I find the idea of a replicator which can only replicate a single thing to be even more ridiculous than a replicator that can replicate anything. Yes, by imagining some completely weird device that could never possibly exist we reach a bizarre conclusion! Moving on.
People always say something retarded like this in the context of robotic manufacturing fantasies as well. It's really interesting to see how deeply rooted the imaginary concept of "money" is in most people's brains, that they cannot see how reality would be completely transformed by the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want.
Money? Why would you give a shit about money? I can use the replicator to create as much as you want. See, the shit's WORTHLESS. And now, you'll get even crazier by telling me that's a bad thing. Right. It's a bad thing that everybody on earth can sit around and do whatever they want and have whatever they want whenever they want.
Take a deep breath. Clear your mind of this concept known as "economics." It's gone. Boom. Outdated, obsolete, irrelevant. We're all sitting around sipping margaritas.
0.4 cubic meters is 400 liters. Approximating the density of a human as that of water, that's 400 kilograms, or 890 pounds. I think your average passenger is somewhat less than 890 pounds. Oh, you were talking about the United States? Nevermind.
Out of curiosity, how is it that both retinas detached simultaneously? From over here in the ignorant chair, it seems highly improbable. What happened?
If Fred Phelps isn't free to say "God hates Fags", then I'm not free to say "Phuck Phred Felps."
It's always tempting to take the easy way out
So the deliberate infliction of psychological pain on specific individuals is to be tolerated? I'm not talking about throwing him in jail because what he's doing is a crime (because it isn't, and shouldn't be), I'm talking about what free private citizens can do, within the law, to stop him from doing what he's doing. Or are you saying we shouldn't even do that?
"Just ignore him" works well if you're not the person he's attacking.
In case it's not obvious, I am not threatening Fred Phelps -- I'm referring to his idiotic practice of protesting military funerals. You know, funerals where there are a lot of battle-hardened, psychologically scarred Iraq veterans in attendance. Someone is going to snap.
I agree with you in principle. But what do we do about people like Fred Phelps? What he does is obviously "speech" but in several very real senses could be considered harassment or intimidation as well. That guy's going to end up shot, and I have to admit I won't feel terribly bad about it when it happens.
Well, I'm not sure, but I'm glad I followed that last link and learned that Google is a motherfucking slimeball who fired somebody for being too old and not staying at work past 7 PM on a regular basis.
If you lose respect for experience, and respect for a work-life balance, your company becomes a ball of pure evil and incompetence. I'm actually completely shocked.
Although there's little that can top the hilarity of an earlier era's bizarre attempt at marketing computers.
Now that's really disturbing. Not the sexist tone of an old ad from a bygone day, no... that's expected. What's disturbing is how women are treated like pieces of meat, drooled over, ridiculed, sexually harassed and frightened away from computer science IN THIS DAY AND AGE. I mean for fuck's sake, here's an advertisement talking about a woman's place in the kitchen and then nonchalantly, without even blinking, states "She'll learn to program it," like that's easily within the range of ability of a "mere woman." PROGRAM IT. Not use it, program it. As in by punching buttons, and toggling binary codes.
Any geek who has ever made a woman feel uncomfortable for being interested in technology should be ashamed of themselves. Congratulations, you've taken a step back to the pre-1960s.
The question is, why wouldn't it? Do you know? I don't. Are you saying scientists should be less observant, record fewer details, ignore more facts? You might as well ask "Why bother mentioning that they were pig hearts, what would it matter?"
Are you offended at the obvious sexism inherent in the selection of two female pig hearts? Bothered by the fact that reality may not be politically correct?
It occurred to me once that a person could write a FS driver that did something like that, but my immediate next thought was "Naaah.. You're insane, man." The fact that somebody has actually done it makes me giggle uncontrollably. I have to stop letting sanity get in the way of ambition -- I coulda been there first!
Hmmm. With a couple thousand "reflector bots" I wonder how much data you could store in the form of IRC messages flying back and forth.
But there's a reason companies don't like the other guys to know their plans. Like it or not, that's how competition works.
I wasn't aware that competition included enlisting the help of armed government goons to bust down doors and raid households. Look, the phone was important. Check. The people involved in the fiasco are kind of slimy. Check. But did anyone ACTUALLY reverse engineer the phone? No. Was the phone ultimately re-obtained from the people who had it? Yes. As far as I'm concerned, end of story. What I'm interested in at this point is how a corporation is able to go after an individual essentially with pseudo-military force for something that is basically just larceny. What if something had gone wrong? What if somebody had been shot? It's just absolutely out of control.
So the humor here is that it's paradoxical to want to solve a single equation with two variables? Or am I being too geeky here? After all, the solution is *trivial*...
Is it? It's quite possible that that equation has no solutions in the reals, though I can't be assed to work it out right now. Given Cohen's penchant for deep mathematical jokes, I wouldn't be surprised if the value of B is complex.
An equation with only complex solutions, where the solutions are supposed to be physical quantities, can in some sense be said to be "unsolvable," or rather, it has no true physical meaning because its solutions are not physical.
College degrees being required for plumbing jobs and the like are only the symptom of this problem.
I had a plumber working on the house a year ago. He was scribbling some notes on a pad and I noticed that he was working out some math. I figured it would be some basic water pressure calculation or something. I looked closer and saw that he was writing things like exp(i*w*t+...). So I asked him "Is that i? As in, the square root of -1?" He says "Yup" and keeps on calculating.
Turns out he was working out the natural frequency of water oscillating in some particular pipe. The dude was using complex numbers.
I was expecting something much more exciting. Say, like Apple has plans to come out with a console. That would be much more interesting than this garbage.
That's ridiculous. If a thief wants to get in my car, he will. What would be "rolling over" is paying $150 from my own pocket every time a window gets smashed. No fucking way dude.
Even in the "real world", where it should be (and is) perfectly fine to use someone elses work to solve a problem its still wrong to take credit for it.
Failing to cite a source is not the same as taking credit for the idea. When people talk to me every day I do not assume that they invented everything that comes out of their mouths. That would make me an idiot.
Stealing credit for something is, in my opinion, morally repugnant. Failing to cite a source, but not in such a way that I get the false impression that you created something? Really, I could not give less of a shit about that. I care about citations from the standpoint of being able to verify your claim, that's all. If I trust you, then I don't need citations.
Serious? Our eyes and minds are being sold to advertisers and you don't find that troubling?
No. Seeing a business taking advantage of the state of affairs is not troubling, it's to be expected. What is troubling is the complete willingness of people to give away their private information, and when you ask them why they tolerate a company acting like that, they say "Who cares?" The problem isn't the company, the problem is the people themselves.
A few months ago my wife learned the lesson the hard way. She left her cheapie cell phone on the seat of her car, parked in front of her parents house in boring suburbia. Somebody smashed the window to take the worthless phone. The best part? Door was unlocked.
Lock the door, get a smashed window. Don't lock the door, get a smashed window. The solution is to leave the window rolled down and remove everything of value from the car.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the idea of a replicator which can only replicate a single thing to be even more ridiculous than a replicator that can replicate anything. Yes, by imagining some completely weird device that could never possibly exist we reach a bizarre conclusion! Moving on.
People always say something retarded like this in the context of robotic manufacturing fantasies as well. It's really interesting to see how deeply rooted the imaginary concept of "money" is in most people's brains, that they cannot see how reality would be completely transformed by the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want.
Money? Why would you give a shit about money? I can use the replicator to create as much as you want. See, the shit's WORTHLESS. And now, you'll get even crazier by telling me that's a bad thing. Right. It's a bad thing that everybody on earth can sit around and do whatever they want and have whatever they want whenever they want.
Take a deep breath. Clear your mind of this concept known as "economics." It's gone. Boom. Outdated, obsolete, irrelevant. We're all sitting around sipping margaritas.
0.4 cubic meters is 400 liters. Approximating the density of a human as that of water, that's 400 kilograms, or 890 pounds. I think your average passenger is somewhat less than 890 pounds. Oh, you were talking about the United States? Nevermind.
Out of curiosity, how is it that both retinas detached simultaneously? From over here in the ignorant chair, it seems highly improbable. What happened?
If Fred Phelps isn't free to say "God hates Fags", then I'm not free to say "Phuck Phred Felps." It's always tempting to take the easy way out
So the deliberate infliction of psychological pain on specific individuals is to be tolerated? I'm not talking about throwing him in jail because what he's doing is a crime (because it isn't, and shouldn't be), I'm talking about what free private citizens can do, within the law, to stop him from doing what he's doing. Or are you saying we shouldn't even do that?
"Just ignore him" works well if you're not the person he's attacking.
In case it's not obvious, I am not threatening Fred Phelps -- I'm referring to his idiotic practice of protesting military funerals. You know, funerals where there are a lot of battle-hardened, psychologically scarred Iraq veterans in attendance. Someone is going to snap.
I agree with you in principle. But what do we do about people like Fred Phelps? What he does is obviously "speech" but in several very real senses could be considered harassment or intimidation as well. That guy's going to end up shot, and I have to admit I won't feel terribly bad about it when it happens.
Well, I'm not sure, but I'm glad I followed that last link and learned that Google is a motherfucking slimeball who fired somebody for being too old and not staying at work past 7 PM on a regular basis.
If you lose respect for experience, and respect for a work-life balance, your company becomes a ball of pure evil and incompetence. I'm actually completely shocked.
Although there's little that can top the hilarity of an earlier era's bizarre attempt at marketing computers.
Now that's really disturbing. Not the sexist tone of an old ad from a bygone day, no... that's expected. What's disturbing is how women are treated like pieces of meat, drooled over, ridiculed, sexually harassed and frightened away from computer science IN THIS DAY AND AGE. I mean for fuck's sake, here's an advertisement talking about a woman's place in the kitchen and then nonchalantly, without even blinking, states "She'll learn to program it," like that's easily within the range of ability of a "mere woman." PROGRAM IT. Not use it, program it. As in by punching buttons, and toggling binary codes.
Any geek who has ever made a woman feel uncomfortable for being interested in technology should be ashamed of themselves. Congratulations, you've taken a step back to the pre-1960s.
(Yes, my wife is a CS graduate, as am I)
Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?
The question is, why wouldn't it? Do you know? I don't. Are you saying scientists should be less observant, record fewer details, ignore more facts? You might as well ask "Why bother mentioning that they were pig hearts, what would it matter?"
Are you offended at the obvious sexism inherent in the selection of two female pig hearts? Bothered by the fact that reality may not be politically correct?
It occurred to me once that a person could write a FS driver that did something like that, but my immediate next thought was "Naaah.. You're insane, man." The fact that somebody has actually done it makes me giggle uncontrollably. I have to stop letting sanity get in the way of ambition -- I coulda been there first!
Hmmm. With a couple thousand "reflector bots" I wonder how much data you could store in the form of IRC messages flying back and forth.
pfft! You're still reading and posting about it.
Yeah, I'm totally posting because I'm interested. Is has nothing to do with a pathological need to waste time or anything like that. </sarcasm>
But there's a reason companies don't like the other guys to know their plans. Like it or not, that's how competition works.
I wasn't aware that competition included enlisting the help of armed government goons to bust down doors and raid households. Look, the phone was important. Check. The people involved in the fiasco are kind of slimy. Check. But did anyone ACTUALLY reverse engineer the phone? No. Was the phone ultimately re-obtained from the people who had it? Yes. As far as I'm concerned, end of story. What I'm interested in at this point is how a corporation is able to go after an individual essentially with pseudo-military force for something that is basically just larceny. What if something had gone wrong? What if somebody had been shot? It's just absolutely out of control.
We don't know all the constraints. What if E must be greater than 100, for instance? It has no solutions.
Whilst you and your hoodie friends might not realise it, stealing a cell phone *is* a crime.
A crime that deserves worldwide news coverage that goes on for weeks and weeks? Please.
Next week, maybe we'll see 5,000 stories on Google news about how somebody stole a lawnmower.
So the humor here is that it's paradoxical to want to solve a single equation with two variables? Or am I being too geeky here? After all, the solution is *trivial*...
Is it? It's quite possible that that equation has no solutions in the reals, though I can't be assed to work it out right now. Given Cohen's penchant for deep mathematical jokes, I wouldn't be surprised if the value of B is complex.
An equation with only complex solutions, where the solutions are supposed to be physical quantities, can in some sense be said to be "unsolvable," or rather, it has no true physical meaning because its solutions are not physical.
College degrees being required for plumbing jobs and the like are only the symptom of this problem.
I had a plumber working on the house a year ago. He was scribbling some notes on a pad and I noticed that he was working out some math. I figured it would be some basic water pressure calculation or something. I looked closer and saw that he was writing things like exp(i*w*t+...). So I asked him "Is that i? As in, the square root of -1?" He says "Yup" and keeps on calculating.
Turns out he was working out the natural frequency of water oscillating in some particular pipe. The dude was using complex numbers.
I was expecting something much more exciting. Say, like Apple has plans to come out with a console. That would be much more interesting than this garbage.
You "read through" reference books? You're... weird.
That's ridiculous. If a thief wants to get in my car, he will. What would be "rolling over" is paying $150 from my own pocket every time a window gets smashed. No fucking way dude.
Even in the "real world", where it should be (and is) perfectly fine to use someone elses work to solve a problem its still wrong to take credit for it.
Failing to cite a source is not the same as taking credit for the idea. When people talk to me every day I do not assume that they invented everything that comes out of their mouths. That would make me an idiot.
Stealing credit for something is, in my opinion, morally repugnant. Failing to cite a source, but not in such a way that I get the false impression that you created something? Really, I could not give less of a shit about that. I care about citations from the standpoint of being able to verify your claim, that's all. If I trust you, then I don't need citations.
Hey, it doesn't stop all of the software engineers here giving their unqualified opinions on climatology.
Or software engineering, for that matter.
Serious? Our eyes and minds are being sold to advertisers and you don't find that troubling?
No. Seeing a business taking advantage of the state of affairs is not troubling, it's to be expected. What is troubling is the complete willingness of people to give away their private information, and when you ask them why they tolerate a company acting like that, they say "Who cares?" The problem isn't the company, the problem is the people themselves.
How expensive would it be?
A few months ago my wife learned the lesson the hard way. She left her cheapie cell phone on the seat of her car, parked in front of her parents house in boring suburbia. Somebody smashed the window to take the worthless phone. The best part? Door was unlocked.
Lock the door, get a smashed window. Don't lock the door, get a smashed window. The solution is to leave the window rolled down and remove everything of value from the car.
Nice. Very nice. Your number is in good agreement with this guy's number which was worked out by a somewhat different method. Good to see consistency.