There was a recent impromptu experiment on the space station where an astronaut shook a bag of power... sugar, flour, I don't remember what and it clumped too. I'm guessing electrostatic... but more to the point... this solves a problem in the early planet formation... namely, gravity is a very weak force. Expecting dust grains to accumulate via gravity alone should a very long time, but having something to jump start the gravitational attraction like the mechanism behind this should speed up that process.
Many years ago I had a conversation with an author friend who mentioned that by the time she gets to writing chapter 11 in a book she begins to lose interest in completing it. Something along the lines of being far enough into the book to have put a good piece of work in and are bored with the prospect of what lies ahead and not far enough into it that the end is in sight. She mentioned that she just needs to power through those spots. Eventually you'll move through it and the work will become self fulfilling again.
I think that book-writing metaphor applies here too.
If this is essentially your first project (or your first solo project) you may not believe there's an joyful end to where you currently are, but if you really believed in what you were doing when you started you'll get that old feeling again when you start to get closer to the end. So... yea... get back to work.
BTW, my author friend didn't refer to this as 'writers block' because that term applies to a loss of ideas and inability to figure out what to write next. Her "chapter-11" concern and what appears to be your concern too, is an easier one of lacking motivation; you know what to do you just don't want to do it. Now... if you got a thorny problem and don't know how to get started working on it then... that's closer to the classical writers block problem.
If you read the TOS of WolframAlpha it says that they/it own the copyright to any output generated. Kids using it as their own work should get sued. Problem solved.
Having not RTFA the things on the student's side are clearly as you state, mainly he did it after the hand-in date. We can further conjecture that the teacher did not request the students keep their work "secret" forever, another potential plus for the student.
However, the suggested laziness of the teacher here could have another explanation. There's the old adage that the first time a prof teaches a course, the prof learns a lot. The second time he teaches that course the students learn a lot. (The third time he teaches it no one learns.) The upshot here is that the prof can work out the bugs in his presentation, assignments, etc for the 2nd session.
If I were the prof I would: a) replace my assignments every 2 years b) ask the students in the first year to keep the questions and answers confidential for another 12 months. c) remind students that solutions may be on the internet (regardless from this school or others) and that any use of these materials will be considered cheating.
A good story beats statistics 9 times out of 10. But that means we get burnt 10 percent of the time. The patient population understands that. The health care industry understands that.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras". If you want to practice medicine in a different way, go for it.
But shouldn't the approach be to only get burnt the first time 10% of the time (with the implied goal to get it right eventually)? I think the problem most folks in the US have with their healthcare (after cost) is that most doctors treat the most probable cause as the ONLY cause. To more correctly phrase your zebra analogy:
"If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, NEVER zebras".
Statistics should provide a first guess, there should still be a verification to that guess and if the verification fails, statistics should indicate the second guess, repeat until done. Somewhere in there of course, doctors gotta start questioning whether the patient is being rational and/or telling them the whole truth, but it seems more often than not that if the first guess isn't right it's because the patient is confused.
The mechanic would have had no reasonable need to have searched those two areas to perform the job he was hired to do. Same with a PC tech, if someone brings in a PC to have a CD-ROM drive replaced, there is absolutely NO REASON for the tech to need to search the browser cache or the images directory.
You're applying rules that apply to the police/government to private citizens. The constitution protects us from unreasonable [governmental] search and seizure. It says nothing about other types of searches (though other types of seizures is probably right called 'theft').
IANAL but if I were trying to defend the hypothetical drug smuggler under the car floor board guy when said guy brought his car in for a break job my first thing to look into was WHY the mechanic looked under there, not to verify if he was authorized to look under there, but to verify he didn't do it as part of a police sting operation. If he was part of a police sting operation then the constitutional rights would kick in. If he wasn't then IMHO it's his own damn fault. Unlike governmental searches, the sort of search we're talking about here is voluntary. He didn't have to take his car/laptop into service before cleaning it of illegal activity.
A few years back I tried to teach my kids programming. I chose C as then I didn't know Perl, PHP or Python. In short it was a disaster. Why? I blame the printf function because the difficulty of learning the quirks of getting output in C got in the way of trying to actually learn PROGRAMMING. But then there's also stuff like declaring variables, strings as string pointers,
In hindsight, I now believe the best language to serve as an introduction to programming is whatever language has the fewest non-programming quirks. The "hello world" program is a horrible example of how simple some language may be. Consider writing a program to add and print 1+2 = 3 where 1,2,3 are stored in variables. Interpreted dynamically typed languages are the the simplest to do this in. You can get right to the core of programming w/o being bogged down in that other crap.
That said... the main/only(?) thing I miss about Fortran is its ability to deal with matrices. But again, I seriously doubt I'd teach that in an intro to programming class anyway (or if I did, it'd be much later in the course).
Every now and then this question comes up here on slashdot. Specifically "What's the best intro language to teach programming to [group x]?" This question is flawed from the start as you have 2 potentially competing goals, specifically: a) what's the best way to teach programming and b) what aspects of programming does [group X] need to know? The right way to phrase this question is simply "what's the best intro language to teach programming?" You can teach the specifics that [group X] may need in a 2nd course.
Is this using Johnny Lee Chung's wii mote technology shown here?
I have no idea how a movie would be encoded to enable this, and of course, as Johnny points out it's only good for one viewer at a time... PERFECT for laptops, not so much for general displays. And... IMHO it's not really full 3-D but a damn good trick.
I started a blog about 4 years ago. I did it entirely to be PROJECT oriented. The blog chronicled my transition, gasp, away from Apple and toward a Windows box. (for those who care this particular purchase happened around the time Apple switched to Intel chips. In fact, Apple took a LONG time to make that switch, so long that I could no longer wait and 'went back to the dark side' as I believe the blog was called.)
Anyway, my point is that *I* was the primary audience for that blog. I knew there would be some tricky things to do, like moving Mac mail to thunderbird, and all that sort of stuff. I started the blog in the tail end of the research process and I stopped about 3 months after I got the new laptop as by then, there were no more conversion issues.
Occasionally I did have to look up some detail on what I did to solve problem X, and I just felt that rather than looking in my personal notes, I'd look it up in my blog and if I got lucky and someone else could benefit from my experience, it was no extra pain to me to make the blog public.
One of the comments I like is the fellow who complains that:
So called scientific "facts" such as, black holes, big bang, stretched space, warped space, spacetime and so on,are merely flawed mathematical constructs. They have never been observed
What always strikes me with these sort of comments is the underlying belief that scientists are hiding something from the rest of us. Don't these posters realize that they're complaining about this "supposed conspiracy theory" in an article where scientists are openly admitting that they saw something they don't understand?
Having a physics undergrad degree myself I always felt this humility was due to quantum mechanics. It is just so bizarre and so far removed from everyday common sense that physicists have to live every day with the realization that the universe *is* stranger than we can suppose. Pretty humbling.
But also, it may be due to a much more rapid set of paradigm changing events in physics as compared to other sciences. Within the last 150 years physics has gone from renowned scientists saying that "we've almost discovered all there is to discover" to Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, steady-state to big bang, dark matter, dark energy, and possibly more that I'm leaving out. When phycisists can look back in relatively recent memory and see such changes as well as titans say things like "God does not play dice with the universe" to seeing proof that, well he does, why should anyone be cocky?
Rather than thinking it as WalMart market dominance that forces us to read "Wall Wart" as "Wall Mart"... I prefer to consider myself and all the others who mis-read the headline as being "up-down dyslexic".
Seriously thought... 2 thoughts... a) a "fax" receiver. although last I checked I didn't think there was a phone line port for this. I do know that I really like my older generation Mac running OSX sitting on my phoneline getting all my faxes. Would love to have a smaller machine for this. b) the question is wrong... "what would you do with 'one' wall-wart" may be missing the point... may not be much you can do with one, but with lots???
Well, if the FBI raided my house and took all my shit because they suspected the guy next door of breaking some law
I'd be interested in hearing a lawyer respond to this. I certainly hope and expect that there's a difference between people and corporations in that laws of unreasonable search and seizure are more stringently applied to people than to businesses. IMANL, but that is my wish.
Also... way back when Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games had his company's computers seized because he was writing RPG materials on things like building bombs or whatever I immediately thought the "right to bear arms" should be extended to the "right to bear computers". To me the same principle applies... when this country was founded the main way the government would keep its citizens down was through arms (in the US's case this would be Britain keeping the colonies in line), now a-days it seems to be information. If the founding fathers drafted the 2nd ammendment today not only would it include the current arms language, but may also go like this:
A transparent government, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep computers and monitor their government, shall not be infringed.
I'm not saying that THIS is what happened in Dallas, but I am saying that if computer ownership rights were as vigorously defended as gun ownership rights this story would at the very least be more headline worthy than it appears to be.
I wish to examine the underlying assumption that more memory puts you more at risk. On the surface it seems right... if there's an X% chance of any given circuit having a failure then having more circuits (ie memory) certainly increases the risk that any one of them will fail. However with regard to cosmic ray damage I believe there's a flaw in this analysis.
Specifically, the quantity to watch out for is the risk of a cosmic ray striking any particular spot on the earth. So... if your 1980's 64KB ram chip took up as much physical space as your 2009 2GB ram chip then nothing has changed. The chance per sqft of a cosmic ray strike is still the same and the chance for damage is still the same then and now.
HOWEVER, back in the 1980s the physical circuits may have been so large that a cosmic ray strike would only take out one circuit and ECC could have dealt with that. But it could be the case that today's memory circuits are so dense that a cosmic ray strike would take out many more circuits, well beyond the ability of ECC to correct.
Now, I am only arguing this from a mathematical point of view, I do not have physical data to back up any specifics presented here, but to summarize. 1) risk due to cosmic rays is a function of the physical size of the chip not the amount of memory contained within 2) smaller denser circuits may mean that more bits are affected by a cosmic ray strike than earlier less dense circuits.
I think there's something about nudity that triggers an adverse reaction in the US (at least, may also be other countries).
My favorite movie nude/semi-nude scenes that were portrayed in an a-sexual way are: 1) topless girl in "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". That girl ran around topless and everyone treated her as if she were a guy running around topless. Pretty cool. 2) Hotel room scene in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". This appears to be a post-orgy scene when everyone was just lounging around in various states of undress, but definitely not doing anything sexual. Dewey's sitting on the floor, camera is looking at his face and a naked guy walks past the camera in the foreground. Only thing you could see of the guy was his schlong. Pretty casual shot, funny as hell. May have been a scene from the "unrated DVD version". 3) Watchmen.
Compare this to the youtube video that occasionally springs up of a fully clothed young woman essentially doing a pole dance. The comments I've seen on the few of those I've watched are along the lines of "Yea, nothing sexual about that, way to go. Don't understand why my parents won't let me watch it." Which I usually take as the earnest utterances of a pimply faced young male teenager who just doesn't understand.
You can do something sexy and suggestive fully clothed and you can do something ordinary and non-suggestive fully naked. Put them on film in this culture and one will net you a PG rating and the other will net you an R rating. Go figure.
So the question is why is music this way and, say hi-def video NOT this way?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the reason is that music is not audio. I'd expect if the question was centered around, say more generic audio quality, say listening to recorded conversations, or bird sounds or whatever the higher quality may be preferred, in a manner that's analogous to preferring higher quality video.
In other words it may be the difference between Content and Delivery. Higher quality DELIVERY is almost always preferred, but when aspects of that delivery work their way into the CONTENT then the content preference will win.
No one ever talks about the warm feeling of low-def TV, but you may find lots of folks who prefer hand drawn cartoons vs "higher quality" computer generated cartoons.
In my case regarding music I do know that I have a preference for recordings of live music vs studio recordings. It evokes in me a sense of a shared experience (even though I know this is a fantasy), it's like I'm there in a concert with others. A studio recording, on the other hand seems more like a solo experience. I suppose I'd prefer higher quality live recordings over lower quality ones, but I also suppose I'd prefer lower quality live recordings over higher quality studio recordings.
Firstly, isn't it odd that the store clerks recognized it as a Batleth? That should help reinforce the nerdy 7-11 store clerk stereotype. Seriously... how would a bank teller have described this sword?
Secondly, the choice to use the batleth was either inspired or insanely stupid. Inspired in that the batleth would draw attention to itself and away from other identifying characteristics of the robber. Insanely stupid in that... how many Colorado Springs residents own a batleth anyway? Kinda reduces the suspect list by a bunch.
Actually, since you're the one saying words have meaning you do know that you changed your definition of luxury between this post and the last? Your first definition was anything not necessary to live. Your second definition of easy to scale back on things, includes many things that would qualify as a luxury item by your first definition.
Regardless, an iPod is a luxury item, and music is an optional item, that we can agree on. As for music being luxury, all we seem to be doing is reading different lines from the dictionary:
Luxury - n a) a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort : sumptuous environment b) something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary
You're picking (b) and I'm picking (a) (emphasis on "great")
Now if I could just wrap my mind around iTunes being a luxury good then I'd be set.
Please, please tell me you're being sarcastic? You do know a luxury item is something you don't need, not something that's expensive - right?
You're dividing it into "need to have" and "nice to have" and that's it? The only things I need to have to live are air, food, water, clothing and shelter. Food can be pretty basic and I'd imagine that nothing at Whole Foods would qualify as basic. Water is just water. Soda, which apparently many poor people drink is a luxury by your definition. The dividing line between need to have and nice to have gets blurrier in the clothing department. Clothing to keep you warm may not earn you much respect at the office, so social norms would seem to indicate that you need a "luxury" suit just to keep up at the office.
On a more practical level, I'd define a luxury item as say, anything the wealthiest 10% - 20% of the people buy and that no one in a lower economic class buys. Music is definitely NOT in that category. And indeed it's that sort of definition that prevents a luxury tax from becoming a regressive tax. Sales tax on any item that I don't *need* to survive, but that 90% of the population buys anyway affects the lower economic classes more than the upper ones. Furniture, dishes, television, telephone, a second pair of shoes are all pretty basic stuff that you would call a luxury and hence would be happy taxing at a luxury tax rate?
Well, on the up side he's trying to raise more money through products rather than income taxes. I'd prefer the taxes on ipods, cigars, gasoline, and luxury cars to income tax increases. Of course if it hurts NY businesses (I don't think it will), then it'll hurt in the long run. But the state needs to stop bleeding money immediately.
Interesting perspective. Normally sales taxes are considered "regressive" taxes because the poor pay relatively more of their income toward these taxes than the rich, while a flat income tax would tax everyone equally.
However, "luxury" taxes almost by definition are not regressive because the poor can't afford the items that trigger the tax and so they're completely unaffected.
Now if I could just wrap my mind around iTunes being a luxury good then I'd be set.
For many years now, I've been using Nerd, Jock and Geek almost interchangeable in every day language. I enjoy particularly calling folks "sports nerds" and "math jocks" though I use the "sports nerd" phrase much more often.
Granted the book appears to be about how Nerds have become successful and essentially success is cool so Nerds (or at least successful nerds) are cool. But my point of mixing these phrases is to showcase the narrow focus each has.
Classically Jocks focus on sports to the near exclusion of everything else. Nerds focus on science to the near exclusion of everything else. Neither, to my mind, are worthy of vaulted status becuase both limit their attention to a subset the wider world. Consequently either or both are worthy of the same praise and derision. Hence Sports Nerd.
At least you're not completely emotionally invested in this thing. Seriously, when it 'dies', somebody is going to need some serious counseling.
True, perhaps more true than you expect. These babies do not have an "off switch", and while I'm not 100% sure what it will do in a "fault-condition" I imagine it could still try to communicate at random times. To those emotionally invested and who can't help being anthropomorphic about it, I imagine these random "fault-condition" communications would be worse than "death".
I try to envision the right model for security and privacy as small town America. In this model everyone knows everyone else and for the most part, when you see your neighbor, he/she sees you.
Extrapolating this to the modern world, a world-wide facial recognition database would be compatible if the following additional conditions were met: a) everyone had access to it (Everyone knows everyone else) b) it was trivially easy to see where the cameras were (when you see me, I see you) c) cameras were only in a relatively few number of places. (when I'm behind "closed doors" I'm out of public view)
I'm not convinced governments can abide by these above rules, but if they could I'd be OK living in a world-wide "small town".
Stories like this underscore my feeling about Palin's quote from the VP debate:
"we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."
I'm sure that the Republican's view of this is one of war/conquest and that America will lose to some foreign non-democratic state, but today the more urgent issue seems to be loss of civil liberties. Loss of freedom from expanding government power. It's the ultimate irony that the party that espouses this quote is most likely THE party that will remove all our civil liberties and turn freedom into just a memory.
You may be right about the "mental modes" idea, but I got the distinct impression from both asking him and recalling my own early driving experiences that the bigger factor was "real-life".
I think my son focused too much on the "immediate" danger, hitting the curb or hitting the car on the side street he was turning into (exacerbated by me being in the car with him), that he completely ignored "2nd tier" dangers: the oncoming car.
The "mode" I think helps with this sort of driving is the "wide awareness" mode. And I think that for kids there's a big chasm to be crossed between that in a video game and that in real-iife-with-significant-consequences (car accident).
For elderly drivers they should already know how to get into the "wide awareness in real life" mode, what they're lacking is practice and/or need more practice to keep it as sharp as they were in their youth. And "wide awareness in game life" helps with that.
In other words, it may be the case that once you got it games help you keep it, but games don't help you get it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a recent impromptu experiment on the space station where an astronaut shook a bag of power... sugar, flour, I don't remember what and it clumped too. I'm guessing electrostatic... but more to the point... this solves a problem in the early planet formation... namely, gravity is a very weak force. Expecting dust grains to accumulate via gravity alone should a very long time, but having something to jump start the gravitational attraction like the mechanism behind this should speed up that process.
Many years ago I had a conversation with an author friend who mentioned that by the time she gets to writing chapter 11 in a book she begins to lose interest in completing it. Something along the lines of being far enough into the book to have put a good piece of work in and are bored with the prospect of what lies ahead and not far enough into it that the end is in sight. She mentioned that she just needs to power through those spots. Eventually you'll move through it and the work will become self fulfilling again.
I think that book-writing metaphor applies here too.
If this is essentially your first project (or your first solo project) you may not believe there's an joyful end to where you currently are, but if you really believed in what you were doing when you started you'll get that old feeling again when you start to get closer to the end. So ... yea... get back to work.
BTW, my author friend didn't refer to this as 'writers block' because that term applies to a loss of ideas and inability to figure out what to write next. Her "chapter-11" concern and what appears to be your concern too, is an easier one of lacking motivation; you know what to do you just don't want to do it. Now... if you got a thorny problem and don't know how to get started working on it then ... that's closer to the classical writers block problem.
If you read the TOS of WolframAlpha it says that they/it own the copyright to any output generated. Kids using it as their own work should get sued. Problem solved.
I think it depends.
Having not RTFA the things on the student's side are clearly as you state, mainly he did it after the hand-in date. We can further conjecture that the teacher did not request the students keep their work "secret" forever, another potential plus for the student.
However, the suggested laziness of the teacher here could have another explanation. There's the old adage that the first time a prof teaches a course, the prof learns a lot. The second time he teaches that course the students learn a lot. (The third time he teaches it no one learns.) The upshot here is that the prof can work out the bugs in his presentation, assignments, etc for the 2nd session.
If I were the prof I would:
a) replace my assignments every 2 years
b) ask the students in the first year to keep the questions and answers confidential for another 12 months.
c) remind students that solutions may be on the internet (regardless from this school or others) and that any use of these materials will be considered cheating.
A good story beats statistics 9 times out of 10. But that means we get burnt 10 percent of the time. The patient population understands that. The health care industry understands that.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras". If you want to practice medicine in a different way, go for it.
But shouldn't the approach be to only get burnt the first time 10% of the time (with the implied goal to get it right eventually)? I think the problem most folks in the US have with their healthcare (after cost) is that most doctors treat the most probable cause as the ONLY cause. To more correctly phrase your zebra analogy:
"If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, NEVER zebras".
Statistics should provide a first guess, there should still be a verification to that guess and if the verification fails, statistics should indicate the second guess, repeat until done. Somewhere in there of course, doctors gotta start questioning whether the patient is being rational and/or telling them the whole truth, but it seems more often than not that if the first guess isn't right it's because the patient is confused.
The mechanic would have had no reasonable need to have searched those two areas to perform the job he was hired to do. Same with a PC tech, if someone brings in a PC to have a CD-ROM drive replaced, there is absolutely NO REASON for the tech to need to search the browser cache or the images directory.
You're applying rules that apply to the police/government to private citizens. The constitution protects us from unreasonable [governmental] search and seizure. It says nothing about other types of searches (though other types of seizures is probably right called 'theft').
IANAL but if I were trying to defend the hypothetical drug smuggler under the car floor board guy when said guy brought his car in for a break job my first thing to look into was WHY the mechanic looked under there, not to verify if he was authorized to look under there, but to verify he didn't do it as part of a police sting operation. If he was part of a police sting operation then the constitutional rights would kick in. If he wasn't then IMHO it's his own damn fault. Unlike governmental searches, the sort of search we're talking about here is voluntary. He didn't have to take his car/laptop into service before cleaning it of illegal activity.
A few years back I tried to teach my kids programming. I chose C as then I didn't know Perl, PHP or Python. In short it was a disaster. Why? I blame the printf function because the difficulty of learning the quirks of getting output in C got in the way of trying to actually learn PROGRAMMING. But then there's also stuff like declaring variables, strings as string pointers,
In hindsight, I now believe the best language to serve as an introduction to programming is whatever language has the fewest non-programming quirks. The "hello world" program is a horrible example of how simple some language may be. Consider writing a program to add and print 1+2 = 3 where 1,2,3 are stored in variables. Interpreted dynamically typed languages are the the simplest to do this in. You can get right to the core of programming w/o being bogged down in that other crap.
That said... the main/only(?) thing I miss about Fortran is its ability to deal with matrices. But again, I seriously doubt I'd teach that in an intro to programming class anyway (or if I did, it'd be much later in the course).
Every now and then this question comes up here on slashdot. Specifically "What's the best intro language to teach programming to [group x]?" This question is flawed from the start as you have 2 potentially competing goals, specifically: a) what's the best way to teach programming and b) what aspects of programming does [group X] need to know? The right way to phrase this question is simply "what's the best intro language to teach programming?" You can teach the specifics that [group X] may need in a 2nd course.
Is this using Johnny Lee Chung's wii mote technology shown here?
I have no idea how a movie would be encoded to enable this, and of course, as Johnny points out it's only good for one viewer at a time... PERFECT for laptops, not so much for general displays. And... IMHO it's not really full 3-D but a damn good trick.
I started a blog about 4 years ago. I did it entirely to be PROJECT oriented. The blog chronicled my transition, gasp, away from Apple and toward a Windows box. (for those who care this particular purchase happened around the time Apple switched to Intel chips. In fact, Apple took a LONG time to make that switch, so long that I could no longer wait and 'went back to the dark side' as I believe the blog was called.)
Anyway, my point is that *I* was the primary audience for that blog. I knew there would be some tricky things to do, like moving Mac mail to thunderbird, and all that sort of stuff. I started the blog in the tail end of the research process and I stopped about 3 months after I got the new laptop as by then, there were no more conversion issues.
Occasionally I did have to look up some detail on what I did to solve problem X, and I just felt that rather than looking in my personal notes, I'd look it up in my blog and if I got lucky and someone else could benefit from my experience, it was no extra pain to me to make the blog public.
One of the comments I like is the fellow who complains that:
So called scientific "facts" such as, black holes, big bang, stretched space, warped space, spacetime and so on,are merely flawed mathematical constructs. They have never been observed
What always strikes me with these sort of comments is the underlying belief that scientists are hiding something from the rest of us. Don't these posters realize that they're complaining about this "supposed conspiracy theory" in an article where scientists are openly admitting that they saw something they don't understand?
Having a physics undergrad degree myself I always felt this humility was due to quantum mechanics. It is just so bizarre and so far removed from everyday common sense that physicists have to live every day with the realization that the universe *is* stranger than we can suppose. Pretty humbling.
But also, it may be due to a much more rapid set of paradigm changing events in physics as compared to other sciences. Within the last 150 years physics has gone from renowned scientists saying that "we've almost discovered all there is to discover" to Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, steady-state to big bang, dark matter, dark energy, and possibly more that I'm leaving out. When phycisists can look back in relatively recent memory and see such changes as well as titans say things like "God does not play dice with the universe" to seeing proof that, well he does, why should anyone be cocky?
Rather than thinking it as WalMart market dominance that forces us to read "Wall Wart" as "Wall Mart"... I prefer to consider myself and all the others who mis-read the headline as being "up-down dyslexic".
Seriously thought... 2 thoughts...
a) a "fax" receiver. although last I checked I didn't think there was a phone line port for this. I do know that I really like my older generation Mac running OSX sitting on my phoneline getting all my faxes. Would love to have a smaller machine for this.
b) the question is wrong... "what would you do with 'one' wall-wart" may be missing the point... may not be much you can do with one, but with lots???
Well, if the FBI raided my house and took all my shit because they suspected the guy next door of breaking some law
I'd be interested in hearing a lawyer respond to this. I certainly hope and expect that there's a difference between people and corporations in that laws of unreasonable search and seizure are more stringently applied to people than to businesses. IMANL, but that is my wish.
Also... way back when Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games had his company's computers seized because he was writing RPG materials on things like building bombs or whatever I immediately thought the "right to bear arms" should be extended to the "right to bear computers". To me the same principle applies... when this country was founded the main way the government would keep its citizens down was through arms (in the US's case this would be Britain keeping the colonies in line), now a-days it seems to be information. If the founding fathers drafted the 2nd ammendment today not only would it include the current arms language, but may also go like this:
A transparent government, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep computers and monitor their government, shall not be infringed.
I'm not saying that THIS is what happened in Dallas, but I am saying that if computer ownership rights were as vigorously defended as gun ownership rights this story would at the very least be more headline worthy than it appears to be.
I wish to examine the underlying assumption that more memory puts you more at risk. On the surface it seems right... if there's an X% chance of any given circuit having a failure then having more circuits (ie memory) certainly increases the risk that any one of them will fail. However with regard to cosmic ray damage I believe there's a flaw in this analysis.
Specifically, the quantity to watch out for is the risk of a cosmic ray striking any particular spot on the earth. So... if your 1980's 64KB ram chip took up as much physical space as your 2009 2GB ram chip then nothing has changed. The chance per sqft of a cosmic ray strike is still the same and the chance for damage is still the same then and now.
HOWEVER, back in the 1980s the physical circuits may have been so large that a cosmic ray strike would only take out one circuit and ECC could have dealt with that. But it could be the case that today's memory circuits are so dense that a cosmic ray strike would take out many more circuits, well beyond the ability of ECC to correct.
Now, I am only arguing this from a mathematical point of view, I do not have physical data to back up any specifics presented here, but to summarize.
1) risk due to cosmic rays is a function of the physical size of the chip not the amount of memory contained within
2) smaller denser circuits may mean that more bits are affected by a cosmic ray strike than earlier less dense circuits.
I think there's something about nudity that triggers an adverse reaction in the US (at least, may also be other countries).
My favorite movie nude/semi-nude scenes that were portrayed in an a-sexual way are:
1) topless girl in "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". That girl ran around topless and everyone treated her as if she were a guy running around topless. Pretty cool.
2) Hotel room scene in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". This appears to be a post-orgy scene when everyone was just lounging around in various states of undress, but definitely not doing anything sexual. Dewey's sitting on the floor, camera is looking at his face and a naked guy walks past the camera in the foreground. Only thing you could see of the guy was his schlong. Pretty casual shot, funny as hell. May have been a scene from the "unrated DVD version".
3) Watchmen.
Compare this to the youtube video that occasionally springs up of a fully clothed young woman essentially doing a pole dance. The comments I've seen on the few of those I've watched are along the lines of "Yea, nothing sexual about that, way to go. Don't understand why my parents won't let me watch it." Which I usually take as the earnest utterances of a pimply faced young male teenager who just doesn't understand.
You can do something sexy and suggestive fully clothed and you can do something ordinary and non-suggestive fully naked. Put them on film in this culture and one will net you a PG rating and the other will net you an R rating. Go figure.
So the question is why is music this way and, say hi-def video NOT this way?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the reason is that music is not audio. I'd expect if the question was centered around, say more generic audio quality, say listening to recorded conversations, or bird sounds or whatever the higher quality may be preferred, in a manner that's analogous to preferring higher quality video.
In other words it may be the difference between Content and Delivery. Higher quality DELIVERY is almost always preferred, but when aspects of that delivery work their way into the CONTENT then the content preference will win.
No one ever talks about the warm feeling of low-def TV, but you may find lots of folks who prefer hand drawn cartoons vs "higher quality" computer generated cartoons.
In my case regarding music I do know that I have a preference for recordings of live music vs studio recordings. It evokes in me a sense of a shared experience (even though I know this is a fantasy), it's like I'm there in a concert with others. A studio recording, on the other hand seems more like a solo experience. I suppose I'd prefer higher quality live recordings over lower quality ones, but I also suppose I'd prefer lower quality live recordings over higher quality studio recordings.
Firstly, isn't it odd that the store clerks recognized it as a Batleth? That should help reinforce the nerdy 7-11 store clerk stereotype. Seriously... how would a bank teller have described this sword?
Secondly, the choice to use the batleth was either inspired or insanely stupid. Inspired in that the batleth would draw attention to itself and away from other identifying characteristics of the robber. Insanely stupid in that... how many Colorado Springs residents own a batleth anyway? Kinda reduces the suspect list by a bunch.
Actually, since you're the one saying words have meaning you do know that you changed your definition of luxury between this post and the last? Your first definition was anything not necessary to live. Your second definition of easy to scale back on things, includes many things that would qualify as a luxury item by your first definition.
Regardless, an iPod is a luxury item, and music is an optional item, that we can agree on. As for music being luxury, all we seem to be doing is reading different lines from the dictionary:
Luxury - n
a) a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort : sumptuous environment
b) something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary
You're picking (b) and I'm picking (a) (emphasis on "great")
Now if I could just wrap my mind around iTunes being a luxury good then I'd be set.
Please, please tell me you're being sarcastic? You do know a luxury item is something you don't need, not something that's expensive - right?
You're dividing it into "need to have" and "nice to have" and that's it? The only things I need to have to live are air, food, water, clothing and shelter. Food can be pretty basic and I'd imagine that nothing at Whole Foods would qualify as basic. Water is just water. Soda, which apparently many poor people drink is a luxury by your definition. The dividing line between need to have and nice to have gets blurrier in the clothing department. Clothing to keep you warm may not earn you much respect at the office, so social norms would seem to indicate that you need a "luxury" suit just to keep up at the office.
On a more practical level, I'd define a luxury item as say, anything the wealthiest 10% - 20% of the people buy and that no one in a lower economic class buys. Music is definitely NOT in that category. And indeed it's that sort of definition that prevents a luxury tax from becoming a regressive tax. Sales tax on any item that I don't *need* to survive, but that 90% of the population buys anyway affects the lower economic classes more than the upper ones. Furniture, dishes, television, telephone, a second pair of shoes are all pretty basic stuff that you would call a luxury and hence would be happy taxing at a luxury tax rate?
Well, on the up side he's trying to raise more money through products rather than income taxes. I'd prefer the taxes on ipods, cigars, gasoline, and luxury cars to income tax increases. Of course if it hurts NY businesses (I don't think it will), then it'll hurt in the long run. But the state needs to stop bleeding money immediately.
Interesting perspective. Normally sales taxes are considered "regressive" taxes because the poor pay relatively more of their income toward these taxes than the rich, while a flat income tax would tax everyone equally.
However, "luxury" taxes almost by definition are not regressive because the poor can't afford the items that trigger the tax and so they're completely unaffected.
Now if I could just wrap my mind around iTunes being a luxury good then I'd be set.
For many years now, I've been using Nerd, Jock and Geek almost interchangeable in every day language. I enjoy particularly calling folks "sports nerds" and "math jocks" though I use the "sports nerd" phrase much more often.
Granted the book appears to be about how Nerds have become successful and essentially success is cool so Nerds (or at least successful nerds) are cool. But my point of mixing these phrases is to showcase the narrow focus each has.
Classically Jocks focus on sports to the near exclusion of everything else. Nerds focus on science to the near exclusion of everything else. Neither, to my mind, are worthy of vaulted status becuase both limit their attention to a subset the wider world. Consequently either or both are worthy of the same praise and derision. Hence Sports Nerd.
(from someone at JPL)
At least you're not completely emotionally invested in this thing. Seriously, when it 'dies', somebody is going to need some serious counseling.
True, perhaps more true than you expect. These babies do not have an "off switch", and while I'm not 100% sure what it will do in a "fault-condition" I imagine it could still try to communicate at random times. To those emotionally invested and who can't help being anthropomorphic about it, I imagine these random "fault-condition" communications would be worse than "death".
I try to envision the right model for security and privacy as small town America. In this model everyone knows everyone else and for the most part, when you see your neighbor, he/she sees you.
Extrapolating this to the modern world, a world-wide facial recognition database would be compatible if the following additional conditions were met:
a) everyone had access to it (Everyone knows everyone else)
b) it was trivially easy to see where the cameras were (when you see me, I see you)
c) cameras were only in a relatively few number of places. (when I'm behind "closed doors" I'm out of public view)
I'm not convinced governments can abide by these above rules, but if they could I'd be OK living in a world-wide "small town".
Stories like this underscore my feeling about Palin's quote from the VP debate:
"we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."
I'm sure that the Republican's view of this is one of war/conquest and that America will lose to some foreign non-democratic state, but today the more urgent issue seems to be loss of civil liberties. Loss of freedom from expanding government power. It's the ultimate irony that the party that espouses this quote is most likely THE party that will remove all our civil liberties and turn freedom into just a memory.
You may be right about the "mental modes" idea, but I got the distinct impression from both asking him and recalling my own early driving experiences that the bigger factor was "real-life".
I think my son focused too much on the "immediate" danger, hitting the curb or hitting the car on the side street he was turning into (exacerbated by me being in the car with him), that he completely ignored "2nd tier" dangers: the oncoming car.
The "mode" I think helps with this sort of driving is the "wide awareness" mode. And I think that for kids there's a big chasm to be crossed between that in a video game and that in real-iife-with-significant-consequences (car accident).
For elderly drivers they should already know how to get into the "wide awareness in real life" mode, what they're lacking is practice and/or need more practice to keep it as sharp as they were in their youth. And "wide awareness in game life" helps with that.
In other words, it may be the case that once you got it games help you keep it, but games don't help you get it in the first place.