And then put that picture as your login screen, so it'll log you in if you point at a mirror.
It'll still be a problem if Zombie Teddy Roosevelt steals your phone, but how likely is that...
So you now have a cell-phone that's only useful near mirrors.
And you now have a cell-phone that can be broken into by anyone else who is carrying a mirror or who is near a mirror. They just have to watch you log in once...
So they didn't actually measure how much sleep the subjects got. They just took their word on it. Given that some people will overestimate or underestimate their sleep, this could just mean that the people who tend to underreport their sleep are the same people who tend to have strokes.
Basically, the study is useless.
Not really. As long as you are prone to exaggerating the amount of sleep you get, you'll be OK.
It would be interesting to see where earlier hominids would fall along the "uncanny valley" curve.
There you go, always taking the Cro-Magnon side. Maybe if you looked at it from the early hominids' point of view, it's the modern humans who are the uncanny ones.
Slashdot's not just for you modern hominids, you know. We primitive cavemen have feelings too.
No, there's much more missing than just the large screen and keyboard: Office applications, for one. A web browser is not enough.
My Android tablet - which has its own laptop-style keyboard (it's an Asus Transformer) - comes with an office suite - Polaris.
This is what the netbook should have been - small, lightweight, keyboard... and Android. The Transformer is all that. Hope they keep making it - or some other vendor picks up the idea.
The beauty of capitalism and the free market is the fact that you can have your pony and the other guy can have his tablet.
But I want a ponaptoblet - a pony crossed with a laptop crossed with a tablet. It's a laptop/tablet that can trot by itself - I don't have to carry it, it can carry me.
Quick! I should patent this invention before anyone else does.
I have the TF101 (the original Asus Transformer) with keyboard. It is effectively an ARM-based Android laptop, with touch screen (and Gorilla glass!), but I can turn it into a tablet whenever I want.
I love it. I never bother turning it off unless it needs the occasional reboot. It lasts all day - watch movies on the train, read ebooks, play games, surf the web in bed. Very portable entertainment device with enough screen space and keyboard to do lightweight word processing or presentations if I need it.
I just open it up and start using it - no waiting for boot up or unhibernating.
Exactly. THEY invent the process. THEY license it. They do not buy up moribund (and often obvious) patents from other organisations and litigate as their main business.
An organisation that invents non-trivial things, and patents its own inventions, and only litigates against unlicensed use of its own patented inventions, is not a troll.
An organisation that buys up old patents for the purpose of litigating against alleged unlicensed users, without inventing the patented inventions itself, is a troll.
The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right. ALL hypothetical questions must be answered hypothetically. The question in class were usually something like "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, are all cats horses?", the hypothetical answer is "yes" but in reality (truth) is no.
You have just reinvented the subjunctive mood for verbs. Just rewrite your syllogism in the old fashioned English subjunctive mood and see:
"If all cats WERE dogs, and all dogs WERE horses, WOULD all cats BE horses?" Yes, they would be, but they aren't, as you pointed out. A counter-factual "would be" can coexist with a factual "are not". Making hypothetical, but false, statements is one of the classic uses of the subjunctive. The subjunctive makes it clear that you are not asserting a real fact, just a hypothesis.
Since all software runs on hardware that only understands the values of 0 and 1, it is all reducible to math. Anyone who has taken a digital logic class can attest to this. What you see on the screen is a representation of that math. Dump the contents of the RAM in binary if you want to prove it to yourself. Math is discovered, and therefore not patentable.
Numbers are not necessarily "math". Numbers can be arbitrary names ("the Class 44 Locomotive"). Numbers can be arbitrary values in codes - such as the ASCII values of alphanumeric and punctuation characters (versus EBCDIC, etc). You can do some arithmetic on ASCII values (e.g. the ASCII code of a capital letter, plus 32, gives you the ASCII code of its matching lower case letter... by convention). But (say) using division with ASCII codes is meaningless. Numbers can also be instructions in a machine language - e.g. x86 opcodes. While certain opcodes do have a meaningful arithmetic relationship to certain other opcodes (e.g. the word size and byte size versions of certain operations), the system as a whole is arbitrary and no arithmetical operation on opcodes has any meaningful result right across the instruction set.
A number can even just be a bit array for encoding an arbitrary set of (say) boolean values: the overall number is irrelevant - you just test particular bits in the number.
Moral: computers use numbers in different ways, and not all of them are "math". Letters are "just numbers" on a computer, but that does not mean that any block of text is "just math" because it can be regarded as a very long integer. Shakespeare was not a mathematician, even though his output can be represented as a rather large (multibyte) integer on a computer.
...the use of special glasses that fire infrared signals into the eye and onto an implanted array of silicon photodiodes. The system, tested in rats...
I won't be impressed until they show us pictures of rats wearing tiny eyeglasses.
But... maybe large glasses are fashionable amongst rats, like the 1960s for humans.
Notice that no computers where involved in the proof — this is classical mathematical proof involving logical deductions rather than exhaustive search.
Exhaustive search for a result that holds for every integer? Good luck with that one.
Everyone knows integers only go from 0 to 4294967295!
I'm not clicking through 8 pages, each of which seems to load a popup, just to read a list of 30 items. And judging from the first couple of pages I could stand to look at, the article is hyping up some very un-newsworthy information indeed! There's nothing worse than a site with tid bits of "information" surrounded by an orgy of advertising. Get lost!
Any article devoted to touting the "30 best features" of any commercial product already sounds to me like advertising, without the added "benefit" of third-party advertisements.
But then, the technology press is full of advertisements masquerading as independent articles.
socialism is defined as state ownership of enterprises
Defined by whom?
There are many forms of socialism, and some do not require any state ownership of enterprises.
For example, let me (as imaginary emperor) decree that all enterprises are hereby the property of their employees (one employee, one vote) rather than the shareholders (one share, one vote). So each board of directors will be democratically elected by the employees of the enterprise. We would now have total *worker* ownership and management of enterprises - a classic socialist position - without one skerrick of state ownership.
Leninist socialism was very much in favour of state ownership. Anarchist socialism - and many forms of democratic socialism - have preferred a "bottom up" democratisation of enterprises, where each enterpise is a self-governing association of workers rather than the current capitalist formula of a self-governing association of shareholders. State ownership defines "Marxism-Leninism", or Bolshevism, or Soviet Communism. It does not define socialism.
You should read the Wikipedia article on "state socialism".
I worry that China is broadcasting the source code for Windows Vista, and 200 years from now some alien civilization will receive it and think they're schematics for something great. They'll build it, nearly destroy themselves and then come looking for us.
No problem. The aliens won't be able to activate their copies of Windows for another 200 years after they install it.
They were buried in August 1945 - so after the end of WW2. The Japanese - the most recent "enemy" - had surrendered, and were not in a position to get control of the aircraft or use them. The reason they were buried was because the aircraft were surplus and it would cost too much to return them to the UK.
So I am not sure who the "enemy" was that they were being hidden from. I suspect it was a case of burying military equipment after a war because it would be dangerous for anyone else (eg random civilians or possible insurgents, etc) to have access to it.
Instead I get a bunch of sales/marketing aggregates, tech discussions that are really disguised sales/marketing crap, ebay listings, go-get-bids, sorority-sluts, etc.
Yeah, it is a shame they keep putting the sorority sluts last. Bummer to have to scroll down all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
BING = BING is not Google.
And here was I thinking it meant "BING Is No Good".
if i move to mars for the rest of my life what are the entertainment options?
Cable.
Really long cable.
"Living on Mars cannot be considered entirely risk-free, in particular during the first few years."
Ya think?
Um, wouldn't the real problem be the last few years of living on Mars? The last one particularly.
Dupe.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/05/2332224/china-secretly-clones-austrian-village
To be fair, its more than a day or two. But only 2 weeks ago.
So, it is a duplicate of a story about a duplicate of a village?
Use someone *else's* face as your unlock.
Like Teddy Roosevelt.
And then put that picture as your login screen, so it'll log you in if you point at a mirror.
It'll still be a problem if Zombie Teddy Roosevelt steals your phone, but how likely is that...
So you now have a cell-phone that's only useful near mirrors.
And you now have a cell-phone that can be broken into by anyone else who is carrying a mirror or who is near a mirror. They just have to watch you log in once ...
So they didn't actually measure how much sleep the subjects got. They just took their word on it. Given that some people will overestimate or underestimate their sleep, this could just mean that the people who tend to underreport their sleep are the same people who tend to have strokes.
Basically, the study is useless.
Not really. As long as you are prone to exaggerating the amount of sleep you get, you'll be OK.
It would be interesting to see where earlier hominids would fall along the "uncanny valley" curve.
There you go, always taking the Cro-Magnon side. Maybe if you looked at it from the early hominids' point of view, it's the modern humans who are the uncanny ones.
Slashdot's not just for you modern hominids, you know. We primitive cavemen have feelings too.
Now get out of my valley!
No, there's much more missing than just the large screen and keyboard: Office applications, for one. A web browser is not enough.
My Android tablet - which has its own laptop-style keyboard (it's an Asus Transformer) - comes with an office suite - Polaris.
This is what the netbook should have been - small, lightweight, keyboard ... and Android. The Transformer is all that. Hope they keep making it - or some other vendor picks up the idea.
The beauty of capitalism and the free market is the fact that you can have your pony and the other guy can have his tablet.
But I want a ponaptoblet - a pony crossed with a laptop crossed with a tablet. It's a laptop/tablet that can trot by itself - I don't have to carry it, it can carry me.
Quick! I should patent this invention before anyone else does.
I have the TF101 (the original Asus Transformer) with keyboard. It is effectively an ARM-based Android laptop, with touch screen (and Gorilla glass!), but I can turn it into a tablet whenever I want.
I love it. I never bother turning it off unless it needs the occasional reboot. It lasts all day - watch movies on the train, read ebooks, play games, surf the web in bed. Very portable entertainment device with enough screen space and keyboard to do lightweight word processing or presentations if I need it.
I just open it up and start using it - no waiting for boot up or unhibernating.
I don't want a Windows based x86 device.
Exactly. THEY invent the process. THEY license it. They do not buy up moribund (and often obvious) patents from other organisations and litigate as their main business.
An organisation that invents non-trivial things, and patents its own inventions, and only litigates against unlicensed use of its own patented inventions, is not a troll.
An organisation that buys up old patents for the purpose of litigating against alleged unlicensed users, without inventing the patented inventions itself, is a troll.
I have a hard time picturing how a hover dam manages to trap any water. Won't the water simply flow underneath the dam?
It's a Hoover Dam. It vacuums up all the water, so it disappears. A hover dam is more like a cloud in the sky. Well, until it rains.
The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right. ALL hypothetical questions must be answered hypothetically. The question in class were usually something like "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, are all cats horses?", the hypothetical answer is "yes" but in reality (truth) is no.
You have just reinvented the subjunctive mood for verbs. Just rewrite your syllogism in the old fashioned English subjunctive mood and see:
"If all cats WERE dogs, and all dogs WERE horses, WOULD all cats BE horses?" Yes, they would be, but they aren't, as you pointed out. A counter-factual "would be" can coexist with a factual "are not". Making hypothetical, but false, statements is one of the classic uses of the subjunctive. The subjunctive makes it clear that you are not asserting a real fact, just a hypothesis.
I'm not sure if you are joking, but this totally happens to me all the time.
I started reading your post, but my mind wandered.
4) A website is automatically uncool the moment your parents join.
So here's the deal, Google. Get all the parents on the web to join FB. You have worked out who they are from their search patterns, haven't you?
Since all software runs on hardware that only understands the values of 0 and 1, it is all reducible to math. Anyone who has taken a digital logic class can attest to this. What you see on the screen is a representation of that math. Dump the contents of the RAM in binary if you want to prove it to yourself. Math is discovered, and therefore not patentable.
Numbers are not necessarily "math". Numbers can be arbitrary names ("the Class 44 Locomotive"). Numbers can be arbitrary values in codes - such as the ASCII values of alphanumeric and punctuation characters (versus EBCDIC, etc). You can do some arithmetic on ASCII values (e.g. the ASCII code of a capital letter, plus 32, gives you the ASCII code of its matching lower case letter ... by convention). But (say) using division with ASCII codes is meaningless. Numbers can also be instructions in a machine language - e.g. x86 opcodes. While certain opcodes do have a meaningful arithmetic relationship to certain other opcodes (e.g. the word size and byte size versions of certain operations), the system as a whole is arbitrary and no arithmetical operation on opcodes has any meaningful result right across the instruction set.
A number can even just be a bit array for encoding an arbitrary set of (say) boolean values: the overall number is irrelevant - you just test particular bits in the number.
Moral: computers use numbers in different ways, and not all of them are "math". Letters are "just numbers" on a computer, but that does not mean that any block of text is "just math" because it can be regarded as a very long integer. Shakespeare was not a mathematician, even though his output can be represented as a rather large (multibyte) integer on a computer.
...the use of special glasses that fire infrared signals into the eye and onto an implanted array of silicon photodiodes. The system, tested in rats...
I won't be impressed until they show us pictures of rats wearing tiny eyeglasses.
But ... maybe large glasses are fashionable amongst rats, like the 1960s for humans.
Notice that no computers where involved in the proof — this is classical mathematical proof involving logical deductions rather than exhaustive search.
Exhaustive search for a result that holds for every integer? Good luck with that one.
Everyone knows integers only go from 0 to 4294967295!
Can't afford a 64bit PC, huh?
I'm not clicking through 8 pages, each of which seems to load a popup, just to read a list of 30 items. And judging from the first couple of pages I could stand to look at, the article is hyping up some very un-newsworthy information indeed! There's nothing worse than a site with tid bits of "information" surrounded by an orgy of advertising. Get lost!
Any article devoted to touting the "30 best features" of any commercial product already sounds to me like advertising, without the added "benefit" of third-party advertisements.
But then, the technology press is full of advertisements masquerading as independent articles.
socialism is defined as state ownership of enterprises
Defined by whom?
There are many forms of socialism, and some do not require any state ownership of enterprises.
For example, let me (as imaginary emperor) decree that all enterprises are hereby the property of their employees (one employee, one vote) rather than the shareholders (one share, one vote). So each board of directors will be democratically elected by the employees of the enterprise. We would now have total *worker* ownership and management of enterprises - a classic socialist position - without one skerrick of state ownership.
Leninist socialism was very much in favour of state ownership. Anarchist socialism - and many forms of democratic socialism - have preferred a "bottom up" democratisation of enterprises, where each enterpise is a self-governing association of workers rather than the current capitalist formula of a self-governing association of shareholders. State ownership defines "Marxism-Leninism", or Bolshevism, or Soviet Communism. It does not define socialism.
You should read the Wikipedia article on "state socialism".
Are you implying that you don't want to be snooped on because you have something to hide?
As they say in kindergarten ... I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Let the agencies be subject to full public scrutiny if they want the public to be subject to full scrutiny by the agencies.
I worry that China is broadcasting the source code for Windows Vista, and 200 years from now some alien civilization will receive it and think they're schematics for something great. They'll build it, nearly destroy themselves and then come looking for us.
No problem. The aliens won't be able to activate their copies of Windows for another 200 years after they install it.
They were buried in August 1945 - so after the end of WW2. The Japanese - the most recent "enemy" - had surrendered, and were not in a position to get control of the aircraft or use them. The reason they were buried was because the aircraft were surplus and it would cost too much to return them to the UK.
So I am not sure who the "enemy" was that they were being hidden from. I suspect it was a case of burying military equipment after a war because it would be dangerous for anyone else (eg random civilians or possible insurgents, etc) to have access to it.
Instead I get a bunch of sales/marketing aggregates, tech discussions that are really disguised sales/marketing crap, ebay listings, go-get-bids, sorority-sluts, etc.
Yeah, it is a shame they keep putting the sorority sluts last. Bummer to have to scroll down all the time.
I'm in australia ...doing math
No you're not. Real Aussies do mathSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
None of this Yank "math" stuff.