What folks don't seem to realize is that a lot of DoD funding is science. Without defense spending, we wouldn't have GPS, materials research wouldn't be where it is (lighter weight, stronger materials, often for ballistics). We wouldn't even have the internet. That's just DARPA though, other agencies like the Army Research Lab and Air Force Research Lab have "How can this benefit the public" as part of their requirements for small business research. Those aren't NSF funds, those are DoD funds.
If you're curious about other stuff, here's a list from New Scientist from back in 2008.
"the average american" didn't and doesn't want for Trump, and didn't vote for him, let's remember that. You're right that the rest of the world, like an unfortunate amount of americans don't care about the important details, they just want to seem above political fights.
Lets not forget that roughly 46% of eligible voters actually voted in the last election. Minority turnout was much lower than for Obama's first or second election. Most polls had Clinton in the lead, but those may have been skewed by those people that couldn't be bothered to get off their asses and go vote. It's sad that the government is a two-party system where we have the choice between evil and evil-er.
Personally I can't stand Trump as a person, but there is that glimmer of hope that his business experience *could* bring some good change. That glimmer is fading fast.
This has much more to do with the nature of the folks you work with than the office layout. I had the same office-supply-store cubical wall layout in two separate groups. Sure, they were ~6 feet tall and provided some amount of privacy... but when working with a lot of extroverted artists, they don't shield anything from the yells of "hey! did you fix that one thing?". Next group had the same layout, but was full of mathematicians and physicists (introverts). You could hear a pin drop most days, people even kept quiet during phone calls.
Fast forward a couple jobs where we had near-ceiling true walls - the metal frame and gypsum kind. I sat between a couple guys that were often on the same conference call and loved to put things on speaker. I heard every part of the conversation in delayed stereo. Also engineers here, but *lots* of meetings.
TL,DR: If you want a quiet environment, work with quiet people (if you can find them). If you want loud, work with extroverts (artists, marketing folks, etc...)
One of my undergrad Prof's had "Define, Defend, Attack" questions on his exams. His thinking was that to truly know something well, you have to be able to do all three. I found it incredibly useful to be able to explain something to someone else, too. I would think it would be pretty simple, hopefully not too time consuming, for the resident grey-beard to ask a question of them.
"Multiple Inheritance is the notion that one class can inherit from more than one parent class. A pen can be both a "writer" and a "cylinder". It's useful when the data encapsulation and functions make sense, but breaks down quickly when you inherit from two things that themselves have the same parent (diamond inheritance)"
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone else seen the slew of ads by Samsung lately? They are trying to save face by advertising some 8-point battery inspection - while showing videos of a nail being driven through the battery and at least one heat test. The monologue is "we take your safety first which is why we blah blah blah". It's a blatant attempt to save face after the multi-billion dollar fiasco from last year.
I'm more surprised that VW finally admitted guilt after many years of fighting and pointing blame at mid and low level employees. Of course their PR spin is going to be something like "This is against everything we value... We've changed, please take us back". The court of public opinion can be very harsh, but the punishments are generally very short term. It's only a matter of months before John Q. Public takes that crazy cheating ex-gf back.
The only logical solution is a hyperloop between Nevada and Australia. It wouldn't take long at the 600 mph, plus in a low-pressure environment the resulting fire from a mishap wouldn't spread quickly.:-)
When my career started the VP knew *every* employee in the building. We had 5 discretionary holidays a year, on top of the 10 Federal holidays. Vacation accrual started at ~2 weeks a year and maxed somewhere around 6 weeks. There was a 401k plan AND a pension plan, the former you were fully vested in from day 1.
By the time I left that job, no discretionary holidays, vacation accrual started at ~1.5 weeks, and maxed out around 4 weeks. Those gray-beards that had been around for 15+ years saw their vacation accrual slashed. The pension plan was removed entirely. Not only did I not know who the VP was, my direct supervisor was two states away and I never met the guy in the ~6 months or so I reported to him.
We've entered a vicious cycle of employees saying "This company doesn't care about employees, I'm gonna keep looking for greener grass" and employers saying "They aren't sticking around anyway, why should we invest in them?"
There's so much press about how Trump is an amazing businessman. Truth is he's not all that good compared to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. Sure, he's still much richer than most of us slobs, but he *only* increased his wealth by 300% from 1987 to 2015. Bill Gates' worth grew 7,173%, and the S&P grew ~1,300%.
That's right folks, our president would be much wealthier if he just invested in some stocks... instead of his failed University, his failed airlines, and other instances. So yea, his children would be wise to make their own investments into some up-and-coming technologies and companies. Or even some established big guys that have a history of strong growth.
I'd like to show you my original NES that still works today. Or my Super Nintendo that, aside from some small amount of yellowing, still plays all of my games on the first try. Or maybe my N64, with controllers that still function like new and games come up first try every time.
I can also show you my original Playstation whose CD-ROM went out about 10 years ago. Originally due to the fact that Sony used skimpy hardware within the CD-ROM and had plastic gliding on plastic that eventually wore out and angled the laser, forcing me to turn the console upside-down to try to play games before the thing finally just burned out entirely. Or maybe you'd like to take a look at my original fat PS3 whose blu-ray drive died after 2 years?
One example does not a trend make. There's bound to be a few bad apples in the batch of millions, it's all in how the company responds to those bad apples for customer good will. It also doesn't make sense to build a $1000 super-console with top-of-the-line components that will last 100 years, nobody would buy it when it sits next to a $150 good-enough with good games. Look at what happened to the Neo-Geo.
The reason Waze and kin are so popular is because the city planners aren't doing their damned jobs. They simply don't do up-front investment and planning to handle what is obviously going to be an area with increased traffic. Traffic in the Austin metro area is a nightmare 6 hours of every day. The 3-lane highways are parking lots from 7-10 am and 4-7 pm EVERY DAY. All major roads are 2 lanes and 35-45 mph limits. It's absurdly common to have traffic backed up to the next light, 1 mile away. Even funnier is you can tell when you leave one county and enter another because the roads magically widen and are in better repair.
The solution to this rush hour purgatory? Add a single toll lane, each way, on the highway that nobody will use. The toll lane has 3 exits, all the way north, downtown, and all the way south over a span of ~14 miles. The toll is higher during rush hour, lower during off hours - when there aren't enough cars to use it anyway. So not only does it not serve the majority of commuters due to lack of exits, it also is prohibitively expensive when it's most needed by those that can use it. It's not uncommon to spend $10 on tolls in one day around here on fixed-rate tolls. $200+ a month adds up.
A little more info. If you're looking at building your own arcade cabinet with light guns, then ultimarc has the Aimtrak. I picked up a couple guns and the IR sensor bar for my cabinet, basically it's just like the WII with an IR sensor bar mounted either above or below the screen, and each gun appears as a mouse to the computer. The actually work pretty well for games like Area 51.
Note that is for the "free-standing" guns that are tethered with a cable. Games like RevolutionX and Terminator 2 have hard-mounted guns on a swivel. Those are joysticks in disguise.
I agree with the sentiment, though it is a bit short-sighted. The U.S. does not have an official language to enable people to stay in touch with their heritage, let those from Mexico continue to speak Spanish. These people are trying to work *with* English speakers for their job, they took the initiative of learning our language to do so. I'm as annoyed as the next person by the list-readers that are not tech support, usually I'm more irritated with their lack of help than I am with their ability to speak. I am literate and can read the bundled directions for my gadget, I'm calling tech support for a question your booklet doesn't answer.
It's common for Europeans to be able to speak 3 or more languages. The U.S. doesn't reciprocate that idea, we seem to think that English should be the standard world-wide. We even go so far as to visit a country like France, and if they don't speak English, we speak English slower and LOUDER until they get what we are saying.
Hell, this feature was available on my Cyangen-Modded Galaxy S3 years ago. The Oneplus-1 was also able to do this with typical headphones.
It was actually pretty neat, you listened to a series of pitches at different volumes with each ear and it was able to tell if you had some amount of loss in one ear and calibrate sound for it.
I fail to see how what he did is really any different than "in-game A.I.". Sure, he didn't succeed at making a TASBOT with a controller and camera, but he did manage to best Nintendo's top computer-controlled player using a Neural Network. I'd say that's significant in it's own right. After all, enemies in Halo or GoW work on in-game memory and don't have controllers in-hand.
Would it have been much cooler to have ROB with a gamecube controller-in-hand and some fancy kinect cameras in his head? Of course it would. But that's all for show really. It may be more realistic if he had introduced a delay between state recognition and action taken to simulate input perception lag. He didn't, and he managed to create an awesome computer opponent.
"if you had enough time to do it a second time, you had enough time to do it right the first time."
Though in Samsungs case, "Third times the charm"?
I still think its funny there's this talk about e-waste from disposal of the phones. Somehow it was left out that they need to get rid of 2.5 million 3500 mAh batteries. Don't those count as environmental waste? Are they going to be properly disposed of?....Don't tell me Samsung just took a sander/file/saw to the existing batteries and slapped them back in...
Sitting in front of a computer for hours each day makes my eyes tired, so I routinely turn the brightness down to nothing. I put blue-blocker on my latest pair of glasses and Bam!, my sleep cycle is screwed up. Turns out blue light is really useful for stuff like your circadian rhythm. Now I only really use those glasses sparingly, and will make sure to take them off or look over them every few minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
What folks don't seem to realize is that a lot of DoD funding is science. Without defense spending, we wouldn't have GPS, materials research wouldn't be where it is (lighter weight, stronger materials, often for ballistics). We wouldn't even have the internet. That's just DARPA though, other agencies like the Army Research Lab and Air Force Research Lab have "How can this benefit the public" as part of their requirements for small business research. Those aren't NSF funds, those are DoD funds.
If you're curious about other stuff, here's a list from New Scientist from back in 2008.
"the average american" didn't and doesn't want for Trump, and didn't vote for him, let's remember that. You're right that the rest of the world, like an unfortunate amount of americans don't care about the important details, they just want to seem above political fights.
Lets not forget that roughly 46% of eligible voters actually voted in the last election. Minority turnout was much lower than for Obama's first or second election. Most polls had Clinton in the lead, but those may have been skewed by those people that couldn't be bothered to get off their asses and go vote. It's sad that the government is a two-party system where we have the choice between evil and evil-er.
Personally I can't stand Trump as a person, but there is that glimmer of hope that his business experience *could* bring some good change. That glimmer is fading fast.
I have my own Vista anecdote that isn't too far off... One time I signed on and got the following (almost) infinite loop:
1) Login
2) (unresponsive for ~5 minutes)
3) Dialog pops up with "The following program is forcing explorer to crash: explorer.exe. Do you wish to restart it?"
4) Click okay
4) GOTO 2
It was a Toshiba laptop, so that could also be the reason...
This has much more to do with the nature of the folks you work with than the office layout. I had the same office-supply-store cubical wall layout in two separate groups. Sure, they were ~6 feet tall and provided some amount of privacy... but when working with a lot of extroverted artists, they don't shield anything from the yells of "hey! did you fix that one thing?". Next group had the same layout, but was full of mathematicians and physicists (introverts). You could hear a pin drop most days, people even kept quiet during phone calls.
Fast forward a couple jobs where we had near-ceiling true walls - the metal frame and gypsum kind. I sat between a couple guys that were often on the same conference call and loved to put things on speaker. I heard every part of the conversation in delayed stereo. Also engineers here, but *lots* of meetings.
TL,DR: If you want a quiet environment, work with quiet people (if you can find them). If you want loud, work with extroverts (artists, marketing folks, etc...)
One of my undergrad Prof's had "Define, Defend, Attack" questions on his exams. His thinking was that to truly know something well, you have to be able to do all three. I found it incredibly useful to be able to explain something to someone else, too. I would think it would be pretty simple, hopefully not too time consuming, for the resident grey-beard to ask a question of them.
"Multiple Inheritance is the notion that one class can inherit from more than one parent class. A pen can be both a "writer" and a "cylinder". It's useful when the data encapsulation and functions make sense, but breaks down quickly when you inherit from two things that themselves have the same parent (diamond inheritance)"
It's another case of Government over-reach. No one tells me what to do. We have the right to make it whatever time we want it to be.
So it's beer o'clock? I like this new work schedule.
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone else seen the slew of ads by Samsung lately? They are trying to save face by advertising some 8-point battery inspection - while showing videos of a nail being driven through the battery and at least one heat test. The monologue is "we take your safety first which is why we blah blah blah". It's a blatant attempt to save face after the multi-billion dollar fiasco from last year.
I'm more surprised that VW finally admitted guilt after many years of fighting and pointing blame at mid and low level employees. Of course their PR spin is going to be something like "This is against everything we value... We've changed, please take us back". The court of public opinion can be very harsh, but the punishments are generally very short term. It's only a matter of months before John Q. Public takes that crazy cheating ex-gf back.
The only logical solution is a hyperloop between Nevada and Australia. It wouldn't take long at the 600 mph, plus in a low-pressure environment the resulting fire from a mishap wouldn't spread quickly. :-)
So much this...
When my career started the VP knew *every* employee in the building. We had 5 discretionary holidays a year, on top of the 10 Federal holidays. Vacation accrual started at ~2 weeks a year and maxed somewhere around 6 weeks. There was a 401k plan AND a pension plan, the former you were fully vested in from day 1.
By the time I left that job, no discretionary holidays, vacation accrual started at ~1.5 weeks, and maxed out around 4 weeks. Those gray-beards that had been around for 15+ years saw their vacation accrual slashed. The pension plan was removed entirely. Not only did I not know who the VP was, my direct supervisor was two states away and I never met the guy in the ~6 months or so I reported to him.
We've entered a vicious cycle of employees saying "This company doesn't care about employees, I'm gonna keep looking for greener grass" and employers saying "They aren't sticking around anyway, why should we invest in them?"
If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con', whats the opposite of 'progress'?
There's so much press about how Trump is an amazing businessman. Truth is he's not all that good compared to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. Sure, he's still much richer than most of us slobs, but he *only* increased his wealth by 300% from 1987 to 2015. Bill Gates' worth grew 7,173%, and the S&P grew ~1,300%.
That's right folks, our president would be much wealthier if he just invested in some stocks... instead of his failed University, his failed airlines, and other instances. So yea, his children would be wise to make their own investments into some up-and-coming technologies and companies. Or even some established big guys that have a history of strong growth.
I'd like to show you my original NES that still works today. Or my Super Nintendo that, aside from some small amount of yellowing, still plays all of my games on the first try. Or maybe my N64, with controllers that still function like new and games come up first try every time.
I can also show you my original Playstation whose CD-ROM went out about 10 years ago. Originally due to the fact that Sony used skimpy hardware within the CD-ROM and had plastic gliding on plastic that eventually wore out and angled the laser, forcing me to turn the console upside-down to try to play games before the thing finally just burned out entirely. Or maybe you'd like to take a look at my original fat PS3 whose blu-ray drive died after 2 years?
One example does not a trend make. There's bound to be a few bad apples in the batch of millions, it's all in how the company responds to those bad apples for customer good will. It also doesn't make sense to build a $1000 super-console with top-of-the-line components that will last 100 years, nobody would buy it when it sits next to a $150 good-enough with good games. Look at what happened to the Neo-Geo.
The reason Waze and kin are so popular is because the city planners aren't doing their damned jobs. They simply don't do up-front investment and planning to handle what is obviously going to be an area with increased traffic. Traffic in the Austin metro area is a nightmare 6 hours of every day. The 3-lane highways are parking lots from 7-10 am and 4-7 pm EVERY DAY. All major roads are 2 lanes and 35-45 mph limits. It's absurdly common to have traffic backed up to the next light, 1 mile away. Even funnier is you can tell when you leave one county and enter another because the roads magically widen and are in better repair.
The solution to this rush hour purgatory? Add a single toll lane, each way, on the highway that nobody will use. The toll lane has 3 exits, all the way north, downtown, and all the way south over a span of ~14 miles. The toll is higher during rush hour, lower during off hours - when there aren't enough cars to use it anyway. So not only does it not serve the majority of commuters due to lack of exits, it also is prohibitively expensive when it's most needed by those that can use it. It's not uncommon to spend $10 on tolls in one day around here on fixed-rate tolls. $200+ a month adds up.
A little more info. If you're looking at building your own arcade cabinet with light guns, then ultimarc has the Aimtrak. I picked up a couple guns and the IR sensor bar for my cabinet, basically it's just like the WII with an IR sensor bar mounted either above or below the screen, and each gun appears as a mouse to the computer. The actually work pretty well for games like Area 51.
Note that is for the "free-standing" guns that are tethered with a cable. Games like RevolutionX and Terminator 2 have hard-mounted guns on a swivel. Those are joysticks in disguise.
I agree with the sentiment, though it is a bit short-sighted. The U.S. does not have an official language to enable people to stay in touch with their heritage, let those from Mexico continue to speak Spanish. These people are trying to work *with* English speakers for their job, they took the initiative of learning our language to do so. I'm as annoyed as the next person by the list-readers that are not tech support, usually I'm more irritated with their lack of help than I am with their ability to speak. I am literate and can read the bundled directions for my gadget, I'm calling tech support for a question your booklet doesn't answer.
It's common for Europeans to be able to speak 3 or more languages. The U.S. doesn't reciprocate that idea, we seem to think that English should be the standard world-wide. We even go so far as to visit a country like France, and if they don't speak English, we speak English slower and LOUDER until they get what we are saying.
Hell, this feature was available on my Cyangen-Modded Galaxy S3 years ago. The Oneplus-1 was also able to do this with typical headphones.
It was actually pretty neat, you listened to a series of pitches at different volumes with each ear and it was able to tell if you had some amount of loss in one ear and calibrate sound for it.
No no no... I'm pretty sure some of the fossils on the road around here pre-date McCain by at least 100M years.
I fail to see how what he did is really any different than "in-game A.I.". Sure, he didn't succeed at making a TASBOT with a controller and camera, but he did manage to best Nintendo's top computer-controlled player using a Neural Network. I'd say that's significant in it's own right. After all, enemies in Halo or GoW work on in-game memory and don't have controllers in-hand.
Would it have been much cooler to have ROB with a gamecube controller-in-hand and some fancy kinect cameras in his head? Of course it would. But that's all for show really. It may be more realistic if he had introduced a delay between state recognition and action taken to simulate input perception lag. He didn't, and he managed to create an awesome computer opponent.
Isn't this exactly what Gaben said a couple years ago, which sparked the creation of SteamOS and SteamMachines?
I thought this too... until reading up on Bill Paxtons death I discovered this trivia is wrong.
As others have pointed out below...
-Lance Henrikson was Bishop in Aliens. Impaled by a Xenomorph and in the next movie (Alien 3) asked to be shutdown because he was too badly damaged.
- He was killed by a Predator in Aliens vs. Predator
- He was also killed in The Terminator.
So, really it was true until Aliens vs. Predator.... If you count the irreparable damage in Aliens and 'killed' in Alien 3.
Are you talking about Scientology, mormonism, or some other mother ship?
Unless they can do a field test a-la soylent and live off the stuff for weeks while developing horse-killing farts, I don't buy it either.
"if you had enough time to do it a second time, you had enough time to do it right the first time."
....Don't tell me Samsung just took a sander/file/saw to the existing batteries and slapped them back in...
Though in Samsungs case, "Third times the charm"?
I still think its funny there's this talk about e-waste from disposal of the phones. Somehow it was left out that they need to get rid of 2.5 million 3500 mAh batteries. Don't those count as environmental waste? Are they going to be properly disposed of?
Sitting in front of a computer for hours each day makes my eyes tired, so I routinely turn the brightness down to nothing. I put blue-blocker on my latest pair of glasses and Bam!, my sleep cycle is screwed up. Turns out blue light is really useful for stuff like your circadian rhythm. Now I only really use those glasses sparingly, and will make sure to take them off or look over them every few minutes.
Um... what did I just read?