Go into an empty parking lot with an automatic transmission.
... put the care into drive... then pull the handbreak...The car will keep rolling on every vehicle I've ever driven
At that speed the car will be in a low gear, so it is more likely for the engine to overpower the handbrake. At 125 mph the engine will be in a high gear, so less likely.
5) He thought that to go electronic and/or to extend the srange, the dial code needed to be all digits. Why? The old alpha characters were already translated into digits, so why couldn't buttons do the same?
FTFA : "telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers". Who said they had to be pronouncable? My postcode (zip code to Americans?) and most others are not pronouncable (eg mine starts "NP16" - the 16th area of Newport - and goes on with another digit and two letters which I dont want to put here) but neverthless are much easier to remember than all-digit phone numbers.
6) Shortened phone leads from 3 ft, which sounds long. However in the 1950/60s office phones were quite scarce and often shared between several people. Desks were placed face-to-face in pairs or groups of four to share a phone, in which case that 3 ft was all needed, and more. But, Karlin worked in a phone company office, where no doubt phones were all over the place and that fact does not seem to have occurred to him.
I have worked with people like Karlin. The same sort of busy-bodies who will change your chair height and adjust your screen brightness when you are not looking because they have views on the subject. They volunteer for the "Elf and Safety" courses and become the office safety vigilante, and get biscuits banned at meetings because they are considered unhealthy. They are jerks.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
What other seven-digit numbers would you need to remember?
Any number, like the plumber's, that you have just looked up in a directory or got off the Web needs to be transferred to the phone pad. Perhaps I'm retarded, but I cannot do that without glancing back at the number part way through.
2) Shortens co-workers phone leads in the middle of the night until they complained loud enough for him to hear. They might have been irritated long before that point, and how would they necessarily know to complain to him. Could he not have confined the experiment to his own phone? Co-incidentally, yesterday I rigged a cord for an overhead bathroom switch. It only took a minute to fix an optimum length by trying it, and getting my wife to try it too.
3) Replaces a rotary dial with push buttons - a no-brainer as all electro-mechanical devices were being replaced with electronics at that time.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
There is at least two unique innovations offered by Amazon:
1. You are charged separately instead of annual subscription as you would with newspapers
2. Subscription happens on the internet with a computer
Yep, that looks highly innovative to me. They should have filed for two separate patents.
I take it that your post is irony, but pay annually for newspapers? Maybe direct from the publishers, but it is quite usual (in UK at least) to order papers and mags to be delivered from a local newsagent, and call in the shop to pay him once a week.
we have a few good reasons to believe that most of that is gone and will not be coming back, and that is that all races are far more integrated and in constant contact with each other
What makes you think that knowing people makes you like them? You must be really nice and have only ever met really nice people - in La La Land perhaps? Anyway, it did not work in the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up. The worst disputes are within families, and the most brutal wars are civil wars, where people know each other only too well. Japan became uninsulated in the 19th century only to become embroiled in 20th century wars. In fact people have no particular reason to hate people they do not meet.
we may eventually come to a time where it's impossible to determine someone's race.
But it will remain possible to determine what someone's race is not. Blacks in the UK will complain if one of their number "has too much milk in their coffee", and I do not believe the Nazis bothered to determine what someones precise mix if they did not think it was pure Arian.
Why do these renewable fanatics (not neccessarily these scientists, maybe the journos reporting this) always pick on the wrong things to renew. Looking around things that are manufactured - and discarded - the weight of transistors cannot constitute even 0.0001% of it all.
Why don't the greenies pick on something like the fact that many people rip out and replace their bathrooms and kitchens and general furniture every five years.
Unfortunately, making things "renewable", and hence compromising their robustness and lifetime, leads into a downward spiral in which people have to replace things frequently, leading to even more waste of material and energy, notwithstanding their "renewabilty". A transistor made of paper - who the heck is going to sit there at the end of its life and pick off the paper to recycle it? I think that even the up-country Chinese 8-year-olds who normally do this work will draw the line at that.
I think companies split up too readily as it is, in the UK at least. Like the railways, once responsible for everything within their fences, are now the supreme buck-passing artists. Train late? The train staff blame the signalling (different company), who blame the track maintenance teams (different company) who blame a sub-contractor (different company) who say they are only an administrating agency who blame their self-employed workers who blame thier suppliers who blame a delay on the railway... and so on and so on.
Same with the electicity supply, water, road maintenance, builders, and, in my professional job, even "well known", "large" engineering companies which are actually conglomerates of sub-companies. It is often impossible with these these to find out just who you are dealing with, they are administrative mazes, deliberately so. Even the people "fronting" a company often genuinely do not know who is behind them, there are so many layers of buck-passing though mini-companies of pure middle-men, all taking a commission, that the buck stops nowhere.
This love affair with small companies in the UK was boosted by Mrs Thatcher, who's attitudes were rooted in her father's small-town grocer's shop. The fallacy of applying this attitude to the economy as a whole is described here:-
No offense, but I don't want to pay for a DOJ that staffs an extra 2,000 people just so that they can read every piece of email that comes in, and respond back with a detailed analysis of all the legal mistakes made.
In fact I would pay for my proportion of the extra staff to consider these points and investigate them properly.
Better (and cheaper) than allowing MS to treat me as a doormat and cash cow, by locking me out of my own PC unless I buy their software.
How would entering a bootloader key into an UEFI input box be more complicated than typing a product key into an installer input box, which apparently users managed to do for quite some time?
Not neccessarily more complicated, but a serious psychological barrier. Because when installing an app with a product key the user is not overriding, or conscious of overriding, a "safety feature". But entering a bootloader key will have the nature of overriding a safety feature, which will deter casual users from trying out Linux and possibly liking it. Microsoft hate it when that happens.
Of course, most Windows users never install an OS, Windows being pre-installed. To do things at UEFI level will be a bridge too far for most users.
But you don't have to do business with non-government corporations. (It's not like you are forced to buy health care.)
You have left me puzzled. You mention health care - are you saying that you can choose to die untreated? Or are you saying that doing business with non-gov organisations is dissimilar to being obliged to doing [forced by bad health] business with a health company? Further confusing is the difference between health care in USA and elsewhere in the world, where it is often free.
Actually, I am (in UK) forced to do business with many non-gov corporations - unless I drop out of society and become a down-and-out. I must pay for food, electricity, water, transport, etc, etc, all with non-gov corporations, many of them monopolies.
I saw a calc once of how long, at the present expansion rate and ignoring the technical problems, it would take before the entire mass of the universe would be converted to human biomass. Only a few thousand years AFAIR, less than human history.
The question is not whether to stop population growth, as it will be stopped somehow, but when and how. Unfortunately the human race does not seem to be intelligent enough to decide to do it painlessly while it can. [Except of course for wounding the pride of certain social classes in India and the Middle East to whom the fathering of children is a serious pissing contest.]
Tom Murphy is an idiot. He ignores the fact that the human population will peak in 65 years and then decline.
Reference please. Someone has been there in a time machine perhaps? It does not look like slowing down from where I am sitting, and with medicine getting better (or at least reaching more people) there is no reason to think it will decline.
I find it sad that an icon of international repute (I am in the UK) is to be used as a billboard, of even for someone's art. Such bridges are already art in themselves. It is like using an Old Master as a base for some aerosol art.
...As for testing, it definitely can be done through a simulator. It may not be cost effective but it's easily possible,
Several posters here do not seem to understand the debugging that would would be needed here. Up to a point debugging can be done off line but there comes a point when the bridge lights themselves are being controlled. You then need to establish the relationship between the software address of each light and its position on the bridge. If you think that the workmen, given a box of LEDs, are going to position each one in the position required by a number, you do not know workmen.
You might get it roughly right by saying "Put the hundred in this box on that cable there", but you are still going to be spending time afterwards establishing the actual position of each one.
Yes, It's actually way more skill than chance, but the fact that some pieces are a better draw than others tilts it more towards chance than if they were all equivalent.
Still, It's more accurately a game of skill and I'm a shithead...
Scrabble is skill in that I could thrash the average 10 year old. However, I regualrly play against my wife and sometimes she beats me by over 100 and sometimes I beat her by over 100, and I do not believe our skills change that much in a few days.
What makes the difference is who gets most of the high scoring letters, and the S's and blanks. I remember as a beginner that getting a Q, X or Z made my heart sink, but as we are now both moderately good players we pray we draw these letters. The high scoring of these letters is meant to compensate for the difficulty of playing them, but in our games they dominates the scoring, particularly as we make sure we use them on a premium square.
In other word, these letters score too high, even though we do not even use the weird Q X and Z words in the Scrabble dictionary - we banned them.
I think they should stop changing the dictionary and add[ing] BS words.
Agreed. I play Scrabble a lot, but some of the words that I have seen in the competitive context are just crazy, and certainly not English, even if they are in the official Scrabble dictionary. I do not know where they get them from. I am saying that, even though I have a personal vocabulary of about 40,000 words. To my mind these crazy words spoil the game because the winner will be the player who can remember the most of them, even though they have no application in normal English.
Within my own family we play with the Oxford Concise Dictionary as the arbiter, except for two-letter words for which we have our own printed list.
Slashdot Mirror
Go into an empty parking lot with an automatic transmission.
... put the care into drive. .. then pull the handbreak...The car will keep rolling on every vehicle I've ever driven
At that speed the car will be in a low gear, so it is more likely for the engine to overpower the handbrake. At 125 mph the engine will be in a high gear, so less likely.
Bet this wouldn't work if you looked like a muslim.
It would in the Middle East.
Oh, and :-
5) He thought that to go electronic and/or to extend the srange, the dial code needed to be all digits. Why? The old alpha characters were already translated into digits, so why couldn't buttons do the same?
FTFA : "telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers". Who said they had to be pronouncable? My postcode (zip code to Americans?) and most others are not pronouncable (eg mine starts "NP16" - the 16th area of Newport - and goes on with another digit and two letters which I dont want to put here) but neverthless are much easier to remember than all-digit phone numbers.
Oh, and :-
6) Shortened phone leads from 3 ft, which sounds long. However in the 1950/60s office phones were quite scarce and often shared between several people. Desks were placed face-to-face in pairs or groups of four to share a phone, in which case that 3 ft was all needed, and more. But, Karlin worked in a phone company office, where no doubt phones were all over the place and that fact does not seem to have occurred to him.
I have worked with people like Karlin. The same sort of busy-bodies who will change your chair height and adjust your screen brightness when you are not looking because they have views on the subject. They volunteer for the "Elf and Safety" courses and become the office safety vigilante, and get biscuits banned at meetings because they are considered unhealthy. They are jerks.
.... but not the order of keys on a calculator or a full PC keyboard. Se elsewhere in this discussion for why this is. .
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
What other seven-digit numbers would you need to remember?
Any number, like the plumber's, that you have just looked up in a directory or got off the Web needs to be transferred to the phone pad. Perhaps I'm retarded, but I cannot do that without glancing back at the number part way through.
No-one thinks Steve Jobs is cool .... He wore sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck. That is not cool.
Hey, steady on, sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck were cool (in 1963).
But we know Karlin was cool
Karlin was cool? Sounds like a jerk to me.
1) Got numeric keys the wrong way up
2) Shortens co-workers phone leads in the middle of the night until they complained loud enough for him to hear. They might have been irritated long before that point, and how would they necessarily know to complain to him. Could he not have confined the experiment to his own phone? Co-incidentally, yesterday I rigged a cord for an overhead bathroom switch. It only took a minute to fix an optimum length by trying it, and getting my wife to try it too.
3) Replaces a rotary dial with push buttons - a no-brainer as all electro-mechanical devices were being replaced with electronics at that time.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
Well, Steve Jobs invented the phone after all.
I know it's funny, but someone modded it as "Informative"! (as at 1014 hrs GMT) Is there a way here of modding a mod as "funny"?
The only way for upstanding citizens to protect themselves from this madness is to retreat from modern society entirely.
You could start by cutting your Internet connection.
There is at least two unique innovations offered by Amazon:
1. You are charged separately instead of annual subscription as you would with newspapers
2. Subscription happens on the internet with a computer
Yep, that looks highly innovative to me. They should have filed for two separate patents.
I take it that your post is irony, but pay annually for newspapers? Maybe direct from the publishers, but it is quite usual (in UK at least) to order papers and mags to be delivered from a local newsagent, and call in the shop to pay him once a week.
we have a few good reasons to believe that most of that is gone and will not be coming back, and that is that all races are far more integrated and in constant contact with each other
What makes you think that knowing people makes you like them? You must be really nice and have only ever met really nice people - in La La Land perhaps? Anyway, it did not work in the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up. The worst disputes are within families, and the most brutal wars are civil wars, where people know each other only too well. Japan became uninsulated in the 19th century only to become embroiled in 20th century wars. In fact people have no particular reason to hate people they do not meet.
we may eventually come to a time where it's impossible to determine someone's race.
But it will remain possible to determine what someone's race is not. Blacks in the UK will complain if one of their number "has too much milk in their coffee", and I do not believe the Nazis bothered to determine what someones precise mix if they did not think it was pure Arian.
Why do these renewable fanatics (not neccessarily these scientists, maybe the journos reporting this) always pick on the wrong things to renew. Looking around things that are manufactured - and discarded - the weight of transistors cannot constitute even 0.0001% of it all.
Why don't the greenies pick on something like the fact that many people rip out and replace their bathrooms and kitchens and general furniture every five years.
Unfortunately, making things "renewable", and hence compromising their robustness and lifetime, leads into a downward spiral in which people have to replace things frequently, leading to even more waste of material and energy, notwithstanding their "renewabilty". A transistor made of paper - who the heck is going to sit there at the end of its life and pick off the paper to recycle it? I think that even the up-country Chinese 8-year-olds who normally do this work will draw the line at that.
I think companies split up too readily as it is, in the UK at least. Like the railways, once responsible for everything within their fences, are now the supreme buck-passing artists. Train late? The train staff blame the signalling (different company), who blame the track maintenance teams (different company) who blame a sub-contractor (different company) who say they are only an administrating agency who blame their self-employed workers who blame thier suppliers who blame a delay on the railway ... and so on and so on.
:-
Same with the electicity supply, water, road maintenance, builders, and, in my professional job, even "well known", "large" engineering companies which are actually conglomerates of sub-companies. It is often impossible with these these to find out just who you are dealing with, they are administrative mazes, deliberately so. Even the people "fronting" a company often genuinely do not know who is behind them, there are so many layers of buck-passing though mini-companies of pure middle-men, all taking a commission, that the buck stops nowhere.
This love affair with small companies in the UK was boosted by Mrs Thatcher, who's attitudes were rooted in her father's small-town grocer's shop. The fallacy of applying this attitude to the economy as a whole is described here
www.nuke.demon.co.uk/grantham_grocer
No offense, but I don't want to pay for a DOJ that staffs an extra 2,000 people just so that they can read every piece of email that comes in, and respond back with a detailed analysis of all the legal mistakes made.
In fact I would pay for my proportion of the extra staff to consider these points and investigate them properly.
Better (and cheaper) than allowing MS to treat me as a doormat and cash cow, by locking me out of my own PC unless I buy their software.
How would entering a bootloader key into an UEFI input box be more complicated than typing a product key into an installer input box, which apparently users managed to do for quite some time?
Not neccessarily more complicated, but a serious psychological barrier. Because when installing an app with a product key the user is not overriding, or conscious of overriding, a "safety feature". But entering a bootloader key will have the nature of overriding a safety feature, which will deter casual users from trying out Linux and possibly liking it. Microsoft hate it when that happens.
Of course, most Windows users never install an OS, Windows being pre-installed. To do things at UEFI level will be a bridge too far for most users.
But you don't have to do business with non-government corporations. (It's not like you are forced to buy health care.)
You have left me puzzled. You mention health care - are you saying that you can choose to die untreated? Or are you saying that doing business with non-gov organisations is dissimilar to being obliged to doing [forced by bad health] business with a health company? Further confusing is the difference between health care in USA and elsewhere in the world, where it is often free.
Actually, I am (in UK) forced to do business with many non-gov corporations - unless I drop out of society and become a down-and-out. I must pay for food, electricity, water, transport, etc, etc, all with non-gov corporations, many of them monopolies.
Because batteries dont exist?
You run your washing machine on batteries?
I saw a calc once of how long, at the present expansion rate and ignoring the technical problems, it would take before the entire mass of the universe would be converted to human biomass. Only a few thousand years AFAIR, less than human history.
The question is not whether to stop population growth, as it will be stopped somehow, but when and how. Unfortunately the human race does not seem to be intelligent enough to decide to do it painlessly while it can. [Except of course for wounding the pride of certain social classes in India and the Middle East to whom the fathering of children is a serious pissing contest.]
Tom Murphy is an idiot. He ignores the fact that the human population will peak in 65 years and then decline.
Reference please. Someone has been there in a time machine perhaps? It does not look like slowing down from where I am sitting, and with medicine getting better (or at least reaching more people) there is no reason to think it will decline.
"Art" --> "Advertising"
I find it sad that an icon of international repute (I am in the UK) is to be used as a billboard, of even for someone's art. Such bridges are already art in themselves. It is like using an Old Master as a base for some aerosol art.
...As for testing, it definitely can be done through a simulator. It may not be cost effective but it's easily possible,
Several posters here do not seem to understand the debugging that would would be needed here. Up to a point debugging can be done off line but there comes a point when the bridge lights themselves are being controlled. You then need to establish the relationship between the software address of each light and its position on the bridge. If you think that the workmen, given a box of LEDs, are going to position each one in the position required by a number, you do not know workmen.
You might get it roughly right by saying "Put the hundred in this box on that cable there", but you are still going to be spending time afterwards establishing the actual position of each one.
. . . As they surely will, I see Slashdotters falling for stupider trolls than this all the time.
Can you give some examples of that? - I'm curious. All the time?
Yes, It's actually way more skill than chance, but the fact that some pieces are a better draw than others tilts it more towards chance than if they were all equivalent.
Still, It's more accurately a game of skill and I'm a shithead...
Scrabble is skill in that I could thrash the average 10 year old. However, I regualrly play against my wife and sometimes she beats me by over 100 and sometimes I beat her by over 100, and I do not believe our skills change that much in a few days.
What makes the difference is who gets most of the high scoring letters, and the S's and blanks. I remember as a beginner that getting a Q, X or Z made my heart sink, but as we are now both moderately good players we pray we draw these letters. The high scoring of these letters is meant to compensate for the difficulty of playing them, but in our games they dominates the scoring, particularly as we make sure we use them on a premium square.
In other word, these letters score too high, even though we do not even use the weird Q X and Z words in the Scrabble dictionary - we banned them.
I think they should stop changing the dictionary and add[ing] BS words.
Agreed. I play Scrabble a lot, but some of the words that I have seen in the competitive context are just crazy, and certainly not English, even if they are in the official Scrabble dictionary. I do not know where they get them from. I am saying that, even though I have a personal vocabulary of about 40,000 words. To my mind these crazy words spoil the game because the winner will be the player who can remember the most of them, even though they have no application in normal English.
Within my own family we play with the Oxford Concise Dictionary as the arbiter, except for two-letter words for which we have our own printed list.