I mean, whenever someone talks about futures, they mention pork bellies, but what are they talking about, really?
A hypothetical example?
A term used to describe a cut of meat from a pig, not their actual stomach?
The reason Oscar Myer hires a relatively small, unknown, elite group of financial analysts that are known and feared throughout the halls of banking worldwide?
What are they? Anyone know, or care? And if they are hypothetical, when was the term coined? Please enlighten us all...
Why is it that every forward-looking guru has it in for hierarchical filesystems? I remember reading something like this a year ago on/. with essentially the same refrain - that hierarchy is somehow more confusing or harder for the user. On the contrary -
we use hierarchies all the time in real life to organize important stuff - we divide furniture by room, food by shelf in the fridge, and tools onto different hooks in the garage.
(Emphasis mine)
Organized people use heirarchies. Disorganized people put stuff wherever there's a handy surface.(self included, unfortunately)
People who complain about computers are not usually complaining about actual shortcomings, they're complaining that their computer isn't a magic box, one that will do all their work for them. In fact, this has been the great hope of humanity for years: Smart Computers, Robot Butlers, etc.
The only problem I see w/ this is the following: the only thing capable of performing all tasks a human can perform is, from a functional perspective, a human. This 'human' may take the form of sentient silicon, but isn't that the whole idea of the Turing Test? 'If you can't tell that it isn't human, treat it w/ the same courtesy you would give your fellow man.' or some such?
Given the evil inherent in human beings, I don't look forward to an Age of Spiritual Machines half as much as I fear an Age of Digital Enslavement, where lazy humans take the potential to create smarter, more empathic, kinder, and all-around more decent sentient Beings, and instead of using that ability, we pervert it into a tool of control, abusing and embittering our digital children until we get our just deserts...
Well, that post went offtopic, but I'm feeling excessively cynical about humanity at the moment... just relieving pressure, that's all...
When you switch the green lens w/ the red one, you'll be able to cross the street w/o that pesky wait!
Disclaimer: think this was done at Caltech once... they were thinking up cool ways to mess w/ the light,(someone left a cherry-picker unoccupied..oops!) and came up w/ the Simple Solution... but the repairmen had to look at the thing for hours before they figured out what insane modifications those 'techers must have made to it... after all, everyone knows how geeks love wires and stuff, right?;)
Yep, the world's anti-terrorists agree: in extremely male-dominated places, the few females present have had to prove themselves to be Damned Good to get the same acceptance. Therefore, the female terrorist will be, as a rule, faster, smarter, and deadlier than her male compatriots...take her out first, before she gets you, your backup, or the hostages.
OTOH, this says nothing about actual relationships between ability and gender... In fact, IIRC, average IQ is the same for each gender, but the standard deviation is higher in males... I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds true for a lot of other tendencies/ablities.
<UNFOUNDED_SPECULATIONS> After all, males are (evolutionarily) expendable, and thus they are a good place for nature to...'test' the extreme effects of mutations. And before someone points out that "Man is quasi-monogomous. Two parents provide better for offspring, and males aren't interchangable in our society!", I'd reply "That's a recent trend, on the evolutionary scale. Call it legacy code from the pre-hominid era..." </UNFOUNDED_SPECULATIONS>
In conclusion, Humans can be wonderful, wicked, wool-brained, and wizardly, defying all general descriptions but one: Weird. I'll never understand them....
Didn't you learn anything from NASA? Use Metric! Call it 364.2kg!
Oh, whoops. You mean that's not an '31337'ism? You actually meant to use '1'? My bad
Clarksville citizen:You too? Getting spooky here..
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 1
My brother and I are both in Clarksville, TN reading this! How odd....
But, if we're lucky, we can start a whole new thread about geography! Everyone from a town that is so small/backwards that they think they are the lone/.'er there, please respond!
Just an adaptation of a small part of a much larger Manga called Gunnm(Battle Angel Alita in the US), translated and published by Viz. Consult your favorite online bookseller to purchase.
I'm giving up promoting my personal favorites... they aren't primarily comedies, they aren't all that well covered here, but... hey, what sane moderator will browse ~700 comments at 1 or less??
Cool! You troll for karma by trying to get a (+1 funny), and you actually get informed! If I hadn't already posted, I'd moderate this up! Oh well, if I hadn't posted my goofball comment, I'm not sure anyone else would have promped your intelligent response, so...
Wow, Blizzard is putting everything into # III. For the life of me, I can't see why the Queen Mum would want to discuss this topic, but, OTOH, she is the coolest centenarian on the face of the planet...
Digession: Yeah, that's only one Department, but who's really concerned about what Agriculture is trying to keep secret? Does it matter if the Chinese know beans about our soy beans? OTOH, there's probably a lot of/.'ers who want to get some solid figures on corn production, and thus, our potential Hot Grits capacity...
A student has to develop/exercise the ability to hold arbitrary symbols in his head.
Start the kids off with simple arithmetic. Get them to solve the problems w/o calculators, or even writing utensils. Train them in this way until they can do moderately long division (3_digits / 2_digits) and multiplication (2_digit * 2_dig) in this manner.
This way, they train their minds to hold those stupid, annoying, nearly-arbitrary 'carry' digits in their heads, and thus don't have to ask questions like "what does 'b' stand for here?" 25 times before they remember, 'cause they were able to do some of the operations in their heads...As opposed to seeing the operations on paper, which have no real analogue to anything they can keep in their heads, and thus don't make any sense.
Before you can teach high-level abstractions, you need to have something that can hold those abstractions. In light of this, I personally wouldn't hand out calculators unless you wanted more than 3 digits of precision in simple arithmetic, or were handling equations more complicated than a quadratic polynomial...but IANATeacher, thank God. Underpayed, overworked, and forced to keep things at or below the pace of the average student, frustrating all the bright ones who 'got it' already, stressing out the slower ones, unable to deal with them as individuals...
In light of their circumstances, I guess I can understand why teachers allow the abuse of calculators, especially if they don't understand the idea of basic arithmetic as early exercise and training in symbolic manipulation and short-term memory...
The suits have no idea how to deal with it. Do they
Allow bleem to sell the emulator for the PC and other platforms like this, encouraging people to buy competing platforms and thus negating the 'third party advantage' the PSX has.
or
Do they use Sony's huge store of cash to purchase this little company, put them to work creating emulators for the PSX and Dreamcast on their PS2, discouraging developers from immediately jumping on the PS2 bandwagon and watch their third party developers work on obsolete or competing platforms.
Either way, they lose something. With the first option, they lose the accrued advantage of years of third party support, and with the second, they discourage exclusivity in third party support. Admittedly, they also win something in both cases (i.e., continued licence income from PSX games or boosting third party support to include all current Dreamcast games) but they have to say to the boss "Getting these apples is worth losing these oranges," or vice versa.
If it was a case where the managers could definitely say "Iff we succeed, we'll increase revenues," then someone might stick out their neck, but as it is, there are too many tradeoffs. So, the managers waffle when asked their positions about bleem, and eventually decide to try to make the whole problem disappear. Thus, they try to sue the product and company out of existence.
What the public and Sony really needs is for the suits at Sony to sit down, analyze the situation, and decide on one course or the other. They cannot make the technology disappear, and even if they could, it would be a really bad precedent. The minute technology is forced to disappear because of the decisions of a few powerful people is the day when we can look forward/backward to a time like the Dark Ages, where knowledge was destroyed because it didn't fit with Church/Corporate Dogma. Yes, there come times when we, the public may decide to 'retire' a product (leaded gasoline, CFC's) but the underlying ideas/technolgy are usually replaced, not destroyed.(i.e., other, healthier catalysts and refridgerants)
In any case, Sony, a technology driven company, should really think carefully before leading any sort of crusade back into the past...
My guess is that sony plans a launch of the system in two versions, one with modem & hard drive, one without. This way, you can legitimately say 'So the X-box has feature y? Got that, and a years worth head start...' while still offering a 'value-priced' console for people who don't need feature y.
Remember, the NES was released in two versions- the Super Mario Bros. version, and the Duck Hunt/Gyromite versions, so there's a good precedent to follow here... A hard drive and modem sounds much cooler than a 'Robotic Operating Buddy', though I don't know if you could have convinced me of that 15 years ago...
But I'm older and wiser now, and have learned to steer clear of the R.O.B.'s of the world... wait a second... What did you say CmdrTaco's real name was?
Wasn't the Pinto (one of) the car(s) that exploded in simple rear-end collisions?
In that case, no, your advertising executive is not working 60 hours for speed, comfort, or even status. His rationale is much more simple: "But I don't wanna die in a massive fireball!!"
Next time, choose a better car for your illustrations and examples;)
every single enterprise in this country to which copyright protection is vital -- professional baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, NASCAR, NCAA, broadcasters, television stations, cable systems, music songwriters, movies, television programs
(emphasis mine)
But what about videogames? And software?
The gaming industry has surpassed the music industry in earnings, IIRC
Both groups have been concerned with digital piracy longer than Movies but...at least from what I've heard mentioned on/.,
They've adopted a different approach to the problem, going after actual pirates rather than panicking and prosecuting everyone with a CD Burner, or, heaven forbid, A Hard Drive!And don't even mention that vast collection of evil programmer's tools (Disassemblers, Debuggers,oh my!)
Could someone tell this guy to get some professional help? And no, I'm not going to say what kind;)
people here seem to think that they could do your job better than you with no hands, no eyes, and a pen with no ink
Hmm, no hands, no eyes, no ink... wait a sec..
Wow! Are you implying that Katz is Zen Buddhist? And all this time I thought he was an atheist! You know, this at least explains why he posts here: He is a pilgrim, seeking to purge his sins (or theological equivalent) upon the flames of slashdot!
Ah, now to sit back, and enjoy the flames from people who think I've insulted Buddhism, that I'm praising it, that think I'm promoting either it or organized religion, that want to rant on religion, pro and con, etc. Fortunately, I'm into self-flagellation too. You're not alone, Katz!
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, whenever someone talks about futures, they mention pork bellies, but what are they talking about, really?
- A hypothetical example?
- A term used to describe a cut of meat from a pig, not their actual stomach?
- The reason Oscar Myer hires a relatively small, unknown, elite group of financial analysts that are known and feared throughout the halls of banking worldwide?
What are they? Anyone know, or care? And if they are hypothetical, when was the term coined? Please enlighten us all...Maybe they'll digitally add a dancing paperclip to various scenes, since in retrospect, Jar Jar wasn't quite annoying enough...
Organized people use heirarchies. Disorganized people put stuff wherever there's a handy surface.(self included, unfortunately)
People who complain about computers are not usually complaining about actual shortcomings, they're complaining that their computer isn't a magic box, one that will do all their work for them. In fact, this has been the great hope of humanity for years: Smart Computers, Robot Butlers, etc.
The only problem I see w/ this is the following: the only thing capable of performing all tasks a human can perform is, from a functional perspective, a human. This 'human' may take the form of sentient silicon, but isn't that the whole idea of the Turing Test? 'If you can't tell that it isn't human, treat it w/ the same courtesy you would give your fellow man.' or some such?
Given the evil inherent in human beings, I don't look forward to an Age of Spiritual Machines half as much as I fear an Age of Digital Enslavement, where lazy humans take the potential to create smarter, more empathic, kinder, and all-around more decent sentient Beings, and instead of using that ability, we pervert it into a tool of control, abusing and embittering our digital children until we get our just deserts...
Well, that post went offtopic, but I'm feeling excessively cynical about humanity at the moment... just relieving pressure, that's all...
Disclaimer: think this was done at Caltech once... they were thinking up cool ways to mess w/ the light,(someone left a cherry-picker unoccupied..oops!) and came up w/ the Simple Solution... but the repairmen had to look at the thing for hours before they figured out what insane modifications those 'techers must have made to it... after all, everyone knows how geeks love wires and stuff, right? ;)
OTOH, this says nothing about actual relationships between ability and gender... In fact, IIRC, average IQ is the same for each gender, but the standard deviation is higher in males... I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds true for a lot of other tendencies/ablities.
<UNFOUNDED_SPECULATIONS>
After all, males are (evolutionarily) expendable, and thus they are a good place for nature to...'test' the extreme effects of mutations. And before someone points out that "Man is quasi-monogomous. Two parents provide better for offspring, and males aren't interchangable in our society!", I'd reply "That's a recent trend, on the evolutionary scale. Call it legacy code from the pre-hominid era..."
</UNFOUNDED_SPECULATIONS>
Anyways, returning to the original thought, it's just an interesting observation on social dynamics. Another interesting one would be the performance of the 442nd in WWII... The gov. put their parents in internment camps, and they go on to become the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in American military history? Huh?
In conclusion, Humans can be wonderful, wicked, wool-brained, and wizardly, defying all general descriptions but one: Weird. I'll never understand them....
<Job Interview>
</Job Interview>Needless to say, I didn't get the job...
sorry, beg to differ.
To find the interesting stuff on a computer, all you have to do is CTRL-F, "passionate", "panting", or any other common sex-scene word...
Contrast that with books, where you have to scan through the whole thing, pausing at ends of chapters, scene transistions, etc...<SING>
</SING>to stop the ones who want
prosthetic foreheads on their real heads!
official site here
BTW, I think the dead parrot skit made it into Bartlett's some time ago- sign of the Impending Apocalypse, or harbinger of the Millenial Age?
Didn't you learn anything from NASA? Use Metric! Call it 364.2kg!
Oh, whoops. You mean that's not an '31337'ism? You actually meant to use '1'? My bad
But, if we're lucky, we can start a whole new thread about geography! Everyone from a town that is so small/backwards that they think they are the lone /.'er there, please respond!
Just an adaptation of a small part of a much larger Manga called Gunnm(Battle Angel Alita in the US), translated and published by Viz. Consult your favorite online bookseller to purchase.
I'm giving up promoting my personal favorites... they aren't primarily comedies, they aren't all that well covered here, but... hey, what sane moderator will browse ~700 comments at 1 or less??
Cool! You troll for karma by trying to get a (+1 funny), and you actually get informed! If I hadn't already posted, I'd moderate this up! Oh well, if I hadn't posted my goofball comment, I'm not sure anyone else would have promped your intelligent response, so...
Digession: Yeah, that's only one Department, but who's really concerned about what Agriculture is trying to keep secret? Does it matter if the Chinese know beans about our soy beans? OTOH, there's probably a lot of /.'ers who want to get some solid figures on corn production, and thus, our potential Hot Grits capacity...
Start the kids off with simple arithmetic. Get them to solve the problems w/o calculators, or even writing utensils. Train them in this way until they can do moderately long division (3_digits / 2_digits) and multiplication (2_digit * 2_dig) in this manner.
This way, they train their minds to hold those stupid, annoying, nearly-arbitrary 'carry' digits in their heads, and thus don't have to ask questions like "what does 'b' stand for here?" 25 times before they remember, 'cause they were able to do some of the operations in their heads...As opposed to seeing the operations on paper, which have no real analogue to anything they can keep in their heads, and thus don't make any sense.
Before you can teach high-level abstractions, you need to have something that can hold those abstractions. In light of this, I personally wouldn't hand out calculators unless you wanted more than 3 digits of precision in simple arithmetic, or were handling equations more complicated than a quadratic polynomial...but IANATeacher, thank God. Underpayed, overworked, and forced to keep things at or below the pace of the average student, frustrating all the bright ones who 'got it' already, stressing out the slower ones, unable to deal with them as individuals...
In light of their circumstances, I guess I can understand why teachers allow the abuse of calculators, especially if they don't understand the idea of basic arithmetic as early exercise and training in symbolic manipulation and short-term memory...
They had plans to nuke L.A. before it sprawled out of control...
I said it before, I'll say it again. Great climate, lousy city non-planning.
The suits have no idea how to deal with it. Do they
or
Either way, they lose something. With the first option, they lose the accrued advantage of years of third party support, and with the second, they discourage exclusivity in third party support. Admittedly, they also win something in both cases (i.e., continued licence income from PSX games or boosting third party support to include all current Dreamcast games) but they have to say to the boss "Getting these apples is worth losing these oranges," or vice versa.
If it was a case where the managers could definitely say "Iff we succeed, we'll increase revenues," then someone might stick out their neck, but as it is, there are too many tradeoffs. So, the managers waffle when asked their positions about bleem, and eventually decide to try to make the whole problem disappear. Thus, they try to sue the product and company out of existence.
What the public and Sony really needs is for the suits at Sony to sit down, analyze the situation, and decide on one course or the other. They cannot make the technology disappear, and even if they could, it would be a really bad precedent. The minute technology is forced to disappear because of the decisions of a few powerful people is the day when we can look forward/backward to a time like the Dark Ages, where knowledge was destroyed because it didn't fit with Church/Corporate Dogma. Yes, there come times when we, the public may decide to 'retire' a product (leaded gasoline, CFC's) but the underlying ideas/technolgy are usually replaced, not destroyed.(i.e., other, healthier catalysts and refridgerants)
In any case, Sony, a technology driven company, should really think carefully before leading any sort of crusade back into the past...
Oh, and if you're wondering, I'm not making fun of Christians, (really!) seeing as I'm wearing a WWJD wristband on my watch myself...
For confirmation, here's the link to the question yourself, or, better yet, the reply, Ask Jesusfied!
My guess is that sony plans a launch of the system in two versions, one with modem & hard drive, one without. This way, you can legitimately say 'So the X-box has feature y? Got that, and a years worth head start...' while still offering a 'value-priced' console for people who don't need feature y.
Remember, the NES was released in two versions- the Super Mario Bros. version, and the Duck Hunt/Gyromite versions, so there's a good precedent to follow here... A hard drive and modem sounds much cooler than a 'Robotic Operating Buddy', though I don't know if you could have convinced me of that 15 years ago...
But I'm older and wiser now, and have learned to steer clear of the R.O.B.'s of the world... wait a second... What did you say CmdrTaco's real name was?
Wasn't the Pinto (one of) the car(s) that exploded in simple rear-end collisions?
In that case, no, your advertising executive is not working 60 hours for speed, comfort, or even status. His rationale is much more simple: "But I don't wanna die in a massive fireball!!"
Next time, choose a better car for your illustrations and examples ;)
Three cheers for intelligent AC's!
But what about videogames? And software?
The gaming industry has surpassed the music industry in earnings, IIRC
Both groups have been concerned with digital piracy longer than Movies /.,
but...at least from what I've heard mentioned on
They've adopted a different approach to the problem, going after actual pirates rather than panicking and prosecuting everyone with a CD Burner, or, heaven forbid, A Hard Drive!And don't even mention that vast collection of evil programmer's tools (Disassemblers, Debuggers,oh my!)
Could someone tell this guy to get some professional help? And no, I'm not going to say what kind ;)
Hmm, no hands, no eyes, no ink... wait a sec..
Wow! Are you implying that Katz is Zen Buddhist? And all this time I thought he was an atheist! You know, this at least explains why he posts here: He is a pilgrim, seeking to purge his sins (or theological equivalent) upon the flames of slashdot!
Ah, now to sit back, and enjoy the flames from people who think I've insulted Buddhism, that I'm praising it, that think I'm promoting either it or organized religion, that want to rant on religion, pro and con, etc. Fortunately, I'm into self-flagellation too. You're not alone, Katz!