I seem to remember my undergraduate calculus textbook describing an algorithm to computer integrals that wouldn't be much help on a pen-and-paper test, but could be used to great effect as a computer program. I seem to remember my calculus book from high school having plenty of information using your TI-89 calculator. (oblig) They may have been around in 1996, but they sure as shit weren't around in 1960. So sure, there have been reasons to update the books since Eisenhower administration.
Except with a critical difference: nobody's paying for it. And studios haven't fully adopted the streaming model yet; I know, I pay for Netflix and while I use the streaming, I don't ever get DVDs shipped to me, I just torrent the ones in my queue.
So then it's more like BitTorrent, except with the MPAA's blessing. Now that's a thought.
I want to say that I've honestly never felt the need to make JavaScript run faster. It runs fine as it is. I wouldn't complain if it were faster, but it's not what I'm looking for. I am looking for features. Chrome has had high enough adoption that there are plenty of good plugins for it, but it's still not customizable enough to really use them to the same extent as Firefox. (I browse with mouse gestures, for instance. Chrome has a very slick addon for mouse gestures, but I want to use the middle mouse button....which causes all sorts of problems because as far as I've looked into it, the browser won't let me override the default middle mouse button behavior.) The only thing Chrome really has going for it is putting tabs in different processes, which would be nice for the times that Firefox crashes, but Firefox doesn't crash often enough for it to be worth switching over.
We must invent a new way to make money [off] of books and to pay the writers.
1. Ad-sponsorship. Preferably a big blinking click-the-monkey banner in the margin of "Walden." Doesn't provide very much revenue, but hey, it's money.
2. Old People. Paleophiles who actually like physical books. That includes a lot of us; perhaps it will stay that way.
3. J.D. SALINGER WORLD TOUR! Mark Twain did a lecture circuit to help with his debt back in the old days. Of course, most authors do signing tours, which are strictly promotional. And it seems that, while J.K. Rowling might always be able to fill a stadium, the vast majority of won't be able to pull it off. Neal Stephenson is an interesting guy, writes great books, speaks in a monotone, drives people nuts.
4. Whoring. If Stephanie Meyer started offering blowjobs, I might be persuaded to purchase a copy of the Twilight Saga.
5. Work for the Man. Assuming Hollywood is not similarly affected, become wandering sell-pens, mercenaries of the written word, occasionally working on that novel that maybe, just maybe, the studio execs will want a script from.
6. Get a Day Job. In order to balance a full workload of pay-the-bills case-of-the-Mondays job with the tempestuous sexiness of late-night authorship, consider developing a cocaine addiction. It worked pretty well for Robert Louis Stephenson and Stephen King. If the day job does not sound appealing, consider buying the cocaine in bulk, and selling in smaller quantities.
7. Kitschy Tie-Ins. Who wouldn't want to play a browser-based Flash game based on the plot of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?
You know what? If I had the Library of Congress in my apartment (stashed in a neatly organized Bag of Holding somewhere), and I could check out any book at any time just by reaching my hand into said Bag of Holding and saying the magic words, I really wouldn't ever bother buying books.
But since there's a slight opportunity cost, plus a convenience cost, plus a few associated costs (gas, etc.) associated with visiting the Library of Congress (or my local library, for that matter), I am perfectly happy to purchase books for the convenience it affords.
I live somewhere else. Can I check out ebooks from your library?
I would bet that the system I was trying to describe would only really work if it were implemented on a large scale. And it would work better if it were P2P and managed like a torrent tracker, rather than relying on a central repository.
I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another
This is what will kill this plan; or rather, what will convince publishers to never, ever, ever allow ebook lending. It would be possible to set up a site, or a protocol for lending books, where you share the unused books you have licensed in a big pool with a bunch of other people; members who share will simply check out books from the pool. Then, it's fishes and loaves: if you have 2 copies of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", and 100 people who want to read it, they can all read from those two copies, 2 at a time. That would call for a queue, but a less popular book might not. And even if you don't want to wait in queue, if you purchase a copy, then there will be 3 books in the total pool....and eventually there will be more copies than there are interested readers at any given time, and no one will have to buy the book.
People complain about first-sale doctrine with digital goods, and I understand, but the fact of the matter is that the potential for a streamlined secondary market for digital content is a much larger liability than it is for physical goods. Even having to make the trip to GameStop to sell your copy of Prince of Persia is prohibitive compared to being able to purchase a game, immediately license it out to people on the cloud, and then license a different copy whenever you feel like playing it.
Maybe I've been drinking too much...I missed that line.
I haven't played baseball since Little League, certainly not on a professional level, but I would think that a runner would have to pay attention to what the outfielders are doing, and adjust on the fly. If so, it's probably better to aim on the side of caution.
But of course, none of what we're talking about right now is reality, reality is the Rangers in the World Series (I've now lived in Dallas long enough that I probably have to become a fan now), we're still talking about theory.
The main reason why they've calculated a circular path is because of the delays that sharp turns introduce. As far as I can tell, this path makes sense if and only if you're trying to run from home to home. If you're going for a single, or a double, or a triple, you'd have different ideal path.
So even in theory, this doesn't really pan out: nobody in MLB makes it to home-plate on an outfield hit. You could probably come up with more effective routes for doubles and triples, but on the other hand, it's probably hard to tell if you've hit a triple right as you start running. If you make a hit that would be a triple, but follow a route like it's a single and then change your mind as the ball gets played, you'll probably still end up with a single or a double. If you start running for a triple on a base hit that's only really going to get you a single, it could slow you down enough to get you out. I'm more in the hedge-your-bets camp, and I'm betting that, on that basis, this isn't an effective way to go.
I don't get the funny mod. I was being 100% serious. Nursing isn't a "manly" enough field, there's a social stigma (albeit, a shrinking one) attached to being a "male nurse," so many men who would otherwise be talented at it shy away; this has caused real shortages in healthcare.
Ideally speaking, there should be more women in engineering as well, but fortunately for current engineers' supply/demand curve, there aren't.
Everyone seems to think that the networks don't know what they're doing. They're banning Google TV, when anyone with half a brain knows this sort of thing is the wave of the future. I'm willing to bet that the network execs do, in fact, have at least one half of a brain between them.
It makes perfect sense if you think, well, maybe they don't really want to ban Google TV. More likely, they want to make a deal with Google, whereby Google pays them for the privilege of using their content.
I don't really think that the US military will be able to stop leaks, Wikileaks itself could go under but the underlying mechanisms might simply grow more sophisticated. The people who leak this information are not enemies or "unpatriotic"---if they were, the more effective way to use sensitive information would be to surreptitiously hand it over to Iran/"insurgents"/whoever, like an old-school spy might. Publicizing classified information is more or less a call for transparency. Maybe the military needs to recognize that it needs to have a greater degree of transparency, or transparency will be imposed on it.
Yeah, exactly. This is why we have a national shortage of nurses. It's because straight men don't want to go into a profession where their job title is the same as the word for "have a baby suck milk form your boobs." On the other hand, there's no shortage of male "paramedics."
Well, maybe. Personally I think we (Americans, I guess) are a little too hung up meting out punishment, when we should be addressing root causes. I'm not suggesting we give hugs to serial killers, I just wonder if focusing on "how do we make this person suffer" is really the most effective approach.
I had my bike stolen several years ago, after having forgotten to lock it up at night. At the time, it was my only means of transportation. It was a brand new bike, so I still had the serial number, and when the thief pawned it, the Austin PD flagged it in their database and I got it back.
When I was picking it up at the police station, the cop who was filling out the report told me, "Look, we know who stole your bike. It was some homeless woman around town. You can press charges if you want, but personally I don't think it's worth it." Now, maybe it was saving him some paperwork on a misdemeanor larceny, but I tend to agree. I was angry about having the bike stolen, but I don't see the utility in it. You could fine her, but is she going to pay? And if she does, how will she pay---by stealing another bike? You could jail her for nonpayment of the fine, but that's not going to solve anything, either: spend some tax dollars on it, she'll get out quickly and be in roughly the same situation as before. It's just not worth it; there's no point.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you might be able to take it down, but banning distribution of the executable is moronic.
If only there were some way for people who had Limewire to share the executable.
Hirohito?
$900 tuition? Are you an American? Even community colleges aren't that cheap for full-time.
Sort of like:
Curriki
CK-12
Open Text Book
(These are all links from old Slashdot articles.)
I'd like to be a bazillionaire and dump a ton of money into a nonprofit of this sort.
I seem to remember my undergraduate calculus textbook describing an algorithm to computer integrals that wouldn't be much help on a pen-and-paper test, but could be used to great effect as a computer program. I seem to remember my calculus book from high school having plenty of information using your TI-89 calculator. (oblig) They may have been around in 1996, but they sure as shit weren't around in 1960. So sure, there have been reasons to update the books since Eisenhower administration.
Wow, that sounds a lot like Netflix!
Except with a critical difference: nobody's paying for it. And studios haven't fully adopted the streaming model yet; I know, I pay for Netflix and while I use the streaming, I don't ever get DVDs shipped to me, I just torrent the ones in my queue.
So then it's more like BitTorrent, except with the MPAA's blessing. Now that's a thought.
I want to say that I've honestly never felt the need to make JavaScript run faster. It runs fine as it is. I wouldn't complain if it were faster, but it's not what I'm looking for. I am looking for features. Chrome has had high enough adoption that there are plenty of good plugins for it, but it's still not customizable enough to really use them to the same extent as Firefox. (I browse with mouse gestures, for instance. Chrome has a very slick addon for mouse gestures, but I want to use the middle mouse button....which causes all sorts of problems because as far as I've looked into it, the browser won't let me override the default middle mouse button behavior.) The only thing Chrome really has going for it is putting tabs in different processes, which would be nice for the times that Firefox crashes, but Firefox doesn't crash often enough for it to be worth switching over.
We must invent a new way to make money [off] of books and to pay the writers.
1. Ad-sponsorship. Preferably a big blinking click-the-monkey banner in the margin of "Walden." Doesn't provide very much revenue, but hey, it's money.
2. Old People. Paleophiles who actually like physical books. That includes a lot of us; perhaps it will stay that way.
3. J.D. SALINGER WORLD TOUR! Mark Twain did a lecture circuit to help with his debt back in the old days. Of course, most authors do signing tours, which are strictly promotional. And it seems that, while J.K. Rowling might always be able to fill a stadium, the vast majority of won't be able to pull it off. Neal Stephenson is an interesting guy, writes great books, speaks in a monotone, drives people nuts.
4. Whoring. If Stephanie Meyer started offering blowjobs, I might be persuaded to purchase a copy of the Twilight Saga.
5. Work for the Man. Assuming Hollywood is not similarly affected, become wandering sell-pens, mercenaries of the written word, occasionally working on that novel that maybe, just maybe, the studio execs will want a script from.
6. Get a Day Job. In order to balance a full workload of pay-the-bills case-of-the-Mondays job with the tempestuous sexiness of late-night authorship, consider developing a cocaine addiction. It worked pretty well for Robert Louis Stephenson and Stephen King. If the day job does not sound appealing, consider buying the cocaine in bulk, and selling in smaller quantities.
7. Kitschy Tie-Ins. Who wouldn't want to play a browser-based Flash game based on the plot of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?
You know what? If I had the Library of Congress in my apartment (stashed in a neatly organized Bag of Holding somewhere), and I could check out any book at any time just by reaching my hand into said Bag of Holding and saying the magic words, I really wouldn't ever bother buying books.
But since there's a slight opportunity cost, plus a convenience cost, plus a few associated costs (gas, etc.) associated with visiting the Library of Congress (or my local library, for that matter), I am perfectly happy to purchase books for the convenience it affords.
I live somewhere else. Can I check out ebooks from your library?
I would bet that the system I was trying to describe would only really work if it were implemented on a large scale. And it would work better if it were P2P and managed like a torrent tracker, rather than relying on a central repository.
I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another
This is what will kill this plan; or rather, what will convince publishers to never, ever, ever allow ebook lending. It would be possible to set up a site, or a protocol for lending books, where you share the unused books you have licensed in a big pool with a bunch of other people; members who share will simply check out books from the pool. Then, it's fishes and loaves: if you have 2 copies of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", and 100 people who want to read it, they can all read from those two copies, 2 at a time. That would call for a queue, but a less popular book might not. And even if you don't want to wait in queue, if you purchase a copy, then there will be 3 books in the total pool....and eventually there will be more copies than there are interested readers at any given time, and no one will have to buy the book.
People complain about first-sale doctrine with digital goods, and I understand, but the fact of the matter is that the potential for a streamlined secondary market for digital content is a much larger liability than it is for physical goods. Even having to make the trip to GameStop to sell your copy of Prince of Persia is prohibitive compared to being able to purchase a game, immediately license it out to people on the cloud, and then license a different copy whenever you feel like playing it.
I don't think so, I think you actually have to mention Hi---him, or the Na---notorious political party that he led.
Well, if the math geeks can find a significant increase in efficiency, and they don't tell the jocks, then guess who gets the ladies?
(The jocks. But it was worth a try.)
Maybe I've been drinking too much...I missed that line.
I haven't played baseball since Little League, certainly not on a professional level, but I would think that a runner would have to pay attention to what the outfielders are doing, and adjust on the fly. If so, it's probably better to aim on the side of caution.
But of course, none of what we're talking about right now is reality, reality is the Rangers in the World Series (I've now lived in Dallas long enough that I probably have to become a fan now), we're still talking about theory.
The main reason why they've calculated a circular path is because of the delays that sharp turns introduce. As far as I can tell, this path makes sense if and only if you're trying to run from home to home. If you're going for a single, or a double, or a triple, you'd have different ideal path.
So even in theory, this doesn't really pan out: nobody in MLB makes it to home-plate on an outfield hit. You could probably come up with more effective routes for doubles and triples, but on the other hand, it's probably hard to tell if you've hit a triple right as you start running. If you make a hit that would be a triple, but follow a route like it's a single and then change your mind as the ball gets played, you'll probably still end up with a single or a double. If you start running for a triple on a base hit that's only really going to get you a single, it could slow you down enough to get you out. I'm more in the hedge-your-bets camp, and I'm betting that, on that basis, this isn't an effective way to go.
You know who else tried to shame people who held a contrary opinion?
I wish I wasn't making this up
Then stop making stuff up! ;-)
I think you would feel better about it if you were in a more subjunctive mood.
Do you know what Scheme is?
I don't get the funny mod. I was being 100% serious. Nursing isn't a "manly" enough field, there's a social stigma (albeit, a shrinking one) attached to being a "male nurse," so many men who would otherwise be talented at it shy away; this has caused real shortages in healthcare.
Ideally speaking, there should be more women in engineering as well, but fortunately for current engineers' supply/demand curve, there aren't.
Everyone seems to think that the networks don't know what they're doing. They're banning Google TV, when anyone with half a brain knows this sort of thing is the wave of the future. I'm willing to bet that the network execs do, in fact, have at least one half of a brain between them.
It makes perfect sense if you think, well, maybe they don't really want to ban Google TV. More likely, they want to make a deal with Google, whereby Google pays them for the privilege of using their content.
I don't really think that the US military will be able to stop leaks, Wikileaks itself could go under but the underlying mechanisms might simply grow more sophisticated. The people who leak this information are not enemies or "unpatriotic"---if they were, the more effective way to use sensitive information would be to surreptitiously hand it over to Iran/"insurgents"/whoever, like an old-school spy might. Publicizing classified information is more or less a call for transparency. Maybe the military needs to recognize that it needs to have a greater degree of transparency, or transparency will be imposed on it.
Yeah, exactly. This is why we have a national shortage of nurses. It's because straight men don't want to go into a profession where their job title is the same as the word for "have a baby suck milk form your boobs." On the other hand, there's no shortage of male "paramedics."
Well, maybe. Personally I think we (Americans, I guess) are a little too hung up meting out punishment, when we should be addressing root causes. I'm not suggesting we give hugs to serial killers, I just wonder if focusing on "how do we make this person suffer" is really the most effective approach.
(Dunno why other post is AC.)
I had my bike stolen several years ago, after having forgotten to lock it up at night. At the time, it was my only means of transportation. It was a brand new bike, so I still had the serial number, and when the thief pawned it, the Austin PD flagged it in their database and I got it back.
When I was picking it up at the police station, the cop who was filling out the report told me, "Look, we know who stole your bike. It was some homeless woman around town. You can press charges if you want, but personally I don't think it's worth it." Now, maybe it was saving him some paperwork on a misdemeanor larceny, but I tend to agree. I was angry about having the bike stolen, but I don't see the utility in it. You could fine her, but is she going to pay? And if she does, how will she pay---by stealing another bike? You could jail her for nonpayment of the fine, but that's not going to solve anything, either: spend some tax dollars on it, she'll get out quickly and be in roughly the same situation as before. It's just not worth it; there's no point.
But that might just be me.