Right. Sure. Now as soon as Steam can successfully host an internet game without resorting to editing config files in 3 different places, I'll be happier with it.
Wouldn't work unless said island was big enough to support food crops for us all, because every nation in the world with food to spare would put some kind of trade embargo on us until we adopted similar patent and copyright laws.
Even if we could be self-supporting, an island full of self-supporting smart people using large amounts of electricity (hope that island is volcanic for the geothermal power) would surely draw members of every intelligence agency in the world... shortly after which we'd be bombed into oblivion for supporting terrorism via patent infringement.
The trick to rolling your r's is not about what you do with your tongue. It's about how you project the air from your lungs. Try rolling an r while singing spanish (and I mean really singing, not just muttering along with the music). It'll come a lot easier. You have to know how to project your voice to speak Spanish well and this is difficult for many native English speakers; English doesn't require voice projection. One of the reasons why Spanish is sometimes seen as a rowdy language is because you have to push a lot of air around to speak it properly.
Chipotle is tolerable provided you don't go in expecting to eat Mexican food.
I grew up in south Texas* and (like Anonymous Coward) was surrounded by Mexicans and Mexican food. I've since moved north and although I like the climate here a lot better... it is impossible to get anything even resembling Mexican food. People think that beef stir-fried with green peppers makes a fajita, that tacos should be eaten with sour cream, and, yes, that Chipotle serves Mexican food.
They don't.
They are at least a cut above Taco Bell, who have the audacity to state they serve Mexican food yet still think you can get fajitas from shrimp and chicken. Chipotle at least doesn't call their food Mexican. From their website: "a classically trained chef decides to put his unique culinary take on burritos and tacos." So Chipotle serves Mexican-inspired food and calls it that. That at least, doesn't gnaw at my soul the way Taco Bell and its countless local copycat chain-stores do...
The only reasons I ever visit the Rio Grande valley any more are to see old friends and get some -real- fajitas that have been sitting in a mesquite grill for hours...
(*Start in San Antonio. Drive south for about 5 hours. Down there.)
Re:playing the lottery is not stupid
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To get excited, you have to be bad at math... or you have to have been reduced to a ad-soaked stupor by the scores of mindless lottery advertisements on the radio, TV, etc. I usually turn down the radio during the ad breaks, and even so I have half the speels about "more excitement, more action, more fun!" running though my head whenever I look at a Powerball billboard (with its ever changing running total).
Or the other line that sticks with me..
"Powerball, it's America's game!".. spoken by Ray Charles, no less. I'm not sure what the saddest aspect of this is... 1) Ray Charles advertised for these people practically from his deathbed 2) What the sentence itself says about Powerball
or worse
3) What the sentence itself says about America.
I'm going home now... try to ignore the Powerball billboards... but I know I'll have to read the number anyway. To anyone strapped for cash, constantly bombarded by stories about the winners, and maybe lacking a basic knowledge of the real odds.. the lottery must be a pretty addictive and frustrating thing.
I bought a DVD player. Cost me $50, plus the half hour or so it took me to apply firmware to fix the Macrovision and region-coding bugs.
I held off buying one for a long time, mostly because I wanted to make sure that the one I bought came from a company that made such firmware available, and that it would enable me to continue to view movies I've paid for the right to view.
"\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions"
should be
"\Documents and Settings\WindowsProfile\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" where WindowsProfile is your Windows Profile name. Obviously this only applies to 2000/XP. In Windows 98/ME I believe this is stored in "\windows\Application Data".
For those of you using Adblock with Firefox under Windows and find it missing after the upgrade, here's what I did to fix it.
Check the new Extensions manager under Tools and see if it's there. If it is, uninstall it from that window.
Close Firefox and use Explorer or whatever to browse to "\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" on your system drive.
Now you have to figure out which of these obscurely named subdirectories is Adblock. You can use Notepad or some other text editer to open "Extensions.rdf" and see. This string may be the same on all systems, if so, I'm sure someone can post it. Once you know which directory Adblock is still hiding in, delete it. Now go and install the AdBlock nightly from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html
That took care of it on my systems. YMMV, as always.
Real simple answer to that; you are not a typical Windows user.
The vast majority of Windows users behave exactly as the grandparent post states. I know this because I deal with the results every day in my shop. I'd guess that 80% of the machines I see are in due to spyware and virus problems that could have been fixed with a patch available weeks earlier. More often than not, when I get these systems up and running, the first thing that happens is "*pop* Windows has downloaded updates and is now ready to install them." So the updates were already downloaded, waiting for the user to click "Install"... but the user never did, for reasons already mentioned.
Automatic patching on XP Home would be doing end-users (and the internet!) a huge favor.
Actually schitzophrenic "voices" are not just like a song stuck in the head. Most of the time they are loud and clear and the person can pinpoint exactly where the voice is "located", based on the echoes, reverberation, and direction he heard it from. For some schitzophrenics, this uncanny sense of "where" the voice is provides the only means for telling it apart from a real voice.
On Google Answers there was once a guy who asked a question that alarmed many of us researchers...
It started off innocently enough; a question on how to block radio waves in his home. An odd request, sure, but... Faraday cages and such were being talked about, and someone asked in passing if there was some particular frequency he wanted to stop...
He basically stated that there was a group near him that was using some sort of broadcasting equipment to play thoughts in his head in an attempt to brainwash him. He didn't know what the frequency was, so he needed to block everything.
In addition he stated that he had been recommended to various psychologists, but since they were a part of the group doing the broadcasting he could not accept their diagnoses. I think the final answer to that question was a detailed explanation of radio physics, faraday cages, and also a caution suggestion that radio broadcasts can't be received by the human brain directly. I hope that guy, whoever he is, found some help...
Or so I'm told. My personal experiences with allowing the Windows Indexing service to run in the background have been that it's more trouble than its worth. Yes, on the rare occasion that it's actually -not- indexing when I search, the search is blazingly fast (compared to a non-indexed search).
But if the index is currently being modified, then the Windows search feature can't use it. Period. So when you search, you get the text "Windows is currently building an index of the files on drive C:" and it falls back to the regular, non-indexed search. In addition, the indexer consumes massive amounts of RAM while indexing, so a search run when the index is being modified ends up being about two times slower than usual.
It also doesn't seem to be able to tell when the user is idle. No amount of tweaking seems to fix this, without leaving you with a days-old index. If the index is complete, but you've saved a file since it was completed, that file will not show up in the search at all. I've had it kick on while in the middle of working on something else so often that I finally just turned it off entirely and have resigned myself to slow(er) searches in Windows.
In the interest of fairness I will say that the search seems to work quite well when searching a remote server that is running the indexing service. But running it locally is just a pain.
On the subject of biological wheels, I was going point out the Golden Wheel spider of the Mojave desert. Its legs are pretty much all the same length, and I saw a documentary once that showed the thing cartwheeling right down a dune to the bottom.
Oddly, though, I did a quick search for it which turned up only a few informational tidbits, and no pictures of the spider in motion. Makes me wonder if this thing really exists. I'm certainly not aware of any other examples of wheels in nature, so you'd think these little guys would get more attention.
Papa John's pizza actually varies widely from store to store. The pizza from the store near where I work is loads better than the greasy, nasty stuff from the store near my house.
I agree about the breadsticks, though. They serve mainly as a vehicle for the garlic sauce (or, in my wife's case, the ranch sauce). I swear they must put crack in their sauce, it's so addictive that I now have a stockpile of it to eat with homemade breadsticks, too...
If you'll check the Spybot S&D forums, you'll find that, yes, there is a way to get push SpybotSD out to machines on a domain, and update it, and run it, silently, with no user interaction.
It exists already. There are several, some free, some not, but the most useful (and free!) one I've found so far is the brand-new Spybot TeaTimer. It's available with the newest release candidate. You can download that here (link at the bottom of the forum post). Just run Spybot SD, do the immunization and such, run the scan, then switch it to Advanced mode and activate the "resident protection". Bingo. Nothing will ever write itself into your startup, or install a BHO, or toolbar, or change your homepage, without your knowledge and permission. Bear in mind it's a release candidate and there may be bugs; I know the Teatimer sometimes shuts off when you run the main Spybot program, and you have to go activate it again. Other than that it seems to work like a charm.
That was Dune, yes. Although this stuff reminds me more of Niven's "impact armor", a sort of jumpsuit that would go completely rigid upon impact. Padding on the inside would shield your body from the transferred kinetic energy. If the impact was localized, the rest of the suit retained mobility. With a full suit of this stuff it was possible to fall off a small building and land on your head. You'd be jostled and have a mild concussion, but you'd be alive and able to walk away in one piece.
This is why we have the Turing test. Simply put (as I understand it, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) the idea behind the Turing test is that if you can't tell the AI from a biological intelligence, then by definition the AI must be on equal footing with the real thing. If, by talking to an AI, you cannot tell whether or not a human somewhere responding is actually to you, then the AI passes the test and must be treated with the dignity and respect due another human being.
In a related subject, many people try to argue that a computer or AI will never be able to actually "feel" emotions, only imitate them, but there's a fundamental problem with that way of thinking. You see, there isn't any way we can "prove" that you, or I, or anyone else actually possesses a "mind" or has emotions. I mean, sure, there may be the right chemicals in your bloodstream, the brainwave patterns might be right, but are you -really- happy/angry/upset/whatever? No way to prove it. Likewise, if an AI "acts" angry, and responds to all stimulus as if it were angry, then.. well, it's angry.
If the AI "acts" as if it possesses a mind... then it does, as much as we do, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Sure. Now as soon as Steam can successfully host an internet game without resorting to editing config files in 3 different places, I'll be happier with it.
Wouldn't work unless said island was big enough to support food crops for us all, because every nation in the world with food to spare would put some kind of trade embargo on us until we adopted similar patent and copyright laws.
Even if we could be self-supporting, an island full of self-supporting smart people using large amounts of electricity (hope that island is volcanic for the geothermal power) would surely draw members of every intelligence agency in the world... shortly after which we'd be bombed into oblivion for supporting terrorism via patent infringement.
The trick to rolling your r's is not about what you do with your tongue. It's about how you project the air from your lungs. Try rolling an r while singing spanish (and I mean really singing, not just muttering along with the music). It'll come a lot easier. You have to know how to project your voice to speak Spanish well and this is difficult for many native English speakers; English doesn't require voice projection. One of the reasons why Spanish is sometimes seen as a rowdy language is because you have to push a lot of air around to speak it properly.
Ideally the people control the government. Unfortunately, in the USA at least, this isn't always the case.
I prefer a phrase from a friend of mine in college:
"It would take too much effort to care any less."
Just got over bronchitis and I still choke like Yoda every time I laugh.
Thanks to you I just damn near suffocated myself.
Nice job.
Border food, then. As opposed to the Mexican food places around here, which are merely borderline...
Chipotle is tolerable provided you don't go in expecting to eat Mexican food.
I grew up in south Texas* and (like Anonymous Coward) was surrounded by Mexicans and Mexican food. I've since moved north and although I like the climate here a lot better... it is impossible to get anything even resembling Mexican food. People think that beef stir-fried with green peppers makes a fajita, that tacos should be eaten with sour cream, and, yes, that Chipotle serves Mexican food.
They don't.
They are at least a cut above Taco Bell, who have the audacity to state they serve Mexican food yet still think you can get fajitas from shrimp and chicken. Chipotle at least doesn't call their food Mexican. From their website: "a classically trained chef decides to put his unique culinary take on burritos and tacos." So Chipotle serves Mexican-inspired food and calls it that. That at least, doesn't gnaw at my soul the way Taco Bell and its countless local copycat chain-stores do...
The only reasons I ever visit the Rio Grande valley any more are to see old friends and get some -real- fajitas that have been sitting in a mesquite grill for hours...
(*Start in San Antonio. Drive south for about 5 hours. Down there.)
To get excited, you have to be bad at math... or you have to have been reduced to a ad-soaked stupor by the scores of mindless lottery advertisements on the radio, TV, etc. I usually turn down the radio during the ad breaks, and even so I have half the speels about "more excitement, more action, more fun!" running though my head whenever I look at a Powerball billboard (with its ever changing running total).
.. spoken by Ray Charles, no less. I'm not sure what the saddest aspect of this is...
Or the other line that sticks with me..
"Powerball, it's America's game!"
1) Ray Charles advertised for these people practically from his deathbed
2) What the sentence itself says about Powerball
or worse
3) What the sentence itself says about America.
I'm going home now... try to ignore the Powerball billboards... but I know I'll have to read the number anyway. To anyone strapped for cash, constantly bombarded by stories about the winners, and maybe lacking a basic knowledge of the real odds.. the lottery must be a pretty addictive and frustrating thing.
I bought a DVD player. Cost me $50, plus the half hour or so it took me to apply firmware to fix the Macrovision and region-coding bugs.
I held off buying one for a long time, mostly because I wanted to make sure that the one I bought came from a company that made such firmware available, and that it would enable me to continue to view movies I've paid for the right to view.
quick correction:
"\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions"
should be
"\Documents and Settings\WindowsProfile\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" where WindowsProfile is your Windows Profile name. Obviously this only applies to 2000/XP. In Windows 98/ME I believe this is stored in "\windows\Application Data".
For those of you using Adblock with Firefox under Windows and find it missing after the upgrade, here's what I did to fix it.
Check the new Extensions manager under Tools and see if it's there. If it is, uninstall it from that window.
Close Firefox and use Explorer or whatever to browse to "\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" on your system drive.
Now you have to figure out which of these obscurely named subdirectories is Adblock. You can use Notepad or some other text editer to open "Extensions.rdf" and see. This string may be the same on all systems, if so, I'm sure someone can post it. Once you know which directory Adblock is still hiding in, delete it. Now go and install the AdBlock nightly from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html
That took care of it on my systems. YMMV, as always.
Real simple answer to that; you are not a typical Windows user.
The vast majority of Windows users behave exactly as the grandparent post states. I know this because I deal with the results every day in my shop. I'd guess that 80% of the machines I see are in due to spyware and virus problems that could have been fixed with a patch available weeks earlier. More often than not, when I get these systems up and running, the first thing that happens is "*pop* Windows has downloaded updates and is now ready to install them." So the updates were already downloaded, waiting for the user to click "Install"... but the user never did, for reasons already mentioned.
Automatic patching on XP Home would be doing end-users (and the internet!) a huge favor.
Actually schitzophrenic "voices" are not just like a song stuck in the head. Most of the time they are loud and clear and the person can pinpoint exactly where the voice is "located", based on the echoes, reverberation, and direction he heard it from. For some schitzophrenics, this uncanny sense of "where" the voice is provides the only means for telling it apart from a real voice.
On Google Answers there was once a guy who asked a question that alarmed many of us researchers...
It started off innocently enough; a question on how to block radio waves in his home. An odd request, sure, but... Faraday cages and such were being talked about, and someone asked in passing if there was some particular frequency he wanted to stop...
He basically stated that there was a group near him that was using some sort of broadcasting equipment to play thoughts in his head in an attempt to brainwash him. He didn't know what the frequency was, so he needed to block everything.
In addition he stated that he had been recommended to various psychologists, but since they were a part of the group doing the broadcasting he could not accept their diagnoses. I think the final answer to that question was a detailed explanation of radio physics, faraday cages, and also a caution suggestion that radio broadcasts can't be received by the human brain directly. I hope that guy, whoever he is, found some help...
The Powerpuff Girls torturing C3PO? Might be the best part of the whole movie.
It works a lot better when you enable indexing.
Or so I'm told. My personal experiences with allowing the Windows Indexing service to run in the background have been that it's more trouble than its worth. Yes, on the rare occasion that it's actually -not- indexing when I search, the search is blazingly fast (compared to a non-indexed search).
But if the index is currently being modified, then the Windows search feature can't use it. Period. So when you search, you get the text "Windows is currently building an index of the files on drive C:" and it falls back to the regular, non-indexed search. In addition, the indexer consumes massive amounts of RAM while indexing, so a search run when the index is being modified ends up being about two times slower than usual.
It also doesn't seem to be able to tell when the user is idle. No amount of tweaking seems to fix this, without leaving you with a days-old index. If the index is complete, but you've saved a file since it was completed, that file will not show up in the search at all. I've had it kick on while in the middle of working on something else so often that I finally just turned it off entirely and have resigned myself to slow(er) searches in Windows.
In the interest of fairness I will say that the search seems to work quite well when searching a remote server that is running the indexing service. But running it locally is just a pain.
On the subject of biological wheels, I was going point out the Golden Wheel spider of the Mojave desert. Its legs are pretty much all the same length, and I saw a documentary once that showed the thing cartwheeling right down a dune to the bottom.
Oddly, though, I did a quick search for it which turned up only a few informational tidbits, and no pictures of the spider in motion. Makes me wonder if this thing really exists. I'm certainly not aware of any other examples of wheels in nature, so you'd think these little guys would get more attention.
Papa John's pizza actually varies widely from store to store. The pizza from the store near where I work is loads better than the greasy, nasty stuff from the store near my house.
I agree about the breadsticks, though. They serve mainly as a vehicle for the garlic sauce (or, in my wife's case, the ranch sauce). I swear they must put crack in their sauce, it's so addictive that I now have a stockpile of it to eat with homemade breadsticks, too...
If you'll check the Spybot S&D forums, you'll find that, yes, there is a way to get push SpybotSD out to machines on a domain, and update it, and run it, silently, with no user interaction.
http://forums.net-integration.net/index.php?c=7
It exists already. There are several, some free, some not, but the most useful (and free!) one I've found so far is the brand-new Spybot TeaTimer. It's available with the newest release candidate. You can download that here (link at the bottom of the forum post). Just run Spybot SD, do the immunization and such, run the scan, then switch it to Advanced mode and activate the "resident protection". Bingo. Nothing will ever write itself into your startup, or install a BHO, or toolbar, or change your homepage, without your knowledge and permission. Bear in mind it's a release candidate and there may be bugs; I know the Teatimer sometimes shuts off when you run the main Spybot program, and you have to go activate it again. Other than that it seems to work like a charm.
Try Banco de Gaia. See if you can find Drunk as a Monk to start out with. Very evocative stuff.
Why not coat the stuff with a layer of some piezoelectric substance that will generate enough current to harden the layer beneath?
That was Dune, yes. Although this stuff reminds me more of Niven's "impact armor", a sort of jumpsuit that would go completely rigid upon impact. Padding on the inside would shield your body from the transferred kinetic energy. If the impact was localized, the rest of the suit retained mobility. With a full suit of this stuff it was possible to fall off a small building and land on your head. You'd be jostled and have a mild concussion, but you'd be alive and able to walk away in one piece.
This is why we have the Turing test. Simply put (as I understand it, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) the idea behind the Turing test is that if you can't tell the AI from a biological intelligence, then by definition the AI must be on equal footing with the real thing. If, by talking to an AI, you cannot tell whether or not a human somewhere responding is actually to you, then the AI passes the test and must be treated with the dignity and respect due another human being.
In a related subject, many people try to argue that a computer or AI will never be able to actually "feel" emotions, only imitate them, but there's a fundamental problem with that way of thinking. You see, there isn't any way we can "prove" that you, or I, or anyone else actually possesses a "mind" or has emotions. I mean, sure, there may be the right chemicals in your bloodstream, the brainwave patterns might be right, but are you -really- happy/angry/upset/whatever? No way to prove it. Likewise, if an AI "acts" angry, and responds to all stimulus as if it were angry, then.. well, it's angry.
If the AI "acts" as if it possesses a mind... then it does, as much as we do, anyway.