Huh? The academy doesn't pay people? Medical research is a net negative?
Maybe you could make some money doing character consulting for an upcoming season of Portlandia.
Forget the catchall mailbox. http://mailinator.com/ has a great system for disposable email addresses, with the caveat that you shouldn't use it if your personal information is on the line. But if you just need to give an email address to a site and get something in return that's not sensitive, it's fantastic.
You know, of course Google has the right to put just about anything in their logo, and where ever you draw the line, that's great. But they do have some kind of issue with respect. Because frankly, putting people/things in your corporate logo is really not that much of an honor.
They did this on MLK day, with an image of Dr. King that is frankly absurd. I posted about it and put together a similar McDonalds logo at the time:
My pet peeve is related. I don't know if it's the submitter or the editor who picks these titles, but the sensationalist posts of the form "Do ___, Go to Jail" are positively ludicrous. More often than not, the article in question is about a legal opinion, or legislation, or proposed legislation. And whatever it's about, "___" is a vast oversimplification and misrepresents some crucial bit of nasty information about the case. And in any case, often no one has gone to jail.
"Send Email to Utah, Go to Jail" "Get a Cablemodem, Go to Jail"
I confess that occasionally there are articles that involve a sentence that includes prison time, but these are few and far between...
this is not quite right. when people say "three sphere," they mean the same object that you call a sphere in four dimensional space. however, it doesn't necessarily need to be embedded in any four (or higher) dimensional space. the important part is that viewed in isolation, it's got three dimensions of its own.
the "sphere" you know and love, we call the "two sphere."
nobody uses media player to encode mp3's. media player doesn't do that! they are ADDING that functionality, but only up to 56k. and now they're going to get condemned on slashdot doing that, and probably also for introducing a format that sounds better and is smaller.
maybe alan macdiarmid? he's at penn, in the chemistry department (and somehow connected with the lrsm, the building across the street from me) and he just won the nobel prize in chemistry for plastics that are conductors, or some such thing (i am not a chemist).
- pal
Re:It doesn't matter what degree you get
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
I was more of a software than a hardware person (translation: only a heavy-duty HP calculator got me through my calculus classes)
i don't think this is fair.. i have a bs and an ms in mathematics, which i love, but i hate hardware. i like software a lot (getting an ms in cs). it's pretty much all about personal preference.
it looks to me like article misrepresents what's going on. look at the other "permissions" on that screen shot. like -- it cannot be printed, and the text cannot be copied to the clipboard. they sound like capabilities of the software that this particular book is denying the user.
so it seems reasonable to me to think that this particular listing (cannot be read aloud) might mean there is a feature of the software that will use voice synthesis to read a text aloud, and this particular book has disabled that.
i knew someone that ran a bbs for years. he was using cnet on an amiga, and by '92 he had 21 nodes up. that's twenty-one 19.2 usr couriers. he slept in the room next to the one the computer was in.
the thing that makes this amazing is that he LEFT THE MODEM SPEAKERS ON! at a low volume, to be sure, but those damned things buzzed and screeched 24 hours a day, every minute or two. absolutely annoying.
the setup was impressive in other ways. like, the power supplies to the modems. there were many of them, and since they put the blocky transformer part ON the plug (which is still immensely stupid) you can't fit more than three of them on a power supply. so he had nearly a dozen power supplies with transformers filling the area under the desk. it was hot.
and the phone company had to dig up his yard to install some kind of switchboard with about a million wires, in his basement.
i disagree somewhat. i think they thought of "bob" themselves. =)
anyway, i _do_ like microsoft hardware. i never saw a wheel on a mouse before microsoft did it, and that damned thing is addictive. in fact, after a week of using it at work, i had to get rid of it because i found myself trying to use it when i got home to my linux box.
and the sidewinder gamepad is the most comfortable gamepad i've ever had the pleasure to use.
- pal
Re:DeCSS will be good for DVD
on
DeCSS Update
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· Score: 1
i didn't say every movie collector was a loser. that would be a stupid claim.
i just wanted to make the point that the mpaa can't possibly believe they are losing all that much money by selling dvds on other continents that don't play here, and vice versa.
the control they gain doing this is not really hurting them.
- pal
Re:DeCSS will be good for DVD
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 1
i'm going to go out on a limb here and risk coming off as flamebait. i agree that your point is valid, but i also think that portion of the population that is as well traveled and worldly as you are is not the same portion that the mpaa wants to target.
most of the people i know who spend boatloads of money on home electronics, including home theatre systems and dvd players (and dvds) are... well, are moderately loserish (which is as polite a term as i can come up with). i know someone that owns upwards of 300 dvds, two players, and an amazing system. i don't know the last time he left his house, let alone the state or the country.
i mean, really, how much money do you think they should plan to make off of americans purchasing their own copy of "galaxy quest" while on tour in europe? (compare this figure with the money they'll make on the same movie from guys who never kissed a girl).
i agree region encoding is stupid, but i disagree that it's necessarily bad business. corporations typically try not to take actions that cost them profit.. and if you prove them wrong on this one, they'll adapt.
if you lay you a grid of squares 64 units on a side, then the average distance between a point in the plane and the grid is 32/3, a little less than 11. to arrive at this number you have to integrate the distance function over the square, and divide by its area. it's not obvious. (one way to see that your answer of 32 is wrong is to notice that 32 is the _maximal_ distance between a point and the grid. most points are closer.)
also, to assume that the population is uniformly distributed is really wrong. most everyone will live in clumps, and railroads will run right through those clumps. so the average distance is going to be much smaller than 11.
aside from that, they clearly don't want to run the connection straight to residences.
i thought the movie was enjoyable, but that's neither here nor there. what i want to know is -- what kind of motorcycles were used in the conclusion? or, how would i find out?
1 is _not_ a prime number. there are many different, but equivalent, definitions of a prime number. none of them include 1.
basically, a prime is a non-unit that cannot be written as the product of two non-units. a non-unit is something that doesn't have a multiplicative inverse in the system (ring) we are looking at. for instance, 2 has no inverse (which we usually would call 1/2) in the integers, and any product that includes two non-units cannot be 2. so 2 is prime.
however, 1 has an inverse -- itself.
if we permitted units to be considered prime, we would totally mess up the idea of "unique factorization," which the primes are pretty much designed for.
how are they going to do this; does anyone know? will the dreamcast be capable of booting off the bleem cd and then permitting you to insert another cd? or is there some kind of solid-state plug that they can use?
also, aren't playstation cd's crippled somehow (with bad sectors?) how would the dreamcast read these things if it's not expecting it?
hey.. that brings up a good point. i wonder if bleem checks for the bad sectors like a playstation does. if not, buy a dreamcast with bleem, and then you can play duplicated playstation games without having to do anything nasty to the interior of a playstation..
well, i rather liked that service (my.mp3.com) while it lasted.
anyway, now that they can't do that anymore, i wonder what they are going to do with the database they spent all that time creating? i'll volunteer to.. uh.. take the hard drives with all the mp3's.. =)
if the mp3's you want to listen to are already available online, why would you want to use an external site to simply link to them? i agree that would probably sheild them from the law they are currently up against, but such a service doesn't make any sense.
i have copied entire books. many people i know have. text books are way too expensive, especially the ones i care about. fortunately, such books are not too large, and my department has a photocopier that is free to graduate students.
of course, i sometimes buy the book, if i discover that i'll be using it for years to come.
first of all, no one would dare call a cryptosystem secure UNLESS it has been through exhaustive public cryptanalysis.
and secondly, yes, authors can put back doors in their programs in subtle ways. however, unless you agree to write ALL of the software that you use, the absolute BEST solution to this that you can hope for is access to the source code. now, since you're not embarking on the task of writing all the software you use (i think RMS was for a while), that means software for which source is available is your best bet. the more people that have the source, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? The academy doesn't pay people? Medical research is a net negative? Maybe you could make some money doing character consulting for an upcoming season of Portlandia.
Forget the catchall mailbox. http://mailinator.com/ has a great system for disposable email addresses, with the caveat that you shouldn't use it if your personal information is on the line. But if you just need to give an email address to a site and get something in return that's not sensitive, it's fantastic.
They did this on MLK day, with an image of Dr. King that is frankly absurd. I posted about it and put together a similar McDonalds logo at the time:
http://iheartteriyaki.blogspot.com/2006/01/on-icon s-and-logos.html
"Send Email to Utah, Go to Jail"
"Get a Cablemodem, Go to Jail"
I confess that occasionally there are articles that involve a sentence that includes prison time, but these are few and far between...
this is not quite right. when people say "three sphere," they mean the same object that you call a sphere in four dimensional space. however, it doesn't necessarily need to be embedded in any four (or higher) dimensional space. the important part is that viewed in isolation, it's got three dimensions of its own.
the "sphere" you know and love, we call the "two sphere."
- pal
nobody uses media player to encode mp3's. media player doesn't do that! they are ADDING that functionality, but only up to 56k. and now they're going to get condemned on slashdot doing that, and probably also for introducing a format that sounds better and is smaller.
maybe alan macdiarmid? he's at penn, in the chemistry department (and somehow connected with the lrsm, the building across the street from me) and he just won the nobel prize in chemistry for plastics that are conductors, or some such thing (i am not a chemist).
- pal
i don't think this is fair.. i have a bs and an ms in mathematics, which i love, but i hate hardware. i like software a lot (getting an ms in cs). it's pretty much all about personal preference.
it looks to me like article misrepresents what's going on. look at the other "permissions" on that screen shot. like -- it cannot be printed, and the text cannot be copied to the clipboard. they sound like capabilities of the software that this particular book is denying the user.
so it seems reasonable to me to think that this particular listing (cannot be read aloud) might mean there is a feature of the software that will use voice synthesis to read a text aloud, and this particular book has disabled that.
if that's so, shame on slashdot for posting this.
- pal
yes you can. just not in the same hole.
- pal
i knew someone that ran a bbs for years. he was using cnet on an amiga, and by '92 he had 21 nodes up. that's twenty-one 19.2 usr couriers. he slept in the room next to the one the computer was in.
the thing that makes this amazing is that he LEFT THE MODEM SPEAKERS ON! at a low volume, to be sure, but those damned things buzzed and screeched 24 hours a day, every minute or two. absolutely annoying.
the setup was impressive in other ways. like, the power supplies to the modems. there were many of them, and since they put the blocky transformer part ON the plug (which is still immensely stupid) you can't fit more than three of them on a power supply. so he had nearly a dozen power supplies with transformers filling the area under the desk. it was hot.
and the phone company had to dig up his yard to install some kind of switchboard with about a million wires, in his basement.
- pal
i disagree somewhat. i think they thought of "bob" themselves. =)
anyway, i _do_ like microsoft hardware. i never saw a wheel on a mouse before microsoft did it, and that damned thing is addictive. in fact, after a week of using it at work, i had to get rid of it because i found myself trying to use it when i got home to my linux box.
and the sidewinder gamepad is the most comfortable gamepad i've ever had the pleasure to use.
- pal
i didn't say every movie collector was a loser. that would be a stupid claim.
i just wanted to make the point that the mpaa can't possibly believe they are losing all that much money by selling dvds on other continents that don't play here, and vice versa.
the control they gain doing this is not really hurting them.
- pal
i'm going to go out on a limb here and risk coming off as flamebait. i agree that your point is valid, but i also think that portion of the population that is as well traveled and worldly as you are is not the same portion that the mpaa wants to target.
most of the people i know who spend boatloads of money on home electronics, including home theatre systems and dvd players (and dvds) are... well, are moderately loserish (which is as polite a term as i can come up with). i know someone that owns upwards of 300 dvds, two players, and an amazing system. i don't know the last time he left his house, let alone the state or the country.
i mean, really, how much money do you think they should plan to make off of americans purchasing their own copy of "galaxy quest" while on tour in europe? (compare this figure with the money they'll make on the same movie from guys who never kissed a girl).
i agree region encoding is stupid, but i disagree that it's necessarily bad business. corporations typically try not to take actions that cost them profit.. and if you prove them wrong on this one, they'll adapt.
- pal
hi,
if you lay you a grid of squares 64 units on a side, then the average distance between a point in the plane and the grid is 32/3, a little less than 11. to arrive at this number you have to integrate the distance function over the square, and divide by its area. it's not obvious. (one way to see that your answer of 32 is wrong is to notice that 32 is the _maximal_ distance between a point and the grid. most points are closer.)
also, to assume that the population is uniformly distributed is really wrong. most everyone will live in clumps, and railroads will run right through those clumps. so the average distance is going to be much smaller than 11.
aside from that, they clearly don't want to run the connection straight to residences.
- pal
hey,
i thought the movie was enjoyable, but that's neither here nor there. what i want to know is -- what kind of motorcycles were used in the conclusion? or, how would i find out?
- pal
NP-hard is a larger class than NP. the intersection of NP-hard and NP is NPC. one would call "in NP but outside of P" simply "NP-P".
- pal
1 is _not_ a prime number. there are many different, but equivalent, definitions of a prime number. none of them include 1.
basically, a prime is a non-unit that cannot be written as the product of two non-units. a non-unit is something that doesn't have a multiplicative inverse in the system (ring) we are looking at. for instance, 2 has no inverse (which we usually would call 1/2) in the integers, and any product that includes two non-units cannot be 2. so 2 is prime.
however, 1 has an inverse -- itself.
if we permitted units to be considered prime, we would totally mess up the idea of "unique factorization," which the primes are pretty much designed for.
- pal
how are they going to do this; does anyone know? will the dreamcast be capable of booting off the bleem cd and then permitting you to insert another cd? or is there some kind of solid-state plug that they can use?
also, aren't playstation cd's crippled somehow (with bad sectors?) how would the dreamcast read these things if it's not expecting it?
hey.. that brings up a good point. i wonder if bleem checks for the bad sectors like a playstation does. if not, buy a dreamcast with bleem, and then you can play duplicated playstation games without having to do anything nasty to the interior of a playstation..
- pal
well, i rather liked that service (my.mp3.com) while it lasted.
anyway, now that they can't do that anymore, i wonder what they are going to do with the database they spent all that time creating? i'll volunteer to.. uh.. take the hard drives with all the mp3's.. =)
if the mp3's you want to listen to are already available online, why would you want to use an external site to simply link to them? i agree that would probably sheild them from the law they are currently up against, but such a service doesn't make any sense.
i have copied entire books. many people i know have. text books are way too expensive, especially the ones i care about. fortunately, such books are not too large, and my department has a photocopier that is free to graduate students.
of course, i sometimes buy the book, if i discover that i'll be using it for years to come.
- pal
the funniest thing about this is that half of the _replies_ read "have some decency; don't reply, you twits!"
ah, the hypocrisy..
- pal
the AVERAGE web site admin gets $50/hr?
that can't be true.
- pal
first of all, no one would dare call a cryptosystem secure UNLESS it has been through exhaustive public cryptanalysis.
and secondly, yes, authors can put back doors in their programs in subtle ways. however, unless you agree to write ALL of the software that you use, the absolute BEST solution to this that you can hope for is access to the source code. now, since you're not embarking on the task of writing all the software you use (i think RMS was for a while), that means software for which source is available is your best bet. the more people that have the source, the better.
- pal