Technically, everything you ever perceive is in the past. More often than not, two simultaneous perceptions of the same thing are not even the same past.
How brains manage to correct for both the perception latencies and the action latency, so that we can interact with our environment, is pretty amazing.
I try to convey to people that we are effectively, for the sake of explanation, a fixed point in the middle of an aquarium - with little floaty bits all around us in the water, moving at their own velocity on their own course. The light we see took some time to reach us and that floaty bit we think is there is since moved. If we got in a high speed star ship and traced the route back to it we'd find that route likely contains curves and even moves a bit as the gravity of other bodies have diverted it ever so slightly along its path. Due to the speed of light, and the passing nature of it along its way, if we sailed toward a galaxy at Warp speed we'd see it spin much faster than it actually does as we are seeing a fast-forward effect.
Daft as it may sound, we really get people's minds wrapped around some basic physics, even if for a short while, away from the other distractions of life.
> I'm always stressing to people at our star parties the light you see is history. I'm surprised they still invite you. They probably already know.
I'm usually the one with the telescope, making peoples minds boggle. Explaining the speed of light and vast distances I usually have a rapt audience who aren't given to thinking about these things. Nothing quite like a Star Party to answer the questions the people themselves are asking. We don't have the great pictures of Hubble or Spitzer, but we have people who aren't watching TV, but are actually seeing things through the eyepiece and getting some of the science explained first hand.
DO NOT buy 5 identical drives at the same time from the same place and same manufacturer or face increased risk of more than one dying at (or near) the same time.
Also keep in mind that raid will not protect you from data corruption (or more correctly, it will assure that you retain corrupt data). The happiest event is when a drive flat out dies.
Thank goodness I bought 7 identical drives at the same time from the same place and same manufacturer. Dodged that bullet!
Seriously, they're all chugging along nicely, 1 year on (touch wood!) I did pick up another which is set aside for the expected first drive to fail.
I'm always stressing to people at our star parties the light you see is history. That which cast it forth is not there at the present and possibly no longer exists in the same condition.
Exploding stars, though, yeah, that's the stuff of excitement for some. Once they get tired of seeing the same ol' - same ol' Hubble extravaganzas.
Huh. Loathsome and terrible? A store window seems like the perfect place to be selling things. People have been putting animated advertisements in them for decades. That being said, this seems a rather expensive way to do it. Glass is much cheaper to replace.
I'm sick of people coming up with these inventions that use some form of exotic material. Silver, gold, palladium, rhodium... for God's sake, use something that is not an investment grade metal.
Considering the prices people pay for electronics, the raw materials are a tiny fraction of the cost. The quantities of these metals is likely no more than you're already getting in your $300 Samsung 27 inch monitor.
I for one would pay extra for something much cooler than ordinary LED, especially if I could stack them and get some cool 3D effect out of it.:P
Driving in to work I usually listen to the BBC World Service and they have been running a series on the Elements. This morning was Carbon, Part II - which covered Graphene and flixable displays, due to the nature of Graphene's transparent nature. While it's been interesting to see the series of articles on/. regarding Nanotubes and Graphene, this brought it more to life.
The prospect of using Graphene as custom-tailored filters, perhaps to trap CO2 was also pretty good.
I can think of another real world addiction: buying/collecting tons of useless crap, and hoard everything they see. The funny thing is, getting these people onto games like WoW would only improve their life - instead of wasting money on crap that takes up precious space in tiny apartments, for $15 / month they can satisfy the collector urge without cluttering the apartment.
The funny thing is, once I realized this effect, I was able to benefit from it without actually playing the game. Every time I think "it'd be neat to have $USELESS_THING", I'd switch my thoughts over to "or I could reactivate my WoW account and work towards $TIMESINK_ACHIEVEMENT" and with that, I avoid both wasting time and buying useless crap.
Several years ago the Detroit Free Press had a story on a family, presumably living on welfare, who all were massive online gaming addicts. Only one example, but the article touched on several other cases where adults as well as children were hooked and couldn't part ways with leveling, fighting NPCs (or other players) getting LEET EQZ, etc. Don't blame the gaming companies, I always hear, it's not their fault people have a genetic predisposition to gaming. (You'd think they could find a paying profession, for that kind of effort, eh?)
"Welcome to Shifty Ackthpt's House o' Cheap Bargain Rate Options, where you can buy to own seats, transmissions, engines, in-vehicle entertainment systems and even Smart Phone connectivity enhancements!
All constructed of Erector Set or Lego at customer's choice.
Seagate drives are terrible drives now. I've had three of there external drives not last more then a year.
Agree, I bought 3 2TB Seagates for my home server a few years back...2 of them failed within a year. Yet another brand name I used to trust, now shot to shit.
This is why you just buy whatever is cheap and rig up a RAID 5. A drive craps out and you throw another one in and keep on going.
Sounds more like they are addicted to the freedom they get within the game.
Much better than their reality....
Nah. People of all walks of life, even Americans are completely sucked into these games, too. I mudded pretty intensely, back about 1997 and know too well how the hours and days flew by. All just to get another level or piece of eq. Marathon sessions were not unknown on weekends. I told a friend who worked in the video game industry these games were going to be the next big thing, but he couldn't see how anyone could set up a nationwide network of servers for this so dismissed it. I wonder how many times he has kicked himself for not taking the gamble on it.
MMORPG can maybe be changed so you don't need to be on 24/7 to get the most of them / fell like you are paying for it so you better play 24/7.
Other games have more breaks build in and you don't have to play 24/7.
Here's some historical anecdotal stuff to chew on...
Long before Warcraft the were MUDs, where people played like addicted players on National Player Addiction Day. I know, I was once one. The terms Life Suck and Time Sink were well known among us, though we laughed it off as we could quit whenever we wanted, though not just yet.
Before I got sucked into mudding I traveled Europe and met a couple in a restaurant in Brugge, Belgium. As I was an American on holiday, this husband and wife wanted to know a little about what life was like in the states and what I did for a living. Their living was currently treating people for Network Addiction - those people who were so glued to every post on a Fido (or other) board they couldn't function outside of hitting Reload every 10 seconds to see if they had any replies. Flamewars were what they lived for, a reason to participate and be heard (even if today nobody remembers any of it.) This meeting was in early January, 1994. Not a new thing, so it turns out. My younger brother was one of those who would do anything (include lie and steal) to keep his connection to a BBS going. They completely understood.
More generic lesson; don't point a video camera at the screen in a movie theater.
Only a complete moron would go into a theater with something which looks like a camera perched in the middle of their face. That may skate in China, but not in the US. I've been quizzed over my GPSr, simply because few theater people have seen such a thing and want assurance it's not some newfangled recording device (as IF. Besides is usually clipped to my belt, not like I'm going to thrust my pelvis into the air to record something, geez.)
Banking regulations, Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), National Recovery Administration (NRA)... to name a few
This is a post 9/11 world, didn't anyone get the memo?
There have been numerous accounts of secondary school students censored or reprimanded as well as public university students who have felt the heavy hand of administration for having their say online.
I'd say it is to get them out of our lives. If this person could never meet face-to-face with another human being without a guard on standby who is ready to restrain or kill the man, what is the point of keeping the prisoner alive? Some would argue that he could contribute to society in other ways though. That is the only place i could see a life sentence over execution. Vengeance could only satisfy the hurt and society as a whole would not understand and feel it wrong anyways.
The world is filling up with people who consider "out of sight, out of mind" any person convicted and sentenced to prison. Of these people we have a vocal number who wring their hands over how poor the prisoners are and how we should bend over backward for them. The share of our state budget going to house, feed and provide various resources (including healthcare) to them is getting to be a bit much. As a vengeance thing, prison is getting to have heavy price tag. As a "keep them out of our town" thing, the price tag is equally heavy.
Those looking at the percentage of their income taxes which are expended on prisons may start to feel a little less charitable towards the number of lifers.
Who cares about Facebook? If it doesn't work without noscript, don't bother with it. Not like AOLv2.0 is a desirable site to visit anyway.
You miss the point entirely.
The use of Adblock is for the masses, not the elitist few who chose to turn their noses up at Farcebook. Who wants to advertise to the few? Any social site you wish to visit is crammed with script and when something like Farcebook employs advertising the way they do it becomes more pervasive. Rather than blast you with a few ads, which they can do, they blast you with 20 or 30 ads, which they can also do. Next thing you see is this behavior at your favorite sites and no way to stop it except to disengage, which few people really intend to do.
Slashdot Mirror
12 million years ago.
thanks for clarifying that, I mistaken from the article it was two weeks ago.
12 million years + 2 weeks. News doesn't travel as fast as it once did.
Technically, everything you ever perceive is in the past. More often than not, two simultaneous perceptions of the same thing are not even the same past.
How brains manage to correct for both the perception latencies and the action latency, so that we can interact with our environment, is pretty amazing.
I try to convey to people that we are effectively, for the sake of explanation, a fixed point in the middle of an aquarium - with little floaty bits all around us in the water, moving at their own velocity on their own course. The light we see took some time to reach us and that floaty bit we think is there is since moved. If we got in a high speed star ship and traced the route back to it we'd find that route likely contains curves and even moves a bit as the gravity of other bodies have diverted it ever so slightly along its path. Due to the speed of light, and the passing nature of it along its way, if we sailed toward a galaxy at Warp speed we'd see it spin much faster than it actually does as we are seeing a fast-forward effect.
Daft as it may sound, we really get people's minds wrapped around some basic physics, even if for a short while, away from the other distractions of life.
> I'm always stressing to people at our star parties the light you see is history.
I'm surprised they still invite you. They probably already know.
I'm usually the one with the telescope, making peoples minds boggle. Explaining the speed of light and vast distances I usually have a rapt audience who aren't given to thinking about these things. Nothing quite like a Star Party to answer the questions the people themselves are asking. We don't have the great pictures of Hubble or Spitzer, but we have people who aren't watching TV, but are actually seeing things through the eyepiece and getting some of the science explained first hand.
DO NOT buy 5 identical drives at the same time from the same place and same manufacturer or face increased risk of more than one dying at (or near) the same time.
Also keep in mind that raid will not protect you from data corruption (or more correctly, it will assure that you retain corrupt data). The happiest event is when a drive flat out dies.
Thank goodness I bought 7 identical drives at the same time from the same place and same manufacturer. Dodged that bullet!
Seriously, they're all chugging along nicely, 1 year on (touch wood!) I did pick up another which is set aside for the expected first drive to fail.
Just sayin'.....
It was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
And yes, many Bothans died to bring us this information.
It was a Trap!
12 million years ago.
I'm always stressing to people at our star parties the light you see is history. That which cast it forth is not there at the present and possibly no longer exists in the same condition.
Exploding stars, though, yeah, that's the stuff of excitement for some. Once they get tired of seeing the same ol' - same ol' Hubble extravaganzas.
Huh. Loathsome and terrible? A store window seems like the perfect place to be selling things. People have been putting animated advertisements in them for decades. That being said, this seems a rather expensive way to do it. Glass is much cheaper to replace.
Always expensive the first generation is.
Each succession more accommodating is.
I'm thinking I need to come up with something memorable when I drive off a cliff in a stolen flying car.
Pretty much all cars that drive off cliffs are flying. Not for long and the landing sucks, but flying none-the-less.
This is why I need something out of the ordinary - zapped by aliens, crushed by a giant Terry Gilliamesque foot, that sorta thing.
Aaron arranged for Aaron's death. What did he come up with?
"Death By Conspiracy Theory"
It's all the rage these days. I'm thinking I need to come up with something memorable when I drive off a cliff in a stolen flying car.
Hey look! The people who arranged for the death of Aaron Swartz have come up with something new.
It's called The Ring. You should watch it!
I'm sick of people coming up with these inventions that use some form of exotic material. Silver, gold, palladium, rhodium ... for God's sake, use something that is not an investment grade metal.
Considering the prices people pay for electronics, the raw materials are a tiny fraction of the cost. The quantities of these metals is likely no more than you're already getting in your $300 Samsung 27 inch monitor.
I for one would pay extra for something much cooler than ordinary LED, especially if I could stack them and get some cool 3D effect out of it. :P
Driving in to work I usually listen to the BBC World Service and they have been running a series on the Elements. This morning was Carbon, Part II - which covered Graphene and flixable displays, due to the nature of Graphene's transparent nature. While it's been interesting to see the series of articles on /. regarding Nanotubes and Graphene, this brought it more to life.
The prospect of using Graphene as custom-tailored filters, perhaps to trap CO2 was also pretty good.
At some point it should appear on the PodCast directory
I can think of another real world addiction: buying/collecting tons of useless crap, and hoard everything they see. The funny thing is, getting these people onto games like WoW would only improve their life - instead of wasting money on crap that takes up precious space in tiny apartments, for $15 / month they can satisfy the collector urge without cluttering the apartment.
The funny thing is, once I realized this effect, I was able to benefit from it without actually playing the game. Every time I think "it'd be neat to have $USELESS_THING", I'd switch my thoughts over to "or I could reactivate my WoW account and work towards $TIMESINK_ACHIEVEMENT" and with that, I avoid both wasting time and buying useless crap.
Several years ago the Detroit Free Press had a story on a family, presumably living on welfare, who all were massive online gaming addicts. Only one example, but the article touched on several other cases where adults as well as children were hooked and couldn't part ways with leveling, fighting NPCs (or other players) getting LEET EQZ, etc. Don't blame the gaming companies, I always hear, it's not their fault people have a genetic predisposition to gaming. (You'd think they could find a paying profession, for that kind of effort, eh?)
It's 500 pages, right?
They needed a thick enough book to reach the cookie jar.
The car will now require an always on connection to work.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't you drive outside of network coverage."
"Welcome to Shifty Ackthpt's House o' Cheap Bargain Rate Options, where you can buy to own seats, transmissions, engines, in-vehicle entertainment systems and even Smart Phone connectivity enhancements!
All constructed of Erector Set or Lego at customer's choice.
Seagate drives are terrible drives now. I've had three of there external drives not last more then a year.
Agree, I bought 3 2TB Seagates for my home server a few years back...2 of them failed within a year. Yet another brand name I used to trust, now shot to shit.
This is why you just buy whatever is cheap and rig up a RAID 5. A drive craps out and you throw another one in and keep on going.
Sounds more like they are addicted to the freedom they get within the game.
Much better than their reality....
Nah. People of all walks of life, even Americans are completely sucked into these games, too. I mudded pretty intensely, back about 1997 and know too well how the hours and days flew by. All just to get another level or piece of eq. Marathon sessions were not unknown on weekends. I told a friend who worked in the video game industry these games were going to be the next big thing, but he couldn't see how anyone could set up a nationwide network of servers for this so dismissed it. I wonder how many times he has kicked himself for not taking the gamble on it.
MMORPG can maybe be changed so you don't need to be on 24/7 to get the most of them / fell like you are paying for it so you better play 24/7.
Other games have more breaks build in and you don't have to play 24/7.
Here's some historical anecdotal stuff to chew on...
Long before Warcraft the were MUDs, where people played like addicted players on National Player Addiction Day. I know, I was once one. The terms Life Suck and Time Sink were well known among us, though we laughed it off as we could quit whenever we wanted, though not just yet.
Before I got sucked into mudding I traveled Europe and met a couple in a restaurant in Brugge, Belgium. As I was an American on holiday, this husband and wife wanted to know a little about what life was like in the states and what I did for a living. Their living was currently treating people for Network Addiction - those people who were so glued to every post on a Fido (or other) board they couldn't function outside of hitting Reload every 10 seconds to see if they had any replies. Flamewars were what they lived for, a reason to participate and be heard (even if today nobody remembers any of it.) This meeting was in early January, 1994. Not a new thing, so it turns out. My younger brother was one of those who would do anything (include lie and steal) to keep his connection to a BBS going. They completely understood.
That's what I meant.
Those post on facebook walls
Roll their shit in little balls
Those who browse those walls of wit
Eat those little balls of shit.
More generic lesson; don't point a video camera at the screen in a movie theater.
Only a complete moron would go into a theater with something which looks like a camera perched in the middle of their face. That may skate in China, but not in the US. I've been quizzed over my GPSr, simply because few theater people have seen such a thing and want assurance it's not some newfangled recording device (as IF. Besides is usually clipped to my belt, not like I'm going to thrust my pelvis into the air to record something, geez.)
Banking regulations, Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), National Recovery Administration (NRA)... to name a few
This is a post 9/11 world, didn't anyone get the memo?
There have been numerous accounts of secondary school students censored or reprimanded as well as public university students who have felt the heavy hand of administration for having their say online.
I'd say it is to get them out of our lives. If this person could never meet face-to-face with another human being without a guard on standby who is ready to restrain or kill the man, what is the point of keeping the prisoner alive? Some would argue that he could contribute to society in other ways though. That is the only place i could see a life sentence over execution. Vengeance could only satisfy the hurt and society as a whole would not understand and feel it wrong anyways.
The world is filling up with people who consider "out of sight, out of mind" any person convicted and sentenced to prison. Of these people we have a vocal number who wring their hands over how poor the prisoners are and how we should bend over backward for them. The share of our state budget going to house, feed and provide various resources (including healthcare) to them is getting to be a bit much. As a vengeance thing, prison is getting to have heavy price tag. As a "keep them out of our town" thing, the price tag is equally heavy.
Those looking at the percentage of their income taxes which are expended on prisons may start to feel a little less charitable towards the number of lifers.
Who cares about Facebook? If it doesn't work without noscript, don't bother with it. Not like AOLv2.0 is a desirable site to visit anyway.
You miss the point entirely.
The use of Adblock is for the masses, not the elitist few who chose to turn their noses up at Farcebook. Who wants to advertise to the few? Any social site you wish to visit is crammed with script and when something like Farcebook employs advertising the way they do it becomes more pervasive. Rather than blast you with a few ads, which they can do, they blast you with 20 or 30 ads, which they can also do. Next thing you see is this behavior at your favorite sites and no way to stop it except to disengage, which few people really intend to do.