I entered a couple programming contests for fun. It's kind of a thrill to have to solve 6 somewhat tricky problems in three hours, especially since you have to handle bad input of various unspecified ways. But at the same time, it's something that I kinda roll my eyes at when talking about these national competitions. Meet in groups? Have set roles for parsers, math guys, etc.? Bah, I'd go to the pub, put down a couple guinesses, and then go to the competition (which would always have free pizza).
I'd always go solo (the local competitions allowed teams of 2), and usually did pretty well nonetheless. If I'd win something, that was cool and all (they were offering $200 video cards as prizes), but generally I'd just look at which problem no one had solved yet (they keep a running total of solved problems) and go after that. I loved it when I had the only solution in the room. Not good game strategy, but much more satisfying.
However, it's just BS reporter-ese to transition from "winning programming contest" to "best programmers in the world." It's like saying a person who wins a spelling bee is the best writer in the world. It's an accomplishment to be proud of, but given how hard foreign university teams train compared with ours (our team met once before the state competition, for example), I'm not surprised, nor shocked, that they tend to do better.
I think it's illegal in the sense that if you have packaging saying "There are no boobies in this game! Nope! None!" and then you do indeed have bare breasts, you can (maybe) get sued for that.
The trouble is, unlike Hot Coffee, which was accessible (albiet with difficulty) simply through the normal game, Oblivion requires you to actually modify the game files itself. There's no way to get at the files, so it's doubtful their ESRB rating could be construed as false advertising.
When I was in China for a month, I spent a lot of time in internet cafes writing to friends. At first, I didn't even try to use SSH presuming that it would be blocked; I was surprised to find it wasn't.
So I was tempted to just bypass the firewall by routing through my machine in America.
But then I noticed the guy wearing a Red Army outfit watching over the internet cafe.
Methinks they need to revise their presumptions. Software can do a lot of things, but it can't hide the fact you're reading a banned website from a physical eye-over-your-shoulder in an internet cafe (most common way the Chinese people I met there used the internet).
>>It's not avoiding the issue. There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and >>then there are really bad polls trying to masquarade as statistics.
And there are people that don't understand basic concepts like margin of error by complaining about only a couple hundred people in a poll.
The key thing about the polls is not self-reported "conservative" or "liberal" which tends to get misreported, but rather who they voted for. In every election, people in the mainstream media, across all levels from reporter to executive, vote Democrat over Republican by a wide, wide margin.
This is unquestionable.
>>Over and over by more bad polling
No, this is exactly the correct question to ask. Not "are you liberal or conservative?" but rather who they voted for.
>>, and by making one of more of the following fallacies: someone is >>liberal if they say something opposing a conservative candidate or >>official
See previous statement.
This isn't what was asked at all, but rather who they voted for which is a nice black and white question that eliminates pollster bias.
>>And your "journalists" argument is bullshit for a third reason: by >>focusing only on reporters
See above statements. The trend is across the entire spectrum.
>>For example, when Kenneth Tomlinson, the formoer CPB chairman, was >>monitoring PBS for "liberal bias", his consultant tagged Chuck Hagel, >>R-Nebraska, as "liberal" for having some disagreements with the Bush >>administration and misgivings over Iraq.
Correct. The story was liberal, even if the person was not.
Liberals rather famously try to appear "balanced" by using conservatives on their show that disagree with other conservatives.
Read this, learn this.
For example, NPR last month had a conservative economist who was bashing Bush's economic policies. Not that I disagree with the economist, in fact, but it earns a liberal tag, not a conservative one.
This is in contrast to, of course, actually running a conservative viewpoint.
>>you ignore the most conservative part of the media: talk radio
Correct. Talk radio rather famously became conservative because conservatives grew frustrated at the lack of their viewpoint being seen in TV and print. Rush Limbaugh's explosive success was not the result of his charming personality.
Again, it's not something you can even really argue about. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal. It's not even a stance, simply a fact.
>>1970. Just because someone is not a rabbid neocon or a hardcore conservative does not make them "liberal".
Uh, Neocon means they have adopted traditionally liberal positions in relation to the government's role in society. Big government? Liberals and neocons believe in that one. That's the main reason Bush is losing his conservative base.
>>>>NPR is unquestionably liberal. >>Nonsense. Name me a media source less biased than NPR.
Well, right. Exactly my point.
I've been tracking NPR stories here in SF for about two years now, and have yet to hear a single one with a conservative viewpoint. The balance is about 70% liberal, 30% neutral.
I call, for example, a story about defending the environment a liberal story, but a story about, say, the actual enviroment (such as Yosemite's pass being closed by a landslide) neutral. Conservatives attacking conservatives counts as liberal.
>>Oh, so because he's a self professed liberal, he's automatically discredited?
Not a self-professed liberal, but contributor to Mother Jones', then yeah.
>>You might pay attention during the parts where he lists conservative >>pundits who will admit that the "biased liberal media" is nothing more >>than political propoganda by the GOP.
As someone who has studied the media, I can tell you I wish more people were capable of recog
I had a major in Computer Science and a minor in writing, and work now professionally now as a writer (though I still do CS work on a regular basis).
The best class I took in college to prepare me was called Technical Writing. The key insight of the class was that one can use good writing techniques even when dealing with purely scientific material.
The example I remember the most went something like this: 1) "In early February, a robin was observed doing [some scientific term for preening feathers] well in advance of [some scientific term for mating season]." 2) "On February 4th, a robin was observed on a low cemetery wall, preening its feathers in an unseasonal display of mating behavior, well in advance of when similar sightings had been reported."
I don't think I'm making #1 dry enough (but it was really I-want-to-sleep-now dry), but I think one can see the point. The key point being the addition of the bird being observed on a cemetary wall. It doesn't really cost you any additional space, but it suddenly creates a mental image of the observation in progress instead of some purely numerical fact.
The course's other key observation is that one can use fiction writing techniques in technical writing. Not blatant vehicles like alliteration or metaphors, more like crafting beautiful sentences that still convey the same level of scientific fact and meaning. And this makes your technical writing much more enjoyable to read. And understandable -- which makes you in turn look something like a genius by being able to explain difficult concepts cleanly and easily.
It's a shard that gives you 2 points of augmentation (which does NOT count against the manifester limit) for free, three times per day. You can have up to one per level, so a 7th level psion would get 14 points of augmentation free 3 times per day, resulting as him being the equivalent of a 21st level psion for all intents and purposes. Magic of Eberron, can't remember the exact name since it's banned in Living Planar (www.livingplanar.com).
>>4) Some of the Eberron products are really well-designed.
Sure, like the one that lets a 7th level Psion cast as if he were a 21st level psion? Only three times per day, but that's some crazy astral constructs you can spit out. Or the original weretouched master, or bleh.
Well-designed and Eberron don't really go hand in hand. The setting is almost overwhelmingly bland, doesn't fit their goal (film noir / action film D&D) in the slightest, the setting has no rules support for this goal (action points does nothing to contribute to an action film setting), and about half the game content they release is too weak, the other half too strong.
>>240 journalists out of tens of thousands nationwide.
An interesting way to try to avoid the issue.
Meet statistics: that's a 6.25% margin of error (240 out of 10,000, 6.32% for 240 out of 100,000).
Also, the survey results have been repeatedly confirmed over and over. Liberal reporters outnumber conservative reporters by up to a 9-to-1 ratio. This is throughout various populations, and throughout the media establishment, not just at the reporter level (who do indeed write the articles or do the reporting in question -- bias seeps into everything one does, it's unavoidable).
People are quite good at sensing unspoken bias. People are comfortable listening to people speak that have the same set of operating beliefs as them. People become distraught and angry when they hear words spoken with a different set of underlying beliefs. Hence liberals do not believe the media has a liberal bias, and conservatives overwhelmingly do. Except for Fox News, which conservatives think is pretty well balanced, and liberals constantly mock and/or hate.
I'm personally center-wing, and get irritated at both sides. =)
As someone who has studied the media rather thoroughly (comm minor), I agree that you are right: they do indeed have big business' interests at heart. And they are also liberal. It's an odd synergy of philosophies, but is the dominant one in our mainstream media today, and has been for many decades now. So you'll see them hammering Bush on one hand, and then supporting measures like the DMCA on the other (if they even report on it at all).
As far as the people controlling the media being conservatives? No.
Ted Turner is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. He thought the 9-11 terrorists were "brave men", and thought the world would be better if Al Gore was elected. Sumner Redstone is a self described "liberal democrat" Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw were all liberals. NPR is unquestionably liberal. I've been listening to NPR and public radio here in San Francisco for years, and the closest thing I've heard to a conservative voice on NPR was a conservative attacking Bush for his spending policies. Which is actually a favorite tactic of a liberal media wanting to present "both sides".
>>The second reason this argument is bullshit, is because in the words of Eric Alterman, "you are only as liberal as the man who ones you".
I personally find it amusing that you'd use a quote from a contributor to Mother Jones' magazine to make a point that there's no liberal bias. "His books include What Liberal Bias? and The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America" -- a juxtoposition I find to be particularly amusing.
Unless you don't think Mother Jones' magazine has left-wing tendencies? Which, uh, would be at least a novel point of view.
Honestly, anyone who believes the media doesn't have a liberal bias is simply delusional. Well, I take that back. My favorite writing professor was a communist. He thought the media always represented big business (which is generally true, except when it comes to heavy industry) and that the media wasn't liberal enough. To him, Peter Jennings sounded like Sean Hannity. He simply couldn't be convinced otherwise.
That's why it's important to recognize one's own bias in trying to classify a reporter as liberal/conservative, and why I, whenever discussing the issue, always try to disregard opinion for fact. I know facts are dirty words to some people, but the nice thing about them is that one's own cognition can't change them.
9-to-1 voted for Clinton vs Bush Sr.
Dig your heels in, grit your teeth, pull your hair out, argue that a 6.23% margin of error is really a much larger number, whatever -- those are the facts.
>>You can't ignore something if you don't exist in the first place.
Every person is biased, and stories always reflect the political orientation of the writer, whether consciously or not.
So instead of looking at stories and arguing if they're biased toward a liberal or conservative POV, it's more instructive to just look at how reporters vote. I recalled it being reported back in the day that something like 90% of reporters voted for Clinton (vs Bush Sr.), so I dug around to find some references.
The funny thing about hard numbers is that you can't just wave your hands in the air or stick your head in the ground when confronted by them.
I personally think it would be very beneficial for every editorial in a newspaper to have a small Nolan Chart next to the name of every writer, and that TV news (especially) try to have reportage from people of opposite ends of the Nolan Chart.
I always pore over benchmarks before buying a new car, err, card.
If I absolutely wanted the best performance, I'd go with the 7900gtx. It has a real speed advantage over the 7900gt. But not a $200 advantage. It's called the price-performance ratio, and it's rather amusing the editors of slashdot have never heard of it before. You get reasonably increasing price and performance together as you move up a chain of video cards, CPUs, whatever, but then that last 10-20% of performance starts costing 150-200% as much. Wow, what a crazy revelation. And according to another slashdot article, you can go Quad 7900GTX now too. So that'll give you maybe +75% speedup over a single card for 400% the cost. It's a crazy, mixed up world we live in.
The main reason I'm probably going to buy a 7900GT is because overclocked versions exist in retail that give pretty nice speedup for only 20 bucks more or so. Search for 7900GTs on Newegg (GL finding them at Best Buy, the salesman looked at me funny yesterday when I asked about a 7900 -- he'd never heard of it), and look at the clock rate line they have for each card. Look for ones clocked in at 520MHz. Those are your best price/peformance cards right now.
I believe you're wrong. Check the ACM reference. I realize that really was a MS 'dirty little secret' for quite some time, but I believe they're completely MS-hosted now. If you have any evidence that they're still on a BSD, please post. A large number of Slashdotters would love to see it--myself very much included.
A friend of mine was hired at Hotmail (in Mountain View) a year or two ago because he was a UNIX nerd. They still use UNIX, just not on the actual servers. He does test tools, etc., and some of their backend stuff is UNIX.
It's funny when he wears his Thinkgeek stuff to work.
I unfortunately know too many people that think that "fighting while locked in a telephone booth" (or alternatively, a bathroom) is all they need to know. The trouble is, they not only suck when a person can step away, but also suck up close to anything beyond the limited number of short-range techniques they've seen. I just demonstrated a judo throw to one White Tiger guy (who wanted to "learn how to defeat Judo") and the guy tossed himself on the ground, he was so unused to throwing techniques.
What's interesting is that some studies I've found shows that martial arts is an effective treatment for ADD.
From my own personal experience too. When I get called in to teach kids classes I run the kids into the ground. Even the two kids with ADD in the class stop acting symptomatically by the end of the class. And over time, they've gotten an incredible amount better.
Pure BJJ guys have problems. I've done BJJ for a while, and plenty of them came into my Judo class to cross train. The reason? In a stand up fight about all they knew how to do was to grab on and fall. All of the even moderately experienced Judo guys in our class had a field day with that, even with the experienced BJJ guys. On the converse, BJJ guys would clean up Judo guys in matwork, and only the most experienced Judo guys could hold their own.
Hence I trained in BJJ, Judo and Tangsoodo (now Taekwondo), since I didn't like having glaring problems with my fighting style.
Been doing martial arts for about 10 years now (2nd Dan Taekwondo, also some Judo and BJJ). As best as I can tell, every 10-20lbs you have on a guy is worth about one rank. They have weight classes in martial arts for a reason: in an even match, the heavier guy has a tendency to win. I'm 6'6", 260lbs, and have had my ass kicked by all sorts of women and short guys back in the day, so I'm not saying it can't happen, but the advantage is certainly there.
Slashdot Mirror
I entered a couple programming contests for fun. It's kind of a thrill to have to solve 6 somewhat tricky problems in three hours, especially since you have to handle bad input of various unspecified ways. But at the same time, it's something that I kinda roll my eyes at when talking about these national competitions. Meet in groups? Have set roles for parsers, math guys, etc.? Bah, I'd go to the pub, put down a couple guinesses, and then go to the competition (which would always have free pizza).
I'd always go solo (the local competitions allowed teams of 2), and usually did pretty well nonetheless. If I'd win something, that was cool and all (they were offering $200 video cards as prizes), but generally I'd just look at which problem no one had solved yet (they keep a running total of solved problems) and go after that. I loved it when I had the only solution in the room. Not good game strategy, but much more satisfying.
However, it's just BS reporter-ese to transition from "winning programming contest" to "best programmers in the world." It's like saying a person who wins a spelling bee is the best writer in the world. It's an accomplishment to be proud of, but given how hard foreign university teams train compared with ours (our team met once before the state competition, for example), I'm not surprised, nor shocked, that they tend to do better.
>>What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?
You must not read Slashdot a lot. =)
There's been a number of stories about dedicated physics processors recently, many of them dupes
dupes.
Actually, mice are resistant to Warfarin now.
= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=621381&dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Yeah that was exactly my thinking on this... all a controller needs is tilt, preferably for games like Grand Turismo or motorcycle racing games.
I think it's illegal in the sense that if you have packaging saying "There are no boobies in this game! Nope! None!" and then you do indeed have bare breasts, you can (maybe) get sued for that.
The trouble is, unlike Hot Coffee, which was accessible (albiet with difficulty) simply through the normal game, Oblivion requires you to actually modify the game files itself. There's no way to get at the files, so it's doubtful their ESRB rating could be construed as false advertising.
When I was in China for a month, I spent a lot of time in internet cafes writing to friends. At first, I didn't even try to use SSH presuming that it would be blocked; I was surprised to find it wasn't.
So I was tempted to just bypass the firewall by routing through my machine in America.
But then I noticed the guy wearing a Red Army outfit watching over the internet cafe.
Methinks they need to revise their presumptions. Software can do a lot of things, but it can't hide the fact you're reading a banned website from a physical eye-over-your-shoulder in an internet cafe (most common way the Chinese people I met there used the internet).
GG
>>It's not avoiding the issue. There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and
>>then there are really bad polls trying to masquarade as statistics.
And there are people that don't understand basic concepts like margin of error by complaining about only a couple hundred people in a poll.
The key thing about the polls is not self-reported "conservative" or "liberal" which tends to get misreported, but rather who they voted for. In every election, people in the mainstream media, across all levels from reporter to executive, vote Democrat over Republican by a wide, wide margin.
This is unquestionable.
>>Over and over by more bad polling
No, this is exactly the correct question to ask. Not "are you liberal or conservative?" but rather who they voted for.
>>, and by making one of more of the following fallacies: someone is
>>liberal if they say something opposing a conservative candidate or
>>official
See previous statement.
This isn't what was asked at all, but rather who they voted for which is a nice black and white question that eliminates pollster bias.
>>And your "journalists" argument is bullshit for a third reason: by
>>focusing only on reporters
See above statements. The trend is across the entire spectrum.
>>For example, when Kenneth Tomlinson, the formoer CPB chairman, was
>>monitoring PBS for "liberal bias", his consultant tagged Chuck Hagel,
>>R-Nebraska, as "liberal" for having some disagreements with the Bush
>>administration and misgivings over Iraq.
Correct. The story was liberal, even if the person was not.
Liberals rather famously try to appear "balanced" by using conservatives on their show that disagree with other conservatives.
Read this, learn this.
For example, NPR last month had a conservative economist who was bashing Bush's economic policies. Not that I disagree with the economist, in fact, but it earns a liberal tag, not a conservative one.
This is in contrast to, of course, actually running a conservative viewpoint.
>>you ignore the most conservative part of the media: talk radio
Correct. Talk radio rather famously became conservative because conservatives grew frustrated at the lack of their viewpoint being seen in TV and print. Rush Limbaugh's explosive success was not the result of his charming personality.
Again, it's not something you can even really argue about. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal. It's not even a stance, simply a fact.
>>1970. Just because someone is not a rabbid neocon or a hardcore conservative does not make them "liberal".
Uh, Neocon means they have adopted traditionally liberal positions in relation to the government's role in society. Big government? Liberals and neocons believe in that one. That's the main reason Bush is losing his conservative base.
>>>>NPR is unquestionably liberal.
>>Nonsense. Name me a media source less biased than NPR.
Well, right. Exactly my point.
I've been tracking NPR stories here in SF for about two years now, and have yet to hear a single one with a conservative viewpoint. The balance is about 70% liberal, 30% neutral.
I call, for example, a story about defending the environment a liberal story, but a story about, say, the actual enviroment (such as Yosemite's pass being closed by a landslide) neutral. Conservatives attacking conservatives counts as liberal.
>>Oh, so because he's a self professed liberal, he's automatically discredited?
Not a self-professed liberal, but contributor to Mother Jones', then yeah.
>>You might pay attention during the parts where he lists conservative
>>pundits who will admit that the "biased liberal media" is nothing more
>>than political propoganda by the GOP.
As someone who has studied the media, I can tell you I wish more people were capable of recog
As one of my Lit professors put it: "The passive voice is a beautiful construct, but an overused one."
I had a major in Computer Science and a minor in writing, and work now professionally now as a writer (though I still do CS work on a regular basis).
The best class I took in college to prepare me was called Technical Writing. The key insight of the class was that one can use good writing techniques even when dealing with purely scientific material.
The example I remember the most went something like this:
1) "In early February, a robin was observed doing [some scientific term for preening feathers] well in advance of [some scientific term for mating season]."
2) "On February 4th, a robin was observed on a low cemetery wall, preening its feathers in an unseasonal display of mating behavior, well in advance of when similar sightings had been reported."
I don't think I'm making #1 dry enough (but it was really I-want-to-sleep-now dry), but I think one can see the point. The key point being the addition of the bird being observed on a cemetary wall. It doesn't really cost you any additional space, but it suddenly creates a mental image of the observation in progress instead of some purely numerical fact.
The course's other key observation is that one can use fiction writing techniques in technical writing. Not blatant vehicles like alliteration or metaphors, more like crafting beautiful sentences that still convey the same level of scientific fact and meaning. And this makes your technical writing much more enjoyable to read. And understandable -- which makes you in turn look something like a genius by being able to explain difficult concepts cleanly and easily.
Wait, Half Life 2 is finally out?
All I've played so far is some demo for the Havok engine.
It's a shard that gives you 2 points of augmentation (which does NOT count against the manifester limit) for free, three times per day. You can have up to one per level, so a 7th level psion would get 14 points of augmentation free 3 times per day, resulting as him being the equivalent of a 21st level psion for all intents and purposes. Magic of Eberron, can't remember the exact name since it's banned in Living Planar (www.livingplanar.com).
>>4) Some of the Eberron products are really well-designed.
Sure, like the one that lets a 7th level Psion cast as if he were a 21st level psion? Only three times per day, but that's some crazy astral constructs you can spit out. Or the original weretouched master, or bleh.
Well-designed and Eberron don't really go hand in hand. The setting is almost overwhelmingly bland, doesn't fit their goal (film noir / action film D&D) in the slightest, the setting has no rules support for this goal (action points does nothing to contribute to an action film setting), and about half the game content they release is too weak, the other half too strong.
Over all, I give all of Eberron 3/10.
>>Amal Grappsta
Anyone else read that as "Anal Grafster"?
I was wondering where the RFID would go anyway.
>>240 journalists out of tens of thousands nationwide.
An interesting way to try to avoid the issue.
Meet statistics: that's a 6.25% margin of error (240 out of 10,000, 6.32% for 240 out of 100,000).
Also, the survey results have been repeatedly confirmed over and over. Liberal reporters outnumber conservative reporters by up to a 9-to-1 ratio. This is throughout various populations, and throughout the media establishment, not just at the reporter level (who do indeed write the articles or do the reporting in question -- bias seeps into everything one does, it's unavoidable).
People are quite good at sensing unspoken bias. People are comfortable listening to people speak that have the same set of operating beliefs as them. People become distraught and angry when they hear words spoken with a different set of underlying beliefs. Hence liberals do not believe the media has a liberal bias, and conservatives overwhelmingly do. Except for Fox News, which conservatives think is pretty well balanced, and liberals constantly mock and/or hate.
I'm personally center-wing, and get irritated at both sides. =)
As someone who has studied the media rather thoroughly (comm minor), I agree that you are right: they do indeed have big business' interests at heart. And they are also liberal. It's an odd synergy of philosophies, but is the dominant one in our mainstream media today, and has been for many decades now. So you'll see them hammering Bush on one hand, and then supporting measures like the DMCA on the other (if they even report on it at all).
As far as the people controlling the media being conservatives? No.
Ted Turner is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. He thought the 9-11 terrorists were "brave men", and thought the world would be better if Al Gore was elected.
Sumner Redstone is a self described "liberal democrat"
Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw were all liberals.
NPR is unquestionably liberal. I've been listening to NPR and public radio here in San Francisco for years, and the closest thing I've heard to a conservative voice on NPR was a conservative attacking Bush for his spending policies. Which is actually a favorite tactic of a liberal media wanting to present "both sides".
>>The second reason this argument is bullshit, is because in the words of Eric Alterman, "you are only as liberal as the man who ones you".
I personally find it amusing that you'd use a quote from a contributor to Mother Jones' magazine to make a point that there's no liberal bias. "His books include What Liberal Bias? and The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America" -- a juxtoposition I find to be particularly amusing.
Unless you don't think Mother Jones' magazine has left-wing tendencies? Which, uh, would be at least a novel point of view.
Honestly, anyone who believes the media doesn't have a liberal bias is simply delusional. Well, I take that back. My favorite writing professor was a communist. He thought the media always represented big business (which is generally true, except when it comes to heavy industry) and that the media wasn't liberal enough. To him, Peter Jennings sounded like Sean Hannity. He simply couldn't be convinced otherwise.
That's why it's important to recognize one's own bias in trying to classify a reporter as liberal/conservative, and why I, whenever discussing the issue, always try to disregard opinion for fact. I know facts are dirty words to some people, but the nice thing about them is that one's own cognition can't change them.
9-to-1 voted for Clinton vs Bush Sr.
Dig your heels in, grit your teeth, pull your hair out, argue that a 6.23% margin of error is really a much larger number, whatever -- those are the facts.
What an interesting world you live in when you know the Gennifer Flowers story is fake.
When, you know, Clinton himself has admitted to having an affair with her.
Unless you know better than the people in question?
Hm.
Odd, very odd.
>>You can't ignore something if you don't exist in the first place.
i cs.html#HOW%20THE%20MEDIA%20VOTE
Every person is biased, and stories always reflect the political orientation of the writer, whether consciously or not.
So instead of looking at stories and arguing if they're biased toward a liberal or conservative POV, it's more instructive to just look at how reporters vote. I recalled it being reported back in the day that something like 90% of reporters voted for Clinton (vs Bush Sr.), so I dug around to find some references.
Start here, and scroll down:
http://secure.mediaresearch.org/news/MediaBiasBas
The funny thing about hard numbers is that you can't just wave your hands in the air or stick your head in the ground when confronted by them.
I personally think it would be very beneficial for every editorial in a newspaper to have a small Nolan Chart next to the name of every writer, and that TV news (especially) try to have reportage from people of opposite ends of the Nolan Chart.
Front page Drudge Report, darling of conservative "indie" news readers.
Fox is covering it too.
Why would only the liberal media be ignoring it? Thats the real question. I'd expect stories tomorrow night.
Ignored? It's front page on the drudge report.
http://www.drudgereport.com/
Must be a slow news day when Slashdot is reporting on Stephen Colbert making fun of republicans.
What's next, the NY Times not agreeing with the president on Iraq?
Dog bites man
I always pore over benchmarks before buying a new car, err, card.
If I absolutely wanted the best performance, I'd go with the 7900gtx. It has a real speed advantage over the 7900gt. But not a $200 advantage. It's called the price-performance ratio, and it's rather amusing the editors of slashdot have never heard of it before. You get reasonably increasing price and performance together as you move up a chain of video cards, CPUs, whatever, but then that last 10-20% of performance starts costing 150-200% as much. Wow, what a crazy revelation. And according to another slashdot article, you can go Quad 7900GTX now too. So that'll give you maybe +75% speedup over a single card for 400% the cost. It's a crazy, mixed up world we live in.
The main reason I'm probably going to buy a 7900GT is because overclocked versions exist in retail that give pretty nice speedup for only 20 bucks more or so. Search for 7900GTs on Newegg (GL finding them at Best Buy, the salesman looked at me funny yesterday when I asked about a 7900 -- he'd never heard of it), and look at the clock rate line they have for each card. Look for ones clocked in at 520MHz. Those are your best price/peformance cards right now.
I believe you're wrong. Check the ACM reference. I realize that really was a MS 'dirty little secret' for quite some time, but I believe they're completely MS-hosted now. If you have any evidence that they're still on a BSD, please post. A large number of Slashdotters would love to see it--myself very much included.
A friend of mine was hired at Hotmail (in Mountain View) a year or two ago because he was a UNIX nerd. They still use UNIX, just not on the actual servers. He does test tools, etc., and some of their backend stuff is UNIX.
It's funny when he wears his Thinkgeek stuff to work.
Lol
Let me guess: White Tiger Gong Fu?
I unfortunately know too many people that think that "fighting while locked in a telephone booth" (or alternatively, a bathroom) is all they need to know. The trouble is, they not only suck when a person can step away, but also suck up close to anything beyond the limited number of short-range techniques they've seen. I just demonstrated a judo throw to one White Tiger guy (who wanted to "learn how to defeat Judo") and the guy tossed himself on the ground, he was so unused to throwing techniques.
What's interesting is that some studies I've found shows that martial arts is an effective treatment for ADD.
From my own personal experience too. When I get called in to teach kids classes I run the kids into the ground. Even the two kids with ADD in the class stop acting symptomatically by the end of the class. And over time, they've gotten an incredible amount better.
Pure BJJ guys have problems. I've done BJJ for a while, and plenty of them came into my Judo class to cross train. The reason? In a stand up fight about all they knew how to do was to grab on and fall. All of the even moderately experienced Judo guys in our class had a field day with that, even with the experienced BJJ guys. On the converse, BJJ guys would clean up Judo guys in matwork, and only the most experienced Judo guys could hold their own.
Hence I trained in BJJ, Judo and Tangsoodo (now Taekwondo), since I didn't like having glaring problems with my fighting style.
Been doing martial arts for about 10 years now (2nd Dan Taekwondo, also some Judo and BJJ). As best as I can tell, every 10-20lbs you have on a guy is worth about one rank. They have weight classes in martial arts for a reason: in an even match, the heavier guy has a tendency to win. I'm 6'6", 260lbs, and have had my ass kicked by all sorts of women and short guys back in the day, so I'm not saying it can't happen, but the advantage is certainly there.