are they going to make "unreliable transistors" that, upon failure, simply decode a pixel incorrectly, rather than, oh, I don't know, branching the program to an unspecified memory address in the middle of nowhere and borking everything.
They'd have to completely re-architect whatever chip is doing the calculations. You'd need three classes of "data" - instructions, important data (branch addresses, etc), and unimportant data. Only one of these could be run on unreliable transistors.
I can't imagine a way of doing that where the overhead takes less time than actually using decent transistors in the first place.
Oh, wait. It's a software lab that's doing this. Never mind, they're not thinking about the hardware at all.
Man, I _wish_ I had been taught Turbo Pascal one year earlier in high school. I was taught Quick BASIC, and basically invented a hacked-together jury-rigged version of recursion using an unbounded array to store previous states for a programming competition.
It would have been way easier if: 1. Someone had formally taught me what recursion was. 2. I knew how to use tools that didn't throw stack overflow errors when you try to use it.
We learned Turbo Pascal the very next year, and one of the first things taught to us was recursive sorts.
If your SO really likes collaborative storytelling, well, that's exactly what a good pen & paper RPG is. You can hold the game over Skype, or gchat, or anything that allows you to talk or text back and forth.
If you need maps & miniatures in realtime, I'm sure there are several different solutions to that problem as well.
If you've never played a pen&paper before, the learning curve can be rather steep, depending on which system you choose to play. And I caution you that having a 1-DM, 1-PC game can also be challenging. Expect to spend as much time doing prep for the game (as DM) as you actually spend playing the game as well.
to illuminating a house with no windows is . . . to add windows? Wow.
I mean, some kudos are deserved for finding an inexpensive (almost free) way to add windows, and using windows whose shape provides some refractory scattering of the incoming light. Still though, his solution to no windows was literally TO ADD WINDOWS.
Per the article, the airport is private property, and these people have been asked to not return to it. By returning after that warning, they are trespassing.
I'm guessing you're a Canadian, as our criminal code divides crimes up into indictable offenses and summary conviction offenses, rather than felonies and misdemeanors.
Trespass is a misdemeanor in California, but the California Penal Code authorizes arrest by a private citizen when said private citizen witnesses a "Breach of Peace." Breach of Peace has been interpreted to include felonies, misdemeanors, and even infractions (offenses smaller than misdemeanors).
Though I disagree with your terminology, I agree with your sentiments. Apparently, in California, citizens are allowed to make arrests any time they witness a felony, a misdemeanor, or a disruption of the peace. If you see someone toss a cigarette butt on the ground, you're allowed to arrest them.
I think the laws regarding citizen's arrest are much more sane up here in Canada, where it is only authorized for indictable offenses (what the US calls felonies), and not for summary conviction offenses (misdemeanors). Trespass is only an indictable offense if it occurs at night, so nobody would be authorized to perform a citizen's arrest for a daytime trespass.
Alert Diver is the magazine that is included in my membership with Divers Alert Network, which I joined for their travel insurance for my scuba trips.
National Geographic is awesome. I don't care how much you paid for your monitor, the photos in that magazine will always look better on paper than they do online.
Listen, just because I do not enumerate all of the things that you're not allowed to do while driving, it doesn't mean that they're okay. This article is about electronic devices.
If you really care, solving a rubik's cube, preparing and cooking food, or even just eating food while driving can ALREADY get you dinged under distracted driving or dangerous driving laws. Ontario explicitly ennumerated cell phones and other electronic devices because they were so prevalent in cars, and because they were new, and because it wasn't clear whether or not talking on the phone would qualify as distracted driving.
And feel free to press the "ignore" button on your phone, as long as it's mounted somewhere.
Several Canadian provinces (including Ontario) have "distracted driving" laws that basically state "no fucking around with electronic devices unless they're mounted to your vehicle somewhere."
If you have to hold your phone to look at Google Maps, and/or enter information into it, that's verboten. If you enter your destination before you start driving, and then mount it on your dashboard or windscreen, that's okay.
I like this distinction, and think it is a reasonable restriction on the use of electronic devices while driving. Note - hands-free phone operation is still allowed. Texting is pretty much right out (as it should be).
And in order to "test" a hypothesis, the hypothesis must predict a result. Then you carry out the experiment, and if the predicted result is the same as the expected result, your hypothesis has been tested and has passed the test.
If I had to travel more than 10km, chances are I'd be coming in from out of town, and I wouldn't spend as much time stopped at red lights. I can average about 26kph on my bike when I'm out riding in the country.
Next up - statistics, man. The average trip is 16 miles. That does not mean that 50% of the people travel more than 16 miles, and 50% travel less than 16 miles. An educated guess would be that commute distances follow something more akin to a Poisson distribution (sorry, I forget what the continuous form of that distribution is), with the median commute distinctly shorter than the man, due to the long tail formed by people with 100 mile commutes.
Thirdly- citation needed. Here's a report from the US Dept of Transportation:
Here, it states that the average commute for someone who drives alone, in 2009, was 12.09 miles (page 54), and for all people, it was 11.79 miles. Based on the historical trends, I find it hard to believe that it's jumped by 30% in just four years.
Finally - I'm not telling everyone in the US to bike to work. Some guy asked for a good way to stay in shape, and I responded that the only thing that I do is bike to work. I don't really get any exercise outside of that. I think it's a great way to keep in shape. Unless you are also Dishwasha, or you know their commuting arrangements intimately, don't discount my suggestion to them. Anecdotes aren't data, and data isn't anecdotes. Maybe it's a good suggestion, maybe it's not. Only they can tell that.
You have kids and you want to increase your fitness level?
Go play with them.
Because of the crazy power-to-weight ratio that kids have, no adult can even hope to keep up with them. You'll burn 10 times the energy that they do, just trying to keep pace.
Climb trees. Play soccer. Chase them around the park. Throw a frisbee or a football back and forth. Ride bikes.
Your kids will love it, you'll love it, and you'll be more fit than you've ever been!
"Truly ridiculous" is anything you can't bike without reaching your personal "I'm gonna die now" limit. For me, I'd set that at about an hour of riding, which would let me acheive the average commute distance on a good day (26km/16mi). But it's a personal choice. Obviously, as the distance increases, the extra time required to bike it instead of driving it increases as well.
I totally understand the stones it takes to join the cars on the road. My route has no bike lanes at all, and is along the biggest, busiest roads in a city of 350,000 people. But I've been riding my bike around town for 15 years now, so I'm pretty inured to the horrific driving that goes on around me. On the other hand, you are correct, I'm not from the US (rather, from that cold neighbour to the North), so at the very least, I don't have to worry about being shot to death when some jackass behind me gets pissed off that I've slowed him down.
If you are going to try this, there are three things I highly recommend:
One - get a rear-view mirror. It's invaluable when you want to change lanes, and for keeping an eye on the cars behind you that might cut you off at that right turn ahead.
Two - practice vehicular cycling, and take the lane (ride in the middle) when it's necessary to do so for your safety. Vehicular cycling means that your actions are predictable to the cars around you.
Three - if you're really having problems, either mount a camera on your helmet, or mount something that looks like a camera on your helmet. I was astounded by how much more room I was given when people thought they were being recorded.
As far as temperatures, I'm one of the lucky few that experiences days as hot as 100F (39C) in the summer, and -30F (-33C) in the winter. I get both extremes! I am fortunate enough to have a shower provided at my workplace, and I recognize that.
I've heard other work-from-homers say that including a morning commute helps them separate their work from their not-work time at home. They'll leave through the front door, go for a 20 minute walk (you could do a 20 minute bike ride), then come in the back door and go straight to their office.
At the end of the day, out through the back door, 20 minute bike ride, in through the front.
I like what they do for my water & gas bills. They're just not that satisfying to use.
So my solution is doubly good. I get nice, satisfying, high-pressure water with little risk of running out of hot water. And I don't have to pay for it:)
I actually ride a recumbent with hard, skinny tires as soon as the snow has melted. My personal best of 17 minutes occurred because I managed to hit almost all green lights on the way home. A faster bike won't speed me up that much:)
In the winter, on a singlespeed mountain bike (well, actually a 15-speed, but the gears stop working after the first week of salt & slush), it takes closer to 30 minutes to complete the ride.
Unless you've got a truly ridiculous commute, you can probably bike to work without taking much more time than driving. I've got a 7km commute that takes 15 mintues in rush-hour traffic. I can ride it in 20 (17 minutes is my personal best).
It takes an additional 15 minutes at work to shower and change, but that's 15 minutes that I'm not spending showering at home. All told, I get 40 minutes of exercise in a day with a net time loss of only 10 minutes. AND! I use the hot water at work (free!), where they don't have those horrible low-flow showerheads.
Slashdot Mirror
are they going to make "unreliable transistors" that, upon failure, simply decode a pixel incorrectly, rather than, oh, I don't know, branching the program to an unspecified memory address in the middle of nowhere and borking everything.
They'd have to completely re-architect whatever chip is doing the calculations. You'd need three classes of "data" - instructions, important data (branch addresses, etc), and unimportant data. Only one of these could be run on unreliable transistors.
I can't imagine a way of doing that where the overhead takes less time than actually using decent transistors in the first place.
Oh, wait. It's a software lab that's doing this. Never mind, they're not thinking about the hardware at all.
http://xkcd.com/927/
And now I'm typing to kill some time between hitting "reply" and posting. La la la.
Man, I _wish_ I had been taught Turbo Pascal one year earlier in high school. I was taught Quick BASIC, and basically invented a hacked-together jury-rigged version of recursion using an unbounded array to store previous states for a programming competition.
It would have been way easier if:
1. Someone had formally taught me what recursion was.
2. I knew how to use tools that didn't throw stack overflow errors when you try to use it.
We learned Turbo Pascal the very next year, and one of the first things taught to us was recursive sorts.
Dollars to donuts, those vomiting Canadian drinkers _are_ teenagers.
(legal drinking age in Ontario is 19)
If your SO really likes collaborative storytelling, well, that's exactly what a good pen & paper RPG is. You can hold the game over Skype, or gchat, or anything that allows you to talk or text back and forth.
If you need maps & miniatures in realtime, I'm sure there are several different solutions to that problem as well.
If you've never played a pen&paper before, the learning curve can be rather steep, depending on which system you choose to play. And I caution you that having a 1-DM, 1-PC game can also be challenging. Expect to spend as much time doing prep for the game (as DM) as you actually spend playing the game as well.
to illuminating a house with no windows is . . . to add windows? Wow.
I mean, some kudos are deserved for finding an inexpensive (almost free) way to add windows, and using windows whose shape provides some refractory scattering of the incoming light. Still though, his solution to no windows was literally TO ADD WINDOWS.
Per the article, the airport is private property, and these people have been asked to not return to it. By returning after that warning, they are trespassing.
I'm guessing you're a Canadian, as our criminal code divides crimes up into indictable offenses and summary conviction offenses, rather than felonies and misdemeanors.
Trespass is a misdemeanor in California, but the California Penal Code authorizes arrest by a private citizen when said private citizen witnesses a "Breach of Peace." Breach of Peace has been interpreted to include felonies, misdemeanors, and even infractions (offenses smaller than misdemeanors).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_arrest_in_the_United_States#State_Statutes
Which I agree, is completely crazy.
Though I disagree with your terminology, I agree with your sentiments. Apparently, in California, citizens are allowed to make arrests any time they witness a felony, a misdemeanor, or a disruption of the peace. If you see someone toss a cigarette butt on the ground, you're allowed to arrest them.
I think the laws regarding citizen's arrest are much more sane up here in Canada, where it is only authorized for indictable offenses (what the US calls felonies), and not for summary conviction offenses (misdemeanors). Trespass is only an indictable offense if it occurs at night, so nobody would be authorized to perform a citizen's arrest for a daytime trespass.
http://what3words.com/useless.proprietary.solution
I could have sworn this would have been at the company's head office, rather than the shores of Greenland.
Or normalize all capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar.
FTFY. Oxford comma FTW!
I get two magazines regularly:
National Geographic
Alert Diver
Alert Diver is the magazine that is included in my membership with Divers Alert Network, which I joined for their travel insurance for my scuba trips.
National Geographic is awesome. I don't care how much you paid for your monitor, the photos in that magazine will always look better on paper than they do online.
TSA decrees that you have to take your shoes off to go to the Boston Marathon now.
Listen, just because I do not enumerate all of the things that you're not allowed to do while driving, it doesn't mean that they're okay. This article is about electronic devices.
If you really care, solving a rubik's cube, preparing and cooking food, or even just eating food while driving can ALREADY get you dinged under distracted driving or dangerous driving laws. Ontario explicitly ennumerated cell phones and other electronic devices because they were so prevalent in cars, and because they were new, and because it wasn't clear whether or not talking on the phone would qualify as distracted driving.
And feel free to press the "ignore" button on your phone, as long as it's mounted somewhere.
Several Canadian provinces (including Ontario) have "distracted driving" laws that basically state "no fucking around with electronic devices unless they're mounted to your vehicle somewhere."
If you have to hold your phone to look at Google Maps, and/or enter information into it, that's verboten. If you enter your destination before you start driving, and then mount it on your dashboard or windscreen, that's okay.
I like this distinction, and think it is a reasonable restriction on the use of electronic devices while driving. Note - hands-free phone operation is still allowed. Texting is pretty much right out (as it should be).
Summoning Cthulhu is a little bit easier on the throat.
And in order to "test" a hypothesis, the hypothesis must predict a result. Then you carry out the experiment, and if the predicted result is the same as the expected result, your hypothesis has been tested and has passed the test.
The prediction can be something as simple as:
If I drop this cup, it will fall to the floor.
If I had to travel more than 10km, chances are I'd be coming in from out of town, and I wouldn't spend as much time stopped at red lights. I can average about 26kph on my bike when I'm out riding in the country.
Next up - statistics, man. The average trip is 16 miles. That does not mean that 50% of the people travel more than 16 miles, and 50% travel less than 16 miles. An educated guess would be that commute distances follow something more akin to a Poisson distribution (sorry, I forget what the continuous form of that distribution is), with the median commute distinctly shorter than the man, due to the long tail formed by people with 100 mile commutes.
Thirdly- citation needed. Here's a report from the US Dept of Transportation:
http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf
Here, it states that the average commute for someone who drives alone, in 2009, was 12.09 miles (page 54), and for all people, it was 11.79 miles. Based on the historical trends, I find it hard to believe that it's jumped by 30% in just four years.
Finally - I'm not telling everyone in the US to bike to work. Some guy asked for a good way to stay in shape, and I responded that the only thing that I do is bike to work. I don't really get any exercise outside of that. I think it's a great way to keep in shape. Unless you are also Dishwasha, or you know their commuting arrangements intimately, don't discount my suggestion to them. Anecdotes aren't data, and data isn't anecdotes. Maybe it's a good suggestion, maybe it's not. Only they can tell that.
Buy a bike rack, drive most of the way, and then bike whatever's left.
That, or move a little closer to your place of employment :)
You have kids and you want to increase your fitness level?
Go play with them.
Because of the crazy power-to-weight ratio that kids have, no adult can even hope to keep up with them. You'll burn 10 times the energy that they do, just trying to keep pace.
Climb trees. Play soccer. Chase them around the park. Throw a frisbee or a football back and forth. Ride bikes.
Your kids will love it, you'll love it, and you'll be more fit than you've ever been!
"Truly ridiculous" is anything you can't bike without reaching your personal "I'm gonna die now" limit. For me, I'd set that at about an hour of riding, which would let me acheive the average commute distance on a good day (26km/16mi). But it's a personal choice. Obviously, as the distance increases, the extra time required to bike it instead of driving it increases as well.
I totally understand the stones it takes to join the cars on the road. My route has no bike lanes at all, and is along the biggest, busiest roads in a city of 350,000 people. But I've been riding my bike around town for 15 years now, so I'm pretty inured to the horrific driving that goes on around me. On the other hand, you are correct, I'm not from the US (rather, from that cold neighbour to the North), so at the very least, I don't have to worry about being shot to death when some jackass behind me gets pissed off that I've slowed him down.
If you are going to try this, there are three things I highly recommend:
One - get a rear-view mirror. It's invaluable when you want to change lanes, and for keeping an eye on the cars behind you that might cut you off at that right turn ahead.
Two - practice vehicular cycling, and take the lane (ride in the middle) when it's necessary to do so for your safety. Vehicular cycling means that your actions are predictable to the cars around you.
Three - if you're really having problems, either mount a camera on your helmet, or mount something that looks like a camera on your helmet. I was astounded by how much more room I was given when people thought they were being recorded.
As far as temperatures, I'm one of the lucky few that experiences days as hot as 100F (39C) in the summer, and -30F (-33C) in the winter. I get both extremes! I am fortunate enough to have a shower provided at my workplace, and I recognize that.
I've heard other work-from-homers say that including a morning commute helps them separate their work from their not-work time at home. They'll leave through the front door, go for a 20 minute walk (you could do a 20 minute bike ride), then come in the back door and go straight to their office.
At the end of the day, out through the back door, 20 minute bike ride, in through the front.
I like what they do for my water & gas bills. They're just not that satisfying to use.
So my solution is doubly good. I get nice, satisfying, high-pressure water with little risk of running out of hot water. And I don't have to pay for it :)
I actually ride a recumbent with hard, skinny tires as soon as the snow has melted. My personal best of 17 minutes occurred because I managed to hit almost all green lights on the way home. A faster bike won't speed me up that much :)
In the winter, on a singlespeed mountain bike (well, actually a 15-speed, but the gears stop working after the first week of salt & slush), it takes closer to 30 minutes to complete the ride.
Unless you've got a truly ridiculous commute, you can probably bike to work without taking much more time than driving. I've got a 7km commute that takes 15 mintues in rush-hour traffic. I can ride it in 20 (17 minutes is my personal best).
It takes an additional 15 minutes at work to shower and change, but that's 15 minutes that I'm not spending showering at home. All told, I get 40 minutes of exercise in a day with a net time loss of only 10 minutes. AND! I use the hot water at work (free!), where they don't have those horrible low-flow showerheads.