It's both fascinating and sad how technology and warfare has been intertwined from the very dawn of man. A lot of "geeks" from way back, Greek philosophers, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. were sponsored by the rich and powerful of their respectable eras in exchange for using their minds to create better warfare technology.
For good or for evil, it seems that's the way it has always been, and likely always will be. We possibly wouldn't be having this discussion if it weren't for DARPA...
...I've been doing this on my personal site for years, but never thought big commercial ones would do it. Then again, the amount of man hours lost on IE6-related issues just for me personally is huge, and I can't even begin the think globally...
So basically they can easily lay cable from and to the site, and they can have excellent connections to Russia without actually having to place the hardware there. (Not that I'm sure it would be an issue these days.)
Also, they can literally put the hardware on a ship and ship it right to the location.
Accepting games as a cultural artifact is very important. This will in the long run open up a legal way of running abandonware, which is a great thing both for history as well as entertainment.
When credible, tax-funded institutions start highlighting the legal problems with running and copying old software the law will eventually adapt.
By the way, if you know any elementary or middle school teachers, many of the concepts in abstract algebra can be taught to those age groups as well. Being able to do "adult math" can be a real point of pride and inspiration at those ages.
I was rather surprised how much Finnish math teaching had evolved since I was in elementary school when I recently read a first grade math book.
Those kids are solving equations in first grade.
The genius behind it is that the symbol layer is taught after the concepts. The kids learn to do the basics all with pictures. A simple equation like 2+X = 4 can be presented like a set of scales with four apples on one side, and two on the other. The task is to make the scales balance out.
Using this principle a lot of rather advanced math (for elementary school) can be taught without learning all the symbols for everything. Later on when the idea has been mastered the symbols are introduced and you just tell the kids what technique to apply with which combination of symbols.
This approach greatly reduces the tendency to do math by applying a "set of preprogrammed instructions" you learn mechanically and instead actually tackle the problem. Math problems with a lot of scary looking symbols tend to demotivate a lot of kids.
I can deal with 2% lost votes in one election. But why they want to use electronic voting machines in the first place I'm not getting. And if they plan to use them after this I'll be voting by pen and paper as long as it is an option.
The Finnish system is so simple that you can't really make it any better. You get a piece of paper, with a circle designating where to write your number. A line shows which way is down.
In the voting booth there are writing models of every number, and a list of all candidates with their numbers. Most six year olds have mastered pen usage enough to copy the model numbers so that there is a 99% chance they won't be ambiguous. They are, of course, designed to be non-ambiguous in the first place.
Counting is done by hand, huge amounts of eyeballs, usually representatives from each party. You'd have to corrupt an insane amount of people to make a dent in the system.
There is no box to mis-tick, no buttons to mispress. Why fuck the system up by complicating it? Making voting cheaper is not an argument. I'd rather pay more taxes and trust that my vote counts whey they spend the rest...
Of course we're affected by all media around us. Be it games, movies, advertising, written, spoken, everything. Our brains are wired to pick up as much information as possible in order to make wiser choices.
But behavioral preference and turning people into something is not the same thing. I personally think violent movies are just as bad/harmless as violent games. But surely the think-of-the-children zealots will keep doing their thing, just like they always have...
Real world performance not radically better than fast traditional HDs or SSD solutions, and you can't power off your PC for the night. (Unless you backup to flash every night.)
I'd say this is a niche product, but could be a very good one for a chosen few applications.
Perhaps one day in the hopeful future, large apartment complexes or city blocks will have mini-plants which have a septic and solid waste processor, and perhaps even something to separate metals or plastics for re-use.
Here in Europe we have processors like that... called humans.
In our household we separate paper, cardboard, glass, metal, energy (burnable trash) and biodegradable (gets composted).
Of course, we have separate trash cans for most of these in our apartment complex. Only metal, glass and energy has to be transported elsewhere. (Our local shopping center accepts those in their recycling center.)
This is a nice idea. In fact I think all solutions which work by localizing energy distribution is the way to go. Minimizing needless transportation of energy and waste is a huge improvement over the current situation.
I don't think there will ever be a single "silver bullet" tech to solve our energy and environment issues. The solution is lots and lots of small local (even house-level) improvements.
Just for the sake of discussion / argument, what kind of trouble are you genuinely afraid that your children will get into by surfing the net ?
Mine are still 2 and 4, so not so sure yet... Long time (net-wise) till then.;)
But mostly my concern is exposure to unnecessarily and/or biased heavy stuff in an uncontrolled setting. Porn is not something I want them to access too early, (say before they are teens and become interested,) and violent stuff even less. There's things like pro-ano sites which express heavily biased opinions with no peer review.
Then there's the possibility that they themselves will do something stupid... Bully someone for instance.
Mostly I think a parent should be there in the beginning. Children need guidance for things like this. But you have a good point about teaching people what the net really is. That helps them develop proper reasoning about these things.:)
The Internet isn't a baby sitter any more than videos/DVDs. Responsible parents should monitor their children's media consumption and teach them about being critical, separating fantasy from reality etc.
My kids are too small to use a computer for now, but once they become big enough I'm not going to just let them browse at their leisure. I'm going to monitor them by first being there with them, and once it seems they are OK on their own I'm going to be in the same room. Only much later will I allow them to browse on their own, and even them I'm going to reserve the rights to monitor their logs.
Parents should get a grip and deal with the fact that getting kids involves parenting and responsibility. Not just media. I'm responsible for seeing to it that they exercise enough, eat healthily, brush their teeth, go to bed in time... That's the way it works.
White noise is just like white light: An even distribution of energy across the spectrum.
It makes perfect sense that white noise is less of a problem than an equal amount of noise at a specific frequency. Given a suitable frequency the material absorbing the energy will vibrate and even resonate. (That particular engineer's yelling, apparently, resonates well with the disks in the array of that video...)
It's the same reason why a bullet-proof west can make the impact of a bullet non-lethal: Spread out distribution of energy.
I suggest you learn to live with it instead of supporting making everybody life gradually more and more miserable until perfect safety is achieved, which of course will never happen.
Indeed. The local municipality recently replaced a really nice and wide slide in our local park. (I'm lucky enough to live in a place where taxes are devoted to working and maintained public playgrounds.) The reason: It was too wide. So now instead of a cool slide I can slide down together with the kids there's a boring standard slide which is one person at a time only. Cause somehow two persons on a 1,5 meter wide slide at the same time is dangerous? WTF...
Unfortunately the safety argument seems to work every time, including those when it makes _no sense_.
Slashdot Mirror
But we would have long found girlfriends, tried them out, chosen one, and got married.
Dude, I don't know about you but Slashdot didn't stop me doing that... Then again judging from your UID you might be a little younger than I am? ;)
It's both fascinating and sad how technology and warfare has been intertwined from the very dawn of man. A lot of "geeks" from way back, Greek philosophers, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. were sponsored by the rich and powerful of their respectable eras in exchange for using their minds to create better warfare technology.
For good or for evil, it seems that's the way it has always been, and likely always will be. We possibly wouldn't be having this discussion if it weren't for DARPA...
...I've been doing this on my personal site for years, but never thought big commercial ones would do it. Then again, the amount of man hours lost on IE6-related issues just for me personally is huge, and I can't even begin the think globally...
This seems to be the site:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=ensontie+summa+finland&sll=60.535839,27.158031&sspn=0.065861,0.179901&ie=UTF8&ll=60.544113,27.142239&spn=0.065844,0.179901&t=h&z=13&iwloc=addr
(Judging from the fact that "Ensontie" (Enso road) goes right by the gray bits which are clearly an industrial complex.)
My co worker tells me they have a power plant on site, so tick the electricity box...
The location is right my the sea, and also handily close to Russia. There's a map in this Helsingin Sanomat article:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Stora+Enso+closing+Summa+and+Kemij%C3%A4rvi+mills+at+brisk+pace+/1135233375617
So basically they can easily lay cable from and to the site, and they can have excellent connections to Russia without actually having to place the hardware there. (Not that I'm sure it would be an issue these days.)
Also, they can literally put the hardware on a ship and ship it right to the location.
Accepting games as a cultural artifact is very important. This will in the long run open up a legal way of running abandonware, which is a great thing both for history as well as entertainment.
When credible, tax-funded institutions start highlighting the legal problems with running and copying old software the law will eventually adapt.
Leave it to Slashdot sensationalism to spin an EU report which is generally very positive towards gaming as some kind of evil plot...
Read the Reuters article in the summary for more info on what this was actually about:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/healthNewsMolt/idUKTRE51A60H20090211
By the way, if you know any elementary or middle school teachers, many of the concepts in abstract algebra can be taught to those age groups as well. Being able to do "adult math" can be a real point of pride and inspiration at those ages.
I was rather surprised how much Finnish math teaching had evolved since I was in elementary school when I recently read a first grade math book.
Those kids are solving equations in first grade.
The genius behind it is that the symbol layer is taught after the concepts. The kids learn to do the basics all with pictures. A simple equation like 2+X = 4 can be presented like a set of scales with four apples on one side, and two on the other. The task is to make the scales balance out.
Using this principle a lot of rather advanced math (for elementary school) can be taught without learning all the symbols for everything. Later on when the idea has been mastered the symbols are introduced and you just tell the kids what technique to apply with which combination of symbols.
This approach greatly reduces the tendency to do math by applying a "set of preprogrammed instructions" you learn mechanically and instead actually tackle the problem. Math problems with a lot of scary looking symbols tend to demotivate a lot of kids.
I think it's not an arrow, but an horizontal line which designates the "floor".
Exactly. :)
I can deal with 2% lost votes in one election. But why they want to use electronic voting machines in the first place I'm not getting. And if they plan to use them after this I'll be voting by pen and paper as long as it is an option.
The Finnish system is so simple that you can't really make it any better. You get a piece of paper, with a circle designating where to write your number. A line shows which way is down.
In the voting booth there are writing models of every number, and a list of all candidates with their numbers. Most six year olds have mastered pen usage enough to copy the model numbers so that there is a 99% chance they won't be ambiguous. They are, of course, designed to be non-ambiguous in the first place.
Counting is done by hand, huge amounts of eyeballs, usually representatives from each party. You'd have to corrupt an insane amount of people to make a dent in the system.
There is no box to mis-tick, no buttons to mispress. Why fuck the system up by complicating it? Making voting cheaper is not an argument. I'd rather pay more taxes and trust that my vote counts whey they spend the rest...
Did you bother to RT entire FA? There was a much more detailed drawing further below, done after further study.
Also, the FA clearly states this guy didn't really publish his works, whereas Galileo did. No wonder which one is remembered...
Of course we're affected by all media around us. Be it games, movies, advertising, written, spoken, everything. Our brains are wired to pick up as much information as possible in order to make wiser choices.
But behavioral preference and turning people into something is not the same thing. I personally think violent movies are just as bad/harmless as violent games. But surely the think-of-the-children zealots will keep doing their thing, just like they always have...
It's too bad, but on average, the human race is pretty darn stupid. I think that just about sums it up...
what's the difference from a tmpfs then?
There's a battery that lasts a few hours or something, but not through the night. RTFA for proper details. ;)
Skimming the article, I'd summarize as follows:
Real world performance not radically better than fast traditional HDs or SSD solutions, and you can't power off your PC for the night. (Unless you backup to flash every night.)
I'd say this is a niche product, but could be a very good one for a chosen few applications.
That would of course be nice. But the Japanese are on it with their robots! ;)
Perhaps one day in the hopeful future, large apartment complexes or city blocks will have mini-plants which have a septic and solid waste processor, and perhaps even something to separate metals or plastics for re-use.
Here in Europe we have processors like that... called humans.
In our household we separate paper, cardboard, glass, metal, energy (burnable trash) and biodegradable (gets composted).
Of course, we have separate trash cans for most of these in our apartment complex. Only metal, glass and energy has to be transported elsewhere. (Our local shopping center accepts those in their recycling center.)
This is a nice idea. In fact I think all solutions which work by localizing energy distribution is the way to go. Minimizing needless transportation of energy and waste is a huge improvement over the current situation.
I don't think there will ever be a single "silver bullet" tech to solve our energy and environment issues. The solution is lots and lots of small local (even house-level) improvements.
Mono Silverlight 2.0 support is in pre-alpha stages and there is no guarantee it will do a trick like that (live streaming).
Live streaming is easy. (You just read bytes from a port, after all...) Codecs are usually the stumbling block.
http://www.dpreview.com/
...but this. Come on. I get this being newsworthy at Gizmodo etc. But Slashdot? Seriously... Cool, yes. Newsworthy? Not buying it. ;)
Just for the sake of discussion / argument, what kind of trouble are you genuinely afraid that your children will get into by surfing the net ?
Mine are still 2 and 4, so not so sure yet... Long time (net-wise) till then. ;)
But mostly my concern is exposure to unnecessarily and/or biased heavy stuff in an uncontrolled setting. Porn is not something I want them to access too early, (say before they are teens and become interested,) and violent stuff even less. There's things like pro-ano sites which express heavily biased opinions with no peer review.
Then there's the possibility that they themselves will do something stupid... Bully someone for instance.
Mostly I think a parent should be there in the beginning. Children need guidance for things like this. But you have a good point about teaching people what the net really is. That helps them develop proper reasoning about these things. :)
The Internet isn't a baby sitter any more than videos/DVDs. Responsible parents should monitor their children's media consumption and teach them about being critical, separating fantasy from reality etc.
My kids are too small to use a computer for now, but once they become big enough I'm not going to just let them browse at their leisure. I'm going to monitor them by first being there with them, and once it seems they are OK on their own I'm going to be in the same room. Only much later will I allow them to browse on their own, and even them I'm going to reserve the rights to monitor their logs.
Parents should get a grip and deal with the fact that getting kids involves parenting and responsibility. Not just media. I'm responsible for seeing to it that they exercise enough, eat healthily, brush their teeth, go to bed in time... That's the way it works.
White noise is just like white light: An even distribution of energy across the spectrum.
It makes perfect sense that white noise is less of a problem than an equal amount of noise at a specific frequency. Given a suitable frequency the material absorbing the energy will vibrate and even resonate. (That particular engineer's yelling, apparently, resonates well with the disks in the array of that video...)
It's the same reason why a bullet-proof west can make the impact of a bullet non-lethal: Spread out distribution of energy.
I suggest you learn to live with it instead of supporting making everybody life gradually more and more miserable until perfect safety is achieved, which of course will never happen.
Indeed. The local municipality recently replaced a really nice and wide slide in our local park. (I'm lucky enough to live in a place where taxes are devoted to working and maintained public playgrounds.) The reason: It was too wide. So now instead of a cool slide I can slide down together with the kids there's a boring standard slide which is one person at a time only. Cause somehow two persons on a 1,5 meter wide slide at the same time is dangerous? WTF...
Unfortunately the safety argument seems to work every time, including those when it makes _no sense_.