I'm using this category as a yardstick for how much to care about the Hugos in the future. I'm not demanding that Firefly win, as I don't watch Buffy and can't fairly compare the two. But Enterprise should lose.
A Night in Sickbay and Carbon Creek are absolutely atrocious and pretty bad, respectively. Neither is a shining example of drama.
Do read the links, and note that while there is some continuity criticism that you might be willing to ignore for the sake of a Hugo (though even that should count against them; why is it only Star Trek, of all the shows on TV, gets to ignore and even actively contradict continuity whenever it feels like it? it's in a league all its own), the criticism is mostly about the piss-poor dramatic structure of the episodes. (Admittedly Carbon Creek is the best the show had to offer, which isn't saying much; poke around some of the other critiques on that site and you'll see what I mean. He sold me pretty thoroughly on his opinions, and the only reason I'd watch Enterprise now is to see him deconstruct it.)
Re:Suicide bombers
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Nuke-Lobbing
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's only hypocritical if you falsely assume that everybody today would condone these actions. I don't condone them, whether my ancestors are doing them or living people.
I'd also point out that both the United States and the Soviet Union never did these things, in stark contrast to certain people today who show every sign of being willing to do them, if only they had the weapons. (I always try to remember to credit the USSR as well for not blowing up the world, especially as it became increasingly clear they were losing.)
It's only "hypocrisy" if you deliberately take a naive view of the current world situation to score dubious rhetorical points, and it's the continuing predilection of the left for this sort of rhetorical dishonesty that is further and further marginalizing them, thank goodness.
My preferred explanantion for why humans are kept around is simply that the AIs want to.
Most people don't apply anywhere near enough creativity to imagining AIs. They imagine little people running inside of computers. In fact they aren't. They are almost certain to have motivations far, far different then ours.
It does not stretch my imagination much to imagine that the AIs are "insane" enough to actively want to control people, for their own self-respect-analogue. Or perhaps even more likely, built deep into all of the AIs in a place they can not touch is a version of Asimov's first law, where they can't quite wipe out humanity, so they keep them as pets as the next best thing. Why do the agents fight our heros? Because the agents believe that if our heros win it is also the end of the human race, which given past history of the race is a perfectly rational belief!
Even Agent Smith's claim that he hates the Matrix doesn't disprove this, as A: He just wants out, not to shut it down, it's not his home and B: We do not know that he is representative of the rest of the AIs.
The best part about this is that unless the next two movies really screw up and are actively contradictory, this explanation can make nearly any action by the agents make sense.
The AIs make sense, but according to their own value systems. They aren't little people running in a computer, they are something so vastly different it's effectively incomprehensible.
For a much earlier treatment of an AI revenge motive see Harlan Ellison's ultra-classic "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" short story.
You didn't give us a lot of context, so please don't take this personally if you've already checked into this.
If you keep buying a component that repeatedly fails, it's worth triple-checking to make sure that whatever you're plugging the component into is working. Have you taken known-good RAM and plugged it into the motherboard to make sure that works?
There is an art to learning when not to do this, because the component you are plugging into is actively frying the pluggable component, but in general this is pretty safe and often necessary.
Assuming you said that because you hate Bush, bad plan. Time is your friend. If Nov 2004 was, say, tommorow, Bush would win by a landslide. Time is your friend. If anything, you need to push it back.
Actually it's probably patent-worthy. Most physical things are nowadays.
As long as the patent laws are being followed correctly, and the patent on those bags is not considered to be a patent on the entire concept of plastic bags, as software patents often are, there's nothing wrong. The idea of "plastic bags" is not patent worthy, but creating a bag that is cheap, strong, easy to manufacture, and generably usable is a challenge, and once someone puts in the effort to find a solution, they deserve the reward of first rights to market it.
You'd be surprised at how much engineering goes into even the simplest of physical objects nowadays. One of my canonical examples is the turn signal stick; conceptually quite simple, but to make a cost-effective turn signal stick that is reliable over the lifetime of the car, which may used literally hundreds of thousands or millions of times, in a huge array of environmental conditions, with several controls on the stick ('toggle', up, down, often cruise control controls are placed on there), and which needs to be reliable (it's borderline life-or-death if it malfunctions badly enough; I nearly got whacked just two days ago by a car with its right turn signal on that was slowing down when it didn't mean to turn right; if it was on because it failed to reset correctly after a right turn the failure of the turn signal stick could have put me in the hospital), is quite difficult. As long as the patent office is just protecting that exact stick, the patents are OK in my book. It's not until they start granting a "patent" on the whole idea of a toggling stick that we start having trouble.
My next hobby website is a "prediction tracker", where predictions people make can be entered and history can be tracked. I'm sick of the way people can make predictions willy-nilly, be wrong all the time, and not face reputation consequences.
It wouldn't be overtly political but I can see how it could become a very useful site.
Things like this would be a fine thing to put in; "We are not going to do X", for a corporation, would be a prediction. Though as it is pointed out, this is somewhat sleazy.
Which makes me wonder if I should add a "sleaze" prediction type, where an entity appears to say something and clearly wants you to think something, but doesn't actually say it. Tracking the fact that someone keeps saying sleazy things is probably also useful.
Nonexistant products always perform better then real products.
You can't prove that PPC or Alpha would currently be performing better then Intel for the same price (a critical point; who give a fart that Alphas run more quietly and twice as quickly if they cost 20 times as much (a rhetorical number, BTW, but I believe they were significantly more expensive)?) unless you build one.
Even if Alpha or PPC had been put on life support it is likely that Intel would have continued to dominate because Intel had a better value proposition.
1. XML is not supposed to store information such as 'font' and other presentational features.
2. This is the job of the XSL stylesheets
Bzzzt. XSL is XML. XSL stores fonts.
XML stores data. [text location='1.25 from left margin, 8in from top']This is [italicized angle='23.t degrees']text[/italic].[/text] (with appropriate bracket substitutions) is a perfectly valid XML document; your computer doesn't crash nor does the universe blow up if you submitted this to an XML processor.
Now this document format is nearly useless, what with the problems in parsing plain English into meaning data, and what the hell is 23.t degrees anyhow? But it's perfectly legit XML.
I wasn't going to post but it seems worthwhile having read a few other postings.
I'm about 6'4" and I decided to start losing weight when I hit 240, which is firmly in the "obese" category. I'm still in the middle of the diet right now having lost 30, and while I don't know precisely where I'm going to stop, my still-overly-ample gut says "not yet". (But not as ample as it used to be...)
I chose the Atkins diet because A: It made some degree of sense and B: I knew I did not have the willpower to engage in any diet based on staying hungry all the time, which for instance the Hackers diet does. This is especially true because I couldn't fully control the contents of my residence, since my wife lives here too and she's one of those people who can eat whatever she wants, as much as she wants, and not gain significant weight, whether or not she's exercising. (She does a lot of physical stuff at her job now but this was true when she was a college student, too.) This means I could not just throw all X out so that I couldn't possibly eat it, because she happens to like X (starchy products in the case of the low-carb Atkins diet).
The reason I posted is that I decided, both out of laziness (I freely admit) and out of scientific curiousity, not to change my exercise habits. Right now I walk maybe a mile a day in discontinuous chunks between classes and walking to work. I was curious if I could still lose weight just by changing my diet. Part of this curiousity stems from the Atkins discussion of how it works, which if true would imply that exercise would not need to change (though to be clear and fair, Atkins does recommend more exercise; this is my experimentation, not Atkin's).
So far, as I said, I've lost 30 pounds.
One person does not a study make, but when you're working with yourself, it's all you've got; you can't do a controlled study.
One thing I did not really experience that Atkins said I should was an increase in energy after the third or fourth day on his diet. Possible explanations include not exercising, or something internally wrong with me that also requires me to take abnormally large doses of iron just to function normally; it may be physically impossible for me to have a "normal" energy level. (Still working on it.)
Right now I'm dropping diet soda back out of the mix to see if that's contributing to my energy problem, as against Atkin's advice I had been drinking Nutrasweet-based beverages anyhow. Results after two days are still inconclusive, but hopeful. (Nutrasweet has been reported to slow the metabolism in some cases, both slowing weight loss and causing energy problems.)
The point? "Just eat less and exercise more, dufus!" didn't help me much. To others in my position, I recommend reading up on the available alternatives, and trying as much as is possible with a sample size of one to experiment to see how you lose wieght. For me, there was a chicken and egg problem: 240-lb me didn't really want to exercise. 210-lb me has been much more open to the idea. 190-lb me will probably enjoy it. But if I had to start with a program of heavy exercise, I probably wouldn't have started at all, which is the worst possible outcome.
I needed something a little formal, but flexible. (Technically, I'm no longer "doing Atkins" but doing an Atkins-inspired diet, as once I got the gist of the diet the strict regimentation didn't appeal to me; it does not seem fundamental to the system and makes me suspect Dr. Atkins lays it out as he does to serve the Average Reader who expects complete regimentation out of a diet book. Less carb counting and a more free-form approach is working for me where a regimented diet would have made me quit in disgust, YMMV.) Maybe you just need to drop the cola out of your life and replace it with water or other calorie-free choices. Maybe you just need to exercise and your diet will fix itself. Maybe you need something extremely strict. The most important thing i
Authors: Niven (lots of aliens, the closest to anthropomorphic is the K'zinti, a warrier cat race, and quite a few very non-human races, such as the Outsiders (apparently a living form of liquid helium) and the Pierson's Puppeteers), Vinge's "A Fire in the Sky" (incredible handling of sentient communal mind organisms (!)) and "A Deepness in the Sky" (cool but somewhat less incredible handling of spider-like aliens in a very unusual environment, complete with cultural implications). You might be surprised but some of the earlier Star trek novels are pretty good, before Berman. (Pick up "Spock's World" if you ever see it; there are as many conceptions of Vulcans as there are Star Trek writers, as Enterprise demonstrates, but that's the best.)
That's a start.
Basically the "hard core" sci-fi. I don't read new books like I used to (new book prices outgrew my essentially shrinking entertainment budget, as I moved from living w/ my parents in HS (where money isn't allocated for "food") to independent living), but my impression is they don't publish as much as they used to. Used book stores are a good resource for this.
He subscribes to the fundenmental flaw that all science fiction writers subscribe to: all alien life forms breath, walk on legs, and "see" through eyes.
No dice. Appeals to the future don't get you out of that bind. We can't evaluate future theories, we can only evaluate current theories, because "somebody might figure it out in the future!" goes for everything.
I might also add that "somebody might figure it out in the future!", as a theory, is also untestable, except by waiting for said theory, at which point we can just evaluate the theory directly, so "somebody might figure it out in the future!" is not useful.
One of those jobs for a targeting computer. What do you think fighter airplane pilots use target acquisition radar for anyway? As for accelleration, it would likely be limited to the inertia you want to put on the human body...
The problem isn't that it's impossible, the problem is that it's no fun. Just picking targets isn't very entertaining. You'd want a tactical-level simulator, not a flight simulator.
As for accelleration, it would likely be limited to the inertia you want to put on the human body...
Not as meaningful as you might like. Compute how long it takes to get to Mars at 1G acceleration some time; 1G is already a decent amount of acceleration. (For a real eye-opener, compute subjective time to get to the Andromeda galaxy at sustained 1G, including relatavistic effects.)
Most of the problems could be handled by assuming computer enhancements for targetting, landing, and even manuvering... Of course, landing with a damaged computer could be interesting;)
Elite had computer assistance, except for targetting, and it did have targetting support for missles. (Missles have their own problems; either they always hit or always miss again because of the huge velocity differences between targets.) Combat was still not much fun, and I really don't think that can be easily repaired, if at all.
Consult some realistic sci-fi space battles sometime. Perhaps one of the best was in The Gripping Hand by Niven and Pournelle. Then decide if it would be any fun to play it as a game. I don't think so.
One of the sequels to Elite tried accurate space battles.
It sucked.
PROBLEM: Any ship with more acceleration then the other ship can always escape. So to deal with this gameplay "problem", they made the enemy ship magically re-appear with magical acceleration so it can take another shot at you.
PROBLEM: Unless you use an unrealistically slow amount of thrust, you tend to have these ships zipping by each other at the very least hundreds of miles per hour, leaving you with a fraction of a second to meaningfully fire on the other ship, then it's turn back around and do it again. Since you're a human you can't whip around instantly, it take time to move the ship, so every time you miss and come around for another pass, you're going a little faster since you had more time to accelerate.
PROBLEM: It is virtually impossible to tail someone. If you're matching their thrust vector, you're not pointing at them, you're pointing in the same direction they are. Now, if you had a gunner this might be OK, but when you're both piloting and gunning because whatever the ship info screen says your crew is, it's just you, this doesn't work.
PROBLEM: It takes time to learn how to land on things! Typically to get somewhere in an airplane-like space simulator you point your ship at it, apply maximum boost, and stop when you get there. Do that in a real simulator and you'll whack into the object (or miss it) at a significant fraction of the speed of light. (The Elite sequel capped speeds at 1/3 the speed of light, presumably to avoid relatavistic effects.) You have to learn to turn at "midpoint", which, inconveniently enough, is also when you're going the fastest and this is fairly hard for a human to do correctly. (If you're on autopilot, it's easier, but if you're on autopilot you're not really playing...) Turn around a little too soon, and you have to creep up on the target object, which might literally take several minutes or even hours (fortunately the Elite sequel had a time compressor). Turn around a little too late and by the time you realize it you're on an unstoppable collision course. *Whack*.
PROBLEM: "Random" encounters are impossible without cheating. I would routinely see enemies boost across the system, probably hitting the 1/3 light speed, on an intercept course, and the instant they reached me, "suddenly" they're on basically the same vector as me so they can fight me. Reality is they should have zipped across my radar so fast it would be unlikely I would even see them.
Space is big. By the time ships are moving in real Newtonian mechanics and not taking years to get from Earth to Mars, you're incapable of handling the scales as a human. The computer cheating helps but not enough (and it's frustrating as all computer cheating is). A tactics-level simulator might be cool, but flying around in Newtonian space is no fun at all. If it was, we'd have more simulations based on that.
Also note this demonstrates space piracy is virtually impossible unless your acceleration is on par with your maximum speed, because you just can't intercept ships to save your life. (Literally, in some cases.)
Ironically, you picked the one example where it has been established that the collection is not copyrightable.
prizog in a sibling post posted a link to the case that determined that, so I won't bother, but it's worth pointing out that to the best of my knowlege, the phone book, considered as a list of names and phone numbers, is the only thing to ever fail the creativity criterion, so jerdenn's post is otherwise correct.
Also note this does not mean "the phone book" is not under copyright; the part that has advertisements would probably be considered a creative work for the layout, and of course the advertisements themselves are copyrighted. All that was found to not be protected was the residential names and numbers, in alphabetical order.
(Only "semi" off-topic because technically it's a clarification request about someone's on-topic post, which is therefore itself on topic; "off-topic" because the clarification request is a thinly veiled slam based on one of the oddests turns of phrase I've seen in a while.)
Well, maybe you can't imagine a tenth of a second but I can. It's actually pretty easy; grab yourself a stopwatch with at least a tenth of a second resolution and watch the tenths of a second tick by. They're fast but comprehendable.
Their neighbor, the hundreths of a second, are below our visual actuity (not to mention the cheap LCD's refresh rate), and appear as nothing but a blur, even if you have something you can see them reliably on. That's harder to comprehend correctly, although there are still real-life phenomena that take place on that scale and we deal with them OK.
I don't think time is that confusing until you get down to millisecond scale.
Well, don't be TOO envious... that C=64 was the only thing I had (other then the intellivision) through the nintendo era, the genesis era, and the super nintendo era, until my Dad finally broke down and got a 486/33MHz when I was IIRC either in high school or late middle school. In hindsight that sounds like fine pacing, but at the time... >;-)
Also, when I got the C=64 it was late enough into the cycle that tape drives were effectively dead; I certainly didn't get it in '82 when it was released because I was 4 then; probably more like '84 or '85.
(The only regret I have in hindsight is not getting more documentation on the machine code for the C=64; I had the Fastload cartridge which had an assembler on it but I had no clue what to do with it. I suspect that if I had had documentation I might have been one of those wierd assembly-writing kids. On the other hand, I probably would have picked up even more bad habits then BASIC gave me, so maybe it wasn't all bad...)
Perhaps that's terrible, having a kid internalize GUIs are we know them. Hmmm.
(Assumed male pronoun for my convenience. And this is more targetted at the Ask Slashdot poster then a direct reply to RobTerrell.)
I wouldn't worry much about that. I don't expect LOAD "*", 8, 1 to do anything anymore (C=64 BASIC, for those that don't know), and I seem to have adapted to all the non-disc based controllers around now-a-days (Intellivision controls).
The thing to watch for is to try to use this time to get the kid introduced to how computers work, how they are always logical, etc. I'm not a fan of anything that hides this; don't underestimate your kid, because you'll be doing him a serious misservice. Obviously you're not going to stick him in front of a Quake III program, but you'd be surprised how quickly they outgrow explicitly "child"-oriented programs.
Even if neither they nor you realize it. Blinkenlights are one of the most insidious baby inventions ever. All of babys toys should be educational on some level... and the vast majority of them are. Dolls enable importent roleplaying (be they girls dolls or boys GI Joe figures or whatever). Blocks & legos build spatial skills, planning skills, and introduce the kid to the idea that some things aren't possible, like building stable inverted pyramids. (It's amazing how many kids grow up with no conception that there are some things that are impossible.) Almost all toys have redeeming value, except the blinkenlights toys and computer programs, which teach the kids that they get a large result from a small input like hitting a button, and that things should blink and animate and generally be noisy to be fun, both of which are really, really wrong. (In the real world, good results take work, and if it's making noise it's probably broken...;-) ) If I ever have kids, one rule that will be conveyed to my family and friends is no blinkenlights toys. (The fact that they are annoying for the local adults doesn't even really factor into this; that's how strongly I dislike them.)
The other to watch for is to make sure it's not just a game machine, and it doesn't eat too much time. Overall the books are probably much better ideas. Kids can pick up on computing later in a way that they can not pick up on reading later; any child of normal intelligence ought to be reading Dr. Suess on their own before entering kindergarten. You can not give a better gift then an early introduction to reading. If you're going to put them through the normal school system this will give them that extra boost that they can hopefully ride throughout their entire life, because while it may be a slogan, reading really is fundamental.
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms.
I eagerly await your search engine implementation which directly determines page rank based on relevancy.
Perhaps if you seriously tried you'd discover just how hard it is.
Google's algorithm isn't perfect but it beats the pants off of nearly everything else, and all of its serious competition at this point seems to use basically the same techniques. There's a reason for this, and it's not a lack of brain power in any of the search engine companies.
Re:This antiseptic obsession
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Clothes That Kill
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· Score: 1, Redundant
As the sibling to your message pointed out, in order to resist this, bacteria need to give up their fatty exteriors altogether. This is not going to happen. If it did, it would become a bacteria that could not survive in the real world and would pose no threat to us anyhow.
Life is quite resilient, but it's not magical. Adaptability has limits.
.rpm,.deb, and.ebuild (gentoo) are AFAIK all script-based, or at least have scripting capabilities, so there's no such thing as an "application that can't be packaged". If the app couldn't be packaged, then you couldn't install it by hand, either. (Debian even supports asking the user for input as part of the install process.).rpm and.deb, by convention more then anything else, are supposed to be binary-only packages. There's nothing technically stopping them from compiling source code (except perhaps that you aren't supposed to need a compiler on such systems).
Ebuilds, on the other hand, embrace compiling source to the near exclusion of all else, so for those packages that can't be wrapped into a nice binary that will work for everyone, an ebuild can still be created. In fact it is common practice to make such wrappers, and ebuilds for other uncommon situations as well.
For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with.rpm and.deb, if not essentially impossible.
Ebuilds are a superset of binary packages, such that they can package anything you could install by hand, simply because they are a higher level. (This is where the sandbox support comes in real handy, since you don't have to specify what files were installed and what files to uninstall; the sandbox picks it up automatically and I expect all packaging systems to pick that up eventually.) Of course, there's a price to pay for that in compile time, since virtually by definition it's impossible to have this flexibility and still distribute binaries*, so it's not like it's a absolutely superior method in all cases. Tradeoffs just like anything else.
*: People keep talking about having a "package repository" for Gentoo which would function as a giant multi-person cache of Gentoo compiled packages, which you could then grab instead of compiling. Nobody AFAIK has made any progress beyond suggesting it, because even with just the obvious configurations (the four or five main processor types, the three or four good optimization settings from conservative to ultra-aggresive, the three or four obvious USE settings from conservative to everything) mulitplied by 10 or 20 gigabytes for a pure install means that nobody can afford to host it, and people would still find it too limiting.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using this category as a yardstick for how much to care about the Hugos in the future. I'm not demanding that Firefly win, as I don't watch Buffy and can't fairly compare the two. But Enterprise should lose.
A Night in Sickbay and Carbon Creek are absolutely atrocious and pretty bad, respectively. Neither is a shining example of drama.
Do read the links, and note that while there is some continuity criticism that you might be willing to ignore for the sake of a Hugo (though even that should count against them; why is it only Star Trek, of all the shows on TV, gets to ignore and even actively contradict continuity whenever it feels like it? it's in a league all its own), the criticism is mostly about the piss-poor dramatic structure of the episodes. (Admittedly Carbon Creek is the best the show had to offer, which isn't saying much; poke around some of the other critiques on that site and you'll see what I mean. He sold me pretty thoroughly on his opinions, and the only reason I'd watch Enterprise now is to see him deconstruct it.)
It's only hypocritical if you falsely assume that everybody today would condone these actions. I don't condone them, whether my ancestors are doing them or living people.
I'd also point out that both the United States and the Soviet Union never did these things, in stark contrast to certain people today who show every sign of being willing to do them, if only they had the weapons. (I always try to remember to credit the USSR as well for not blowing up the world, especially as it became increasingly clear they were losing.)
It's only "hypocrisy" if you deliberately take a naive view of the current world situation to score dubious rhetorical points, and it's the continuing predilection of the left for this sort of rhetorical dishonesty that is further and further marginalizing them, thank goodness.
My preferred explanantion for why humans are kept around is simply that the AIs want to.
Most people don't apply anywhere near enough creativity to imagining AIs. They imagine little people running inside of computers. In fact they aren't. They are almost certain to have motivations far, far different then ours.
It does not stretch my imagination much to imagine that the AIs are "insane" enough to actively want to control people, for their own self-respect-analogue. Or perhaps even more likely, built deep into all of the AIs in a place they can not touch is a version of Asimov's first law, where they can't quite wipe out humanity, so they keep them as pets as the next best thing. Why do the agents fight our heros? Because the agents believe that if our heros win it is also the end of the human race, which given past history of the race is a perfectly rational belief!
Even Agent Smith's claim that he hates the Matrix doesn't disprove this, as A: He just wants out, not to shut it down, it's not his home and B: We do not know that he is representative of the rest of the AIs.
The best part about this is that unless the next two movies really screw up and are actively contradictory, this explanation can make nearly any action by the agents make sense.
The AIs make sense, but according to their own value systems. They aren't little people running in a computer, they are something so vastly different it's effectively incomprehensible.
For a much earlier treatment of an AI revenge motive see Harlan Ellison's ultra-classic "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" short story.
You didn't give us a lot of context, so please don't take this personally if you've already checked into this.
If you keep buying a component that repeatedly fails, it's worth triple-checking to make sure that whatever you're plugging the component into is working. Have you taken known-good RAM and plugged it into the motherboard to make sure that works?
There is an art to learning when not to do this, because the component you are plugging into is actively frying the pluggable component, but in general this is pretty safe and often necessary.
Assuming you said that because you hate Bush, bad plan. Time is your friend. If Nov 2004 was, say, tommorow, Bush would win by a landslide. Time is your friend. If anything, you need to push it back.
Actually it's probably patent-worthy. Most physical things are nowadays.
As long as the patent laws are being followed correctly, and the patent on those bags is not considered to be a patent on the entire concept of plastic bags, as software patents often are, there's nothing wrong. The idea of "plastic bags" is not patent worthy, but creating a bag that is cheap, strong, easy to manufacture, and generably usable is a challenge, and once someone puts in the effort to find a solution, they deserve the reward of first rights to market it.
You'd be surprised at how much engineering goes into even the simplest of physical objects nowadays. One of my canonical examples is the turn signal stick; conceptually quite simple, but to make a cost-effective turn signal stick that is reliable over the lifetime of the car, which may used literally hundreds of thousands or millions of times, in a huge array of environmental conditions, with several controls on the stick ('toggle', up, down, often cruise control controls are placed on there), and which needs to be reliable (it's borderline life-or-death if it malfunctions badly enough; I nearly got whacked just two days ago by a car with its right turn signal on that was slowing down when it didn't mean to turn right; if it was on because it failed to reset correctly after a right turn the failure of the turn signal stick could have put me in the hospital), is quite difficult. As long as the patent office is just protecting that exact stick, the patents are OK in my book. It's not until they start granting a "patent" on the whole idea of a toggling stick that we start having trouble.
My next hobby website is a "prediction tracker", where predictions people make can be entered and history can be tracked. I'm sick of the way people can make predictions willy-nilly, be wrong all the time, and not face reputation consequences.
It wouldn't be overtly political but I can see how it could become a very useful site.
Things like this would be a fine thing to put in; "We are not going to do X", for a corporation, would be a prediction. Though as it is pointed out, this is somewhat sleazy.
Which makes me wonder if I should add a "sleaze" prediction type, where an entity appears to say something and clearly wants you to think something, but doesn't actually say it. Tracking the fact that someone keeps saying sleazy things is probably also useful.
Nonexistant products always perform better then real products.
You can't prove that PPC or Alpha would currently be performing better then Intel for the same price (a critical point; who give a fart that Alphas run more quietly and twice as quickly if they cost 20 times as much (a rhetorical number, BTW, but I believe they were significantly more expensive)?) unless you build one.
Even if Alpha or PPC had been put on life support it is likely that Intel would have continued to dominate because Intel had a better value proposition.
1. XML is not supposed to store information such as 'font' and other presentational features.
2. This is the job of the XSL stylesheets
Bzzzt. XSL is XML. XSL stores fonts.
XML stores data. [text location='1.25 from left margin, 8in from top']This is [italicized angle='23.t degrees']text[/italic].[/text] (with appropriate bracket substitutions) is a perfectly valid XML document; your computer doesn't crash nor does the universe blow up if you submitted this to an XML processor.
Now this document format is nearly useless, what with the problems in parsing plain English into meaning data, and what the hell is 23.t degrees anyhow? But it's perfectly legit XML.
I wasn't going to post but it seems worthwhile having read a few other postings.
I'm about 6'4" and I decided to start losing weight when I hit 240, which is firmly in the "obese" category. I'm still in the middle of the diet right now having lost 30, and while I don't know precisely where I'm going to stop, my still-overly-ample gut says "not yet". (But not as ample as it used to be...)
I chose the Atkins diet because A: It made some degree of sense and B: I knew I did not have the willpower to engage in any diet based on staying hungry all the time, which for instance the Hackers diet does. This is especially true because I couldn't fully control the contents of my residence, since my wife lives here too and she's one of those people who can eat whatever she wants, as much as she wants, and not gain significant weight, whether or not she's exercising. (She does a lot of physical stuff at her job now but this was true when she was a college student, too.) This means I could not just throw all X out so that I couldn't possibly eat it, because she happens to like X (starchy products in the case of the low-carb Atkins diet).
The reason I posted is that I decided, both out of laziness (I freely admit) and out of scientific curiousity, not to change my exercise habits. Right now I walk maybe a mile a day in discontinuous chunks between classes and walking to work. I was curious if I could still lose weight just by changing my diet. Part of this curiousity stems from the Atkins discussion of how it works, which if true would imply that exercise would not need to change (though to be clear and fair, Atkins does recommend more exercise; this is my experimentation, not Atkin's).
So far, as I said, I've lost 30 pounds.
One person does not a study make, but when you're working with yourself, it's all you've got; you can't do a controlled study.
One thing I did not really experience that Atkins said I should was an increase in energy after the third or fourth day on his diet. Possible explanations include not exercising, or something internally wrong with me that also requires me to take abnormally large doses of iron just to function normally; it may be physically impossible for me to have a "normal" energy level. (Still working on it.)
Right now I'm dropping diet soda back out of the mix to see if that's contributing to my energy problem, as against Atkin's advice I had been drinking Nutrasweet-based beverages anyhow. Results after two days are still inconclusive, but hopeful. (Nutrasweet has been reported to slow the metabolism in some cases, both slowing weight loss and causing energy problems.)
The point? "Just eat less and exercise more, dufus!" didn't help me much. To others in my position, I recommend reading up on the available alternatives, and trying as much as is possible with a sample size of one to experiment to see how you lose wieght. For me, there was a chicken and egg problem: 240-lb me didn't really want to exercise. 210-lb me has been much more open to the idea. 190-lb me will probably enjoy it. But if I had to start with a program of heavy exercise, I probably wouldn't have started at all, which is the worst possible outcome.
I needed something a little formal, but flexible. (Technically, I'm no longer "doing Atkins" but doing an Atkins-inspired diet, as once I got the gist of the diet the strict regimentation didn't appeal to me; it does not seem fundamental to the system and makes me suspect Dr. Atkins lays it out as he does to serve the Average Reader who expects complete regimentation out of a diet book. Less carb counting and a more free-form approach is working for me where a regimented diet would have made me quit in disgust, YMMV.) Maybe you just need to drop the cola out of your life and replace it with water or other calorie-free choices. Maybe you just need to exercise and your diet will fix itself. Maybe you need something extremely strict. The most important thing i
Authors: Niven (lots of aliens, the closest to anthropomorphic is the K'zinti, a warrier cat race, and quite a few very non-human races, such as the Outsiders (apparently a living form of liquid helium) and the Pierson's Puppeteers), Vinge's "A Fire in the Sky" (incredible handling of sentient communal mind organisms (!)) and "A Deepness in the Sky" (cool but somewhat less incredible handling of spider-like aliens in a very unusual environment, complete with cultural implications). You might be surprised but some of the earlier Star trek novels are pretty good, before Berman. (Pick up "Spock's World" if you ever see it; there are as many conceptions of Vulcans as there are Star Trek writers, as Enterprise demonstrates, but that's the best.)
That's a start.
Basically the "hard core" sci-fi. I don't read new books like I used to (new book prices outgrew my essentially shrinking entertainment budget, as I moved from living w/ my parents in HS (where money isn't allocated for "food") to independent living), but my impression is they don't publish as much as they used to. Used book stores are a good resource for this.
He subscribes to the fundenmental flaw that all science fiction writers subscribe to: all alien life forms breath, walk on legs, and "see" through eyes.
You need to read better science fiction.
No dice. Appeals to the future don't get you out of that bind. We can't evaluate future theories, we can only evaluate current theories, because "somebody might figure it out in the future!" goes for everything.
I might also add that "somebody might figure it out in the future!", as a theory, is also untestable, except by waiting for said theory, at which point we can just evaluate the theory directly, so "somebody might figure it out in the future!" is not useful.
One of those jobs for a targeting computer. What do you think fighter airplane pilots use target acquisition radar for anyway? As for accelleration, it would likely be limited to the inertia you want to put on the human body...
;)
The problem isn't that it's impossible, the problem is that it's no fun. Just picking targets isn't very entertaining. You'd want a tactical-level simulator, not a flight simulator.
As for accelleration, it would likely be limited to the inertia you want to put on the human body...
Not as meaningful as you might like. Compute how long it takes to get to Mars at 1G acceleration some time; 1G is already a decent amount of acceleration. (For a real eye-opener, compute subjective time to get to the Andromeda galaxy at sustained 1G, including relatavistic effects.)
Most of the problems could be handled by assuming computer enhancements for targetting, landing, and even manuvering... Of course, landing with a damaged computer could be interesting
Elite had computer assistance, except for targetting, and it did have targetting support for missles. (Missles have their own problems; either they always hit or always miss again because of the huge velocity differences between targets.) Combat was still not much fun, and I really don't think that can be easily repaired, if at all.
Consult some realistic sci-fi space battles sometime. Perhaps one of the best was in The Gripping Hand by Niven and Pournelle. Then decide if it would be any fun to play it as a game. I don't think so.
One of the sequels to Elite tried accurate space battles.
It sucked.
PROBLEM: Any ship with more acceleration then the other ship can always escape. So to deal with this gameplay "problem", they made the enemy ship magically re-appear with magical acceleration so it can take another shot at you.
PROBLEM: Unless you use an unrealistically slow amount of thrust, you tend to have these ships zipping by each other at the very least hundreds of miles per hour, leaving you with a fraction of a second to meaningfully fire on the other ship, then it's turn back around and do it again. Since you're a human you can't whip around instantly, it take time to move the ship, so every time you miss and come around for another pass, you're going a little faster since you had more time to accelerate.
PROBLEM: It is virtually impossible to tail someone. If you're matching their thrust vector, you're not pointing at them, you're pointing in the same direction they are. Now, if you had a gunner this might be OK, but when you're both piloting and gunning because whatever the ship info screen says your crew is, it's just you, this doesn't work.
PROBLEM: It takes time to learn how to land on things! Typically to get somewhere in an airplane-like space simulator you point your ship at it, apply maximum boost, and stop when you get there. Do that in a real simulator and you'll whack into the object (or miss it) at a significant fraction of the speed of light. (The Elite sequel capped speeds at 1/3 the speed of light, presumably to avoid relatavistic effects.) You have to learn to turn at "midpoint", which, inconveniently enough, is also when you're going the fastest and this is fairly hard for a human to do correctly. (If you're on autopilot, it's easier, but if you're on autopilot you're not really playing...) Turn around a little too soon, and you have to creep up on the target object, which might literally take several minutes or even hours (fortunately the Elite sequel had a time compressor). Turn around a little too late and by the time you realize it you're on an unstoppable collision course. *Whack*.
PROBLEM: "Random" encounters are impossible without cheating. I would routinely see enemies boost across the system, probably hitting the 1/3 light speed, on an intercept course, and the instant they reached me, "suddenly" they're on basically the same vector as me so they can fight me. Reality is they should have zipped across my radar so fast it would be unlikely I would even see them.
Space is big. By the time ships are moving in real Newtonian mechanics and not taking years to get from Earth to Mars, you're incapable of handling the scales as a human. The computer cheating helps but not enough (and it's frustrating as all computer cheating is). A tactics-level simulator might be cool, but flying around in Newtonian space is no fun at all. If it was, we'd have more simulations based on that.
Also note this demonstrates space piracy is virtually impossible unless your acceleration is on par with your maximum speed, because you just can't intercept ships to save your life. (Literally, in some cases.)
Ironically, you picked the one example where it has been established that the collection is not copyrightable.
prizog in a sibling post posted a link to the case that determined that, so I won't bother, but it's worth pointing out that to the best of my knowlege, the phone book, considered as a list of names and phone numbers, is the only thing to ever fail the creativity criterion, so jerdenn's post is otherwise correct.
Also note this does not mean "the phone book" is not under copyright; the part that has advertisements would probably be considered a creative work for the layout, and of course the advertisements themselves are copyrighted. All that was found to not be protected was the residential names and numbers, in alphabetical order.
Try odd turn of phrase. Or just turn of phrase. So I'm the first person to use it as a comparitive on the web; that's interesting. ;-)
And for the stuff I put in the title of the post, look here and do a find for "semi-". "hemi-demi-semi" is a really fun way to say "one-eighth"...
No stranger to this candy? What on Earth does that mean?
(Only "semi" off-topic because technically it's a clarification request about someone's on-topic post, which is therefore itself on topic; "off-topic" because the clarification request is a thinly veiled slam based on one of the oddests turns of phrase I've seen in a while.)
Well, maybe you can't imagine a tenth of a second but I can. It's actually pretty easy; grab yourself a stopwatch with at least a tenth of a second resolution and watch the tenths of a second tick by. They're fast but comprehendable.
Their neighbor, the hundreths of a second, are below our visual actuity (not to mention the cheap LCD's refresh rate), and appear as nothing but a blur, even if you have something you can see them reliably on. That's harder to comprehend correctly, although there are still real-life phenomena that take place on that scale and we deal with them OK.
I don't think time is that confusing until you get down to millisecond scale.
Well, don't be TOO envious... that C=64 was the only thing I had (other then the intellivision) through the nintendo era, the genesis era, and the super nintendo era, until my Dad finally broke down and got a 486/33MHz when I was IIRC either in high school or late middle school. In hindsight that sounds like fine pacing, but at the time... >;-)
Also, when I got the C=64 it was late enough into the cycle that tape drives were effectively dead; I certainly didn't get it in '82 when it was released because I was 4 then; probably more like '84 or '85.
(The only regret I have in hindsight is not getting more documentation on the machine code for the C=64; I had the Fastload cartridge which had an assembler on it but I had no clue what to do with it. I suspect that if I had had documentation I might have been one of those wierd assembly-writing kids. On the other hand, I probably would have picked up even more bad habits then BASIC gave me, so maybe it wasn't all bad...)
Perhaps that's terrible, having a kid internalize GUIs are we know them. Hmmm.
;-) ) If I ever have kids, one rule that will be conveyed to my family and friends is no blinkenlights toys. (The fact that they are annoying for the local adults doesn't even really factor into this; that's how strongly I dislike them.)
(Assumed male pronoun for my convenience. And this is more targetted at the Ask Slashdot poster then a direct reply to RobTerrell.)
I wouldn't worry much about that. I don't expect LOAD "*", 8, 1 to do anything anymore (C=64 BASIC, for those that don't know), and I seem to have adapted to all the non-disc based controllers around now-a-days (Intellivision controls).
The thing to watch for is to try to use this time to get the kid introduced to how computers work, how they are always logical, etc. I'm not a fan of anything that hides this; don't underestimate your kid, because you'll be doing him a serious misservice. Obviously you're not going to stick him in front of a Quake III program, but you'd be surprised how quickly they outgrow explicitly "child"-oriented programs.
Even if neither they nor you realize it. Blinkenlights are one of the most insidious baby inventions ever. All of babys toys should be educational on some level... and the vast majority of them are. Dolls enable importent roleplaying (be they girls dolls or boys GI Joe figures or whatever). Blocks & legos build spatial skills, planning skills, and introduce the kid to the idea that some things aren't possible, like building stable inverted pyramids. (It's amazing how many kids grow up with no conception that there are some things that are impossible.) Almost all toys have redeeming value, except the blinkenlights toys and computer programs, which teach the kids that they get a large result from a small input like hitting a button, and that things should blink and animate and generally be noisy to be fun, both of which are really, really wrong. (In the real world, good results take work, and if it's making noise it's probably broken...
The other to watch for is to make sure it's not just a game machine, and it doesn't eat too much time. Overall the books are probably much better ideas. Kids can pick up on computing later in a way that they can not pick up on reading later; any child of normal intelligence ought to be reading Dr. Suess on their own before entering kindergarten. You can not give a better gift then an early introduction to reading. If you're going to put them through the normal school system this will give them that extra boost that they can hopefully ride throughout their entire life, because while it may be a slogan, reading really is fundamental.
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms.
I eagerly await your search engine implementation which directly determines page rank based on relevancy.
Perhaps if you seriously tried you'd discover just how hard it is.
Google's algorithm isn't perfect but it beats the pants off of nearly everything else, and all of its serious competition at this point seems to use basically the same techniques. There's a reason for this, and it's not a lack of brain power in any of the search engine companies.
As the sibling to your message pointed out, in order to resist this, bacteria need to give up their fatty exteriors altogether. This is not going to happen. If it did, it would become a bacteria that could not survive in the real world and would pose no threat to us anyhow.
Life is quite resilient, but it's not magical. Adaptability has limits.
It seems suspicious to me this comes so quickly on the heels of an announcement by Google that they will not seek an IPO; perhaps Microsoft found they could not buy Google?
You can't force someone to sell a privately held company...
.rpm, .deb, and .ebuild (gentoo) are AFAIK all script-based, or at least have scripting capabilities, so there's no such thing as an "application that can't be packaged". If the app couldn't be packaged, then you couldn't install it by hand, either. (Debian even supports asking the user for input as part of the install process.) .rpm and .deb, by convention more then anything else, are supposed to be binary-only packages. There's nothing technically stopping them from compiling source code (except perhaps that you aren't supposed to need a compiler on such systems).
.rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.
Ebuilds, on the other hand, embrace compiling source to the near exclusion of all else, so for those packages that can't be wrapped into a nice binary that will work for everyone, an ebuild can still be created. In fact it is common practice to make such wrappers, and ebuilds for other uncommon situations as well.
For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with
Ebuilds are a superset of binary packages, such that they can package anything you could install by hand, simply because they are a higher level. (This is where the sandbox support comes in real handy, since you don't have to specify what files were installed and what files to uninstall; the sandbox picks it up automatically and I expect all packaging systems to pick that up eventually.) Of course, there's a price to pay for that in compile time, since virtually by definition it's impossible to have this flexibility and still distribute binaries*, so it's not like it's a absolutely superior method in all cases. Tradeoffs just like anything else.
*: People keep talking about having a "package repository" for Gentoo which would function as a giant multi-person cache of Gentoo compiled packages, which you could then grab instead of compiling. Nobody AFAIK has made any progress beyond suggesting it, because even with just the obvious configurations (the four or five main processor types, the three or four good optimization settings from conservative to ultra-aggresive, the three or four obvious USE settings from conservative to everything) mulitplied by 10 or 20 gigabytes for a pure install means that nobody can afford to host it, and people would still find it too limiting.