Ah, fair nuf. I was thinking a more general purpose fueling point that just getting up off the surface. I was under the impression that it was difficult to use H as a rocket fuel though. In theory it has a high thrust/weight ratio but in practice it's so hard to keep it contained and cold enough to stay liquid that the extra equipement negates any advantes that it has. Doesn't mean that it's impossible of course, just difficult.
A very poorly placed one, as the vaste majority of the fuel you make is going to be used to get it out of the gravity well (less so for the moon, but still significant). I've said it a dozen times on Slashdot already. A gas station would make more sense on an NEO where the resources are abundant and the gravity almost non-existant.
Get your ass to an NEO! (just doesn't have the same right to it)
User satisfaction with software is inversely proportional to how much work they must do - how many separate actions they must take - to accomplish something.
Yes.
I wouldn't even give him that much. There are innumerable examples of simple shortcuts that save tons of time but people don't know about them; just because they exist doesn't mean that they are helpful to the user. For example, my wife has shown her coworkers how to do a simple mail merge about 20 times, but they still do it by hand (swearing and complaining the whole time) because they just don't get it. Also, just because an option is only buried 3 layers deep in a menu (as opposed to 5 or 6 say) doesn't mean jack if the user can't find it and spends five minutes searching around for the right menu. Drop the 'must' out of what he said and it would be a lot more accurate ("...how many action they take") since that reflects the fact that user satisfaction varies by how familiar the user is with the software as well as the software itself.
It's the 8 hours a week that really powers Google's innovation. For those who don't know, Google employees are supposed to dedicate 8 hours a week of company time to some personal project. Those 8 hours have been responsible for Docs, gMail, Maps, Earth, code search, scholar search, etc., etc. People have ideas, give your employees a chance to explore them a bit and you might be surprised what they come up with on their own.
It's a joke paraphrased as best as I could remember from Dr. Strangelove; the pinical of Cold War era gallows humor. Have a read for that and other greate quotes: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove_or:_How_I_Learned_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_the_Bomb The point of the quote, indeed of the whole movie, is the ridiculousness of the thinking of the time. Some of those quotes were themselves lifted right out of the official briefings and strategies; a fact which is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.
I really hope the system wasn't completely automated in case of some kind of malfunction...
There was a man in the loop, but it was whoever happened to be present at the Perimeter facilities at the time. Ideally, it would be someone from high command sent there because the crisis was recognized before hand; but it's possible that it would be just some random soldier sitting in the hot seat.
Even still, the system is only activated for a limited amount of time by high command, only when they suspected an impending attack.
Second, (as Dr Strangelove pointed out) a doomsday machine only makes sense as a deterent if both sides know about it. Why wasn't the machine made public earlier when the Soviets thought that the US was about to launch an attack?
Third, no worries. A small, controlled population with a ratio of 1 male to 10 females properly sheltered will be able to keep society going. Naturally, the females will need to be chosen for their attractiveness and the males for the knowledge and skills they know (I'm thinking lots of engineers will be needed so sign me up).
But the flaws existed before he did anything. The example in the summary isn't exactly fair either, really they are trying to make him pay for a lock after he announced to the world that there isn't one. The thinking behind this logic is obviously "the security hole wasn't a problem until he announced it to the world". If you bought a new car and the doors didn't lock, would you just say to yourself "oh well, as long as no one knows about it"? Of course not, you'd want the locks fixed as soon as possible because eventually someone is going to notice that your locks don't work.
But you missed why it was important enough to warrant being a frontpage Slashdot article. It it pretty sweet, but that really shouldn't be enough to warrant a front page article. I thought the important thing was that the game is a demonstration that good games are about original gameplay ideas and not about graphics. Before ASCIIpOrtal came along, it would have been easy to argue that the game play mechanics of portal would have been impossible or at least diminished without 3D graphics; now it is much more difficult to make that argument.
I'd say it's more because there's now a group of people who cannot function at their full capacity without ready access to the web. A group of people for whom the internet has become an off site long term memory, slower than your regular one but much larger and much more reliable. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's entirely possible that their full capacity is significantly above the rest of the populations, only that they feel somewhat crippled without access to that information.
After all, there are very few questions that one cannot find the answer to online and it's possible to get a fundamental education in nearly any field online. If I were sitting on a jury of an interesting case I know I would want to look up the basic laws being applied and into any precedents discussed by the lawyers. It's just the nature of our connected society. The problem is that the knowledge gained that way is often superficial and occasionally just plain wrong, not to mention it opens up the possibility of the juror learning specifics about the case that they aren't meant to know; which is why the jury needs to be reminded not to research the case themselves.
Ask a Question (How can he make his back hurt less?) Do Background Research (Asked a doctor, recommended a chiropractor) Construct a Hypothesis (Perhaps a chiropractor can relieve his pain) Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment (Visit chiropractor, compare pain levels before and after) Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion (Pain decreased significantly, chiropractor was effective in a very small sample size) Communicate Your Results (Visit slashdot, be ridiculed for your anecdote not being scientific even if you never claimed it to be)
Please note, I am not a supporter of chiropractics in general. 99% of the people who swear by them visit them once a month or more, wasting enormous amounts of time and money for little to no gain. Occasionally, people get good results, but I have to wonder if the same result couldn't have been accomplished with a simple neck and back massage.
Unless you know of a car manufacturer who publishes all their error codes, uses a common consumer standard cord (think USB) to connect to the car's computer, and makes software (or at least an API) available to read and clear that information. Although the law doesn't go that far, it is that kind of thing that the law is moving towards.
It isn't monitoring their health status, it is monitoring their excertion level. The purpose of gym class is and always has been to keep kids active by forcing all students into activity and by teaching them about those activities (in the hope that they continue them later in life). That has been and should be the purpose. Teaching kids about maintaining heartrate and the proper level of excertion is 100% in line with those goals.
Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.
Why not? The school probably already spends tens of thousands on gym equipment, and tens of thousands more on volountary after school sports. What's a hundred simple heart rate monitors at a bulk rate? A few hundred bucks for something that has been shown to improve the quality of excersise should be a no brainer.
I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. Sounds like a pretty good program to me; if kids are going to not do physical activities willingly and do the bare minimum in gym class, monitoring heart rate might be a necessary evil to ensure they get enough exercise.
Arguably people get staph infections in hospitals because hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing. It leaves the hardiest, and fastest spreading bacteria and viruses to fill the vacuum rather than the millions of common germs that our body knows how to deal with. They've done studies which show a less rigorous sterilization regiment can actually reduce the rate of infections but the whole 'germs are evil' mindset prevents hospitals from actually changing their behavior.
Greed or waste? Why not cash it and send the money to one of the Gamer charities (I thought there was one that raised money for children's hospitals for example). Make sure that you credit them for the contribution and be done with it. Certainly not greedy, and certainly a better use of the money than [random blogger] has for it.
I don't think you understand just how bad the situation is in terms of the threat that hangs over their heads. I recently read one article about a woman who spent 15 years in a labor camp, essentially digging ditches and filling them back in. Not only that, but her children and her parents were also put into camps as well, several of them dying due to the horrible conditions in those camps. They saw people executed without trial for trying to escape, or for stealing for, or any number of other offenses that the commander of the base can make up on the spot.
The horrible thing that the woman had done to deserve this? She knew a woman who once dated Kim Jong Il. Of course, she didn't know that until her release, where she was told that if they ever suspected her of gossiping about the supreme leader, she and her family would be back in prison in a heartbeat.
Now ask yourself, if you lived in a place like that, and a foreign newscaster was asking you what you thought about the government policies, what would you say? I'm not saying that no one over there believes it, I'm just saying that you would never know if they believe it or not. Even those that have left the country and claim to have no family will say they believe it, because quite frankly, they probably do have family and are doing whatever they can to protect them.
It's called Christian Science Monitor basically because the founder was also the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist and she demanded that it be called that. Despite it's name, the paper is 95% secular and is actually known for its fair and balance reporting, especially for avoiding sensationalism (ironically in this case). Their staff has even won a handful of Pulitzer Prizes over the years.
It means 20% of the population can hog 90% of the network resources without any technical measures being allowed to stop them.
Except that in this case, unlike all the other situations where a small minority have all the wealth, any one of the other 80% can step in at any time and use a large share of the bandwidth. Net neutrality garauntees that anyone that wants it can go out and use a larger portion of the available bandwidth, just because today it is file sharers doesn't mean that tomorrow it won't be someone else.
Well, to be fair this does seem like the kind of thing that should be established in, you know, a law or act or something. Not just one commission saying, "We've decided this is illegal now and will enforce it". I'd much rather see this on the books as a semi-permanent change, rather than something that will be easily reversed when the political winds change direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, fair nuf. I was thinking a more general purpose fueling point that just getting up off the surface. I was under the impression that it was difficult to use H as a rocket fuel though. In theory it has a high thrust/weight ratio but in practice it's so hard to keep it contained and cold enough to stay liquid that the extra equipement negates any advantes that it has. Doesn't mean that it's impossible of course, just difficult.
A very poorly placed one, as the vaste majority of the fuel you make is going to be used to get it out of the gravity well (less so for the moon, but still significant). I've said it a dozen times on Slashdot already. A gas station would make more sense on an NEO where the resources are abundant and the gravity almost non-existant.
Get your ass to an NEO! (just doesn't have the same right to it)
User satisfaction with software is inversely proportional to how much work they must do - how many separate actions they must take - to accomplish something.
Yes.
I wouldn't even give him that much. There are innumerable examples of simple shortcuts that save tons of time but people don't know about them; just because they exist doesn't mean that they are helpful to the user. For example, my wife has shown her coworkers how to do a simple mail merge about 20 times, but they still do it by hand (swearing and complaining the whole time) because they just don't get it. Also, just because an option is only buried 3 layers deep in a menu (as opposed to 5 or 6 say) doesn't mean jack if the user can't find it and spends five minutes searching around for the right menu. Drop the 'must' out of what he said and it would be a lot more accurate ("...how many action they take") since that reflects the fact that user satisfaction varies by how familiar the user is with the software as well as the software itself.
It's the 8 hours a week that really powers Google's innovation. For those who don't know, Google employees are supposed to dedicate 8 hours a week of company time to some personal project. Those 8 hours have been responsible for Docs, gMail, Maps, Earth, code search, scholar search, etc., etc. People have ideas, give your employees a chance to explore them a bit and you might be surprised what they come up with on their own.
It's a joke paraphrased as best as I could remember from Dr. Strangelove; the pinical of Cold War era gallows humor. Have a read for that and other greate quotes: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove_or:_How_I_Learned_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_the_Bomb The point of the quote, indeed of the whole movie, is the ridiculousness of the thinking of the time. Some of those quotes were themselves lifted right out of the official briefings and strategies; a fact which is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.
I really hope the system wasn't completely automated in case of some kind of malfunction...
There was a man in the loop, but it was whoever happened to be present at the Perimeter facilities at the time. Ideally, it would be someone from high command sent there because the crisis was recognized before hand; but it's possible that it would be just some random soldier sitting in the hot seat.
Even still, the system is only activated for a limited amount of time by high command, only when they suspected an impending attack.
First, where's the Dr Strangelove tag?
Second, (as Dr Strangelove pointed out) a doomsday machine only makes sense as a deterent if both sides know about it. Why wasn't the machine made public earlier when the Soviets thought that the US was about to launch an attack?
Third, no worries. A small, controlled population with a ratio of 1 male to 10 females properly sheltered will be able to keep society going. Naturally, the females will need to be chosen for their attractiveness and the males for the knowledge and skills they know (I'm thinking lots of engineers will be needed so sign me up).
But the flaws existed before he did anything. The example in the summary isn't exactly fair either, really they are trying to make him pay for a lock after he announced to the world that there isn't one. The thinking behind this logic is obviously "the security hole wasn't a problem until he announced it to the world". If you bought a new car and the doors didn't lock, would you just say to yourself "oh well, as long as no one knows about it"? Of course not, you'd want the locks fixed as soon as possible because eventually someone is going to notice that your locks don't work.
But you missed why it was important enough to warrant being a frontpage Slashdot article. It it pretty sweet, but that really shouldn't be enough to warrant a front page article. I thought the important thing was that the game is a demonstration that good games are about original gameplay ideas and not about graphics. Before ASCIIpOrtal came along, it would have been easy to argue that the game play mechanics of portal would have been impossible or at least diminished without 3D graphics; now it is much more difficult to make that argument.
I'd say it's more because there's now a group of people who cannot function at their full capacity without ready access to the web. A group of people for whom the internet has become an off site long term memory, slower than your regular one but much larger and much more reliable. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's entirely possible that their full capacity is significantly above the rest of the populations, only that they feel somewhat crippled without access to that information.
After all, there are very few questions that one cannot find the answer to online and it's possible to get a fundamental education in nearly any field online. If I were sitting on a jury of an interesting case I know I would want to look up the basic laws being applied and into any precedents discussed by the lawyers. It's just the nature of our connected society. The problem is that the knowledge gained that way is often superficial and occasionally just plain wrong, not to mention it opens up the possibility of the juror learning specifics about the case that they aren't meant to know; which is why the jury needs to be reminded not to research the case themselves.
Steps of the Scientific Method
Ask a Question (How can he make his back hurt less?)
Do Background Research (Asked a doctor, recommended a chiropractor)
Construct a Hypothesis (Perhaps a chiropractor can relieve his pain)
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment (Visit chiropractor, compare pain levels before and after)
Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion (Pain decreased significantly, chiropractor was effective in a very small sample size)
Communicate Your Results (Visit slashdot, be ridiculed for your anecdote not being scientific even if you never claimed it to be)
Please note, I am not a supporter of chiropractics in general. 99% of the people who swear by them visit them once a month or more, wasting enormous amounts of time and money for little to no gain. Occasionally, people get good results, but I have to wonder if the same result couldn't have been accomplished with a simple neck and back massage.
All of them.
Unless you know of a car manufacturer who publishes all their error codes, uses a common consumer standard cord (think USB) to connect to the car's computer, and makes software (or at least an API) available to read and clear that information. Although the law doesn't go that far, it is that kind of thing that the law is moving towards.
It isn't monitoring their health status, it is monitoring their excertion level. The purpose of gym class is and always has been to keep kids active by forcing all students into activity and by teaching them about those activities (in the hope that they continue them later in life). That has been and should be the purpose. Teaching kids about maintaining heartrate and the proper level of excertion is 100% in line with those goals.
Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.
Why not? The school probably already spends tens of thousands on gym equipment, and tens of thousands more on volountary after school sports. What's a hundred simple heart rate monitors at a bulk rate? A few hundred bucks for something that has been shown to improve the quality of excersise should be a no brainer.
I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. Sounds like a pretty good program to me; if kids are going to not do physical activities willingly and do the bare minimum in gym class, monitoring heart rate might be a necessary evil to ensure they get enough exercise.
Arguably people get staph infections in hospitals because hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing. It leaves the hardiest, and fastest spreading bacteria and viruses to fill the vacuum rather than the millions of common germs that our body knows how to deal with. They've done studies which show a less rigorous sterilization regiment can actually reduce the rate of infections but the whole 'germs are evil' mindset prevents hospitals from actually changing their behavior.
Ok, in all seriousness (as someone who hasn't been paying attention) how well do existing draft-n devices conform to the standard?
Greed or waste? Why not cash it and send the money to one of the Gamer charities (I thought there was one that raised money for children's hospitals for example). Make sure that you credit them for the contribution and be done with it. Certainly not greedy, and certainly a better use of the money than [random blogger] has for it.
Repeat after me: "Christian != Creationist". Not every christian denies evolution, and understanding evolution doesn't make one a non-christian.
I don't think you understand just how bad the situation is in terms of the threat that hangs over their heads. I recently read one article about a woman who spent 15 years in a labor camp, essentially digging ditches and filling them back in. Not only that, but her children and her parents were also put into camps as well, several of them dying due to the horrible conditions in those camps. They saw people executed without trial for trying to escape, or for stealing for, or any number of other offenses that the commander of the base can make up on the spot.
The horrible thing that the woman had done to deserve this? She knew a woman who once dated Kim Jong Il. Of course, she didn't know that until her release, where she was told that if they ever suspected her of gossiping about the supreme leader, she and her family would be back in prison in a heartbeat.
Now ask yourself, if you lived in a place like that, and a foreign newscaster was asking you what you thought about the government policies, what would you say? I'm not saying that no one over there believes it, I'm just saying that you would never know if they believe it or not. Even those that have left the country and claim to have no family will say they believe it, because quite frankly, they probably do have family and are doing whatever they can to protect them.
If you're going to change PI to something, why not change it to 0, now that would make things easier for the students around the world.
Q. What's the area of a circle with a radius of 5
A. 0
It's called Christian Science Monitor basically because the founder was also the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist and she demanded that it be called that. Despite it's name, the paper is 95% secular and is actually known for its fair and balance reporting, especially for avoiding sensationalism (ironically in this case). Their staff has even won a handful of Pulitzer Prizes over the years.
It means 20% of the population can hog 90% of the network resources without any technical measures being allowed to stop them.
Except that in this case, unlike all the other situations where a small minority have all the wealth, any one of the other 80% can step in at any time and use a large share of the bandwidth. Net neutrality garauntees that anyone that wants it can go out and use a larger portion of the available bandwidth, just because today it is file sharers doesn't mean that tomorrow it won't be someone else.
Well, to be fair this does seem like the kind of thing that should be established in, you know, a law or act or something. Not just one commission saying, "We've decided this is illegal now and will enforce it". I'd much rather see this on the books as a semi-permanent change, rather than something that will be easily reversed when the political winds change direction.
Yeah, Slashdot editors are uh failure of our educational system.