Also, have you heard of a country called North Korea?!?? How about Palestinians in Israel?
Indeed, China has tons, more than tons, of abuses, some of them capitalistic ones (private factory owners exploiting their workers, etc) But one must at least get the facts straight.
1. Get a Chinese bible, stand on a street corner, and start reading from it out loud.
Probably nothing will happen. The Chinese gov't doen't do anything unless it perceives you as a significant threat. It is quite common to see ordinary people in China critizing their gov't openly with impunity , AS LONG AS they don't publish it in the press, and they are not perceived as part of a bigger, significant opposing power.
3. Tell someone you want to have three children. Depends on where you are in China. In some provinces, having more than one requires paying a fee. If you don't pay the fee, then your extra ones just run around without healthcare/education/etc benefits. As far as I know, no one gets jailed for having more than one child. You hear of forced abortions because in the outback countryside local officials wanted their villages records look "good" to the central gov't. It is not official policy.
4. Offer to buy a piece of land in the countryside.
Pfft. Hong Kong people buy property in China all the time. The mainland Chinese almost encourage it.
The American continent has had its share of repression, but nowhere is there as much a lack of freedom as I believe there is in China, except possibly in Cuba (and it's almost possible to get off that island by swimming). Based on what do you make this statement, have you been to every country in the world to make the comparison? Have you been to Myanmar? Hong Kong is part of China, and I assure you people there are freer than those in Singapore (half kidding). Not to mention various theocracies in the world.
*By the ratio test, the limit of the absolute value of Asub(n+1)/Asub(n) is 1/2. Since 1/2 is less than 1, the series converges. See Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, Boas, page 12.
You shouldn't use ration test here. It works, and it'll get full credit on a midterm, but it's not the right way to approach this. Applying the test "hides" what is going on here.
Ratio test determines whether your series behaves like a geometric series, and if so, whether a converging or diverging one.
In this case you HAVE a geometric series. So you're using too much firepower. Just use a "Gauss-like" argument to figure out a formula for the partial sums (or use the geometric series test, which is one step away from getting the partial sum, if you really like tests).
In the end you'll see that the series converges "because" lim_{n --> infinity} (1/2)^n = 0.
Now one more word here, making sense of "limit" hasn't been a trivial endeavor. Newton himself did not define it rigorously. You really need to get into a delta-epsilon argument to see that lim (1/2)^n = 0.
I always feel they should invest more in tidal power. It seems to me solar and wind power have inherent unreliability. Maybe they have made them so efficient that they can store up enough energy to make up for cloudy or windless days, but I wouldn't know.
Tidal power, on the other hand, is twenty-four seven, unless the moon gets blown up.
I always wonder though, if tidal power harnesses gravitational energy, then by conservation of energy wouldn't that do something to the moon's orbit? It maybe very small, but would it be a significant effect over long period of time?
I use the GNU/linux/gnome/sawfish/teTeX/emacs combo all the time. Many people in my department also use linux to typeset documents. you NEED a desktop to view a ps file (well i guess with svgalib you can do it on a console, but i dont know anyone who does it that way). You NEED to be able to swtich between an emacs window and a gv/xdvi window with ease. Now maybe thats not the FUTURE of desktop linux, but that (coupled with price) is at least one of the reasons why many people find a linux desktop indispensable.
I've always dreamt of playing an FPS with one of them goggles that shines a laser beam directly onto the retina, thus making full use of the field of vision physiologically possible.
what is wrong with you people
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
i don't mean to be all self-righteous and pontificate on good taste, but i am surprised that so many posts express such a light hearted attitude to the situation. Imagine your way of life literally melting away, imagine being forced to move from a place where your ancestors have lived for hundreds of years. I really feel sorry for those alaskans. i can only hope that they'll be compensated by the government.
I must say Nolan's insomnia is in many ways better than the norwegian original. In the original, John Holt (Walter's norwegian counterpart) is hardly developped at all, and there isn't much interaction between detective and criminal. Also, i think the american version gives a more plausible reason why the main character wants to conceal his mistake so bad.
Nevertheless, I was a wee bit disppointed by the gratuitous shootout at the end of the american version. It really isnt essential to story, and it seem to be thrown in just to please some gun happy hollywood exec. "Point of no return" (remake of la femme nikita) had once covninced me that there can be no good american remakes of european movies, but nolan's insomnia is a substantial improvement over the original.
Another problem that i have had with my case was not excactly noise, but the vibration caused by various parts of the machine (the fans, the motors in the harddrive, the transformer). This bugs me because the computer is placed on the floor and the vibration actually tansmitts through the floor to my feet. So what i did was I folded up a bubble wrap sheet (the fat beefy kind, not the wussy nipples kind) to the right dimension and put the computer right on top of it. And the problem was solved, no more annoying vibration. Notice this shouldn't affect the heat dissipation too much since without the bubble wrap it would have been the carpet anyway.
I also suspect that the bubble wrap reduces the noise somewhat. The noise from the computer can be caused not just directly from the fans and whatnot. The thin metalic walls of the case may act as a vibratory membrane. The motherboard itself vibrates a lot if you dont screw it tight completely. Hence I conjecture that several strategically placed cushioning substance may reduce the noise further.
i say strategic because there seems to be a large overlap between material that isolate sound and material that isolate heat. Otherwise wise one can just wrap the whole box in bubble wrap. Thinking of bubble, i think silicone would be an ideal vibration absorber. I think i'd better stop talking now.
I must say his homemade organ tops everything else he shows on his homepage. From the sound samples he included on the page, it seems the organ actually works quite well. I once did a science project in high school on the accoustics of a violin, and found out accoustics is one fuzzy SOB. The tiniest error in craftsmanship can really ruin the sound. This guy is awesome.
you "experiment" is but a crude implemenation of Barnsley' s algorithm, which allows one to rapidly generate an IFS.
This is not really order from chaos because your scheme of plotting the results of successive coin tosses is highly non-random. Your average dot doesnt really have too many places it can go, except, of course, onto the contours of the siespinski casket.
I disagree with the apparently prevailing notion that chinese people are all a bunch of malicious ripper-offs. The piracy condition was once so severe that an individual cannot completely grasp the guilt of him/her buying pirated software, since everyone is doing it. A
ll these stories about Americans going to Hong Kong and buying pirated software only attest to the universal pettiness of human nature. Rule of law has never been a big part of Chinese culture. If some chinese kid wrote a program using GPL'd code but he concealed his code because he didn't read the GPL, because he attaches no great importance to that piece of document, or because nothing in his culture makes him think that he should care about that document, should we condemn him as a criminal?
He is a criminal, by the letter of the law. But is that the main issue? Like with many other things in China, this boils down to a matter of education. Threatening trade sanctions and etc only helps isolate China, and millions of good coders (potentially useful to the opensource cause). Open dialogues and pats-on-backs among fellow coders can go a long way. I hope people take these points into account.
I thought it was going to end when, stuck
in the helicopter/submarince thingy, david was repeating the same sentence over and over again to
the blue fairy. There is something beautifully melancolic about that kind of eternal yearning.
Maybe i'm just a weirdo...
Re:We must defend Nazis to attack Nazism
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 2
I agree absolutely. Permitting the advocacy of questionable agendas is a neccessary evil. It is the price to pay for free speech. Moreover, censorship cannot be the solution to helping people love one another. If one wants people to think good thoughts, one must encourage people to CHOOSE to think good thoughts (whatever that is).
In fact, i think one needs to be exposed to a balanced diet of love speech and hate speech. Only then can one hope to understand his/her fellow human beings. Censorship helps to block that understanding. It in a sense promoting another type of hate: The hate of those who hate, which in turn makes those who hated in the first place feel justified... This subject reminds me of the scene in clockwork orange when the priest argue that the humble narrator (i forgot his name...) isn't really cured since he did not choose to refrain from commiting violent acts, but is compelled to do so by forces out of his control.
I personally don't see anything particularly amazing in.doc that I don't see in other document formats. I only prominent "feature" i notice in it is the fixed page width thing, making it truly wysiwyg. However, over time i've begun to increasingly appreciate.lyx motto wysiwyM (m stands for "mean"). I realized how rarely i need a document to be truely wysiwyg. The most common reason i can think of that people need to have a rigid text/page appearance is for making flyers and etc, which i guess a program like gimp of photoshop may be better suited, since many flyers feature lots of images and stuff anyway. The argument for.doc may be that lots of people are using it, and it'd fascilitate things better if say a windows user can read something from a linux user, or vice versa. But the root of this problem is simply that big word again "STANDARDS." Why reverse engineer a proprietry format, when one could spend the time promoting and developing open standards like html or xml, or even TeX? Another problem with.doc is that it is not a typesetting language. My favorite scenario is that: you make one typo in your resume. You are in a situation that all you have is a telnet program that allows you to connect to thr server where your resume is stored. If your resume is done in a something like html of TeX, u can fix the typo in no time. I'd love to know what i can do in this situation if my resume is done in.doc. Thanks for listening.
by then the game engine of daikatana is going to be so outdated, that, unless they compensate with superperb storyline and gameplay, the game is going to suck.
The perpetrator would probably want to choose a reliable system to launch their attack, otherwise the blue screen of death will screw up their evil project. So yes, linux is more vulnerable than windows as a launch host, but for a different reason.
where are the screenshots?
on
Anarchy Online
·
· Score: 1
Yea, i can follow most of what ESR said, except the part about having quake open-sourced way in the beginning. And i think a lot of posts on this forum will be directed at that. Perhaps it would be better if ESR give an example of how that can be a solution. Otherwise i don;t see how on e can avoid that infamous Turing test problem.
Maybe someone thought about this already. But this morning soon after I read about the cheating problem in linuxgames.com, I wonder:
One solution would be to opensource everything completely. that is opensource the game (which they did) and have a thorough tutorial of the workings of the client so that any joe schmoe can rewrite the code and cheat/counter-cheat. So in the end the invisible hand of self-interest may produce a balanced gameplay. It is like one of those homemade robots competetion where people bring in their bots who try to knock each other out. So now you have different quake clients competing in accordance to a server side protocol. So for example if someone uses an aimbot, you can rewrite the code so that you can dodge incoming projectiles automatically. The cheating would go as far as the game remains fun to the player... Of course this does not apply to people who really don't care about the fun of the game... But then again as i always will believe, this is a whacked out idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, have you heard of a country called North Korea?!?? How about Palestinians in Israel?
Indeed, China has tons, more than tons, of abuses, some of them capitalistic ones (private factory owners exploiting their workers, etc) But one must at least get the facts straight.
1. Get a Chinese bible, stand on a street corner, and start reading from it out loud.
Probably nothing will happen. The Chinese gov't doen't do anything unless it perceives you as a significant threat. It is quite common to see ordinary people in China critizing their gov't openly with impunity , AS LONG AS they don't publish it in the press, and they are not perceived as part of a bigger, significant opposing power.
3. Tell someone you want to have three children.
Depends on where you are in China. In some provinces, having more than one requires paying a fee. If you don't pay the fee, then your extra ones just run around without healthcare/education/etc benefits.
As far as I know, no one gets jailed for having more than one child. You hear of forced abortions because in the outback countryside local officials wanted their villages records look "good" to the central gov't. It is not official policy.
4. Offer to buy a piece of land in the countryside.
Pfft. Hong Kong people buy property in China all the time. The mainland Chinese almost encourage it.
The American continent has had its share of repression, but nowhere is there as much a lack of freedom as I believe there is in China, except possibly in Cuba (and it's almost possible to get off that island by swimming).
Based on what do you make this statement, have you been to every country in the world to make the comparison? Have you been to Myanmar? Hong Kong is part of China, and I assure you people there are freer than those in Singapore (half kidding). Not to mention various theocracies in the world.
War is not glorious but it is necessary from time to time and if you can defeat the enemy without killing non-combatants, I am all for it.
It seems to me it is not always so clear where to draw the line between legitimate targets and non-combatants.
A power plant provides power to a both military radar site and a civilian hospital, do you hit it?
again... no no no, do not use ratio test to show that \Sigma 1/2 does not converge.
If the term does NOT go to zero, the series DOES diverge.
You shouldn't use ration test here. It works, and it'll get full credit on a midterm, but it's not the right way to approach this. Applying the test "hides" what is going on here.
Ratio test determines whether your series behaves like a geometric series, and if so, whether a converging or diverging one.
In this case you HAVE a geometric series. So you're using too much firepower. Just use a "Gauss-like" argument to figure out a formula for the partial sums (or use the geometric series test, which is one step away from getting the partial sum, if you really like tests).
In the end you'll see that the series converges "because" lim_{n --> infinity} (1/2)^n = 0.
Now one more word here, making sense of "limit" hasn't been a trivial endeavor. Newton himself did not define it rigorously. You really need to get into a delta-epsilon argument to see that lim (1/2)^n = 0.
I always feel they should invest more in tidal power. It seems to me solar and wind power have inherent unreliability. Maybe they have made them so efficient that they can store up enough energy to make up for cloudy or windless days, but I wouldn't know.
Tidal power, on the other hand, is twenty-four seven, unless the moon gets blown up.
I always wonder though, if tidal power harnesses gravitational energy, then by conservation of energy wouldn't that do something to the moon's orbit?
It maybe very small, but would it be a significant effect over long period of time?
Perfect, now I can build my own torture chamber!
I use the GNU/linux/gnome/sawfish/teTeX/emacs combo all the time. Many people in my department also use linux to typeset documents. you NEED a desktop to view a ps file (well i guess with svgalib you can do it on a console, but i dont know anyone who does it that way). You NEED to be able to swtich between an emacs window and a gv/xdvi window with ease. Now maybe thats not the FUTURE of desktop linux, but that (coupled with price) is at least one of the reasons why many people find a linux desktop indispensable.
I've always dreamt of playing an FPS with one of them goggles that shines a laser beam directly onto the retina, thus making full use of the field of vision physiologically possible.
i don't mean to be all self-righteous and pontificate on good taste, but i am surprised that so many posts express such a light hearted attitude to the situation. Imagine your way of life literally melting away, imagine being forced to move from a place where your ancestors have lived for hundreds of years. I really feel sorry for those alaskans. i can only hope that they'll be compensated by the government.
I must say Nolan's insomnia is in many ways better than the norwegian original. In the original, John Holt (Walter's norwegian counterpart) is hardly developped at all, and there isn't much interaction between detective and criminal. Also, i think the american version gives a more plausible reason why the main character wants to conceal his mistake so bad.
Nevertheless, I was a wee bit disppointed by the gratuitous shootout at the end of the american version. It really isnt essential to story, and it seem to be thrown in just to please some gun happy hollywood exec. "Point of no return" (remake of la femme nikita) had once covninced me that there can be no good american remakes of european movies, but nolan's insomnia is a substantial improvement over the original.
Another problem that i have had with my case was not excactly noise, but the vibration caused by various parts of the machine (the fans, the motors in the harddrive, the transformer). This bugs me because the computer is placed on the floor and the vibration actually tansmitts through the floor to my feet. So what i did was I folded up a bubble wrap sheet (the fat beefy kind, not the wussy nipples kind) to the right dimension and put the computer right on top of it. And the problem was solved, no more annoying vibration. Notice this shouldn't affect the heat dissipation too much since without the bubble wrap it would have been the carpet anyway.
I also suspect that the bubble wrap reduces the noise somewhat. The noise from the computer can be caused not just directly from the fans and whatnot. The thin metalic walls of the case may act as a vibratory membrane.
The motherboard itself vibrates a lot if you dont screw it tight completely. Hence I conjecture that several strategically placed cushioning substance may reduce the noise further.
i say strategic because there seems to be a large overlap between material that isolate sound and material that isolate heat. Otherwise wise one can just wrap the whole box in bubble wrap. Thinking of bubble, i think silicone would be an ideal vibration absorber. I think i'd better stop talking now.
I must say his homemade organ tops everything else he shows on his homepage. From the sound samples he included on the page, it seems the organ actually works quite well. I once did a science project in high school on the accoustics of a violin, and found out accoustics is one fuzzy SOB. The tiniest error in craftsmanship can really ruin the sound. This guy is awesome.
you "experiment" is but a crude implemenation of Barnsley' s algorithm, which allows one to rapidly generate an IFS.
This is not really order from chaos because your scheme of plotting the results of successive coin tosses is highly non-random. Your average dot doesnt really have too many places it can go, except, of course, onto the contours of the siespinski casket.
I disagree with the apparently prevailing notion that chinese people are all a bunch of malicious ripper-offs. The piracy condition was once so severe that an individual cannot completely grasp the guilt of him/her buying pirated software, since everyone is doing it. A
ll these stories about Americans going to Hong Kong and buying pirated software only attest to the universal pettiness of human nature. Rule of law has never been a big part of Chinese culture. If some chinese kid wrote a program using GPL'd code but he concealed his code because he didn't read the GPL, because he attaches no great importance to that piece of document, or because nothing in his culture makes him think that he should care about that document, should we condemn him as a criminal?
He is a criminal, by the letter of the law. But is that the main issue? Like with many other things in China, this boils down to a matter of education. Threatening trade sanctions and etc only helps isolate China, and millions of good coders (potentially useful to the opensource cause). Open dialogues and pats-on-backs among fellow coders can go a long way. I hope people take these points into account.
I thought it was going to end when, stuck
in the helicopter/submarince thingy, david was repeating the same sentence over and over again to
the blue fairy. There is something beautifully melancolic about that kind of eternal yearning.
Maybe i'm just a weirdo...
I agree absolutely. Permitting the advocacy of questionable agendas is a neccessary evil. It is the price to pay for free speech. Moreover, censorship cannot be the solution to helping people love one another. If one wants people to think good thoughts, one must encourage people to CHOOSE to think good thoughts (whatever that is).
In fact, i think one needs to be exposed to a balanced diet of love speech and hate speech. Only then can one hope to understand his/her fellow human beings. Censorship helps to block that understanding. It in a sense promoting another type of hate: The hate of those who hate, which in turn makes those who hated in the first place feel justified... This subject reminds me of the scene in clockwork orange when the priest argue that the humble narrator (i forgot his name...) isn't really cured since he did not choose to refrain from commiting violent acts, but is compelled to do so by forces out of his control.
or is it a bit strange that one use a 2 monitor setup in a game like quake? with the center view being blocked by the edges of the monitors...
I personally don't see anything particularly amazing in .doc that I don't see in other document formats. I only prominent "feature" i notice in it is the fixed page width thing, making it truly wysiwyg. However, over time i've begun to increasingly appreciate .lyx motto wysiwyM (m stands for "mean"). I realized how rarely i need a document to be truely wysiwyg. The most common reason i can think of that people need to have a rigid text/page appearance is for making flyers and etc, which i guess a program like gimp of photoshop may be better suited, since many flyers feature lots of images and stuff anyway. The argument for .doc may be that lots of people are using it, and it'd fascilitate things better if say a windows user can read something from a linux user, or vice versa. But the root of this problem is simply that big word again "STANDARDS." Why reverse engineer a proprietry format, when one could spend the time promoting and developing open standards like html or xml, or even TeX? Another problem with .doc is that it is not a typesetting language. My favorite scenario is that: you make one typo in your resume. You are in a situation that all you have is a telnet program that allows you to connect to thr server where your resume is stored. If your resume is done in a something like html of TeX, u can fix the typo in no time. I'd love to know what i can do in this situation if my resume is done in .doc. Thanks for listening.
by then the game engine of daikatana is going to be so outdated, that, unless they compensate with superperb storyline and gameplay, the game is going to suck.
The perpetrator would probably want to choose a reliable system to launch their attack, otherwise the blue screen of death will screw up their evil project. So yes, linux is more vulnerable than windows as a launch host, but for a different reason.
show me the screenshots.
as a matter of principle
Yea, i can follow most of what ESR said, except the part about having quake open-sourced way in the beginning. And i think a lot of posts on this forum will be directed at that. Perhaps it would be better if ESR give an example of how that can be a solution. Otherwise i don;t see how on e can avoid that infamous Turing test problem.
Maybe someone thought about this already. But this morning soon after I read about the cheating problem in linuxgames.com, I wonder:
One solution would be to opensource everything completely. that is opensource the game (which they did) and have a thorough tutorial of the workings of the client so that any joe schmoe can rewrite the code and cheat/counter-cheat. So in the end the invisible hand of self-interest may produce a balanced gameplay. It is like one of those homemade robots competetion where people bring in their bots who try to knock each other out. So now you have different quake clients competing in accordance to a server side protocol. So for example if someone uses an aimbot, you can rewrite the code so that you can dodge incoming projectiles automatically. The cheating would go as far as the game remains fun to the player... Of course this does not apply to people who really don't care about the fun of the game...
But then again as i always will believe, this is a whacked out idea.