You seem to have a limited understanding of weather prediction. Given the limitations of our current weather models, it's difficult to generate a forecast for t + 24 hours when you don't receive observational data until t + 168 hours (if ever, as the previous post mentioned).
Great. Now anybody with the simplest image-processing software can see exactly how you'll look with and without a beard, and with and without hair -- just mirror the appropriate part of the image.
Now, if you're really paranoid, there ought to be all sorts of ways to do the equivalent of dazzle camouflage in your DMV photo. Asymmetric stripes in your beard or hair, a bit of Darth Maul work with a sharpie...
This is the real evil of overly draconian regulations or laws. Sure, the subjects can choose to ignore them, and the authorities can choose not to enforce them -- but the authorities can also choose to enforce them, at their own discretion, and with no apparent legal recourse for those they single out. As far as I can tell, "everybody else was doing it" is not a valid defense.
What is the problem with accurately logging your time? You are paid by the hour. Log your time. What is the problem unless you are in fact stealing from your employer by working fewer hours than you are paid for.
This line of argument would be marginally less obtuse if the company were merely requiring its workers to clock out for any break, no matter how short. You're not "stealing from your employer" any more or less by going to the bathroom than by going to the snack machine or the smoking area.
Of course, the real acid test is this: once you're logging your time to the second, does the time spent logging count as "on-duty" or "off-duty"? This will be important, at least until the Company automates it fully -- probably by installing eye-tracking software to log every fraction of a second that you aren't looking at your screen.
All these retards calling for unions in a market where offshoring is easy and doesnt result in loss of quality - really?
...room-temperature superconductivity to be true. But this just feels an awful lot like polywater, cold fusion and the like -- something that would be amazingly cool, but has ambiguous or conflicting or incomplete evidence, and disappears when you look at it crosswise.
I sure hope it pans out. Cold fusion didn't (so far), but high-temp superconductivity (liquid-nitrogen temps) certainly did.
...it's jarring to see a still image stamped with "this content is not currently available for your device". Nice illustration of 113 years of progress, BBC.
It doesn't have to be that way. You would slowly replace parts of your brain with wetware until it was all artificial.
Well, yeah, given the choice, I would prefer that. But once you're "all artificial", I'm betting it'll still be relatively easy to make copies of yourself, and we'll still have to deal with all the existential paradoxes that result.
"On the charge of murder, first-degree, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to six months subjective of isolation. On the charge of attempted extermination of backups, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to corrective editing (removal of aggressive proclivities, augmentation of inhibitions against irrevocable harm), concurrent with the previous sentence."
Yeah, there are two of me, briefly -- but one of me never wakes up after the transfer, and the other wakes up healthy.
I'm actually completely OK with this. Maybe it has something to do with a lifetime of going to sleep every night, and never failing to wake up the next day. Discontinuity of experience is nothing new.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
MRI scanners are generally well above 10,000 gauss (one tesla). So are Buckyballs and speaker magnets.
MRI magnets turn metal objects into projectiles because their magnets are large, and therefore their fields reach a long way. A magnet's "pull" falls off very sharply at distances much larger than the distance between the magnet's poles. That's why degaussers need to be physically close to the tape.
Remember, most hard drives contain extremely powerful magnets within their housing to drive the head-positioning coils. But the field falls off so fast that it doesn't erase the platters spinning just millimeters away.
Yeah, I started out really liking Bear, and after five or six novels I finally realized that every one of them had left me feeling depressed. I think the worst was Psychlone, though -- not to spoil it, but way to ruin even the afterlife.
Probably a few; I'll bet I could even find them. I've also got a few programs that I dumped to paper tape through an ASR33 when I was getting ready to graduate high school. I've thought about fishing those out, building a rig to pull them past my EX-FC100 while it's in 1000FPS mode, and seeing whether a paper-tape reader can outrun a 9-track tape drive...
Then why aren't you calling for them to improve the "sport" by removing more safety equipment? Those drivers can frequently survive the almost-total disintegration of their vehicle in a violent crash. Where's the sport in that?
I really wish I hadn't run off the edge of my trackpad and accidentally modded GP "redundant", forcing me to post this and undo all my mods in the thread.
...on a platform that's already got a perfectly reasonable browser?
Seriously, it took me the better part of a minute to realize that I wasn't seeing "XKCD" in the headline. I was still puzzled afterward, as I'd never heard of XMBC, but not as puzzled.
I was all set to make a snarky comment about what free fluorine would do to your stationary phase (not to mention the tube containing it), but by golly, they'd long since figured out how to deal with that, too.
When oxygen is involved, you get "fluorite", and "fluorate", depending on the number of oxygen atoms involved.
One small nit, from another non-chemist chemistry nerd: this never happens. It does with other halogens (bromine, chlorine, iodine), because they can all be oxidized, and in fact combined with oxygen, to make stable oxyhalide anions. Fluorine don't play that; forced into company with oxygen, fluorine does the oxidizing, and oxygen gives up an electron or two. The resulting oxygen difluoride isn't an acid anhydride; mixed with water, it gradually decomposes into hydrofluoric acid and oxygen, instead of making "hypofluorous acid" or whatever.
I'm stunned that you can find free fluorine, in quantities large enough to smell, occurring naturally on the Earth's surface. I'll have to find out more about this. Wonder if anybody's gotten poisoned from it...?
I go along with the scenario in Vinge's Rainbows End. You just start walking across, and the cars navigate around you. They're tracking your path, and passing the word back upstream about what you're doing so approaching traffic can compensate.
If a whole crowd of people start across, traffic will come to a halt. But the cars closest will have squeezed by as the flood starts, and the ones behind will have had time to come to a controlled stop.
Oh, and if you run out into traffic, the cars still avoid you, perhaps being forced to steer or stop abruptly -- but you get slapped with a fine for interfering with traffic.
You know how I can tell you didn't read the patents?
I owned one of the FingerWorks keyboards. Their gesture-recognition technology seemed like it had been reverse-engineered from UFOs, or brought back by a time-traveler from the far future. It was enormously more advanced than the work Buxton cites, not to slight Bill in any way (he was a big influence on my own doctoral work in HCI).
I only hope that Microsoft does a better job of popularizing Han's advanced features. Apple still has barely begun to exploit the good parts of FingerWorks' gestural technology. (Can I at least get some two- and three-finger gestures to do usable text selection and editing commands?)
Slashdot Mirror
...or so researchers claimed. I know there was some skepticism around their claim, but was it ever refuted?
You seem to have a limited understanding of weather prediction. Given the limitations of our current weather models, it's difficult to generate a forecast for t + 24 hours when you don't receive observational data until t + 168 hours (if ever, as the previous post mentioned).
Happy to hear it. Mod parent up please...
Great. Now anybody with the simplest image-processing software can see exactly how you'll look with and without a beard, and with and without hair -- just mirror the appropriate part of the image.
Now, if you're really paranoid, there ought to be all sorts of ways to do the equivalent of dazzle camouflage in your DMV photo. Asymmetric stripes in your beard or hair, a bit of Darth Maul work with a sharpie...
This is the real evil of overly draconian regulations or laws. Sure, the subjects can choose to ignore them, and the authorities can choose not to enforce them -- but the authorities can also choose to enforce them, at their own discretion, and with no apparent legal recourse for those they single out. As far as I can tell, "everybody else was doing it" is not a valid defense.
What is the problem with accurately logging your time? You are paid by the hour. Log your time. What is the problem unless you are in fact stealing from your employer by working fewer hours than you are paid for.
This line of argument would be marginally less obtuse if the company were merely requiring its workers to clock out for any break, no matter how short. You're not "stealing from your employer" any more or less by going to the bathroom than by going to the snack machine or the smoking area.
Of course, the real acid test is this: once you're logging your time to the second, does the time spent logging count as "on-duty" or "off-duty"? This will be important, at least until the Company automates it fully -- probably by installing eye-tracking software to log every fraction of a second that you aren't looking at your screen.
All these retards calling for unions in a market where offshoring is easy and doesnt result in loss of quality - really?
*chortle*
...room-temperature superconductivity to be true. But this just feels an awful lot like polywater, cold fusion and the like -- something that would be amazingly cool, but has ambiguous or conflicting or incomplete evidence, and disappears when you look at it crosswise.
I sure hope it pans out. Cold fusion didn't (so far), but high-temp superconductivity (liquid-nitrogen temps) certainly did.
...it's jarring to see a still image stamped with "this content is not currently available for your device". Nice illustration of 113 years of progress, BBC.
It doesn't have to be that way. You would slowly replace parts of your brain with wetware until it was all artificial.
Well, yeah, given the choice, I would prefer that. But once you're "all artificial", I'm betting it'll still be relatively easy to make copies of yourself, and we'll still have to deal with all the existential paradoxes that result.
"On the charge of murder, first-degree, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to six months subjective of isolation. On the charge of attempted extermination of backups, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to corrective editing (removal of aggressive proclivities, augmentation of inhibitions against irrevocable harm), concurrent with the previous sentence."
Yeah, there are two of me, briefly -- but one of me never wakes up after the transfer, and the other wakes up healthy.
I'm actually completely OK with this. Maybe it has something to do with a lifetime of going to sleep every night, and never failing to wake up the next day. Discontinuity of experience is nothing new.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
MRI scanners are generally well above 10,000 gauss (one tesla). So are Buckyballs and speaker magnets.
MRI magnets turn metal objects into projectiles because their magnets are large, and therefore their fields reach a long way. A magnet's "pull" falls off very sharply at distances much larger than the distance between the magnet's poles. That's why degaussers need to be physically close to the tape.
Remember, most hard drives contain extremely powerful magnets within their housing to drive the head-positioning coils. But the field falls off so fast that it doesn't erase the platters spinning just millimeters away.
...which Slashdot's related-article-bot apparently DOES equate with "global warming".
Can I get a potted plant to serve as an editor?
Or has this already happened?
That's some really, really dynamic RAM. Don't skip a refresh cycle.
Yeah, I started out really liking Bear, and after five or six novels I finally realized that every one of them had left me feeling depressed. I think the worst was Psychlone, though -- not to spoil it, but way to ruin even the afterlife.
Yeah, now I have to go watch "Jurassic Bark" to cheer up.
Probably a few; I'll bet I could even find them. I've also got a few programs that I dumped to paper tape through an ASR33 when I was getting ready to graduate high school. I've thought about fishing those out, building a rig to pull them past my EX-FC100 while it's in 1000FPS mode, and seeing whether a paper-tape reader can outrun a 9-track tape drive...
Then why aren't you calling for them to improve the "sport" by removing more safety equipment? Those drivers can frequently survive the almost-total disintegration of their vehicle in a violent crash. Where's the sport in that?
I really wish I hadn't run off the edge of my trackpad and accidentally modded GP "redundant", forcing me to post this and undo all my mods in the thread.
AGAIN.
...on a platform that's already got a perfectly reasonable browser?
Seriously, it took me the better part of a minute to realize that I wasn't seeing "XKCD" in the headline. I was still puzzled afterward, as I'd never heard of XMBC, but not as puzzled.
I was all set to make a snarky comment about what free fluorine would do to your stationary phase (not to mention the tube containing it), but by golly, they'd long since figured out how to deal with that, too.
When oxygen is involved, you get "fluorite", and "fluorate", depending on the number of oxygen atoms involved.
One small nit, from another non-chemist chemistry nerd: this never happens. It does with other halogens (bromine, chlorine, iodine), because they can all be oxidized, and in fact combined with oxygen, to make stable oxyhalide anions. Fluorine don't play that; forced into company with oxygen, fluorine does the oxidizing, and oxygen gives up an electron or two. The resulting oxygen difluoride isn't an acid anhydride; mixed with water, it gradually decomposes into hydrofluoric acid and oxygen, instead of making "hypofluorous acid" or whatever.
I'm stunned that you can find free fluorine, in quantities large enough to smell, occurring naturally on the Earth's surface. I'll have to find out more about this. Wonder if anybody's gotten poisoned from it...?
I go along with the scenario in Vinge's Rainbows End. You just start walking across, and the cars navigate around you. They're tracking your path, and passing the word back upstream about what you're doing so approaching traffic can compensate.
If a whole crowd of people start across, traffic will come to a halt. But the cars closest will have squeezed by as the flood starts, and the ones behind will have had time to come to a controlled stop.
Oh, and if you run out into traffic, the cars still avoid you, perhaps being forced to steer or stop abruptly -- but you get slapped with a fine for interfering with traffic.
You know how I can tell you didn't read the patents?
I owned one of the FingerWorks keyboards. Their gesture-recognition technology seemed like it had been reverse-engineered from UFOs, or brought back by a time-traveler from the far future. It was enormously more advanced than the work Buxton cites, not to slight Bill in any way (he was a big influence on my own doctoral work in HCI).
I only hope that Microsoft does a better job of popularizing Han's advanced features. Apple still has barely begun to exploit the good parts of FingerWorks' gestural technology. (Can I at least get some two- and three-finger gestures to do usable text selection and editing commands?)
...but it's still okay to eat cats, right? I mean, as long as you avoid the digestive organs?