Helium's an inert gas. You'd have to be a pretty strange creature to get any buzz off of it. (other than oxygen starvation--or starvation of whatever's your gas of choice... but if hte Martian's got high off of holding their breath, thay'd be dead.)
The man didn't say anything about business supporting Communism. The man said that business is interested in keeping stability in the Chinese government.
Guess what? If a country undergoes a revolution or any major change i social structure, cheap labor dries up. A 7th-grader would understand why a business taking advantage of that cheap labor would want to promote stability.
KarmaWhorific indeed, It took you what, a minute to come up with that link?
Wish I always got (3, Informative) that easily. Maybe I should change my sig.
Offtopic but interesting...
on
The LEGO Desk
·
· Score: 4
Some physicists are in the habit of using Legos for making small adjustments in optics. This is because the studs have high enough friction that you can tweak two blocks relative to one another and they'll stay in the position you set them at. it stays bent. My freshman physics prof gave a demonstration on interferometry this way; he had a mirror mounted on a stack of legos (IIRC), which he could tweak by hand until it was at the right position.
I'll have to say that AGP is cool for audio people (musicians, content creators) too! PCI video cards have the nasty habit of mastering the bus for several milliseconds at a time for burst transfers. This messes up latency big time, which is an issue for hard disk recording and live performance.
Moving the video onto a seperate bus gets your low latencies back, which is a Good Thing.
You don't generally connect your DV camcorder through AGP....
"serial graphics bus" in this case means a peripheral interface. (i think--we're basing the entire thread on a flippant one-sentence remark in a press release that mainly talks about 8x AGP...)
The aforementioned business model is best suited to a small, upstart company. They have their clean interface, because without their original interface no one would have heard of them. It's their form of advertising, and it's very effective.
Now, if Google becomes an entrenched Big Company, that model stops working. But then there'll be another great upstart fresh-out-of-academia company to take its place, and play the same game.
The message Google sends to Major Internet Portals is "we kick your ass at searching, and for a small fee, you can become competitive again by using our search technology..."
video games might help problem
solving, hand-eye, etc. but they promote short attention spans by reinforcing
instant gratification.
Coin-op video games have instant gratification. When I try to get through all D (hex) levels of Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels without using a single continue, that's not instant gratification.
And that's only a side-scroller. Adventure games are even better in this regard.
Games that are based on coin-op genres, like fighing games inparticular, THOSE focus on instant gratification.
But the biggest offender of all is Tetris. Yes, everyone's favorite game, or at least the favorite game of people who "don't like video games," Tetris is more focused on instant decisionmaking, leading to instant gratification, than any other game. I never approached a Tetris game thinking about how I was going to approach level 9... it is the most present-oriented game there is. It works well for short attention spans becaue you don't need to pay attention to any one thing for more time than it takes to place the surrnt piece and move on the the next randomly selected piece. You can't plan ahead because all the pieces are randomly generated. Playing with "show next piece" is generally considered wussing out, even though it is even more intullectually stimulating. This is why I consider Tetris to symbolize the worst, most attention-limited, instant-gratification-oriented aspects of our society.
Suber Mario Brothers, on the other hand, now THERE's a game you have to think about while playing.
If you had read the article you'd see that Google serves MUCH more traffic through partner sites such as Yahoo than they do off of their own front page. Thuse services are paid for---so Google can afford to keep their minimalistic interface around, as long as other companies are paying them for their services.
It's a good business model, offering a cheap free service to the public while making money off of big contracts.
Another good company that operates this way is Maxim who makes analog semiconductor devices. They will send you two of almost anything they make, free, here, which is a great thing for hobbyists and students (I saved over $100 on my latest project:) and yet it's a drop in the bucket compared to the money they make off of manufacturing contracts. It's great advertising because a EE student who has used Maxim ICs in his projects will be much more likely to use Maxim in the future, when designing in the corporate world.
Whenever I use Altavista's iamge search I find about ten images that would work PERFECTLY except that they're 100x100 thumbnails and I have to pay Corbis some obscene abount for using them.
Now go look at early Mac screenshots and compare.
The point being, Windows 1.0 looked awful because pretty much all GUIs
looked awful at the time, to our modern eyes. You've got 15 years worth of GUI
development colouring your judgement there.
Hmm, I'm comparing the series of mockups/screenshots of the lisa GUI with those of early releases of Windows, and I'd say that Windows is consistently more awful by a factor of 5 years....
I can just as easily say that there's nothing in the book to indicate that Heinlein agreed with any of it. Heinlein was particularly concerned about the vote-he felt that the right to vote is given away too freely in pur society, and that one should be required to do civil service in exchange. On this point I disagree with him--but note that the protagonist in starship troopers joins the armed forces of his own accord, over most people's objections! There is no conscription and he could have just as easily become a citizen by doing peaceful civil service. Even when in the military, he is free to leave at any point.
However, I have trouble daying that our current method of granting the vote (to anyone over 18 who is a "citizen" by some standard) is any better. I have always beeen firmly against age discrimination in any form.
In any case you have not given any clue as to what your particular objection with the book is, other than to dismiss it as foaming right-wing gibberish. This does not for a coherent conversation make. Instead of responding to something specific, I'm making scattershot answers to what I think you might be objecting to in the book.
see this reference for more discussion. Here's a quote from Heinlein himself explaining the status of the miltary in Starhsip Troopers:
No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead -- and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older." [Heinlein 1980:398]
I had the same thought, though I think it would be better implemented using Freenet. Reason being that with Gnutella, your files have to be hosted on your computer and you have to choose which files you want to publish--so it's not very "anonymous" at all, as it can be traced back to your computer. Rather, with Freenet, information is moved around between computers, so that information you publish does not have to be hosted on your own computer. Freenet also refernces files using a checksum IIRC, so you can be sure that any "links" you make would point ot the same file.
Furthermore, its pretty easy to argue that singe Google is a continually updated database, the destination of your link is by no means guaranteed by you.
You may have been linking to a Wired News artivle originally, to make an example...
Saying that the book Starsihp Troopers was endorsing violence is equivalent to saying that that Fight Club was endorsing violence. It's reveals nothing except a misunderstanding of the--er, WHOLE GODDAMN POINT.
Maybe you're one of those who needs it spelled out for you in a convenient moral ending, or maybe the concept of "dystopian novel" isn't quite solid in your worldview.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit! THAT's what happened to the dinosaurs!
Guess what? If a country undergoes a revolution or any major change i social structure, cheap labor dries up. A 7th-grader would understand why a business taking advantage of that cheap labor would want to promote stability.
You, on the other hand, do not.
Wish I always got (3, Informative) that easily. Maybe I should change my sig.
Some physicists are in the habit of using Legos for making small adjustments in optics. This is because the studs have high enough friction that you can tweak two blocks relative to one another and they'll stay in the position you set them at. it stays bent. My freshman physics prof gave a demonstration on interferometry this way; he had a mirror mounted on a stack of legos (IIRC), which he could tweak by hand until it was at the right position.
Moving the video onto a seperate bus gets your low latencies back, which is a Good Thing.
"serial graphics bus" in this case means a peripheral interface. (i think--we're basing the entire thread on a flippant one-sentence remark in a press release that mainly talks about 8x AGP...)
right thumb=1, right index=2, right middle=4, right ring=8, right pinky=16, left thumb=32, etc.
Now, if Google becomes an entrenched Big Company, that model stops working. But then there'll be another great upstart fresh-out-of-academia company to take its place, and play the same game.
The message Google sends to Major Internet Portals is "we kick your ass at searching, and for a small fee, you can become competitive again by using our search technology..."
Coin-op video games have instant gratification. When I try to get through all D (hex) levels of Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels without using a single continue, that's not instant gratification.
And that's only a side-scroller. Adventure games are even better in this regard.
Games that are based on coin-op genres, like fighing games inparticular, THOSE focus on instant gratification.
But the biggest offender of all is Tetris. Yes, everyone's favorite game, or at least the favorite game of people who "don't like video games," Tetris is more focused on instant decisionmaking, leading to instant gratification, than any other game. I never approached a Tetris game thinking about how I was going to approach level 9... it is the most present-oriented game there is. It works well for short attention spans becaue you don't need to pay attention to any one thing for more time than it takes to place the surrnt piece and move on the the next randomly selected piece. You can't plan ahead because all the pieces are randomly generated. Playing with "show next piece" is generally considered wussing out, even though it is even more intullectually stimulating. This is why I consider Tetris to symbolize the worst, most attention-limited, instant-gratification-oriented aspects of our society.
Suber Mario Brothers, on the other hand, now THERE's a game you have to think about while playing.
It's a good business model, offering a cheap free service to the public while making money off of big contracts.
Another good company that operates this way is Maxim who makes analog semiconductor devices. They will send you two of almost anything they make, free, here, which is a great thing for hobbyists and students (I saved over $100 on my latest project :) and yet it's a drop in the bucket compared to the money they make off of manufacturing contracts. It's great advertising because a EE student who has used Maxim ICs in his projects will be much more likely to use Maxim in the future, when designing in the corporate world.
Plu shameless plugs from guys like me.
Blech.
please tell me how I can get my computer to do things without interfacing to it.
Hmm, I'm comparing the series of mockups/screenshots of the lisa GUI with those of early releases of Windows, and I'd say that Windows is consistently more awful by a factor of 5 years....
you're forgetting the thumbs. I always start with 1 as my right thumb, ending with 1024 as my left pinky.
no, that's an old meaning ;)
However, I have trouble daying that our current method of granting the vote (to anyone over 18 who is a "citizen" by some standard) is any better. I have always beeen firmly against age discrimination in any form.
In any case you have not given any clue as to what your particular objection with the book is, other than to dismiss it as foaming right-wing gibberish. This does not for a coherent conversation make. Instead of responding to something specific, I'm making scattershot answers to what I think you might be objecting to in the book.
see this reference for more discussion. Here's a quote from Heinlein himself explaining the status of the miltary in Starhsip Troopers:
No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead -- and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older." [Heinlein 1980:398]
ftp://ftp.zdne t.com/gs/gsnews/00_08/24_vg_spaceworld/spaceworld1 .mpg
I had the same thought, though I think it would be better implemented using Freenet. Reason being that with Gnutella, your files have to be hosted on your computer and you have to choose which files you want to publish--so it's not very "anonymous" at all, as it can be traced back to your computer. Rather, with Freenet, information is moved around between computers, so that information you publish does not have to be hosted on your own computer. Freenet also refernces files using a checksum IIRC, so you can be sure that any "links" you make would point ot the same file.
You may have been linking to a Wired News artivle originally, to make an example...
Right click->Open in Browser.
Done.
My van is FAST, fool!
Maybe you're one of those who needs it spelled out for you in a convenient moral ending, or maybe the concept of "dystopian novel" isn't quite solid in your worldview.
macos is tasty, i agree. but saying "everyone go out and get it" is silly.
Though, you may be joking. I'd better check it out.
Then again, perhaps you're a clever troll.
I know! Holds up hand to monitor in right place, clicks...
Um, yeah. hits close box It works.
Because it gets 398.21 BogoGIPS!