). I could leave but I feel a sense of duty to people who love me to stick around. Besides, it's beautiful here. The air in the morning smells like perfume, the water tastes sweet, and the sunsets could blow you away. The 100 degree/99% humidity days are made up for by the -50 degree (plus windchill) days. And both of those days are outweighed by being able to have a beer on my back porch in fantastic weather and watch everything from deer to groundhogs traipse through my yard.
-b
Well, let's not forget the huge bump from the FF download day. I support FF, but I don't think you can extrapolate the current numbers linearly. A graph of downloads would probably look like a steep hill, a spike in that hill, and then the hill slowly sloping asymptotically back to zero.
-b
That's why I use a custom hosts file with many thousand ad, malware, etc sites directed to 127.0.0.1. Slashdot, among other websites, loads much more quickly- quickly enough that updating my hosts files every few months makes an appreciable difference in my browsing speed on commercial websites. Yes slashdot is a commercial website. I'd post a link to the hosts provider I use but to be honest I forgot exactly which one it is (I'm at work). A quick google search will find one or ten.
-b
>>It's also why we often go to sleep working on a tough (programming etc.) problem and wake up with the
>>answer - our "unconscious" brain put the answer together while we slept.
I always kind of thought that if you go to sleep thinking about a problem, it means that you're tired. If you're tired, you are capable of only a fraction of your normal brain function. When you wake up well-rested, your time spent thinking (say from waking up until 10 minutes later) is simply how long it would have taken you to come up with a solution during normal circumstances.
I guess what I mean is that 10 minutes of well-rested thought is worth an hour or two of over-tired thought. I've never been a big believer in purported levels of productivity in the sleeping brain. I base this partly on research that proved that the old theories of nocturnal subliminal suggestion (as in playing educational material to a subject as they slept) were useless.
I personally find this to be disappointing, but as with many things in life, when it comes to brains you get what you paid for ($0.00).
-b
>>A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped
>>out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
I'v heard this and similar arguments a few times already in this discussion. Your argument makes sense at first glance, but the evidence tells a different story.
There are plenty of organisms that have changed little (or not at all) for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Look at alligators and kin; cockroaches; coelocanths (sp?); many insects; and the list goes on.
The rest of your post has its merits, but it's wrong to say that we need genetic diversity just for the sake of having it. We as biochemists and pharmacologists are no longer entirely at the whims of the gradual mutations of e. coli, staph, and friends. We will always have ways to die, but I don't think we face extinction.
-b
>>If you're treating aging like a disease, might as well find a cure for death too.
Err... That is kind of, you know, exactly what they're doing here. I didn't RTFA but I'm pretty sure it's not about exfoliating moisturizers.
-b
So it wouldn't bother you if your random license plate displayed "TIT" everywhere you went? You wouldn't get sick of taking crap for it?
Or ASS?
GAY?
CUM?
OAF?
SOB?
GOD?
PED-0xx?
I mean, come on- those could be generated randomly (and currently weeded out before assignment). I know that if I was assigned any one of those plates I would request another. You spend way to much time in your car for it to say "PED-0" or ASS on it.
WTF has a meaning that almost everyone younger than 30 knows, and many people older than that know it as well. Try getting a license plate with FUBAR or SNAFU on it...
-b