'Order of the Phoenix' was both amazingly long, worth the wait, and quite a milestone for Rowling as an author. She went from a deus-ex-machina-type denoument in the first book to what can only be described as an epic fantasy battle at the end of the fifth. My god, you can't be serious! Phoenix was one of the most boring piles of tripe I've had the displeasure of reading. It was like being beaten over the head with a book of cliches for 800+ pages.
It's actually: "Harry Potter: the plot is shallow".
I know you're just being funny, but the LAST thing you can accuse the HP plot of is being shallow. That world is HUGE and very complex. I think that's one of the reasons that adult readers can get dragged into it as much as the kids. Supposedly JKR has boxes and boxes full of notes about how various things work. She's said she might publish an encyclopdia of the world based on her notes (for charity, like the other two charity books).
The world may be complex, but that has nothing to do with the plot. Harry Potter plots are all exasperatingly shallow. Harry is a bloody dunce who wanders around through a fantastic world in a complete muddle, ignoring or missing clues all around him until he is trapped in a corner and saved by whatever deus ex machina plot device JKR had handy. It's absolutely horrendous writing. Complex? sure. Engaging? Yeah. Well crafted plots? Not at all.
Dude, oriental is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please. Dude, the entity "airline" is not a person. Use of "oriental" in reference to anything other than ethnicity is just fine, even if you do adhere to the weird political correctness that demands "asian" be used for people.
you always get some jackass who talk at top volume on their mobiles for hours
Anyone ever figured out why people talk louder on cellphones? Are they actually talking louder, or is it just a perception we have? Is it because on of their ears isn't available to hear back their loud talking so they compensate? A J. Seinfeld would say, "What's the deal?"
Regular phones have what is called "sidetone", which is your own voice coming out your earpiece. This is the natural result of all parties on a landline communicating on the same circuit. This feedback mechanism essentially allows you to monitor your own volume level by letting you hear what the other person is hearing. Cell phones, on the other hand, do not have sidetone. Your outgoing voice and the other party's incoming voice are on two separate channels. Since people are not "trained" on the use of cell phones, and are even somewhat programmed by landline usage to expect sidetone, they exercise little control over their volume levels. Since the automatic reaction to not hearing your own voice clearly in a sidetone system is to speak louder, the ones that really shout into their cells are mindless morons who are allowing their programmed behavior on landline phones to happen on their cells.
Basically, it comes down to this: if they're speaking above a normal conversational tone on a cell, then they're unthinking fools who can't adjust to lack of sidetone because they're too stupid to realize it's not there. The world is full of unthinking fools.
Today we have a problem implementing fairly rights for convicts, terrorists and animals. You don't seem to understand the basic premise of rights. Animals don't have rights. In order to have rights, you must have the capacity to recognize and respect the rights of others. The premise behind curtailing the rights of criminals/terrorists is that they have shown an unwillingness to respect the rights of others. The appropriate method and degree of curtailing is quite open to debate. In the case of animals, we, as the only known sentient creatures on the planet, have a responsibility to treat animals humanely, but animals certainly have no "rights".
Or if you prefer, read Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"
Remember, though, that survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the best overall. It means survival of the best fit for a particular set of circumstances.
We're pretty good at remaking our surroundings to make ourselves the "fittest" species around, in that sense of the word. But drop the average city-dweller in a small canyon with a hungry lion, and natural selection favors the lion.
Lions are not very fit. They've adapted to a fairly specific niche. Only if the "particular set of circumstances" favor the lion will the lion win against a human, i.e. if the encounter takes place on flat, open ground. Give the human something to climb, like a nice cliff or rock pile, and the lion is toast. Humans are more versatile than any other animal, That's why we're on top. We haven't developed any particular physical traits that make us particularly fit for a small niche. Instead, we are intelligent and self aware, which allows us to adapt our methods to the task at hand rather than relying on programmed instinct.
computers went from 1MHz costing $5000+ to 33MHz costing $2000+ and now 3GHz at $1000.
Cable: 1,000 x faster and about the same price Computers: 3,000x faster and 1/5 the price
NOTE: digital telecoms infrastructure speed depends on the speed of the hardware not the cabling, so the speed should scale with the speed of comuters. You're an idiot. Bandwidth is not merely limited by how fast you can toggle a bloody transistor. And while we all can have an example of the fastest existing PC on our desk, we can't all have the fastest existing network connection because it's a shared resource.
...if they could do the same thing without the whole "killing" part?
I read something about how wonderful the advancements in prosthetics the past few years have been. I even saw a kid of 20 or 22 at the airport carrying a big green duffle bag unassisted, though he had artificial legs and a prosthetic arm and the unmistakable look of a soldier.
Just spend the money. Declare it to be a National Technological Development Something-or-other and so and spend the money on research that doesn't come at such a high cost.
Honestly, that shit is heartbreaking. The money gets spent on research whether there's a war on or not. The difference is that war provides real-life test cases to advance and refine things beyond the theoretical. War is the dark cloud, advancements in prosthetics and lifesaving technology are the silver lining. Progress in handling unpleasant things like dismemberment comes from experience handling unpleasant things like dismemberment. Like it or not, humans are vicious. We always have been. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being a a bunch of happy fluffy bunnies.
An ultrasonic blood-clotting weapon could surely be made to work through walls, if the army threw enough money at it. Yes, because by simply spending enough money you can repeal the laws of physics. The government doesn't need to use secret spy weapons. They have bullets and bombs.
My EMS agency allowed us a trial run of the QuikClot, and you're right. It's amazing, especially on oozing wounds. The other device to come from the military is the Asherman Chest Seal, which is a one way valve with a large sticky surface for sucking chest wounds. Yes, much better than what we were taught to do in basic training 20 years ago: "find a piece of plastic, like the dressing wrapper or the cellophane off a cigarette pack" and put that over the wound under the pressure dressing. Yeah, sure. Sorry man, i tore the pressure dressing wrapper down the middle and it won't cover the wound. Hold on a minute while I find someone who smokes.
You know that DNA is separate molecules right? You realize they can be separated and isolated? If there's two dna's in a given sample the one that isn't the victim is the mugger. There should be enough DNA captured assuming obviously there is some sort of tussive to make the person cough. Please. Do you really think a spray that makes the mugger cough (required, if you want DNA and not just water vapor) is a good idea? You're better off with pepper spray to disable him so he can't hurt you while you run away. Besides, even if it did work, what the fuck are the cops going to do with a DNA sample? Look it up in that secret DNA file the Men in Black have compiled on every person in the world?
Technically that's not true. At least for the Army, perhaps other branches have different rules, but the drinking age on an Army post is the same as the state it is in.But as others have pointed out, it's a rule that is often not enforced. Yeah, DoD Instruction 1015.10 basically says "drinking age reflects the state (or country) in which the base is located, but no lower than 18". This is for all services, and the rules have essentially been that since '84 or so, when those MADD jerks started throwing puritanical hissy fits over drinking ages. That "you can drink on-post at 18" story just won't die. Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how many people keep parroting "facts" drawn from what is likely a third hand story from someone's uncle who was in Vietnam.
Of course we never let "drinking age" stop us when I was in the Amy. We just drank bad beer in the barracks for cheap, rather than paying $5 for beers in a bar.
I still find it interesting that at 18 you're allowed join the military and die but you're not allowed to drink alcohol.
Unless they've changed things, you can still drink on based if you are under 21. When's the last time you checked? During Vietnam? Hasn't been like that for more than 20 years. When I first joined the Army in '87, on-post drinking age was set at whatever the age was in that state--- which, due to the political blackmail that is the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, pretty much has been set at 21.
A big fuck you to whomever modded this as funny. There is nothing funny about those that lose thier lives in service of thier country. The current world circumstances are especially sad when a command in chief is as clueless as the idiot in the White House. As a veteran, it brings tears to my eyes when I hear about the lose of life in Iraq. To make light of those that serve with honor is the greatest abuse of the freedoms you enjoy as a result of thier sacrifice. WTF are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with the humor there. It's not insulting to people in uniform. You need to chill, man. Not long ago I came back from 2 years in Afghanistan with the good ol' US Army. I can't say how it might affect casualties, but I can assure you that a couple drinks a day there would definitely have improved my morale.
WTF does that mean? I have an iPod aftermarket charger that plugs into the wall and accepts the iPod's standard USB cable. Is that what they mean? that's exactly what it means. no funky delicate plastic clips with 3 spring loaded wafer contacts (motorola, damn you!), just industry standard device-side USB connectors supplying industry standard USB power. The other end can be either a regular usb plug, so you can plug into a computer, or a wall wart supplying the power a USB port would. My guess is that the latter will be what comes with the phone.
Now, I wish that china and EU would get together and come up with limits on how much energy a monitor and a computer can use.
What would the criteria be to detemine the amount of power a computer can use? Do you use a low end computer (email and web only POS) for the baseline, or a gaming machine that requires lots of CPU and Video or how about a high end desktop for video editing with multiple multi-core processers and a couple high end video cards, and a RAID array? What about servers? (handwave) The "experts" can figure all that technical stuff out after. He just wants the law passed now.
Not sure how that was a huge technical problem, particularly as name for that technique is derived from the name of the film which popularized it:)
It's named after the method explained in the dialogue, not the particular visual portrayal used, which was clearly chosen by the director so as to let the lay viewer know he's "hooking the phone to the computer". The glaring technical problem is that you can't auto dial with an acoustic coupler because the computer obviously has no mechanism for pressing down the hookswitch on the damn phone to hang up between calls.
It's so common to hear lay-people refer to the computer as their "hard drive". That, or they call the [beige|gray] box "the CPU". Another favorite is answering "100 gigabytes" when asked how much memory their system has. That one I'm usually willing to simply roll my eyes for and let go, because it's almost understandable. As one fellow said to me: "why do they call it memory if it forgets every time you turn off the power?" At least most of 'em know if a dime is bigger than a nickel.
My question is rather simple: Why is the same information being stored electronically on the passport as is printed on it?
A much safer and more secure method would be to simply include a unique ID on the RFID, and have passport agents reference that ID against their database and pull up a copy of the passport as it was issued. Nerds! Always coming up with a more complicated way to do it. That would require a persistent network connection to a reliable database system. This is simply designed as a check on the printed info that can be made with a simple, dumb, appliance-like device. The idea is that even if you can forge the paper and picture document, you can't forge the RFID chip to match it.
If that's the issue - require the 'good doctors' to match their time hour for hour in the public and private systems. No good. The problem with the public system is that they don't have enough money to pay the doctors they have. If you force them in such a system to match hours, their private "big money" hours are limited by what the government can afford to pay for in public hours. Additionally, such systems inevitably breed a "timeclock" mentality, where time spent on the public side is artfully accounted for in the least painful way, which is generally also the least productive.
Tax their services on top of that and use the money to improve the public system. Do you have any idea how heavily they'd have to tax the "private side" to even have the slightest effect on the public costs? You'd end up with an artificially overpriced private system used by only the ultra-rich. There's no point at which you could set the tax rate that would still allow enough participation to matter. Taxes are a deterrent to the activity they're applied to. Too many socialist types don't understand this. I once had someone tell me they should tax all income over $50,000 at 100%. He actually claimed it would be a fantastic boon to social services and social justice alike, with nobody being "overpaid" and tons of money coming in as taxes. Great idea, except for one thing: how many people are going to keep working after they've made their $50K for the year if they know that every dime after that was going to the government? This is the extreme example, but it works at all taxation levels. The higher an activity is taxed, the less of it there is.
I don't get this: why is Canada so fucked in the head on this? I like socialized medicine, where everybody gets a base level of care, but I want the option to get additional coverage. If "the rich" are allowed to buy their own additional medical care at private clinics and hospitals, then you'd see an exodus of the best and brightest doctors to the higher-paying private system. This leaves the "public" system full of the leftovers, the Dr Nick Rivieras. You basically end up with an even worse version of our county hospitals here in the US. A few dedicated idealist doctors toiling in a great vat of underfunded mediocrity. That's the theory, anyway.
Move characters one at a time from the end to the beginning, shifting the remaining characters right and keeping count of what you've moved.
Wow. If that's really the kind of solution Osty was thinking of in his original post, I'm quite disturbed. I was trying to think of something with slightly less horribly poor performance:), but couldn't come up with anything - even ignoring some of Osty's misleading restrictions (sheesh, "without using any extra storage space beyond a single character").
Mind you, this sort of a problem would probably be quite well suited to Brainfuck. In more ways than one.
Aw, the performance wouldn't be that bad. Traditionally, this is how you ended up doing things in small microcontroller environments where RAM is so tight that you don't have the luxury of allocating another block the size of your string. In small environments like that, though, you're never manipulating big strings, and you don't do it very often, so the performance hit is negligible. Any mare, though, even microcontrollers have so much RAM that this sort of "byte pinching" isn't as common as it used to be. In a big environment, coding like that is silly.
there is some speculation that we have reached peak copper. High-grade copper may in fact be a precious metal ere long. Speculation by idiots, maybe. The justification for calling it "peak" is that the places where the highest quality copper ore reserves are "don't like us very much". As if copper isn't a global commodity, as if people in those "antagonized" areas would rather sit on the ore than sell it. Fucking ludicrous. That article is little more than a ridiculous market manipulation scam.
the value of copper has gone up significantly since 1998
You have it backwards just as almost all so called "news reporters" do (including even financial reporters). The value of copper, gold, nickle, etc., hasn't changed at all. The reason copper and all other items cost more than they used to is because the value of the US Dollar has declined. One ounce of pure gold still buys a good quality men's suit just as it always has. No, you have it wrong. Demand for copper has increased drastically in the last 3 years. Take a look at copper prices in relation to any currency. Look at the copper mines in Indonesia and Chile, which are currently struggling to ramp up production. The dollar has indeed dropped, but that's not the whole of it. Copper consumption has increased.
That sounds like the Amiga's way of doing things...over 20 years ago! I'm glad it's catching on, and I'm glad AMD is doing it; AMD usually gets things right, and makes their products a lot more affordable than Intel...
/vjl/ Actually, this is simply the latest iteration of a well-documented pattern going back forty-odd years known as the Cycle of Reincarnation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually: "Harry Potter: the plot is shallow".
I know you're just being funny, but the LAST thing you can accuse the HP plot of is being shallow. That world is HUGE and very complex. I think that's one of the reasons that adult readers can get dragged into it as much as the kids. Supposedly JKR has boxes and boxes full of notes about how various things work. She's said she might publish an encyclopdia of the world based on her notes (for charity, like the other two charity books).
The world may be complex, but that has nothing to do with the plot. Harry Potter plots are all exasperatingly shallow. Harry is a bloody dunce who wanders around through a fantastic world in a complete muddle, ignoring or missing clues all around him until he is trapped in a corner and saved by whatever deus ex machina plot device JKR had handy. It's absolutely horrendous writing. Complex? sure. Engaging? Yeah. Well crafted plots? Not at all.Anyone ever figured out why people talk louder on cellphones? Are they actually talking louder, or is it just a perception we have? Is it because on of their ears isn't available to hear back their loud talking so they compensate? A J. Seinfeld would say, "What's the deal?"
Regular phones have what is called "sidetone", which is your own voice coming out your earpiece. This is the natural result of all parties on a landline communicating on the same circuit. This feedback mechanism essentially allows you to monitor your own volume level by letting you hear what the other person is hearing. Cell phones, on the other hand, do not have sidetone. Your outgoing voice and the other party's incoming voice are on two separate channels. Since people are not "trained" on the use of cell phones, and are even somewhat programmed by landline usage to expect sidetone, they exercise little control over their volume levels. Since the automatic reaction to not hearing your own voice clearly in a sidetone system is to speak louder, the ones that really shout into their cells are mindless morons who are allowing their programmed behavior on landline phones to happen on their cells.Basically, it comes down to this: if they're speaking above a normal conversational tone on a cell, then they're unthinking fools who can't adjust to lack of sidetone because they're too stupid to realize it's not there. The world is full of unthinking fools.
Remember, though, that survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the best overall. It means survival of the best fit for a particular set of circumstances.
We're pretty good at remaking our surroundings to make ourselves the "fittest" species around, in that sense of the word. But drop the average city-dweller in a small canyon with a hungry lion, and natural selection favors the lion.
Lions are not very fit. They've adapted to a fairly specific niche. Only if the "particular set of circumstances" favor the lion will the lion win against a human, i.e. if the encounter takes place on flat, open ground. Give the human something to climb, like a nice cliff or rock pile, and the lion is toast. Humans are more versatile than any other animal, That's why we're on top. We haven't developed any particular physical traits that make us particularly fit for a small niche. Instead, we are intelligent and self aware, which allows us to adapt our methods to the task at hand rather than relying on programmed instinct.Cable: 1,000 x faster and about the same price
Computers: 3,000x faster and 1/5 the price
NOTE: digital telecoms infrastructure speed depends on the speed of the hardware not the cabling, so the speed should scale with the speed of comuters. You're an idiot. Bandwidth is not merely limited by how fast you can toggle a bloody transistor. And while we all can have an example of the fastest existing PC on our desk, we can't all have the fastest existing network connection because it's a shared resource.
...if they could do the same thing without the whole "killing" part?I read something about how wonderful the advancements in prosthetics the past few years have been. I even saw a kid of 20 or 22 at the airport carrying a big green duffle bag unassisted, though he had artificial legs and a prosthetic arm and the unmistakable look of a soldier.
Just spend the money. Declare it to be a National Technological Development Something-or-other and so and spend the money on research that doesn't come at such a high cost.
Honestly, that shit is heartbreaking.
The money gets spent on research whether there's a war on or not. The difference is that war provides real-life test cases to advance and refine things beyond the theoretical. War is the dark cloud, advancements in prosthetics and lifesaving technology are the silver lining. Progress in handling unpleasant things like dismemberment comes from experience handling unpleasant things like dismemberment. Like it or not, humans are vicious. We always have been. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being a a bunch of happy fluffy bunnies.
Please. Do you really think a spray that makes the mugger cough (required, if you want DNA and not just water vapor) is a good idea? You're better off with pepper spray to disable him so he can't hurt you while you run away. Besides, even if it did work, what the fuck are the cops going to do with a DNA sample? Look it up in that secret DNA file the Men in Black have compiled on every person in the world?
Of course we never let "drinking age" stop us when I was in the Amy. We just drank bad beer in the barracks for cheap, rather than paying $5 for beers in a bar.
Unless they've changed things, you can still drink on based if you are under 21. When's the last time you checked? During Vietnam? Hasn't been like that for more than 20 years. When I first joined the Army in '87, on-post drinking age was set at whatever the age was in that state--- which, due to the political blackmail that is the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, pretty much has been set at 21.
What would the criteria be to detemine the amount of power a computer can use? Do you use a low end computer (email and web only POS) for the baseline, or a gaming machine that requires lots of CPU and Video or how about a high end desktop for video editing with multiple multi-core processers and a couple high end video cards, and a RAID array? What about servers? (handwave) The "experts" can figure all that technical stuff out after. He just wants the law passed now.
Not sure how that was a huge technical problem, particularly as name for that technique is derived from the name of the film which popularized it
It's named after the method explained in the dialogue, not the particular visual portrayal used, which was clearly chosen by the director so as to let the lay viewer know he's "hooking the phone to the computer". The glaring technical problem is that you can't auto dial with an acoustic coupler because the computer obviously has no mechanism for pressing down the hookswitch on the damn phone to hang up between calls.
A much safer and more secure method would be to simply include a unique ID on the RFID, and have passport agents reference that ID against their database and pull up a copy of the passport as it was issued. Nerds! Always coming up with a more complicated way to do it. That would require a persistent network connection to a reliable database system. This is simply designed as a check on the printed info that can be made with a simple, dumb, appliance-like device. The idea is that even if you can forge the paper and picture document, you can't forge the RFID chip to match it.
Tax their services on top of that and use the money to improve the public system. Do you have any idea how heavily they'd have to tax the "private side" to even have the slightest effect on the public costs? You'd end up with an artificially overpriced private system used by only the ultra-rich. There's no point at which you could set the tax rate that would still allow enough participation to matter. Taxes are a deterrent to the activity they're applied to. Too many socialist types don't understand this. I once had someone tell me they should tax all income over $50,000 at 100%. He actually claimed it would be a fantastic boon to social services and social justice alike, with nobody being "overpaid" and tons of money coming in as taxes. Great idea, except for one thing: how many people are going to keep working after they've made their $50K for the year if they know that every dime after that was going to the government? This is the extreme example, but it works at all taxation levels. The higher an activity is taxed, the less of it there is.
Wow. If that's really the kind of solution Osty was thinking of in his original post, I'm quite disturbed. I was trying to think of something with slightly less horribly poor performance :), but couldn't come up with anything - even ignoring some of Osty's misleading restrictions (sheesh, "without using any extra storage space beyond a single character").
Mind you, this sort of a problem would probably be quite well suited to Brainfuck. In more ways than one.
Aw, the performance wouldn't be that bad. Traditionally, this is how you ended up doing things in small microcontroller environments where RAM is so tight that you don't have the luxury of allocating another block the size of your string. In small environments like that, though, you're never manipulating big strings, and you don't do it very often, so the performance hit is negligible. Any mare, though, even microcontrollers have so much RAM that this sort of "byte pinching" isn't as common as it used to be. In a big environment, coding like that is silly.