There is no "MIGHT", these bulbs are better for everybody....
Your argument against CFLs and their 'ugly light' or the time it takes for them to turn on is preposterous. It's time we start owning up and educating ourselves about how insanely stupid some of our energy consumption is. Australia and the California government see it so severe that they have to force their citizens to do this. It is evident that people like you will require the government to ban these "illegal substances" so that they aren't used even after the consumer is educated. Are you denying that (a) the light looks different (whether ugly or not is subjective) (b) they take a significant time to reach their full brightness?
I fully support anyone who cares about the environment and puts up with the inconvenience of these bulbs in order to have a lower impact. But don't pretend the inconvenience isn't there.
The other two problems with the CFLs is the ugly light they give off (although it is getting better), and how few of them fit into the lamps I have in my household. I also can't dim them (there are dimmable units now, I've heard), which we utilize all the time for effect, especially when watching movies or for social parties we host. Plus the time they take to reach their steady on state. I can't think of a room in my house where I don't, reasonably often, need to switch on a light for 10 seconds then switch it off again. With a CFL (unless they've improved dramatically since I last checked) you're in half-light for that time.
Try looking at Ableton Live's interface (they have a demo available on their site) - it pretty much does things in the way you are describing them. I knew it was a good enough idea that someone else would already have done it.
Will definitely try the demo when I'm at a loose end one day.
For composition or improvisation you expect to see a timeline horizontally. For a Logic Pro / GarageBand / Cubase clone, you're right that's exactly what you need. The site for this thing is slashdotted, so I can't look at it, but I hope it's something different. (Having said that, plenty of people would like an OSS Logic clone).
I've only dabbled in music software (Cubase ages ago, GarageBand more recently) and the convention you describe doesn't really gel with me. It just seems to linear. What I'd *like* to do would have multi-instrument phrases which you could manipulate in an OO-like manner.
So, for example, you could record all the parts for a basic verse, a chorus and a middle eight, then copy those out to form a basic song structure : verse twice, chorus, verse again, middle eight, chorus, chorus (of course, the software wouldn't constrain you to such a traditional structure). Now if you fiddle with your verse "class", all the verses will inherit your change. Or, you can make some of the verses subclasses -- second verse has a more strident piano line, last verse has strings etc.
Plus, if phrase classes had rules (if next phrases is a chorus, last bar contains drum fill), you'd have a lot of compositional power.
Even if a program such as this didn't make nice enough noises to use as the final product, I reckon it would be a valuable composition aid.
Actually, Creationism and even God, is disprovable.
The experiment runs the entirety of your lifetime. All of your experiences and thoughts contribute to your particular hypothesis. The only problem is the results come in just after you die. Not really, because one can hypothesise a universe created by a divine being, in which there is no afterlife.
Not to sound like a spokesperson for the movie industry, but their only options are: 1. Agressivley protect their content with DRM and lawsuits 2. Go out of business Nonsense. It's been trivially easy to copy DVDs for years. Have the studios gone bust? No.
Many people like to go to the cinema. Many people like official packaging. Many people like to feel honest. Many people would prefer to spend money than fiddle with DRM workarounds.
However, as the key has now been compromised, future disks will not accept that player key. Sure they can remove the compromised player key from the acceptable list. But it remains to see whether they'll actually do it. Presumably there's a decent number of blameless consumers already using that player. What's the commercial impact of pissing them off?
They guy's opinion is just plain 180 degree opposite mine. No AI can be as varied or original as a human opponent. Depends on the human. Try playing against me and you'll be begging for the challenge and variety of an AI in no time.
A more general solution is to have the price of electricity usage reflect actual hourly demand. This will create incentives for all electricity users to time shift usage to lower demand time periods if possible. The problem with that is that it makes things difficult for consumers. A domestic customer is going to get horribly confused if the price of their power varies hour by hour based on actual usage. Assuming electricity costs enough for me to account for it, I want the cost of running my oven for an hour to be predictable.
As early as the 1980s, my parents were on a scheme called "Economy 7": the normal price per KWh was much higher, but you got heavily discounted electricity for 7 off-peak hours at night. Grants were available for storage heaters.
The problem was, the scheme was too successful. The seven hour "off-peak" slot became a peak slot because so many people were charging up their storage heaters. What followed was an adapted scheme where your cheap 7 hours where at one time of day for a two week period, while another group had a different 7 hours. Every two weeks the groups would swap slots. You got sent a wall calendar with your slots marked on it. A radio signal told your meter and your storage heater timer what times to use - so heating was pretty much set-up-and-forget -- but my parents keep in mind whether they're on or off peak before heating water for a bath.... and that's about as complicated as I think you can get away with in a domestic environment.
Commercial power is another matter. I can well imagine companies willing to go onto very complex tariffs if they can monitor the price and adjust the timing of their high-power tasks to when power is cheap.
... and I have no idea what is so significant about being first Being the first wiki encyclopedia probably isn't significant. But building a userbase and a brand first is.
There are now millions of people who's first instinct is to look in Wikipedia. Dragging them to some other site (who's name I've already forgotten) is hard. Like getting Google search users to switch.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is written for a common readership. But students in Yale courses are already consulting primary materials and learning from experts in the discipline. In this context, to rely on Wikipedia -- even when the material is accurate -- is to position your work as inexpert and immature. This applies to any encyclopedia. Whatever your source, you have to think about who might have written it, what their incentives were. For some applications, a Wikipedia citation might be adequate. For a Yale dissertation, you would want to find the sources cited in the Wikipedia article, and maybe follow that link onwards to as near to a primary source as you can get.
I rather welcome the fact that you have to think about whether a Wikipedia article is accurate. You should apply the same evaluation for *any* source. It's high time the "it's right here in black and white" was discredited as an argument winner.
When I first saw this story, I thought the intention was that *everyone* register their screen names -- an unpardonable invasion of privacy, and clearly unenforcable, yet something I could imagine an Internet-ignorant politician might just propose.
But it turns out that it only applies to people on the Sex Offenders Register, which isn't quite as bad. There's some precedent for "you break the law once, you sacrifice some of your rights".
So I no longer see it as such a terrible invasion of privacy. But it does seem about as unworkable as asking burglars, upon release from prison, to call the local police station with a time and address before attempting any further burglaries.
I don't know a single teacher that is any good at their job who doesn't grade papers at home (unpaid), buy some amount of supplies for their class (unreimbursed), and as a result make far less than average on an hourly basis. -nB I live with one. I've also worked in the education system. Our combined observations are:
An awful lot of teachers spend hours complaining about their workload over coffee and biscuits in the staffroom. In the time spent whingeing, the marking/lesson planning/admin they're complaining about could have been done.
Many teachers seem unable to create efficient workflows for themselves. Where someone algorithmically minded might attack a mark-and-collate job by first stacking the work to be marked in appropriate piles, they'll find some tremendously inefficient way of organising the task. It can be quite frustrating to watch them: "But if you were only to put that pile here..." "Stop confusing me!"
Many teachers are terrible at re-use. As long as the curriculum stays still, you should be able to use the same lesson plans year after year. After the first year, there ought to little or no lesson planning required: just some incremental changes. Yet many teachers spend hours doing the same work year upon year.
Re-use again. Many schools are terrible at sharing. If 4 classes are taking the same syllabus, why do four people each need to be producing lesson plans independently? Yet that's what seems to happen. Further, some teachers even object to the idea of someone else using their lesson plans!
My partner considers herself a good teacher; she NEVER brings work home and she NEVER gets home late because of workload (as opposed to parents' evenings etc.)
In an attempt to seem more sympathetic to teachers, I will say this: the qualities which would make them better at organising their workload and getting with it are not the same qualities that make them good at teaching subjects like English Literature.
Siberian Prison Camp is a little hard core for a Bootleg OS. Hope they don't catch me, they might try to genocide my ass or something. The phrase "Siberian Prison camp" has some pretty heavy connotations. But the Stalin era ended decades ago.
All we really know is:
It's a prison -- people are detained there
It's a camp -- whatever that means in this context?
It's in Siberia -- a vast and, in places, beautiful, area of land. Cold though. And traditionally somewhere enemies of the state were exiled even before the Russian revolution.
So we don't really know how harsh this punishment will be. It could be anything from a couple of months in an open prison, to several years breaking rocks on a diet of cold poison.
OLPC is a very useful tool to education: being able to Google or Wikipedia for farming information Would that be over the 1gbit fibre that the African telcos are running out to the farming villages? Bare minimum: a mesh network with their peers. No Google or Wikipedia here: but basic chatting, email, sharing between locals. Next step: a local server for shared resources. Part of the mesh. Basically an OLPC with extra storage: snapshots of sites like Wikipedia, e-books, locally produced content, homepages and blogs, etc. Next step: non-local connectivity, however basic. Ranges from something like Motorman, or maybe a scheduled dialup, right up always-on, depending on circumstances.
The point is, something (however modest) is better than nothing.
written a script to sort through my family photos, because i haven't got any software like iPhoto to do it all for me. iPhoto didn't work like I expected. So I spent 2 hours trying to persuade Automator to drive it the way I wanted. Then I decided Automator couldn't do it either. So then I broke out AppleScript, and after another 2 hours, I'd made AppleScript drive iPhoto to do what I needed.
If I'd just cobbled together some Perl in the first place, I'd have had another 3 hours in the pub, like the GP suggested.
From TFA:
Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn't enable parents to read their child's e-mail or see the child's profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. So it's overt, and it's very limited in scope. If that scope doesn't grow, I think this is pretty positive. It provides a compromise between total surveillance and no supervision whatsoever.
You damaged you argument by trying to clain 10-19 is temperate. Where do you live, the north pole?
That's 50.0F-66.2F. In other words, it's time to put on a light coat.
It's a completely cultural decision.
At 15 Celcius in any British town, you'll see people in vest tops enjoying the fine weather, while others are wrapped up in coats and scarves shivering. The shiverers are usually immigrants from warmer climes.
L/100 Km has got to be the stupidest way to measure gas milage. How the hell is anyone supposed to convert "7.1 L / 100 Km" into a useful measure? If you have a 35 L tank, how far can you go on a single tank of gas? If you want to travel 50 km, how much fuel do you need to buy?
Granted, most people fill their tank every time, but when I was younger and poorer, I used to put enough in for the journey I was making.
Surely, everyone knows that the proper measure for fuel economy is the square millimetre (or millimeter for the other side of the pond). After all, we're dividing volume by distance here, so naturally we get an area. And this measure has an obvious geometric interpretation: Distribute the fuel needed to drive a certain distance as a very thin tube along that entire distance, and measure its cross section. I second that this is brilliant.
A hypothetical 30MPG gives us 1/30 gallons/mile which gives us approximately 0.078 mm^2
Sensible observation: it's not a convenient range of numbers for people to communicate in. Silly observation: petrol spread that thin would evaporate in no time. Visualising that 0.078mm cross section tube demonstrates just how much energy is packed into petroleum.
I personally like knowing that it's exactly a mile from 240th to 256th street. A block is 1/16 of a mile? I didn't know that and it's useful to know. How universally applicable is that? Other than in NYC, where you can see from the maps that until you get to Canal St. the grid is very regular indeed, as a Briton I'm always a bit nonplussed when I ask how far a US destination is and I'm told in blocks.
I know that in NYC East-west blocks are longer than North-South blocks, but then those are "avenues" not "streets".
These would be extremely difficult to convert. Well, you know, 16 blocks would still be a mile, regardless of what unit was on street signs or on your tachometer.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument against CFLs and their 'ugly light' or the time it takes for them to turn on is preposterous. It's time we start owning up and educating ourselves about how insanely stupid some of our energy consumption is. Australia and the California government see it so severe that they have to force their citizens to do this. It is evident that people like you will require the government to ban these "illegal substances" so that they aren't used even after the consumer is educated. Are you denying that (a) the light looks different (whether ugly or not is subjective) (b) they take a significant time to reach their full brightness?
I fully support anyone who cares about the environment and puts up with the inconvenience of these bulbs in order to have a lower impact. But don't pretend the inconvenience isn't there.
"Certain scenarios" was probably added to the sentence to short circuit pedants who'd pipe up with "what if there's no Internet connection?".
Will definitely try the demo when I'm at a loose end one day.
I've only dabbled in music software (Cubase ages ago, GarageBand more recently) and the convention you describe doesn't really gel with me. It just seems to linear. What I'd *like* to do would have multi-instrument phrases which you could manipulate in an OO-like manner.
So, for example, you could record all the parts for a basic verse, a chorus and a middle eight, then copy those out to form a basic song structure : verse twice, chorus, verse again, middle eight, chorus, chorus (of course, the software wouldn't constrain you to such a traditional structure). Now if you fiddle with your verse "class", all the verses will inherit your change. Or, you can make some of the verses subclasses -- second verse has a more strident piano line, last verse has strings etc.
Plus, if phrase classes had rules (if next phrases is a chorus, last bar contains drum fill), you'd have a lot of compositional power.
Even if a program such as this didn't make nice enough noises to use as the final product, I reckon it would be a valuable composition aid.
The experiment runs the entirety of your lifetime. All of your experiences and thoughts contribute to your particular hypothesis. The only problem is the results come in just after you die. Not really, because one can hypothesise a universe created by a divine being, in which there is no afterlife.
1. Agressivley protect their content with DRM and lawsuits
2. Go out of business Nonsense. It's been trivially easy to copy DVDs for years. Have the studios gone bust? No.
Many people like to go to the cinema.
Many people like official packaging.
Many people like to feel honest.
Many people would prefer to spend money than fiddle with DRM workarounds.
As early as the 1980s, my parents were on a scheme called "Economy 7": the normal price per KWh was much higher, but you got heavily discounted electricity for 7 off-peak hours at night. Grants were available for storage heaters.
The problem was, the scheme was too successful. The seven hour "off-peak" slot became a peak slot because so many people were charging up their storage heaters. What followed was an adapted scheme where your cheap 7 hours where at one time of day for a two week period, while another group had a different 7 hours. Every two weeks the groups would swap slots. You got sent a wall calendar with your slots marked on it. A radio signal told your meter and your storage heater timer what times to use - so heating was pretty much set-up-and-forget -- but my parents keep in mind whether they're on or off peak before heating water for a bath.
Commercial power is another matter. I can well imagine companies willing to go onto very complex tariffs if they can monitor the price and adjust the timing of their high-power tasks to when power is cheap.
... and I have no idea what is so significant about being first Being the first wiki encyclopedia probably isn't significant. But building a userbase and a brand first is.There are now millions of people who's first instinct is to look in Wikipedia. Dragging them to some other site (who's name I've already forgotten) is hard. Like getting Google search users to switch.
I rather welcome the fact that you have to think about whether a Wikipedia article is accurate. You should apply the same evaluation for *any* source. It's high time the "it's right here in black and white" was discredited as an argument winner.
When I first saw this story, I thought the intention was that *everyone* register their screen names -- an unpardonable invasion of privacy, and clearly unenforcable, yet something I could imagine an Internet-ignorant politician might just propose.
But it turns out that it only applies to people on the Sex Offenders Register, which isn't quite as bad. There's some precedent for "you break the law once, you sacrifice some of your rights".
So I no longer see it as such a terrible invasion of privacy. But it does seem about as unworkable as asking burglars, upon release from prison, to call the local police station with a time and address before attempting any further burglaries.
-nB I live with one. I've also worked in the education system. Our combined observations are:
My partner considers herself a good teacher; she NEVER brings work home and she NEVER gets home late because of workload (as opposed to parents' evenings etc.)
In an attempt to seem more sympathetic to teachers, I will say this: the qualities which would make them better at organising their workload and getting with it are not the same qualities that make them good at teaching subjects like English Literature.
All we really know is:
So we don't really know how harsh this punishment will be. It could be anything from a couple of months in an open prison, to several years breaking rocks on a diet of cold poison.
Next step: a local server for shared resources. Part of the mesh. Basically an OLPC with extra storage: snapshots of sites like Wikipedia, e-books, locally produced content, homepages and blogs, etc.
Next step: non-local connectivity, however basic. Ranges from something like Motorman, or maybe a scheduled dialup, right up always-on, depending on circumstances.
The point is, something (however modest) is better than nothing.
If I'd just cobbled together some Perl in the first place, I'd have had another 3 hours in the pub, like the GP suggested.
It's pretty distressing how many people are saying they don't eat something for breakfast.
I didn't, for years. Now I make the effort and it's well worth it. Counterintuively, it's good for keeping your weight down.
I'm on porridge at the moment, since it's winter. Fruit or toast in the summer.
That's 50.0F-66.2F. In other words, it's time to put on a light coat.
It's a completely cultural decision.At 15 Celcius in any British town, you'll see people in vest tops enjoying the fine weather, while others are wrapped up in coats and scarves shivering. The shiverers are usually immigrants from warmer climes.
Granted, most people fill their tank every time, but when I was younger and poorer, I used to put enough in for the journey I was making.
A hypothetical 30MPG gives us 1/30 gallons/mile which gives us approximately 0.078 mm^2
Sensible observation: it's not a convenient range of numbers for people to communicate in.
Silly observation: petrol spread that thin would evaporate in no time.
Visualising that 0.078mm cross section tube demonstrates just how much energy is packed into petroleum.
I know that in NYC East-west blocks are longer than North-South blocks, but then those are "avenues" not "streets". These would be extremely difficult to convert. Well, you know, 16 blocks would still be a mile, regardless of what unit was on street signs or on your tachometer.
Mine goes: Da da da da da da da I believe it was:
Da da da dada da da
vs
Da da da da da da
But your point stands.