Funnily enough I never ever think of a kilogram as the weight of some standard weight in a vault somewhere. The only way I ever think about the kilogram is the weight of one liter of water. Also comes in handy when I'm calculating how much liquids I can afford to buy when shopping groceries, given that I often go to the store on foot for the exercise and have to make sure I can manage the haul back.
So, um, does this all really matter? In practice, that is.
If extraterrestrial life forms (biological or mechanical) would decide to come here I'm pretty sure they'd have the means to scan the planet and meet up with whoever they damn well please.
We already have UAVs that are pretty impressive. I'm sure a swarm of intelligence gathering bots the size of insects are not an issue for someone with the capacity for intrastellar travel. I'm guessing they'd pick somewhere remote without huge crowds people bothering them as they attempt to make first contact.
Or then they'd just kill us all and turn us into fertilizer, who knows?
The sad thing is, that as long as humans are stupid enough to think about their nations in terms of supremacy, we will really never evolve past a continuum of wars.
But the most amusing thing is how Americans seem to take it for granted that the USA should always be the best at everything.
I'm not trying to take sides or say how it should be. These are just general observations that seem to contribute to my inevitable fall into ever deeper cynicism. That being said, the longer I live the more convinced I am as broken as everyone else.
You have to hand it to IBM's marketing team... Nice strategy.
Making the government buy more stuff by effectively injecting FUD. I really can't think of a better way to make people buy stuff without knowing what they need it for.
The only way to manage the ever growing amounts of information in the world is to offload part of the processing to some kind of AI. Likely, this is the beginning of a long progression.
Is this bad and horrible or insanely great? (Pun intended.) Who knows? I suspect it is a logical progression of our evolution.
One of the joys (for me) of playing 2D Mario games is learning how a level progresses and eventually being able to beat it though enough practice. If the level keeps changing this is taken away. I think it would be frustrating...
Despite learning reading this "late" the Finnish school system still manages to give you a world class education.
Finnish spelling is also far more regular than English spelling. Does that have anything to do with why Finnish schools can get away with teaching reading so much later?
I wouldn't know about that, I happen to be part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland so I went to school in Swedish. We started with Swedish in first grade, Finnish in third, and English in fifth.
I wonder if you'd parented a baby Mozart, if you'd taken him away from his obsession with music in order to make sure he has the "spontaneous play of early childhood" instead.
Actually I don't think they conflict. Child prodigies have been studied extensively, and one thing that separates them from the rest is that they are indeed obsessed with their given talent, and will practice great amounts out of their own free will. In a sense one could argue that a large amount of their spontaneous play is practicing their skill.
So no, I wouldn't want to take away something like that.:)
I've always found the American preoccupation with "giving the child a head start" strange. I live in Finland, and our older kids are six now. They have just started preschool, and will start primary school next year. Here most kids learn how to read at seven. Before that interaction and focus skills are taught through play and simple exercises.
Despite learning reading this "late" the Finnish school system still manages to give you a world class education.
I firmly believe that play is the most important thing for kids to do. Is the situation really so bad in schools elsewhere that we have to take away the spontaneous play of early childhood just to keep our kids from "being left behind"?
I'm fortunate to live in Helsinki, with one of the best public transportation systems in the world. I try to get around by bus/train/tram/metro and walk as much as I can. At work I also try to get up and walk around regularly, sometimes even resorting to joining the smokers outside in order to get out of the chair. (Not smoking, mind you.) At home, if we need something from the supermarket I often do that walking, I can easily carry 15-20 kg home, it's only about 700 meters.
I have a firm belief that all these little bits and pieces of exercise add up. I might sit all day at work, but I make it a point to spend my other waking time sitting less.:)
I've also taken up dancing, which both improves posture and impresses the opposite sex. Win-win.;)
Cover it with aluminum foil or something else that reflects light well, and try using it as a barbacue!
But with a dish that size you can fit it with quite a few antennas and add a motor to access an insane amount of satellites. A hassle to set up and maintain though.
So what great stuff have I missed on the Wii? Crowdsourcing FTW. KTHXBYE.:)
(I've aquired the Bit Trip stuff, really like those. The Art or Balance was great too. What else? There's too much crap out there, so what other gems are there for us geeks?)
Movies, books, children's (non-computer playing-in-the-yard) games even. We don't like (and thus the kids don't have) toy weapons in our family, and guess what? The pine cones are BOMBS! now...
Games are no different. Tasteful? No. But war never is.
It's nice to see someone involved in the industry "getting it".
For me, the deal-breaker with current 3D movies is the simple fact that I have to look at whatever is in focus to avoid being distracted or getting a headache. I like the freedom to explore the scene, and 3D takes that away from me.
That being said, there are some developments that could be a bit of a game changer for 3D. Where I'd like 3D right now is FPS games. Combined with a webcam and eye-tracking the effect could be configured to put whatever I look at in focus, much like the eye would. I'm guessing this could do a lot for immersion. (I'm not aware of anyone having done this yet.)
Using a flexible depth of field technique it could perhaps be possible to remove the restriction to have to decide the depth of field when shooting. The viewer could decide that part when watching, using the same kind of eye tracking I described above. Granted, this would work only if there is a single viewer, or with a technology to feed individual video feeds to all viewers. This also would strip the director of a creative technique, and in that sense would lessen the cinematic experience.
I agree completely with you about your thoughts on the human visual system. The brain in effect makes a 2D scene with 3D ques into 3D. For now, as far as I'm concerned, 3D is a gimmick in current movies. A cool gimmick, (and technically very well executed in Avatar,) but a gimmick none the less.
Modern moral philosophy does not distinguish between morals and ethics as it traditionally has, and while you clearly distance yourself from the moral system of society as a whole you still make a very poor argument.
You feel that copyright shouldn't exist and lawmakers are corrupt. It's easy to justify copyright infringement from this standpoint. But claiming that you somehow have a universal knowledge of what should be considered ethical is just arrogant. I respect your right to have your own opinion. But I recommend more study of moral philosophy before trying to make the argument that whatever behaviour you engage in is OK because you are abiding by what you think is ethical. (Which, actually acting morally according to your own sense of ethics.)
The future might well be open social networks, but it will take a lot of time. There are huge challenges ahead, given the amount of data that has to be aggregated and displayed. Facebook does some very clever stuff to aggregate all those status updates, comments, images, etc. into your news feed. Doing this across the Internet instead of in a data centre will require a lot more bandwidth and less latency than we currently have.
I'm sure a lot of people here on Slashdot are happy to bash Facebook, but it can be a quite powerful social tool. Especially for keeping track of upcoming (IRL) events that you might be interested in it works quite well. (Why manually monitor the websites of a bunch of clubs when I can just join their Group on Facebook and get event invites automativally?) You can also filter out all the stupid games from the news feed. I barely remember that Farmwille exists anymore.;)
My point is that it will take a lot of progress before a decentralized architecture can match what Facebook can do now. It's doable, but it certainly ain't trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral?"
Not really. They're dead, why would I care?
I'm willing to guess you either have never experienced real loss, or have an inability to feel empathy. That, or you're trolling.
Funnily enough I never ever think of a kilogram as the weight of some standard weight in a vault somewhere. The only way I ever think about the kilogram is the weight of one liter of water. Also comes in handy when I'm calculating how much liquids I can afford to buy when shopping groceries, given that I often go to the store on foot for the exercise and have to make sure I can manage the haul back.
So, um, does this all really matter? In practice, that is.
Facebook has an application blocking feature which keeps me blissfully oblivious that there are more Farmville users than citizens in my country.
Not that I'm saying there's anything worse with playing Farmville compared to some other random game online, but I _just don't care_.
Thank you.
If extraterrestrial life forms (biological or mechanical) would decide to come here I'm pretty sure they'd have the means to scan the planet and meet up with whoever they damn well please.
We already have UAVs that are pretty impressive. I'm sure a swarm of intelligence gathering bots the size of insects are not an issue for someone with the capacity for intrastellar travel. I'm guessing they'd pick somewhere remote without huge crowds people bothering them as they attempt to make first contact.
Or then they'd just kill us all and turn us into fertilizer, who knows?
Unilateral disarmement never works.
Only for as long as people keep thinking like that.
It might take a thousand, ten thousand, or even a hundred thousand years to achieve world piece. But even that is no reason not to try.
The sad thing is, that as long as humans are stupid enough to think about their nations in terms of supremacy, we will really never evolve past a continuum of wars.
But the most amusing thing is how Americans seem to take it for granted that the USA should always be the best at everything.
I'm not trying to take sides or say how it should be. These are just general observations that seem to contribute to my inevitable fall into ever deeper cynicism. That being said, the longer I live the more convinced I am as broken as everyone else.
You have to hand it to IBM's marketing team... Nice strategy.
Making the government buy more stuff by effectively injecting FUD. I really can't think of a better way to make people buy stuff without knowing what they need it for.
I just use an alternate Firefox profile for this. That way you are still free to keep bookmarks. ;)
The only way to manage the ever growing amounts of information in the world is to offload part of the processing to some kind of AI. Likely, this is the beginning of a long progression.
Is this bad and horrible or insanely great? (Pun intended.) Who knows? I suspect it is a logical progression of our evolution.
One of the joys (for me) of playing 2D Mario games is learning how a level progresses and eventually being able to beat it though enough practice. If the level keeps changing this is taken away. I think it would be frustrating...
Then again, I did enjoy Diablo II.
Despite learning reading this "late" the Finnish school system still manages to give you a world class education.
Finnish spelling is also far more regular than English spelling. Does that have anything to do with why Finnish schools can get away with teaching reading so much later?
I wouldn't know about that, I happen to be part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland so I went to school in Swedish. We started with Swedish in first grade, Finnish in third, and English in fifth.
I wonder if you'd parented a baby Mozart, if you'd taken him away from his obsession with music in order to make sure he has the "spontaneous play of early childhood" instead.
Actually I don't think they conflict. Child prodigies have been studied extensively, and one thing that separates them from the rest is that they are indeed obsessed with their given talent, and will practice great amounts out of their own free will. In a sense one could argue that a large amount of their spontaneous play is practicing their skill.
So no, I wouldn't want to take away something like that. :)
I've always found the American preoccupation with "giving the child a head start" strange. I live in Finland, and our older kids are six now. They have just started preschool, and will start primary school next year. Here most kids learn how to read at seven. Before that interaction and focus skills are taught through play and simple exercises.
Despite learning reading this "late" the Finnish school system still manages to give you a world class education.
I firmly believe that play is the most important thing for kids to do. Is the situation really so bad in schools elsewhere that we have to take away the spontaneous play of early childhood just to keep our kids from "being left behind"?
Can I get you on Spotify? It's just so darn handy I can't be bothered with much else these days... :D
I'm fortunate to live in Helsinki, with one of the best public transportation systems in the world. I try to get around by bus/train/tram/metro and walk as much as I can. At work I also try to get up and walk around regularly, sometimes even resorting to joining the smokers outside in order to get out of the chair. (Not smoking, mind you.) At home, if we need something from the supermarket I often do that walking, I can easily carry 15-20 kg home, it's only about 700 meters.
I have a firm belief that all these little bits and pieces of exercise add up. I might sit all day at work, but I make it a point to spend my other waking time sitting less. :)
I've also taken up dancing, which both improves posture and impresses the opposite sex. Win-win. ;)
Cover it with aluminum foil or something else that reflects light well, and try using it as a barbacue!
But with a dish that size you can fit it with quite a few antennas and add a motor to access an insane amount of satellites. A hassle to set up and maintain though.
Did you try out sin and punishment? There is the downloadable original and the sequel that is on disc. Both are fantastic shmups.
No, thanks for the tip. :)
So what great stuff have I missed on the Wii? Crowdsourcing FTW. KTHXBYE. :)
(I've aquired the Bit Trip stuff, really like those. The Art or Balance was great too. What else? There's too much crap out there, so what other gems are there for us geeks?)
Is it just me, or isn't that horrendously fucking ridiculously wasteful? Environmentally, that is.
Movies, books, children's (non-computer playing-in-the-yard) games even. We don't like (and thus the kids don't have) toy weapons in our family, and guess what? The pine cones are BOMBS! now...
Games are no different. Tasteful? No. But war never is.
It's nice to see someone involved in the industry "getting it".
For me, the deal-breaker with current 3D movies is the simple fact that I have to look at whatever is in focus to avoid being distracted or getting a headache. I like the freedom to explore the scene, and 3D takes that away from me.
That being said, there are some developments that could be a bit of a game changer for 3D. Where I'd like 3D right now is FPS games. Combined with a webcam and eye-tracking the effect could be configured to put whatever I look at in focus, much like the eye would. I'm guessing this could do a lot for immersion. (I'm not aware of anyone having done this yet.)
With movies it's much trickier. Depth of field is something you decide when shooting. For now:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
Using a flexible depth of field technique it could perhaps be possible to remove the restriction to have to decide the depth of field when shooting. The viewer could decide that part when watching, using the same kind of eye tracking I described above. Granted, this would work only if there is a single viewer, or with a technology to feed individual video feeds to all viewers. This also would strip the director of a creative technique, and in that sense would lessen the cinematic experience.
I agree completely with you about your thoughts on the human visual system. The brain in effect makes a 2D scene with 3D ques into 3D. For now, as far as I'm concerned, 3D is a gimmick in current movies. A cool gimmick, (and technically very well executed in Avatar,) but a gimmick none the less.
Modern moral philosophy does not distinguish between morals and ethics as it traditionally has, and while you clearly distance yourself from the moral system of society as a whole you still make a very poor argument.
You feel that copyright shouldn't exist and lawmakers are corrupt. It's easy to justify copyright infringement from this standpoint. But claiming that you somehow have a universal knowledge of what should be considered ethical is just arrogant. I respect your right to have your own opinion. But I recommend more study of moral philosophy before trying to make the argument that whatever behaviour you engage in is OK because you are abiding by what you think is ethical. (Which, actually acting morally according to your own sense of ethics.)
The future might well be open social networks, but it will take a lot of time. There are huge challenges ahead, given the amount of data that has to be aggregated and displayed. Facebook does some very clever stuff to aggregate all those status updates, comments, images, etc. into your news feed. Doing this across the Internet instead of in a data centre will require a lot more bandwidth and less latency than we currently have.
I'm sure a lot of people here on Slashdot are happy to bash Facebook, but it can be a quite powerful social tool. Especially for keeping track of upcoming (IRL) events that you might be interested in it works quite well. (Why manually monitor the websites of a bunch of clubs when I can just join their Group on Facebook and get event invites automativally?) You can also filter out all the stupid games from the news feed. I barely remember that Farmwille exists anymore. ;)
My point is that it will take a lot of progress before a decentralized architecture can match what Facebook can do now. It's doable, but it certainly ain't trivial.
CAN I HAS for my mobile phone please?
Seriously, it's a problem in the winter.