We USians love our blind people too... Thats why the notes are all the same size and color, its much easier to 'help' our blind people tip well for services that way:D
The only substantive change we could do immediately to reduce C02 production would be to transition to nuclear power.
While I'll agree with many anti-nuclear folks that nuclear waste handling is a problem without a really good long-term solution (but I disagree that it is insoluble, or even a near-term show-stopper), it looks like we are quickly reaching the point where switching to nuclear even without a long term waste disposal solution makes more sense than continuing to burn coal. At least nuclear waste is more of an economic problem (have to pay to transport, reprocess and store it) than an environmental problem (as long as we aren't releasing it into the enviromnent).
Photographs wouldn't do much to show you proof, film had only just been invented (by Edison), and 3rd party observers of the time would have been easy to dupe (radio was pretty new and freaky stuff back then), so the only proof that would be sound would be a working model.
Tesla did come up with some pretty cool stuff, but he also invented quite a lot of stuff based upon his unusual ability to simulate experiments purely in thought. Sometimes it worked, sometimes he didn't get it quite right, but in his arrogance he most likely figured it was just a matter of getting the thing built properly rather than a problem with the concept.
Tesla was certainly a bright guy, but he was also a bit of a nutcase, so take the more extraordinary claims with a grain of salt. From what I've read it wasn't uncommon for Tesla to make extraordinariy claims as to what he was working on and had done, based on his confidence that he could actually get the stuff working.
[Edison] held many public demonstrations at which he used AC to electrocute live animals
Incidentally, he used his new movie camera invention to record one of the more ambitious electrocutions, in which an elephant was put down. The video is available on most p2p services.
because it means 100 different things depending on what you should really be asking.
This is the kind of response I would expect from an engineer. I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it is typical of people who tend to focus more on machines and processes rather than interpersonal relationships and social situations. The ability to ask a question in a way that allows the responder some choice in the context is a valuable social skill. Unless you are dealing with engineers of course, they tend to prefer specifics.
Managers, good ones anyway, will try to foster some kind of agreeable but loose social interaction with the people they manage. With most people this is a simple matter of asking an open-ended question or two to encourage participation in 'small talk', the function of which is to allow the participants to recognize a loose social bond where no other interaction is normally required (i.e., the participants don't have a specific reason for social contact, such as a trade, but wish to maintain a social bond so that future interaction, if necessary, will be easier).
As you note, engineering-types generally find this kind of interaction to be a waste of time. I attribute this to either a lack of knowledge about social interaction and its purpose, or to the lack of need for social bonds to perform their functions (the former often want to interact, but don't know how, the latter usually just don't care about 'empty' interaction and do just fine with others who feel similarly).
Attitudes like yours are what make traditional managers loath to manage engineering-types. Unfortunately thats their own fault. Engineers are probably easier to manage as long as one tasks them appropriately and recognizes their 'interface specs', as it were.
Just recently researchers have succeded in replacing the pacemaker cells in rat hearts with similar cells taken from embronic rats. They installed the new cells, then destroyed the original cells and the heart continued to beat. Pretty cool because the new cells respond to the signals that cause them to increase the heart rate when required. Its possibly useful because the new cells can be grown from stem cells.
I think Science News had the article. Not availble online though.
While I'm not disagreeing, can you explain precisely why the phrase 'how is x going' is a bad usage of English? Certainly its colloquial, but that doesn't make it bad, just casual.
Culture is such a soft, fuzzy thing, right, and it couldn't be hard at all to make everything mesh, right? You'd think so, because it's basically impossible to put into words why it is difficult
I've always considered the science of human social dynamics to be one of the fields that has the greatest potential of all the sciences. We don't yet have the knowledge necessary to analyse and make predictions about social situations in a rigirous way, but when we do the benefits will be enormous. The lack of vocabulary to describe specific recurring patterns in a social setting is one of the indicators that we haven't yet documented and understood the system. There are names for some small-scale situations, e.g., 'third wheel', 'threesome', 'company christmas party' (the latter being the most henious), and many more, but there is a notable lack of formal theory about how the recognized elements fit together and react to each other.
Unfortunately part of the issue with studying this field is that its goal to better understand how to achieve, um, synergistic social engineering solutions will be seen by many to be a form of mind control, tinfoil hat and black helicopter stuff. In a way, it is, and it could certainly be abused so that certain organizations could achieve their own ends at the expense of others, however, that already happens. This is the kind of tool that would allow more people to analyze and understand what other people are trying to make happen.
Why, yes, I have recently read the Foundation series.
Yeah, I pioneered the EL backlighting (theres a link on those pages to my old host, which is long dead) many, many years ago. Unfortumnately Rich's web design don't appear to have improved any more than my own:)
why aren't you bitching about why an auto's speedometer is routinely called a "speedometer" rather than the more accurate "velocimeter" since speed indicates direction
Perhaps because velocity is a vector composed of speed and direction?
good to know that there are people here who acutally understnd Godel.
If there are simple systems that are complete and complex systems that are not complete, and we can add to the complexity of a simple system by adding rules, where is the point at which systems become incomplete?
A test would be to see if we can express the system within itself, as I understand Godel did, but is that the only way to know? Is it possible that there are systems that are incomplete, but are not powerful enough to be tested using that method?
nope, agnostic is something else. An agnostic (from 'without knowledge') holds a belief that we do not or cannot have the knowledge of the existance of gods.
I can be both a negative, or 'weak', athiest, and at the same time be agnostic. That is, I can believe that we cannot know if gods exist, and not have a belief in gods (as it happens, this is my position).
A positive, or 'strong', athiest believes that god does not exist, and therefor cannot be agnostic. To claim both positions would be contradictory (of course, there isn't really any reason why one can't hold contradictory beliefs, consistancy is overrated anyway, and it really confounds those guys who keep asking me to come to some place they call 'Kingdom Hall').
They claimed that it was incapable of working, so they wouldn't provide it or support it that way. They were proven to be liars. Since the only reason given was that of a technical problem, and that technical problem was solved, then they should be required to support it.
That is truely an incredible line of reasoning. Perhaps you just didn't make your point clear, or perhaps you're just trolling.
The maker of a device is free to choose what features it will or will not support (except where there are laws compelling certain features), regardless of the potential of the device. They are under no obligation to support features that users have added for themselves, and may be within their rights to refuse to support the device at all if it has been used in a manner they deem likely to damage it beyond reasonable limits.
The statement should have been qualified with "in today's society", and presuming those conditions persist long enough to allow natural selection to produce the trend.
I doubt that the decade or two we've had these multitasking pressures would result in significant evolutionary change.
I've never been in NYC, but I spent 10 years in SA, so I know that an important transportation consideration is the climate. There is a reason you can almost always park even the largest SUV within about a 5 minute walk of your destination. In the summer it gets quite warm, frequently 100 to 105F, which makes walking very far uncomfortable, particularly in business or business casual dress. If you're in shape and clothed appropriately its not a problem. Until you get to your destination that is, where the indoor temperature will be anywhere from 68 to 72 degrees and you'll be woefully underdressed.
It also doesn't help that a large proportion of the population is obese. Transit solutions that require lots of walking are not popular with this crowd (but low indoor temperatures are).
This is the reason I like driving on the Kansas Turnpike portion of I-35 (which I did just a couple of days ago, as part of a drive from south of San Antonio to Nebraska (curiously, the highest speed limit was in Nebraska on I-80, where its 75mph, not in Texas, where I'd expect the long distances to encourage high speeds). Nearly all of the turnpike is through undeveloped ranchland. If you tune out the fences its like driving through 1850. All it needed was vast herds of American Bison and some Plains Indians.
it was Herr Hitler [...] who laid the groudwork(sic) for [the autobahn]
So? Does that make it Evil? Even super villians need good tools if they are to make an attempt to take over the world. What's important is how one uses the tool.
Re:Why build more roads for long-haul transportati
on
The Super Superhighway
·
· Score: 1
Somewhat off-topic, but I saw an interesting thing on the railway this week on my drive from south of San Antonio to Nebraska. I was watching a train passing by the tracks, and I noticed that while it was carrying semi trailers, it did not have them on flatbed cars as usual. Each trailer had a set of railway wheels attached to its rear and its front connected to the trailer in front of it. The road tires skimmed along a couple of feet above the track. The trailers were obviously purpose-built, but it was cool to see a new(?) method used to move stuff.
the most exciting one is making everything distributed. Everyone caches a bit of sites and only checks a timestamp when they get a query
Freenet uses a scheme similar to this. Content is inserted into the network with a unique cryptographic key (*nb). The data is inserted with a 'depth' parameter, specifying an approximate TTL value for the insertion directive. Hosts along the way cache the data and pass it to the next host until the TTL expires (hosts usually, but not always, decriment the TTL). When a query for a particular key comes through, many hosts can return bits of the file. The more popular the content, the more likely it is that many hosts will have a copy.
Of course, once content is inserted, its permanent, but there are schemes in place to handle superceding old issues.
Slashdot Mirror
We USians love our blind people too... Thats why the notes are all the same size and color, its much easier to 'help' our blind people tip well for services that way :D
with a little more effort, we could recreate the whole Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual!
Great, I've got the 'housecat' entry covered, whats next?
Cleaner too. I don't have to shower nearly as often now that I've switched fo phishing. Highly recommended.
The only substantive change we could do immediately to reduce C02 production would be to transition to nuclear power.
While I'll agree with many anti-nuclear folks that nuclear waste handling is a problem without a really good long-term solution (but I disagree that it is insoluble, or even a near-term show-stopper), it looks like we are quickly reaching the point where switching to nuclear even without a long term waste disposal solution makes more sense than continuing to burn coal. At least nuclear waste is more of an economic problem (have to pay to transport, reprocess and store it) than an environmental problem (as long as we aren't releasing it into the enviromnent).
Photographs wouldn't do much to show you proof, film had only just been invented (by Edison), and 3rd party observers of the time would have been easy to dupe (radio was pretty new and freaky stuff back then), so the only proof that would be sound would be a working model.
Tesla did come up with some pretty cool stuff, but he also invented quite a lot of stuff based upon his unusual ability to simulate experiments purely in thought. Sometimes it worked, sometimes he didn't get it quite right, but in his arrogance he most likely figured it was just a matter of getting the thing built properly rather than a problem with the concept.
Tesla was certainly a bright guy, but he was also a bit of a nutcase, so take the more extraordinary claims with a grain of salt. From what I've read it wasn't uncommon for Tesla to make extraordinariy claims as to what he was working on and had done, based on his confidence that he could actually get the stuff working.
[Edison] held many public demonstrations at which he used AC to electrocute live animals
Incidentally, he used his new movie camera invention to record one of the more ambitious electrocutions, in which an elephant was put down. The video is available on most p2p services.
because it means 100 different things depending on what you should really be asking.
This is the kind of response I would expect from an engineer. I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it is typical of people who tend to focus more on machines and processes rather than interpersonal relationships and social situations. The ability to ask a question in a way that allows the responder some choice in the context is a valuable social skill. Unless you are dealing with engineers of course, they tend to prefer specifics.
Managers, good ones anyway, will try to foster some kind of agreeable but loose social interaction with the people they manage. With most people this is a simple matter of asking an open-ended question or two to encourage participation in 'small talk', the function of which is to allow the participants to recognize a loose social bond where no other interaction is normally required (i.e., the participants don't have a specific reason for social contact, such as a trade, but wish to maintain a social bond so that future interaction, if necessary, will be easier).
As you note, engineering-types generally find this kind of interaction to be a waste of time. I attribute this to either a lack of knowledge about social interaction and its purpose, or to the lack of need for social bonds to perform their functions (the former often want to interact, but don't know how, the latter usually just don't care about 'empty' interaction and do just fine with others who feel similarly).
Attitudes like yours are what make traditional managers loath to manage engineering-types. Unfortunately thats their own fault. Engineers are probably easier to manage as long as one tasks them appropriately and recognizes their 'interface specs', as it were.
Just recently researchers have succeded in replacing the pacemaker cells in rat hearts with similar cells taken from embronic rats. They installed the new cells, then destroyed the original cells and the heart continued to beat. Pretty cool because the new cells respond to the signals that cause them to increase the heart rate when required. Its possibly useful because the new cells can be grown from stem cells.
I think Science News had the article. Not availble online though.
Heck, if we in the US would follow the French lead on nuclear power generation we wouldn't have to war over oil either.
While I'm not disagreeing, can you explain precisely why the phrase 'how is x going' is a bad usage of English? Certainly its colloquial, but that doesn't make it bad, just casual.
Culture is such a soft, fuzzy thing, right, and it couldn't be hard at all to make everything mesh, right? You'd think so, because it's basically impossible to put into words why it is difficult
I've always considered the science of human social dynamics to be one of the fields that has the greatest potential of all the sciences. We don't yet have the knowledge necessary to analyse and make predictions about social situations in a rigirous way, but when we do the benefits will be enormous. The lack of vocabulary to describe specific recurring patterns in a social setting is one of the indicators that we haven't yet documented and understood the system. There are names for some small-scale situations, e.g., 'third wheel', 'threesome', 'company christmas party' (the latter being the most henious), and many more, but there is a notable lack of formal theory about how the recognized elements fit together and react to each other.
Unfortunately part of the issue with studying this field is that its goal to better understand how to achieve, um, synergistic social engineering solutions will be seen by many to be a form of mind control, tinfoil hat and black helicopter stuff. In a way, it is, and it could certainly be abused so that certain organizations could achieve their own ends at the expense of others, however, that already happens. This is the kind of tool that would allow more people to analyze and understand what other people are trying to make happen.
Why, yes, I have recently read the Foundation series.
Yeah, I pioneered the EL backlighting (theres a link on those pages to my old host, which is long dead) many, many years ago. Unfortumnately Rich's web design don't appear to have improved any more than my own :)
There are ways to get domestic bank accounts that are not easily traced back to the owner, but thats more trouble than most hackers want to deal with.
why aren't you bitching about why an auto's speedometer is routinely called a "speedometer" rather than the more accurate "velocimeter" since speed indicates direction
Perhaps because velocity is a vector composed of speed and direction?
good to know that there are people here who acutally understnd Godel.
If there are simple systems that are complete and complex systems that are not complete, and we can add to the complexity of a simple system by adding rules, where is the point at which systems become incomplete?
A test would be to see if we can express the system within itself, as I understand Godel did, but is that the only way to know? Is it possible that there are systems that are incomplete, but are not powerful enough to be tested using that method?
nope, agnostic is something else. An agnostic (from 'without knowledge') holds a belief that we do not or cannot have the knowledge of the existance of gods.
I can be both a negative, or 'weak', athiest, and at the same time be agnostic. That is, I can believe that we cannot know if gods exist, and not have a belief in gods (as it happens, this is my position).
A positive, or 'strong', athiest believes that god does not exist, and therefor cannot be agnostic. To claim both positions would be contradictory (of course, there isn't really any reason why one can't hold contradictory beliefs, consistancy is overrated anyway, and it really confounds those guys who keep asking me to come to some place they call 'Kingdom Hall').
while a 1000' Beverage is a big antenna
Is that anything like a yard of beer?
They claimed that it was incapable of working, so they wouldn't provide it or support it that way. They were proven to be liars. Since the only reason given was that of a technical problem, and that technical problem was solved, then they should be required to support it.
That is truely an incredible line of reasoning. Perhaps you just didn't make your point clear, or perhaps you're just trolling.
The maker of a device is free to choose what features it will or will not support (except where there are laws compelling certain features), regardless of the potential of the device. They are under no obligation to support features that users have added for themselves, and may be within their rights to refuse to support the device at all if it has been used in a manner they deem likely to damage it beyond reasonable limits.
The statement should have been qualified with "in today's society", and presuming those conditions persist long enough to allow natural selection to produce the trend.
I doubt that the decade or two we've had these multitasking pressures would result in significant evolutionary change.
I've never been in NYC, but I spent 10 years in SA, so I know that an important transportation consideration is the climate. There is a reason you can almost always park even the largest SUV within about a 5 minute walk of your destination. In the summer it gets quite warm, frequently 100 to 105F, which makes walking very far uncomfortable, particularly in business or business casual dress. If you're in shape and clothed appropriately its not a problem. Until you get to your destination that is, where the indoor temperature will be anywhere from 68 to 72 degrees and you'll be woefully underdressed.
It also doesn't help that a large proportion of the population is obese. Transit solutions that require lots of walking are not popular with this crowd (but low indoor temperatures are).
This is the reason I like driving on the Kansas Turnpike portion of I-35 (which I did just a couple of days ago, as part of a drive from south of San Antonio to Nebraska (curiously, the highest speed limit was in Nebraska on I-80, where its 75mph, not in Texas, where I'd expect the long distances to encourage high speeds). Nearly all of the turnpike is through undeveloped ranchland. If you tune out the fences its like driving through 1850. All it needed was vast herds of American Bison and some Plains Indians.
it was Herr Hitler [...] who laid the groudwork(sic) for [the autobahn]
So? Does that make it Evil? Even super villians need good tools if they are to make an attempt to take over the world. What's important is how one uses the tool.
Somewhat off-topic, but I saw an interesting thing on the railway this week on my drive from south of San Antonio to Nebraska. I was watching a train passing by the tracks, and I noticed that while it was carrying semi trailers, it did not have them on flatbed cars as usual. Each trailer had a set of railway wheels attached to its rear and its front connected to the trailer in front of it. The road tires skimmed along a couple of feet above the track. The trailers were obviously purpose-built, but it was cool to see a new(?) method used to move stuff.
I have done designs [...] with a positive power supply called GND and negative called VEE
[shudder] I hope I never have to maintain your code.
the most exciting one is making everything distributed. Everyone caches a bit of sites and only checks a timestamp when they get a query
Freenet uses a scheme similar to this. Content is inserted into the network with a unique cryptographic key (*nb). The data is inserted with a 'depth' parameter, specifying an approximate TTL value for the insertion directive. Hosts along the way cache the data and pass it to the next host until the TTL expires (hosts usually, but not always, decriment the TTL). When a query for a particular key comes through, many hosts can return bits of the file. The more popular the content, the more likely it is that many hosts will have a copy.
Of course, once content is inserted, its permanent, but there are schemes in place to handle superceding old issues.