Traffic stationary ahead... Big grin... Filter Filter Filter Filter Careful, gap on the right Filter Filter Oh. Indicators ahead. Filter Road on the right. Filter Traffic turbulence ahead, joining road on the left Filter up to the lights beside front vehicles. Lights green, empty road ahead, check for jumpers and give it some welly, front goes light. Blip to second. Intersection on the left, car waiting to pull out, seen me? Aye, right... Go wide anyway. Favourite bend coming up, nothing close, pull it over, peg scrapes, a bit more throttle to keep it steady, rear squirms. Mwhahahaha - Halleluyah Shellgrip!
There's *NO* dead time on my commute. The concentration required is actually quite tiring, as well as exhilarating. But then, I don't sit in a cage for several hours a day.
Um, aren't they getting paid for 15 seconds worth of work? To put a link on their page pointing to one search engine rather than another? That's real dumb of them aint it...
There are a couple of tests. The main one as you mentioned is for english speakers, if english isn't your main language then you would be likely to do poorly. Because of that, there are other tests which don't require cultural knowledge.
Your perception of Mensa is coloured.
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As a Mensa member, I'd have to say you're wrong about most members.
Most Mensa members are quite ordinary people who happen to be able to perform logical thought faster and more accurately than average. While there are some arseholes, just as there are in any group, most recognise their ability for what it is. Most also recognise that IQ isn't what makes you a good person, or a particularly valuable member of society.
It might interest you to know that those who score the top 2% out of the population can gain entry to Mensa should they wish to. Know also that Mensa in the UK has only around 40,000 members out of a potential membership of 1,200,000 people. The US stats will probably be similar. That means that there are a *LOT* of equally smart people out there who frankly can't be arsed, haven't bothered or don't think they are smart enough to join.
In conclusion, your perception of Mensa isn't the reality of the organisation or most of the people in it. As I said, most of the people are quite ordinary, from all classes, political persuasions, cultures, races. They get together occasionally for a beer or coffee and a chat.
Finally, if you think you can practice for the test and ace it, on you go. You could then throw the result in their face when you pass and tell them their society isn't worth joining. More power to you.
It's not really a motorcycle, it's an electric bicycle, but as that it is quite cool.
I ride a lot on my motorcycle, 20,000 miles per year through London. It's the only sane way to travel there.
I have a loud exhaust on my bike, I rationalise it as a safety feature but it really just sounds good, and I'm wearing earplugs anyway. My bike isn't a sportsbike, or a cruiser, it's a 650 single, it's very punchy at low revs but not terribly fast, top speed of around 110mph, but it still does 0-60 in under 4 seconds. That's the key feature of a motorcycle, *wicked* acceleration.
I'd like to see this machine's big brother, electric motors can produce fantastic torque from zero rpm. It's the torque which produces acceleration, I'd expect a big brother to be spectacularly quick. Having said that, the current problem getting good acceleration out of a bike is basically gravity, keeping that front wheel on the ground can be a bit of a challenge.
Guess what is by far the largest sources of domestic electricity consumption in cold areas?
Heating.
In hot areas... Cooling.
Neither of which require much electricity to accomplish. It's just easier and we're lazy and stupid.
My hot water tank has an 11kW element, the storage heaters in each room are 3kW each. I burn electricity to make heat.
On the other hand, solar thermal systems are far cheaper than photovoltaics, they're basically black pipes in a glass case. They are also far far more efficient, capturing around 80% of the energy incident on them.
They can produce decent amounts of heat even mid winter in the UK. Enough to heat up my hot water tank to scalding, a few more panels on the roof and I reckon a gas central heating boiler may not even be required. The result is a truly *huge* decrease in the amount of gas and electricity consumed in the home...
You still have a heating element in your water tank, and a gas boiler in your central heating but they spend most of their time inactive.
Big problem? Cost, even though thermal systems can be 80% efficient and are a small fraction of the cost of photovoltaics, the payback period is still 5-10 years.
Good intro: http://www.galeforce.nireland.co.uk/solar/ index.ht m
You mean like colour, aluminium, licence, cheque etc?
e.g. http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/diff erences. htm
England is not Britain. Scotland has entirely different legal, health and educational systems and is part of Britain.
You're right though, English "A levels" are rather narrow. Most university entrants study 3 A levels, two of those would be English and Mathematics with the 3rd being whatever specialisation you want to work towards in your degree course.
Students in Scotland however typically study 5 "Highers". Again, those would include English, Mathematics and 3 others, one of which would probably be in your chosen field in your chosen degree course at university.
"I have read a few articles about how mixed gender groups work better together than groups with only males or only females, I'd say that's a more likely reason."
It's simpler than that. Women will accept a lower salary to do the same job.
"Smart girls will divorce themselves from the stupid social herds"
Smart girls will do no such thing, socially inept girls will do that. The herd or pack instinct which seems to kick in at puberty is useful if you understand it.
"Most males are pigs".
Eh, no they are male humans, the desire to have sex as often as possible and with as many partners as possible is a bog standard part of the human male design. If you don't like the way male and/or female sexuality is expressed by young men or women then talk to the parents.
"It takes a special breed of woman to be interested in IT or engineering. I imagine the male equivilant of such a breed would be a man that would be interest in interior design."
I take it that you mean gay?
"women are, in general, better at multi-tasking."
And generally poorer at focusing on the task at hand.
"Women communicate "better"."
Well they certainly communicate *more*. But if more were better then supersizing would be a good thing, wouldn't it.
Anyway MS are going about it the wrong way. If you want to get women into IT, tell them that the job will naturally put them in regular contact with lots of high status males (and no, I'm not talking about other IT staff, they don't count as high status).
"The expenditures for this solar tower are *still* way out of line, even assuming their best-case estimates are correct."
That's what you get for pushing the technical envelope. They could build a solar thermal system for a fraction of the cost using already developed solar thermal power plant technologies.
e.g. http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/renewable/rec p/solar/
Clearly part of the brief is to develop new technology.
Absolutely correct. The fact that it searches through hundreds of hours of *CRAP* for stuff that you are likely to find interesting and automatically record it for you is *the* killer feature of Tivo.
It just isn't quite clever enough at it and needs to take into account the programme descriptions and channel information as well.
I reckon a bayesian filter would do the job, the ones I use are 99%+ accurate at determining if I'm likely to want to read emails that I get.
A "Good Stuff" or "Tivo Recommends" feature
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 1
See that automatic record feature that Tivo has? The one where it guesses what you'd like. Improve it, make it smarter - a neural network or Bayesian filter or something. It is a killer feature that none of the competitors have, but it's not strong enough at the moment.
Other than that, license your technology cheaply to everyone who wants it, be promiscuous. If you don't then the technically inferior and cheap systems will win.
Actually. Mod it down as ignorant. 20 year old grid technologies (AKA Network Queueing Systems) have already solved that problem. You can define policies on CPU/memory/disk/etc/etc hogs.
"Grid" technology to do this stuff has been around for decades e.g. NQS, hell NASA gave away PBS in the 80s & 90s.
The problem is that most of the CPUs out there run Windows, which is currently damned near useless for this kind of thing. It'll require a rewrite of the OS to take proper advantage of the potential of a network of windows boxes for general purpose computing. OTOH, a couple of shell scripts and SGE (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/) does the job on Linux and other Unix systems.
Thing is these research projects sometimes make it into on the shelf products. Guess what software will run them. When you've spent millions developing something you would have to have a very good reason for throwing away the platform and re-writing it for another platform.
My boxes all run tens to hundreds of processes for tens to hundreds of people. Offloading the processing to a networking subsystem isn't going to hurt, especially with gig and 10gig.
Not that this is a new idea. It's been done for donkey's years.
"Forging ID-cards is trivial regardless of wether you use a single ID-card or not."
Indeed. The difference? An ID card is taken as gospel. If you have a plausible ID card then you *are* that person for all intents and purposes. The card defines the person, not the otherway round. If someone gets hold of your ID number? They become you.
"Oh, and by the way, I'm asian. You don't need an ID-card to lock up people who happens to be of a certain ethnicity."
No, but it does make a bloody good excuse to stop and search, doesn't it. For an ID card to be effective it has to be compulsory. If it's compulsory the police have to be given at least stop and check powers over and above what they have now. Expect to be stopped on a daily or weekly basis and be asked to identify yourself. I obviously won't be stopped because I'm a white male. ID cards are enablers for racism.
Mark my words. The UK independance party are a conservative spoiler party. They have been and will continue to suck away enough votes from the conservatives that they can't win. There is no chance of anyone but Labour winning the next election, despite the Iraq war.
Are you saying that 60 years ago in what had previously been a democracy, Jews weren't identified by their cards, herded into concentration camps and gassed by the million? Are you saying that 10 years ago in Rwanda, Tutsi weren't identified by their ID cards, taken to village halls and butchered with machetes by their government?
Because it did happen. In the real world where governments change and extremists get into power these things happen and ID cards make it easy for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Traffic stationary ahead... Big grin...
Filter
Filter
Filter
Filter
Careful, gap on the right
Filter
Filter
Oh. Indicators ahead.
Filter
Road on the right.
Filter
Traffic turbulence ahead, joining road on the left
Filter up to the lights beside front vehicles.
Lights green, empty road ahead, check for jumpers and give it some welly, front goes light. Blip to second.
Intersection on the left, car waiting to pull out, seen me? Aye, right... Go wide anyway.
Favourite bend coming up, nothing close, pull it over, peg scrapes, a bit more throttle to keep it steady, rear squirms. Mwhahahaha - Halleluyah Shellgrip!
There's *NO* dead time on my commute. The concentration required is actually quite tiring, as well as exhilarating. But then, I don't sit in a cage for several hours a day.
Motorcycle shop. Cut your commute time in half and enjoy yourself at the same time.
Or buy a bunch of language lessons on CD, rip them to MP3 and learn a new language as you drive.
Um, aren't they getting paid for 15 seconds worth of work? To put a link on their page pointing to one search engine rather than another? That's real dumb of them aint it...
There are a couple of tests. The main one as you mentioned is for english speakers, if english isn't your main language then you would be likely to do poorly. Because of that, there are other tests which don't require cultural knowledge.
As a Mensa member, I'd have to say you're wrong about most members.
Most Mensa members are quite ordinary people who happen to be able to perform logical thought faster and more accurately than average. While there are some arseholes, just as there are in any group, most recognise their ability for what it is. Most also recognise that IQ isn't what makes you a good person, or a particularly valuable member of society.
It might interest you to know that those who score the top 2% out of the population can gain entry to Mensa should they wish to. Know also that Mensa in the UK has only around 40,000 members out of a potential membership of 1,200,000 people. The US stats will probably be similar. That means that there are a *LOT* of equally smart people out there who frankly can't be arsed, haven't bothered or don't think they are smart enough to join.
In conclusion, your perception of Mensa isn't the reality of the organisation or most of the people in it. As I said, most of the people are quite ordinary, from all classes, political persuasions, cultures, races. They get together occasionally for a beer or coffee and a chat.
Finally, if you think you can practice for the test and ace it, on you go. You could then throw the result in their face when you pass and tell them their society isn't worth joining. More power to you.
It's not really a motorcycle, it's an electric bicycle, but as that it is quite cool.
I ride a lot on my motorcycle, 20,000 miles per year through London. It's the only sane way to travel there.
I have a loud exhaust on my bike, I rationalise it as a safety feature but it really just sounds good, and I'm wearing earplugs anyway. My bike isn't a sportsbike, or a cruiser, it's a 650 single, it's very punchy at low revs but not terribly fast, top speed of around 110mph, but it still does 0-60 in under 4 seconds. That's the key feature of a motorcycle, *wicked* acceleration.
I'd like to see this machine's big brother, electric motors can produce fantastic torque from zero rpm. It's the torque which produces acceleration, I'd expect a big brother to be spectacularly quick. Having said that, the current problem getting good acceleration out of a bike is basically gravity, keeping that front wheel on the ground can be a bit of a challenge.
Guess what is by far the largest sources of domestic electricity consumption in cold areas?
/ index.ht m
Heating.
In hot areas... Cooling.
Neither of which require much electricity to accomplish. It's just easier and we're lazy and stupid.
My hot water tank has an 11kW element, the storage heaters in each room are 3kW each. I burn electricity to make heat.
On the other hand, solar thermal systems are far cheaper than photovoltaics, they're basically black pipes in a glass case. They are also far far more efficient, capturing around 80% of the energy incident on them.
They can produce decent amounts of heat even mid winter in the UK. Enough to heat up my hot water tank to scalding, a few more panels on the roof and I reckon a gas central heating boiler may not even be required. The result is a truly *huge* decrease in the amount of gas and electricity consumed in the home...
You still have a heating element in your water tank, and a gas boiler in your central heating but they spend most of their time inactive.
Big problem? Cost, even though thermal systems can be 80% efficient and are a small fraction of the cost of photovoltaics, the payback period is still 5-10 years.
Good intro:
http://www.galeforce.nireland.co.uk/solar
"but they can't write and they can't spell"
f erences. htm
You mean like colour, aluminium, licence, cheque etc?
e.g.
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/dif
England is not Britain. Scotland has entirely different legal, health and educational systems and is part of Britain.
You're right though, English "A levels" are rather narrow. Most university entrants study 3 A levels, two of those would be English and Mathematics with the 3rd being whatever specialisation you want to work towards in your degree course.
Students in Scotland however typically study 5 "Highers". Again, those would include English, Mathematics and 3 others, one of which would probably be in your chosen field in your chosen degree course at university.
Not education. Education is a superset of training and is what school and university are for. Microsoft will be happy to sell you training.
"I have read a few articles about how mixed gender groups work better together than groups with only males or only females, I'd say that's a more likely reason."
It's simpler than that. Women will accept a lower salary to do the same job.
"Smart girls will divorce themselves from the stupid social herds"
Smart girls will do no such thing, socially inept girls will do that. The herd or pack instinct which seems to kick in at puberty is useful if you understand it.
"Most males are pigs".
Eh, no they are male humans, the desire to have sex as often as possible and with as many partners as possible is a bog standard part of the human male design. If you don't like the way male and/or female sexuality is expressed by young men or women then talk to the parents.
"It takes a special breed of woman to be interested in IT or engineering. I imagine the male equivilant of such a breed would be a man that would be interest in interior design."
I take it that you mean gay?
"women are, in general, better at multi-tasking."
And generally poorer at focusing on the task at hand.
"Women communicate "better"."
Well they certainly communicate *more*. But if more were better then supersizing would be a good thing, wouldn't it.
Anyway MS are going about it the wrong way. If you want to get women into IT, tell them that the job will naturally put them in regular contact with lots of high status males (and no, I'm not talking about other IT staff, they don't count as high status).
"The expenditures for this solar tower are *still* way out of line, even assuming their best-case estimates are correct."
c p/solar/
That's what you get for pushing the technical envelope. They could build a solar thermal system for a fraction of the cost using already developed solar thermal power plant technologies.
e.g.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/renewable/re
Clearly part of the brief is to develop new technology.
"Google said it was surprised by Jeanneney's remarks"
The day Google reaches sentience is the day the human race's days become numbered.
Absolutely correct. The fact that it searches through hundreds of hours of *CRAP* for stuff that you are likely to find interesting and automatically record it for you is *the* killer feature of Tivo.
It just isn't quite clever enough at it and needs to take into account the programme descriptions and channel information as well.
I reckon a bayesian filter would do the job, the ones I use are 99%+ accurate at determining if I'm likely to want to read emails that I get.
See that automatic record feature that Tivo has? The one where it guesses what you'd like. Improve it, make it smarter - a neural network or Bayesian filter or something. It is a killer feature that none of the competitors have, but it's not strong enough at the moment.
Other than that, license your technology cheaply to everyone who wants it, be promiscuous. If you don't then the technically inferior and cheap systems will win.
Actually. Mod it down as ignorant. 20 year old grid technologies (AKA Network Queueing Systems) have already solved that problem. You can define policies on CPU/memory/disk/etc/etc hogs.
"Grid" technology to do this stuff has been around for decades e.g. NQS, hell NASA gave away PBS in the 80s & 90s.
The problem is that most of the CPUs out there run Windows, which is currently damned near useless for this kind of thing. It'll require a rewrite of the OS to take proper advantage of the potential of a network of windows boxes for general purpose computing. OTOH, a couple of shell scripts and SGE (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/) does the job on Linux and other Unix systems.
Thing is these research projects sometimes make it into on the shelf products. Guess what software will run them. When you've spent millions developing something you would have to have a very good reason for throwing away the platform and re-writing it for another platform.
My boxes all run tens to hundreds of processes for tens to hundreds of people. Offloading the processing to a networking subsystem isn't going to hurt, especially with gig and 10gig.
Not that this is a new idea. It's been done for donkey's years.
And it's only as much as $25/month because of the tanking dollar. Continental European rates can be lower still, the UK is still Rip Off Britain.
You can get one now, they are advertising for test sites on their front page.
The prices listed are for pre-production systems.
"Forging ID-cards is trivial regardless of wether you use a single ID-card or not."
Indeed. The difference? An ID card is taken as gospel. If you have a plausible ID card then you *are* that person for all intents and purposes. The card defines the person, not the otherway round. If someone gets hold of your ID number? They become you.
"Oh, and by the way, I'm asian. You don't need an ID-card to lock up people who happens to be of a certain ethnicity."
No, but it does make a bloody good excuse to stop and search, doesn't it. For an ID card to be effective it has to be compulsory. If it's compulsory the police have to be given at least stop and check powers over and above what they have now. Expect to be stopped on a daily or weekly basis and be asked to identify yourself. I obviously won't be stopped because I'm a white male. ID cards are enablers for racism.
Mark my words. The UK independance party are a conservative spoiler party. They have been and will continue to suck away enough votes from the conservatives that they can't win. There is no chance of anyone but Labour winning the next election, despite the Iraq war.
"What a stupid and outrageous argument!"
Really? Are you saying that it didn't happen?
Are you saying that 60 years ago in what had previously been a democracy, Jews weren't identified by their cards, herded into concentration camps and gassed by the million? Are you saying that 10 years ago in Rwanda, Tutsi weren't identified by their ID cards, taken to village halls and butchered with machetes by their government?
Because it did happen. In the real world where governments change and extremists get into power these things happen and ID cards make it easy for them.