In parts of the USA there used to be a problem with Pellagra. AFAIK the solution to problems like this is to fortify common staples with vitamins. That's what the "enriched" in packaged rice sold here is. Instead of modifying the very source of the food, why not fortify? As an added bonus, you can probably process all varieties with added vitamins. That means you can experiment with diverse crops and still get proper nutrition.
Fortification works so well we don't even think about it. When was the last time you met anybody with a goiter? All our salt is iodized. That's why. It prevents goiter.
Fortification can also be controversial (see, flouridated water), but as long as it's labeled I don't have a problem with it.
That's not as far-fetched as you think. The lake is there it's just not usually very wet. During wet years people have floated canoes and kayaks there for a while.
Whenever somebody criticizes your lifestyle, just point out that vast sums of money are being spent, traded, and speculated based on the color of a consumer product. Building a life-sized T-rex in your backyard? Hitch-hiking to Guatemala? Chucking it all to become a surf-bum and live in a driftwood shack by the beach? Not the least bit absurd by comparison.
I see so many cars on a daily basis with nothing but a license plate frame and the dealer logo in it.
When I first got here I drove around for six months or more like that. I even drove into Nevada. There was a small plastic pouch in the window with some documents in it, but they would have had to pull me over to read that. Nobody ever did. I wasn't trying to pull the Steve Jobs trick or anything. I asked some people how long it takes to get plates and they said, "a while, but usually not that long". So finally I called the dealer and it turns out my plates were sitting in a cardboard box for most of the time. They had moved offices and forgot about them.
The top button is buttoned, but the other two are loose and yet... the buttons are still in there. What's up with that? I don't read anime/manga. Is it a common visual metaphor or something?
a plane flying into space and land by itself should be the real race shouldn't it?
Sometimes the sci-fi vision is prescient. Sometimes it isn't. A flip-phone looks like the original Star Trek communicator. Yay! The new phones don't. Oh well. The 3.5 floppy looked just like the storage used on the original series also. The floppy also came and went.
The Space Shuttle was the closest we've come yet to the sci-fi vision of the space plane to which you refer. It still had to drop a lot of stuff before reaching orbit. I've always wondered to what extent our problems there came because we allowed ourselves to be lead astray by the sci-fi vision. Meanwhile, the Russians continued to perfect un-glamorous but relatively reliable rockets and long duration space flight.
The sci-fi vision is a double-edged sword. It inspires us and stimulates ideas. It can lead us astray if we obsess over achieving objectives that match it in some particular way.
Inexplicably? The 2nd amendment is the only amendment affecting the profitability of a single specific industry. There is money in gun sales... Not so much in the other amendments.
At some point, usenet's purpose changed from "Discussion forums" to "distributing pirated content and porn".
Indeed. I fondly recall being at a school machine in 1991 or 1992, when somebody posted a Beatles tune (in something like 30 UUencoded parts!). Said person was immediately scolded by several users and reminded that not only could his account be revoked, but that the service itself might be in jeopardy if it became a place for such activity.
So I'm pretty sure that the only thing keeping me away from running my own site is lack of interest.
I think that about sums it up for me too. I'm glad you got what I was trying to say. Straw indeed. The biggest problem is trying to make your site look good on every screen. As much as I hate FaceBook and refuse to use it, I understand why companies are going with facebook.com/MyCompany. It's at least partially because FaceBook handles the mess of making sure it looks good everywhere. They may not do it exactly the way you want; but you get to outsource all that boring crap to somebody else. I know this is a geek site and we're supposed to find things interesting; but not every technical problem is interesting to everybody. Securing my web site and making it layout properly were not interesting problems for me.
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
I didn't care about non-commercial copying of the images. It was the bandwidth usage that bothered me. My site could go down and/or I could be charged if exceeded. If I was running my own server, I'd have to get hotter hardware to handle it. That's the theft that was bothering me, not copyright violations.
Yeah, stuff gets stolen on the Internet. I DID deal with it--by no longer hosting my own web site. In fact, I frequently saw leeching from my Flickr account, and it didn't bother me one bit. I was like, "fine, now it's Yahoo's problem"; but I realized I was trading one problem for another and it ultimately bit me. On to the next trade. Get it?
I used to run my own web site. The modest fees didn't bother me; but the image leaches did. There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst. Yeah, there are little scripts and things using the referrer tag; but then I couldn't preview my pages on my hard drive. OK, I suppose I could have run a server on localhost... but... you see where this goes. You get pulled into "tag soup" and having to install every scripting language that begins with 'P' just to show people some stupid pictures.
So. I was drawn towards Flickr. In the back of my mind I knew it could always morph into something I hated; but for the longest time it didn't. Then it got Marissa'd.
So here we are again. Some company with a business that somebody finds unsatisfying even though it's profitable. They throw away the existing customers in hopes of attracting other customers. I hope Yahoo ends up like JCPenney now.
There's also something to be said for "sell, don't tell". I seem to recall that the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Manual was written as if they were enthusiastically pitching the product. For some reason, it was much easier to retain the information when the author gushed about it.
You wouldn't want students finding out about a textbook that is only $17!
Actually, the version I read was the original which is now in the public domain. According to Wiki it's available as a free download from Gutenberg. It's British so the language was a bit odd in some places. Its approach to calculus was enlightening though, so things like that didn't get in the way and it was actually kind of charming.
The $17 is probably worth it if you're an American who doesn't like to infer meaning and/or work around quaint olde dialect.
Finding the link to the free version is "left as an exercise for the reader".
Yes! That's an excellent point. This is bringing back memories of senior year in high school. Physics and calculus were available concurrently at my school, but it wasn't required to take both. I was fortunate to have them together (I didn't pass AP though, which is why I had to re-take calculus at the college level). I was seated next to students who didn't know what a derivative was. I had what you might call an unfair advantage. The teacher was aware that some students didn't have calculus, and would say things like, "for those of you taking calculus, it should be evident that this is a derivative".
When I was struggling with calculus my first year, and a lot of concepts hadn't gelled, I had an idea. I decided to go to the library and see if there were any better calculus texts. I found Calculus Made Easy and believe it or not, it actually made good on its promise. I aced my first semester calculus exam, with much thanks to that book. The biggest take-away was that they actually showed the relationship between summations, limits, and integrals. All of that material had been covered by other texts, and by teachers of course; but they had never related it. The "genius" of the invention of calculus was in that relationship, not just a bunch of dry examples of limits, series, and integrals.
And yes, this was actually more than 20 years ago. The copy I read was dug from the depths of the multi-story engineering library stacks at UVa, and even then it was an old copy. Now you can probably download it...
Guys, guys. This is no place for philosophy. This is Slashdot. Let us graph generosity on the X axis, and success on Y. I posit that the curve is like a hill. In other words, there is some optimum level of generosity.
To find the optimum level of generosity, we should simply take the first derivative of the function that relates success to generosity, and solve for zero.
Get crackin'. I want those results by morning, and if I don't get them I'll bash your faces in. Those results are for a good cause. I intend to donate them to the Institute for Fallacious Research.
Actually you can turn off those rivers. You just shouldn't. The Colorado's delta is virtually dry because we divert so much water. In the early 20th century we did a lot of things like that, and now we're just starting to see the problems. The problem with dumping river water on soil in arid areas is that it concentrates salts. Some actually blame this kind of irrigation for the fall of ancient civilizations in South America. We're already seeing salination in some Central Valley soils. There have been some moves to restore the rivers, so that salmon will run again and original habitat will be restored. OTOH, Jerry Brown wants to create a huge mega-engineering project in the delta. It remains to be seen how we'll trend on this.
Sigh... you never know what's going to sell on Slashdot. I was hoping for +5 Funny and all I get is a kitchen pot. I guess that's what I get for mixing redneck, street, and Honey Badger in one post.
You need the human touch to grow pot or cook meth. No machine could... Oh dammit! Drug-bot 3000 done took our jerbs, and it don't blow up or burn down no trailers.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to pimp out your ride so you're down wid da' homies out front da sto' where you buy shit wid da' EBT card.
Oh no! Pimp-bot 3000 done took our jerbs. Damn, he fly.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to kill terminators. Oh no! Da terminators are killin' eachother. Look at that. HoneyBadger 4000 is killing that other robot. He don't care. HoneyBadger 4000 don't give a shit.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to choke on burning robot fumes...
Maybe he really wants an analogue car. You know the kids that are hipsters now, their kids will be totally into ICE cars with carburetors and everything.(sound of dust blowing off paper) I just know these Studebaker share certificates will be worth something some day.
Everybody wants to be Bing. Why, I have no idea. Of course Bing didn't invent background images, but it seems like Google got scared by Bing (once again, why?) and started laying more eye candy on things. Then of course there's the infinite scrolling fad, which I call "tantalus scrolling" after the figure from mythology who was condemned to drink from a cup where the water level always lowered just below his lips. So. Yet another crappy Yahoo design doesn't surprise me. A lot of us defected from Flickr over this.
Anyway, long story short is that the web design community has collectively hit the crack pipe, and users have to live in the ghetto they create.
I honestly didn't know this. I didn't need to know it, because I guess I'm not klutzy enough to close tabs by accident enough. If I were, I guess I would have gone looking for it, or complained about it and been told by somebody. I'm kinda lazy about looking for keyboard shortcuts. I know other people just love 'em and it's the first thing they look for... but I'm fine with just using the mouse for a lot of things. I can see how others might find tab restoration useful though, and I can kind of understand why you're giving timothy shit for making a whole article out of it... and gushing about it as if it were virginity restoration or something.
Slashdot Mirror
In parts of the USA there used to be a problem with Pellagra. AFAIK the solution to problems like this is to fortify common staples with vitamins. That's what the "enriched" in packaged rice sold here is. Instead of modifying the very source of the food, why not fortify? As an added bonus, you can probably process all varieties with added vitamins. That means you can experiment with diverse crops and still get proper nutrition.
Fortification works so well we don't even think about it. When was the last time you met anybody with a goiter? All our salt is iodized. That's why. It prevents goiter.
Fortification can also be controversial (see, flouridated water), but as long as it's labeled I don't have a problem with it.
lake front property in Death Valley.
That's not as far-fetched as you think. The lake is there it's just not usually very wet. During wet years people have floated canoes and kayaks there for a while.
Whenever somebody criticizes your lifestyle, just point out that vast sums of money are being spent, traded, and speculated based on the color of a consumer product. Building a life-sized T-rex in your backyard? Hitch-hiking to Guatemala? Chucking it all to become a surf-bum and live in a driftwood shack by the beach? Not the least bit absurd by comparison.
I see so many cars on a daily basis with nothing but a license plate frame and the dealer logo in it.
When I first got here I drove around for six months or more like that. I even drove into Nevada. There was a small plastic pouch in the window with some documents in it, but they would have had to pull me over to read that. Nobody ever did. I wasn't trying to pull the Steve Jobs trick or anything. I asked some people how long it takes to get plates and they said, "a while, but usually not that long". So finally I called the dealer and it turns out my plates were sitting in a cardboard box for most of the time. They had moved offices and forgot about them.
I would like our current laws to be enforced
And... Enforcement is the job of the Executive Branch, not Congress. Lots O' luck.
OK, they intercepted; but did they run it back for a--oh crap! The distraction is working.
The top button is buttoned, but the other two are loose and yet... the buttons are still in there. What's up with that? I don't read anime/manga. Is it a common visual metaphor or something?
a plane flying into space and land by itself should be the real race shouldn't it?
Sometimes the sci-fi vision is prescient. Sometimes it isn't. A flip-phone looks like the original Star Trek communicator. Yay! The new phones don't. Oh well. The 3.5 floppy looked just like the storage used on the original series also. The floppy also came and went.
The Space Shuttle was the closest we've come yet to the sci-fi vision of the space plane to which you refer. It still had to drop a lot of stuff before reaching orbit. I've always wondered to what extent our problems there came because we allowed ourselves to be lead astray by the sci-fi vision. Meanwhile, the Russians continued to perfect un-glamorous but relatively reliable rockets and long duration space flight.
The sci-fi vision is a double-edged sword. It inspires us and stimulates ideas. It can lead us astray if we obsess over achieving objectives that match it in some particular way.
I'll drink to that. No I won't. Yes I will.
At some point, usenet's purpose changed from "Discussion forums" to "distributing pirated content and porn".
Indeed. I fondly recall being at a school machine in 1991 or 1992, when somebody posted a Beatles tune (in something like 30 UUencoded parts!). Said person was immediately scolded by several users and reminded that not only could his account be revoked, but that the service itself might be in jeopardy if it became a place for such activity.
The culture changed.
So I'm pretty sure that the only thing keeping me away from running my own site is lack of interest.
I think that about sums it up for me too. I'm glad you got what I was trying to say. Straw indeed. The biggest problem is trying to make your site look good on every screen. As much as I hate FaceBook and refuse to use it, I understand why companies are going with facebook.com/MyCompany. It's at least partially because FaceBook handles the mess of making sure it looks good everywhere. They may not do it exactly the way you want; but you get to outsource all that boring crap to somebody else. I know this is a geek site and we're supposed to find things interesting; but not every technical problem is interesting to everybody. Securing my web site and making it layout properly were not interesting problems for me.
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
I didn't care about non-commercial copying of the images. It was the bandwidth usage that bothered me. My site could go down and/or I could be charged if exceeded. If I was running my own server, I'd have to get hotter hardware to handle it. That's the theft that was bothering me, not copyright violations.
Yeah, stuff gets stolen on the Internet. I DID deal with it--by no longer hosting my own web site. In fact, I frequently saw leeching from my Flickr account, and it didn't bother me one bit. I was like, "fine, now it's Yahoo's problem"; but I realized I was trading one problem for another and it ultimately bit me. On to the next trade. Get it?
I used to run my own web site. The modest fees didn't bother me; but the image leaches did. There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst. Yeah, there are little scripts and things using the referrer tag; but then I couldn't preview my pages on my hard drive. OK, I suppose I could have run a server on localhost... but... you see where this goes. You get pulled into "tag soup" and having to install every scripting language that begins with 'P' just to show people some stupid pictures.
So. I was drawn towards Flickr. In the back of my mind I knew it could always morph into something I hated; but for the longest time it didn't. Then it got Marissa'd.
So here we are again. Some company with a business that somebody finds unsatisfying even though it's profitable. They throw away the existing customers in hopes of attracting other customers. I hope Yahoo ends up like JCPenney now.
Is it possible to give a negative fuck about something?
At any rate, I care this much -->
What, you can't see that? Here it is magnified several thousand times:
There's also something to be said for "sell, don't tell". I seem to recall that the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Manual was written as if they were enthusiastically pitching the product. For some reason, it was much easier to retain the information when the author gushed about it.
You wouldn't want students finding out about a textbook that is only $17!
Actually, the version I read was the original which is now in the public domain. According to Wiki it's available as a free download from Gutenberg. It's British so the language was a bit odd in some places. Its approach to calculus was enlightening though, so things like that didn't get in the way and it was actually kind of charming.
The $17 is probably worth it if you're an American who doesn't like to infer meaning and/or work around quaint olde dialect.
Finding the link to the free version is "left as an exercise for the reader".
Yes! That's an excellent point. This is bringing back memories of senior year in high school. Physics and calculus were available concurrently at my school, but it wasn't required to take both. I was fortunate to have them together (I didn't pass AP though, which is why I had to re-take calculus at the college level). I was seated next to students who didn't know what a derivative was. I had what you might call an unfair advantage. The teacher was aware that some students didn't have calculus, and would say things like, "for those of you taking calculus, it should be evident that this is a derivative".
When I was struggling with calculus my first year, and a lot of concepts hadn't gelled, I had an idea. I decided to go to the library and see if there were any better calculus texts. I found Calculus Made Easy and believe it or not, it actually made good on its promise. I aced my first semester calculus exam, with much thanks to that book. The biggest take-away was that they actually showed the relationship between summations, limits, and integrals. All of that material had been covered by other texts, and by teachers of course; but they had never related it. The "genius" of the invention of calculus was in that relationship, not just a bunch of dry examples of limits, series, and integrals.
And yes, this was actually more than 20 years ago. The copy I read was dug from the depths of the multi-story engineering library stacks at UVa, and even then it was an old copy. Now you can probably download it...
Guys, guys. This is no place for philosophy. This is Slashdot. Let us graph generosity on the X axis, and success on Y. I posit that the curve is like a hill. In other words, there is some optimum level of generosity.
To find the optimum level of generosity, we should simply take the first derivative of the function that relates success to generosity, and solve for zero.
Get crackin'. I want those results by morning, and if I don't get them I'll bash your faces in. Those results are for a good cause. I intend to donate them to the Institute for Fallacious Research.
Actually you can turn off those rivers. You just shouldn't. The Colorado's delta is virtually dry because we divert so much water. In the early 20th century we did a lot of things like that, and now we're just starting to see the problems. The problem with dumping river water on soil in arid areas is that it concentrates salts. Some actually blame this kind of irrigation for the fall of ancient civilizations in South America. We're already seeing salination in some Central Valley soils. There have been some moves to restore the rivers, so that salmon will run again and original habitat will be restored. OTOH, Jerry Brown wants to create a huge mega-engineering project in the delta. It remains to be seen how we'll trend on this.
Sigh... you never know what's going to sell on Slashdot. I was hoping for +5 Funny and all I get is a kitchen pot. I guess that's what I get for mixing redneck, street, and Honey Badger in one post.
You need the human touch to grow pot or cook meth. No machine could... Oh dammit! Drug-bot 3000 done took our jerbs, and it don't blow up or burn down no trailers.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to pimp out your ride so you're down wid da' homies out front da sto' where you buy shit wid da' EBT card.
Oh no! Pimp-bot 3000 done took our jerbs. Damn, he fly.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to kill terminators. Oh no! Da terminators are killin' eachother. Look at that. HoneyBadger 4000 is killing that other robot. He don't care. HoneyBadger 4000 don't give a shit.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to choke on burning robot fumes...
Maybe he really wants an analogue car. You know the kids that are hipsters now, their kids will be totally into ICE cars with carburetors and everything.(sound of dust blowing off paper) I just know these Studebaker share certificates will be worth something some day.
Everybody wants to be Bing. Why, I have no idea. Of course Bing didn't invent background images, but it seems like Google got scared by Bing (once again, why?) and started laying more eye candy on things. Then of course there's the infinite scrolling fad, which I call "tantalus scrolling" after the figure from mythology who was condemned to drink from a cup where the water level always lowered just below his lips. So. Yet another crappy Yahoo design doesn't surprise me. A lot of us defected from Flickr over this.
Anyway, long story short is that the web design community has collectively hit the crack pipe, and users have to live in the ghetto they create.
I honestly didn't know this. I didn't need to know it, because I guess I'm not klutzy enough to close tabs by accident enough. If I were, I guess I would have gone looking for it, or complained about it and been told by somebody. I'm kinda lazy about looking for keyboard shortcuts. I know other people just love 'em and it's the first thing they look for... but I'm fine with just using the mouse for a lot of things. I can see how others might find tab restoration useful though, and I can kind of understand why you're giving timothy shit for making a whole article out of it... and gushing about it as if it were virginity restoration or something.