I find it an interesting coincidence the power outage happened so soon after that the Xenu article was featured.
Gee, you just had to mention the X-word! Now this thread won't load for most Scientologists because the keyword filters they were forced to install by their Church will see "Xenu" and block the site. After all the mere sight of the word could cause "pneumonia and death" if you haven't paid the Church of Scientology for the proper preparation.
Wikipedia's Xenu article has an interesting history if you look, as I did the other night when it was featured. Scientologists vandalize it regularly. You're supposed to pay them a half million (or some absurd sum of money) to find out about Xenu. After you find out, you're too embarrassed to admit to anybody that you paid a half million to learn that your problems are caused by bad science fiction, when you could have bought a house in Silicon Valley instead. So they obviously don't want a Wikipedia article giving away their half-million-dollar "trade secret" for free.
One trick I saw was to use HTML entities to spell out insults at the top of the article- like "only an idiot would believe this" or something. In the editor window, the entities weren't rendered and each letter appeared as a hex code.
A more effective attack took a different approach. The vandal in this case changed "Scientologists" to "Muslims", "Scientology" to "Islam", and inserted a boring-sounding sentence at the end of the first paragraph claiming that "Xenu" is another name that Muslims use for "Allah". It completely discouraged you from reading further. If you didn't know better you wouldn't find out how "Allah" distributed the thetans around volcanoes on various planets and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, and how their blown-up spirits cause problems in your personal life today.
This is OT, but what the hell, why not whack a beehive? Additional information on Xenu: Operation Clambake (Hubbard maintained that humans are descended from clams) The Xenu leaflet (all about Xenu- this information can save you lots of $$$$$) The road to Xenu (authored by a woman who got suckered) The Google cache of Wikipedia's Xenu article is also a must read.
I'm wondering if I'll get a lot of freaks, downmoderations, and hostile AC replies after I post this. After all, that's the kind of thing that Hubbard called "fair game". If it sinks below default visibility I'll repost it again with my karma bonus, so you theta-clear-wannabes out there can save your points for someone else.
But is there no contrition or regret on the part of anyone at lexmark ?
They must still be lex-smarting.
If you want tears and lamentations you could try HP, which has also staked its future on the own-to-rent model. Although, with Carly gone, they must still be hung over from celebrating.
Try doing a search for "Tom Font" or "Dick Font" or "Harry Font" on Google. There seems to be no way to do a search for any of those names without drowning in a million pages containing escaped HTML with stuff like
Tom</FONT> (which appears in search results as Tom</FONT>)
Real FONT tags don't show up, but there are enough escaped FONT tags in the world to thwart searches for anyone named "Font". Even if you do a full string search, with the entire name in quotes, Google insists on returning FONT tag garbage. It doesn't "see" the > stuff in the middle, which is apparently removed in an early filtering step.
Why can't MY name be an HTML keyword! My name is completely unique to me and searchable as hell. HTML needs more ethnic last names in its tag set.
There was a button on the tape player to mute the sound so you wouldn't have to listen to the noise, but i liked to hear it. At some point you'd be able to recognize when a game was almost done loading just by listening to the noise/bleeps.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I used to have a Sinclair ZX81 (this was the British predecessor to the Timex Sinclair, which had twice as much RAM- two kilobytes). The computer was unusable without its 16K RAM pack. I distinctly remember near the end of those recordings the randomness would go away and you would hear zzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... for 24 "clicks". It was the video memory, and the clicks were the "carriage returns" at the end of each line. (The computer didn't use ASCII, so they weren't real carriage returns, just whatever byte corresponded to the screen edge.)
Without the RAM pack, the computer played games with video RAM by doing some sort of RLE compression, so you wouldn't hear that.
Personally, I find your post disturbing. Reading it, it is clear your only conclusion is that anybody who is pro-Microsoft is merely doing it to appear as an independent thinker, which is absolute rubbish.
You misunderstood me then. This is not about "hating Microsoft". I've defended Microsoft plenty of times. They do get bashed a lot here, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. When people attack them simply for selling closed-source software, for example, I always defend them. But look at the context here. The story is about Microsoft holding a patent. The OP says this has nothing to do with us, only Google. I remarked that we are all in the same legal boat as Google, along with anyone else who is not Microsoft, because Microsoft is the patent holder. Which is entirely uncontroversial, I'm thinking, because it's a simple statement about patent law that happens to be true. The same applies to Google and their patents.
That elicits this response: "So, because Google is still 'good' (but for how long???), they can own a stupid patent like this, and because MicroSloth is 'bad', they can't???" I read that and thought, huh, is this guy even responding to the right post? Did he RTFA? Google hasn't even filed a patent. All they've done so far is implement a stupid feature.
To Microsoft's credit, I see nothing about a cease-and-desist, and I expect that the two companies will simply trade patents. But I'm not going to sit back and pretend for anybody that Microsoft's software patents hold no legal significance when they do.
What you're advocating is that everyone adopt your viewpoint because you just so happen not to consider it groupthink as you do for someone who might--gasp--not personally hate Microsoft, a computer software company. Such people should really get a life.
No, I was really just surprised that the great-grandparent was moderated -1, Troll while a factually misleading non-sequitur immediately sailed up to a 5, Insightful. I've seen this a lot recently- "pro-MS" posts (including my own) get modded up immediately, in a way that they didn't seem to a few years ago. I don't think MS or its employees are purposefully gaming the system (what a complete waste of time that would be) but I do think that geeks and nerds, being a relatively independently-minded set, tire easily of opinions that they hear expressed very frequently or uniformly, and will commonly adopt an opposite opinion at least partly for that reason. So I suspected groupthink was at work. Maybe the attitude shift simply reflects an influx of Windows users with high-numbered IDs in recent years, but I doubt it.
The other post (the "troll") may have presented a rosy view of Google's legal department but it made a crucial observation that keeps evading Microsoft's defenders and Google's bashers in this "smart tags" saga- that Google has not registered or applied for any smart-tag patents. I started writing the grandparent mostly just to quote that with a +2 bonus, since you guys certainly won't see it at -1.
30 MeV is impressive for a terrestrial thunderstorm, but much faster and more energetic particles and photons arrive from space. One proton (dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle by the goofy physicists who observed it) was seen striking the upper atmosphere above Utah with a calculated energy of 320000000 TeV or 51 Joules, the energy of a 55 mph baseball.
Yeah, because Google didn't register the patent and it's not their fault it's stupid. And Google would probably not use the patent for predatory purposes like Microsoft who right now probably have a team of lawyers finding people to sue for patent infringement.
was moderated as a Troll because even though it points out a crucial fact (that Google had not in fact applied for any patent), pro-Microsoft opinions are in vogue at the moment. People like to fancy themselves as independent thinkers, which means adopting opinions that "buck the trend". Look at the moronic post you replied to, which is at 5, Insightful right now:
So, because Google is still "good" (but for how long???), they can own a stupid patent like this, and because MicroSloth is "bad", they can't???
A worthless post- completely incoherent and confused, especially given its context (no one had alleged either of these things). But, the post has a pro-Microsoft attitude. So the herds of "independently-minded" sheep will cheerfully dump mod points onto it to prove what independent thinkers they are, despite the factual error and the obvious projection contained in its one line.
All other rich countries are able to organize these things in a halfway decent manner, why don't you?
Americans believe in "personal responsibility". This is a meme that has really taken off in the past several years, initially fueled by public distaste for frivolous lawsuits, and expanded to anything that can be characterized as an undeserved handout. It has very little to do with actual personal responsibility. You are expected to take personal responsibility for your own chronic diseases. I am not responsible for your autism, so why should my tax dollars be used to support you? It's not fair to me.
I didn't say it was important. A right doesn't have to be important to be lost either.
This particular case has some relevance to anyone who develops a particular technology, becomes an expert in it, and acquires a patent for his company. If you change jobs, you might not be able to take your expertise with you.
Yes, you're right- I was thinking you could charge its battery separately. But I can't let minor details like that get in the way of my portrayal of him as a California granola-munching hippie, you see. He does have both the Prius and the solar cell roof going on, so I figure all he needs now is the granola. I know he does sell electricity back to the grid, since he was complaining about PG&E. You can sell power back to PG&E only up to a point- they won't allow the bill to dip below zero, so that they owe you money every month.
This is not about our rights. Not yours, not mine, just Google's. Sheesh.
No, this is about everyone's rights except Microsoft- which includes me, you, and Google. Just because you may not want to implement a goofy smart-tag-like technology doesn't mean you haven't lost the right to do it.
My perception of my siblings' feelings toward my sister is really just based on an impression I picked up on a recent visit. Maybe I'm even projecting. Probably not. But your point is well taken.
My father claimed during my last visit there to be setting up a trust fund of some sort, so that whoever takes care of her "will be getting a lot of money". I think he said something like $60K. I have no idea how long that would last in meeting her needs- but I don't think it would be long. Usually we're thinking "group home" with her but maybe she'll surprise us and live independently, who knows...
He's another story himself. He's a mentally ill mainframe programmer. He may be crazy, depressed, alcoholic, and miserable, but I have to admit he did pick an excellent career for himself back in the seventies, especially for someone who might otherwise find it difficult to hold down a job. He's practically unfireable- and very few programmers in India spend their time learning crap like RAMIS. On the flip side he has to deal with EBCDIC which would drive anybody to drink.
I find it easier to print stereograms like these. Perhaps even re-position them really close to each other in GIMP before printing it out. they seem to be easier to "lock on" on paper than on screen. There's just no way I can see them on screen.
If you're editing them in GIMP or Photoshop, try reversing their order, so you look at them crosseyed. I usually start by holding a finger in front to get them to coincide.
I can do both, but I find the crosseyed method a bit easier than the parallel method- the images can be further apart and your eyes can cross much more easily than they can diverge. The "parallel" viewing method may actually require eye directions that are slightly outside parallel. If your intraocular separation is not as large as the separation between the images on the screen, you'll run into problems with divergence. Unless you are a lizard, or you've had a stroke, your brain will fight very hard to avoid divergent eye directions.
When I'm on vacation I sometimes take shots like this. Take a picture of a canyon or something, move some small distance to the right, and take the same picture again. Sometimes it works. When I'm in very dull meetings, I sometimes pass the time by doodling stereograms freehand. Sometimes they actually work too.
This past Thanksgiving, my mother was excited and took pictures of all of us and our spouses, since we were all there at the same time (we live all over the country). My autistic sister erased them all so she could take pictures of the floor and the ceiling. Can you imagine paying for a porno tape and the camera quickly moves from the bed to the ceiling? I don't know what industry she might work in but it certainly isn't going to be porn.
Although my little sister is quite attractive- that's one thing she's definitely got going for her in life. She looks like me.
I did. I sent her an email just now. Maybe she'll write back.
I can also write much better than I can talk, which supports my mother's Aspberger's theory I guess. I can still speak well, but writing well is much, much easier and requires less mental effort. There are these four arrow keys I use to order thoughts when writing, but when speaking you have to order your thoughts before they come out, and mine are usually in the wrong order. And if I write something stupid, I can (and sometimes do) delete it before anyone sees it. Good thing we don't use typewriters anymore.
I think of things like this all the time. So does everyone in my family. Maybe she'll have a career at NASA. I'd love to train her to be a little autistic DBA if she were to show an aptitude with computers. But right now she's still busy being a teenage girl (as in, not geeky), and I have a feeling that everyone with an autistic kid thinks this way. Look around- how many autistic people do you see working in computers? I see none where I work. Unless you count me- my mother insists I have Aspbergers and was just like her when I was growing up and that my sister will turn out just like me. (She does seem to have avoided the temporal lobe epilepsy that I picked up by her age, which is supposed to be an Aspberger's symptom.) But no one else shares my mother's optimism, and I don't recognize myself in my sister at all.
I think this is the saddest/. post I've ever written.
It's sad that we've created a society for ourselves in which the overriding concern is work and making money. In a world where farmers are going bankrupt because it's so cheap to make food, do we really need to worry what a person looks like in the context of a resume??
Yes, this is a little unspoken crisis in my family. One of us three older non-autistic siblings is going to have to take care of her in a few decades when our parents are no longer around, and although nobody's said anything, it's obvious that nobody wants to be that sibling. This sounds heartless, but if you spent an hour with her you'd understand- she's pleasant enough, but incoherent and unresponsive, so you never really feel like you know her even after you've met her. No one has any idea how employable she'll be when she's an adult (she's in her teens now), or how much of an independent life she'll be able to lead. Right now she's a handful and requires close adult supervision at all times unless a jigsaw puzzle or a DVD player is around- she can't get involved in typical conversations that take place and will try to regain attention by turning off all the lights in the room and laughing at everyone in the darkness. Maybe she'll grow out of it. Right now it's pretty funny at family gatherings- I can tell my brother in law would like to strangle her from the way he groans when the lights go out, but he can't say anything.
She just got a yahoo email account. I should send her an email- she'll be thrilled. Maybe it's possible to have an email conversation with her. I don't even know.
Speaking as a person who lived in a house that was the first on its block to be wired for electricity back in 1905 (completely ineptly, by the original owner of the house) I can tell you that power is a more faithful source of headaches than other sorts of wiring. You should probably worry more about power wiring than signal wiring. Figure out where your computers will go and wire that room as if it were a laundry room. Make sure your computers never share a circuit with a microwave oven or other high amperage kitchen appliances. (Also vacuum cleaners.) Remember where the safe places to drill are, put lots of outlets in every room, slink ethernet and fiber through conduits that you can still access later, and by the time things become a problem, you'll be long dead. Wireless will become much more prevalent in coming years so you're probably OK. I wouldn't mod my house for Christmas lights- unless I were trying to get on Slashdot with a Linux-controlled light display (or if my wife were really going to push it). Put solar cells on your roof instead. In California at least, you significantly increase the resale value of your house. (Unlike Christmas lights- what if you sell to non-Christians?) And you can save on your electric bill and your taxes. I know one guy at work who charges his Prius from current off his roof and hardly pays anything for electricity.
If you want to get fancy- and if it's legal- you can have your electrician route your AC wall current through a point in the basement where you can insert surge protectors, so that you can get relatively clean AC right out of the wall instead of having ugly power strips all over your floors. I can come up with more ideas but I think they'll all be prohibited by the electrical code in your area. My dream home would have multiple, high-amperage outlets in every room, with an individual power meter at each one, and a remotely controllable fusebox. I hate having to get dressed whenever I blow a fuse.
Depending on where you live, wiring shouldn't even be your main concern. If you don't live in a warm area, I'd spend my money on good insulation and a high efficiency heater. I live in the Bay Area, and houses here have these little wall heaters in one central area- they're completely laughable if you live in an area with real weather that requires homes to have radiators or baseboards in every room. But the price for gas and heating oil is quickly getting ridiculous- even here, where it rains during winter, just keeping the wall heater going costs twice as much as the electricity going into the house.
Slashdot Mirror
Because he openly mocked Gore in 2000 for having admitted to smoking pot, when he had smoked it himself.
I find it an interesting coincidence the power outage happened so soon after that the Xenu article was featured.
Gee, you just had to mention the X-word! Now this thread won't load for most Scientologists because the keyword filters they were forced to install by their Church will see "Xenu" and block the site. After all the mere sight of the word could cause "pneumonia and death" if you haven't paid the Church of Scientology for the proper preparation.
Wikipedia's Xenu article has an interesting history if you look, as I did the other night when it was featured. Scientologists vandalize it regularly. You're supposed to pay them a half million (or some absurd sum of money) to find out about Xenu. After you find out, you're too embarrassed to admit to anybody that you paid a half million to learn that your problems are caused by bad science fiction, when you could have bought a house in Silicon Valley instead. So they obviously don't want a Wikipedia article giving away their half-million-dollar "trade secret" for free.
One trick I saw was to use HTML entities to spell out insults at the top of the article- like "only an idiot would believe this" or something. In the editor window, the entities weren't rendered and each letter appeared as a hex code.
A more effective attack took a different approach. The vandal in this case changed "Scientologists" to "Muslims", "Scientology" to "Islam", and inserted a boring-sounding sentence at the end of the first paragraph claiming that "Xenu" is another name that Muslims use for "Allah". It completely discouraged you from reading further. If you didn't know better you wouldn't find out how "Allah" distributed the thetans around volcanoes on various planets and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, and how their blown-up spirits cause problems in your personal life today.
This is OT, but what the hell, why not whack a beehive? Additional information on Xenu:
Operation Clambake (Hubbard maintained that humans are descended from clams)
The Xenu leaflet (all about Xenu- this information can save you lots of $$$$$)
The road to Xenu (authored by a woman who got suckered)
The Google cache of Wikipedia's Xenu article is also a must read.
I'm wondering if I'll get a lot of freaks, downmoderations, and hostile AC replies after I post this. After all, that's the kind of thing that Hubbard called "fair game". If it sinks below default visibility I'll repost it again with my karma bonus, so you theta-clear-wannabes out there can save your points for someone else.
And I had just reprogrammed all my security algorithms to use Go instead of chess! Guess I'll have to convert back to chess, now that Go is "broken".
But is there no contrition or regret on the part of anyone at lexmark ?
They must still be lex-smarting.
If you want tears and lamentations you could try HP, which has also staked its future on the own-to-rent model. Although, with Carly gone, they must still be hung over from celebrating.
Try doing a search for "Tom Font" or "Dick Font" or "Harry Font" on Google. There seems to be no way to do a search for any of those names without drowning in a million pages containing escaped HTML with stuff like
Tom</FONT> (which appears in search results as Tom</FONT>)
Real FONT tags don't show up, but there are enough escaped FONT tags in the world to thwart searches for anyone named "Font". Even if you do a full string search, with the entire name in quotes, Google insists on returning FONT tag garbage. It doesn't "see" the > stuff in the middle, which is apparently removed in an early filtering step.
Why can't MY name be an HTML keyword! My name is completely unique to me and searchable as hell. HTML needs more ethnic last names in its tag set.
There was a button on the tape player to mute the sound so you wouldn't have to listen to the noise, but i liked to hear it. At some point you'd be able to recognize when a game was almost done loading just by listening to the noise/bleeps.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I used to have a Sinclair ZX81 (this was the British predecessor to the Timex Sinclair, which had twice as much RAM- two kilobytes). The computer was unusable without its 16K RAM pack. I distinctly remember near the end of those recordings the randomness would go away and you would hear zzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... clickzzzz.... for 24 "clicks". It was the video memory, and the clicks were the "carriage returns" at the end of each line. (The computer didn't use ASCII, so they weren't real carriage returns, just whatever byte corresponded to the screen edge.)
Without the RAM pack, the computer played games with video RAM by doing some sort of RLE compression, so you wouldn't hear that.
Mind to keep us updated on the communication experiment in your Journal? I'd love to read about it as it's going on.
I can tell you right now.
I sent an email to my mother asking if my sister is checking her mail, since I hadn't gotten an answer.
According to my mother, she is delighted to get E-mail and checks it all the time. Only problem is: don't expect a reply.
Personally, I find your post disturbing. Reading it, it is clear your only conclusion is that anybody who is pro-Microsoft is merely doing it to appear as an independent thinker, which is absolute rubbish.
You misunderstood me then. This is not about "hating Microsoft". I've defended Microsoft plenty of times. They do get bashed a lot here, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. When people attack them simply for selling closed-source software, for example, I always defend them. But look at the context here. The story is about Microsoft holding a patent. The OP says this has nothing to do with us, only Google. I remarked that we are all in the same legal boat as Google, along with anyone else who is not Microsoft, because Microsoft is the patent holder. Which is entirely uncontroversial, I'm thinking, because it's a simple statement about patent law that happens to be true. The same applies to Google and their patents.
That elicits this response: "So, because Google is still 'good' (but for how long???), they can own a stupid patent like this, and because MicroSloth is 'bad', they can't???" I read that and thought, huh, is this guy even responding to the right post? Did he RTFA? Google hasn't even filed a patent. All they've done so far is implement a stupid feature.
To Microsoft's credit, I see nothing about a cease-and-desist, and I expect that the two companies will simply trade patents. But I'm not going to sit back and pretend for anybody that Microsoft's software patents hold no legal significance when they do.
What you're advocating is that everyone adopt your viewpoint because you just so happen not to consider it groupthink as you do for someone who might--gasp--not personally hate Microsoft, a computer software company. Such people should really get a life.
No, I was really just surprised that the great-grandparent was moderated -1, Troll while a factually misleading non-sequitur immediately sailed up to a 5, Insightful. I've seen this a lot recently- "pro-MS" posts (including my own) get modded up immediately, in a way that they didn't seem to a few years ago. I don't think MS or its employees are purposefully gaming the system (what a complete waste of time that would be) but I do think that geeks and nerds, being a relatively independently-minded set, tire easily of opinions that they hear expressed very frequently or uniformly, and will commonly adopt an opposite opinion at least partly for that reason. So I suspected groupthink was at work. Maybe the attitude shift simply reflects an influx of Windows users with high-numbered IDs in recent years, but I doubt it.
The other post (the "troll") may have presented a rosy view of Google's legal department but it made a crucial observation that keeps evading Microsoft's defenders and Google's bashers in this "smart tags" saga- that Google has not registered or applied for any smart-tag patents. I started writing the grandparent mostly just to quote that with a +2 bonus, since you guys certainly won't see it at -1.
30 MeV is impressive for a terrestrial thunderstorm, but much faster and more energetic particles and photons arrive from space. One proton (dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle by the goofy physicists who observed it) was seen striking the upper atmosphere above Utah with a calculated energy of 320000000 TeV or 51 Joules, the energy of a 55 mph baseball.
Hey MillionthMonkey! It's me, Truetype! I haven't seen you since college. Fancy finding you here! T. Font
Where did you go to college, what was your major, and why did you change your first name?
You know what the ultimate crime is? Naming a god damn web browser "links." Do you have any idea how hard it is to find info on the links browser?
Reminds me of a friend I had in college, that I lost track of and will probably never find again. His last name was "Font".
Your statement:
Yeah, because Google didn't register the patent and it's not their fault it's stupid. And Google would probably not use the patent for predatory purposes like Microsoft who right now probably have a team of lawyers finding people to sue for patent infringement.
was moderated as a Troll because even though it points out a crucial fact (that Google had not in fact applied for any patent), pro-Microsoft opinions are in vogue at the moment. People like to fancy themselves as independent thinkers, which means adopting opinions that "buck the trend". Look at the moronic post you replied to, which is at 5, Insightful right now:
So, because Google is still "good" (but for how long???), they can own a stupid patent like this, and because MicroSloth is "bad", they can't???
A worthless post- completely incoherent and confused, especially given its context (no one had alleged either of these things). But, the post has a pro-Microsoft attitude. So the herds of "independently-minded" sheep will cheerfully dump mod points onto it to prove what independent thinkers they are, despite the factual error and the obvious projection contained in its one line.
The groupthink on this site is incredible.
All other rich countries are able to organize these things in a halfway decent manner, why don't you?
Americans believe in "personal responsibility". This is a meme that has really taken off in the past several years, initially fueled by public distaste for frivolous lawsuits, and expanded to anything that can be characterized as an undeserved handout. It has very little to do with actual personal responsibility.
You are expected to take personal responsibility for your own chronic diseases. I am not responsible for your autism, so why should my tax dollars be used to support you? It's not fair to me.
I didn't say it was important. A right doesn't have to be important to be lost either.
This particular case has some relevance to anyone who develops a particular technology, becomes an expert in it, and acquires a patent for his company. If you change jobs, you might not be able to take your expertise with you.
Yes, you're right- I was thinking you could charge its battery separately. But I can't let minor details like that get in the way of my portrayal of him as a California granola-munching hippie, you see. He does have both the Prius and the solar cell roof going on, so I figure all he needs now is the granola.
I know he does sell electricity back to the grid, since he was complaining about PG&E. You can sell power back to PG&E only up to a point- they won't allow the bill to dip below zero, so that they owe you money every month.
This is not about our rights. Not yours, not mine, just Google's. Sheesh.
No, this is about everyone's rights except Microsoft- which includes me, you, and Google. Just because you may not want to implement a goofy smart-tag-like technology doesn't mean you haven't lost the right to do it.
My perception of my siblings' feelings toward my sister is really just based on an impression I picked up on a recent visit. Maybe I'm even projecting. Probably not. But your point is well taken.
My father claimed during my last visit there to be setting up a trust fund of some sort, so that whoever takes care of her "will be getting a lot of money". I think he said something like $60K. I have no idea how long that would last in meeting her needs- but I don't think it would be long. Usually we're thinking "group home" with her but maybe she'll surprise us and live independently, who knows...
He's another story himself. He's a mentally ill mainframe programmer. He may be crazy, depressed, alcoholic, and miserable, but I have to admit he did pick an excellent career for himself back in the seventies, especially for someone who might otherwise find it difficult to hold down a job. He's practically unfireable- and very few programmers in India spend their time learning crap like RAMIS. On the flip side he has to deal with EBCDIC which would drive anybody to drink.
I find it easier to print stereograms like these. Perhaps even re-position them really close to each other in GIMP before printing it out. they seem to be easier to "lock on" on paper than on screen. There's just no way I can see them on screen.
If you're editing them in GIMP or Photoshop, try reversing their order, so you look at them crosseyed. I usually start by holding a finger in front to get them to coincide.
I can do both, but I find the crosseyed method a bit easier than the parallel method- the images can be further apart and your eyes can cross much more easily than they can diverge. The "parallel" viewing method may actually require eye directions that are slightly outside parallel. If your intraocular separation is not as large as the separation between the images on the screen, you'll run into problems with divergence. Unless you are a lizard, or you've had a stroke, your brain will fight very hard to avoid divergent eye directions.
When I'm on vacation I sometimes take shots like this. Take a picture of a canyon or something, move some small distance to the right, and take the same picture again. Sometimes it works. When I'm in very dull meetings, I sometimes pass the time by doodling stereograms freehand. Sometimes they actually work too.
This may sound heartless, but I'm sure she could find employment in the porn industry.
I should kick your ass, AC.
Although I don't think my sister will be going into porn. In fact I can't imagine a career more laughably unsuited for an autistic person. One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals. And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions. That pretty much rules out a career in the porn industry- in front of or behind the camera.
This past Thanksgiving, my mother was excited and took pictures of all of us and our spouses, since we were all there at the same time (we live all over the country). My autistic sister erased them all so she could take pictures of the floor and the ceiling. Can you imagine paying for a porno tape and the camera quickly moves from the bed to the ceiling? I don't know what industry she might work in but it certainly isn't going to be porn.
Although my little sister is quite attractive- that's one thing she's definitely got going for her in life. She looks like me.
I did. I sent her an email just now. Maybe she'll write back.
I can also write much better than I can talk, which supports my mother's Aspberger's theory I guess. I can still speak well, but writing well is much, much easier and requires less mental effort. There are these four arrow keys I use to order thoughts when writing, but when speaking you have to order your thoughts before they come out, and mine are usually in the wrong order. And if I write something stupid, I can (and sometimes do) delete it before anyone sees it. Good thing we don't use typewriters anymore.
I think of things like this all the time. So does everyone in my family. Maybe she'll have a career at NASA. I'd love to train her to be a little autistic DBA if she were to show an aptitude with computers. But right now she's still busy being a teenage girl (as in, not geeky), and I have a feeling that everyone with an autistic kid thinks this way. Look around- how many autistic people do you see working in computers? I see none where I work. Unless you count me- my mother insists I have Aspbergers and was just like her when I was growing up and that my sister will turn out just like me. (She does seem to have avoided the temporal lobe epilepsy that I picked up by her age, which is supposed to be an Aspberger's symptom.) But no one else shares my mother's optimism, and I don't recognize myself in my sister at all.
/. post I've ever written.
I think this is the saddest
It's sad that we've created a society for ourselves in which the overriding concern is work and making money. In a world where farmers are going bankrupt because it's so cheap to make food, do we really need to worry what a person looks like in the context of a resume??
Yes, this is a little unspoken crisis in my family. One of us three older non-autistic siblings is going to have to take care of her in a few decades when our parents are no longer around, and although nobody's said anything, it's obvious that nobody wants to be that sibling. This sounds heartless, but if you spent an hour with her you'd understand- she's pleasant enough, but incoherent and unresponsive, so you never really feel like you know her even after you've met her. No one has any idea how employable she'll be when she's an adult (she's in her teens now), or how much of an independent life she'll be able to lead. Right now she's a handful and requires close adult supervision at all times unless a jigsaw puzzle or a DVD player is around- she can't get involved in typical conversations that take place and will try to regain attention by turning off all the lights in the room and laughing at everyone in the darkness. Maybe she'll grow out of it. Right now it's pretty funny at family gatherings- I can tell my brother in law would like to strangle her from the way he groans when the lights go out, but he can't say anything.
She just got a yahoo email account. I should send her an email- she'll be thrilled. Maybe it's possible to have an email conversation with her. I don't even know.
NO. You don't want this, trust me.
My little sister is autistic, and I think at least a third of her brain is wired for solving jigsaw puzzles. Try working that into a resume.
Speaking as a person who lived in a house that was the first on its block to be wired for electricity back in 1905 (completely ineptly, by the original owner of the house) I can tell you that power is a more faithful source of headaches than other sorts of wiring. You should probably worry more about power wiring than signal wiring. Figure out where your computers will go and wire that room as if it were a laundry room. Make sure your computers never share a circuit with a microwave oven or other high amperage kitchen appliances. (Also vacuum cleaners.) Remember where the safe places to drill are, put lots of outlets in every room, slink ethernet and fiber through conduits that you can still access later, and by the time things become a problem, you'll be long dead. Wireless will become much more prevalent in coming years so you're probably OK. I wouldn't mod my house for Christmas lights- unless I were trying to get on Slashdot with a Linux-controlled light display (or if my wife were really going to push it). Put solar cells on your roof instead. In California at least, you significantly increase the resale value of your house. (Unlike Christmas lights- what if you sell to non-Christians?) And you can save on your electric bill and your taxes. I know one guy at work who charges his Prius from current off his roof and hardly pays anything for electricity.
If you want to get fancy- and if it's legal- you can have your electrician route your AC wall current through a point in the basement where you can insert surge protectors, so that you can get relatively clean AC right out of the wall instead of having ugly power strips all over your floors. I can come up with more ideas but I think they'll all be prohibited by the electrical code in your area. My dream home would have multiple, high-amperage outlets in every room, with an individual power meter at each one, and a remotely controllable fusebox. I hate having to get dressed whenever I blow a fuse.
Depending on where you live, wiring shouldn't even be your main concern. If you don't live in a warm area, I'd spend my money on good insulation and a high efficiency heater. I live in the Bay Area, and houses here have these little wall heaters in one central area- they're completely laughable if you live in an area with real weather that requires homes to have radiators or baseboards in every room. But the price for gas and heating oil is quickly getting ridiculous- even here, where it rains during winter, just keeping the wall heater going costs twice as much as the electricity going into the house.