Congratulations: that is the most blatant example of the misapplication of formulas I have ever seen. Why is it that people don't realise a formula gives a number, but only when used in the right time and place.
Thankyou for providing this, I am going to use this when I teach over the USoA spring semester. I will remember to source it.
It was dry, you have just described a form of humour. What you are describing is satire. Let's take "The Onion", you see the joke coming from around the bend. There is no subtlety of meaning or intent, this is parody.
Satire uses things like irony and wit, which are usually absent from parody (and much of the continental USoA). Any good satire should recieve a few responses falling for the joke, parody should not.
I assure you dry humour can be quite funny, the thing is it doesn't have to rip you a new arsehole telling you how funny it is. Your response is exactly the thing I'm talking about it.
Not talkking about the USoA govt, this is about Slashdot. The question is (fully fleshed out): "Where was the story and comments on/. saying this is a complete waste of time and trying to stick it up the USoA". Sorry if I didn't make myself clear and assumed the reader would be able to handle pronouns.
The movie of The Silmarillion could be amazing. Finally someone could find a use for all those abstract 3D effects; the creation of the world from the songs.
What is it with bringing down China on/. at the moment? It seems that due to China being behind the USoA and Europe that everything it tries to do, in a technological sense (see the Dragon chip comments), is demeaned as being about Chinese ego and sticking it to the West.
The comments of "it's already been done - yeah by us!" and that "they should just use Company X's shit" seem to be bandied about with gay abandon.
There are very good reasons for China to try and develop their own technologies, and for the most part they aren't about ego. More than what follows, but these are a couple.
One is self sufficiency: China has been a terribly unpopular country and to be secure doesn't want to be absolutely dependant on the USoA and EU for it's survival. In fact all countries do this for various items, it shouldn't be surprising that the world's largest does it too.
Another is that 1 billion people live in China and surely they could make a contribution to technology, but first you have to catch up to where everyone is. You can't catch up just by copying; you just have to develop it yourself. Do they teach automotive engineers how to designa car by showing them a Ferrari and saying "OK improve that?" No, they get them to design dinky little things and learn about what has already been done by others.
Also Western technology isn't always that good or the best. Maybe someone in China doesn't like the failure rates, maybe they don't like the implementation, hell maybe they just don't like the colour. For whatever reason some one in China thinks they can do it better and tries.
And this is the ultimate. Maybe one day in the future they won't have to put up with the sanctimonious crap from the USoAians and EUians.
That's right, the continual we are better than you from the EU and the USoA. Where's the huge stink that the EU is putting up a GPS system when the USoA already has one there. What about all those dickheads in the EU (and some in the USoA) trying to build a new OS, we've already got a great one that is ubiquitous. That's right this is the EU, the EU is advanced and can justify what they are doing. China isn't and can't.
Moderators, here's a tip. This disagrees with the majority opinion and is maybe a little controversial. So you must vote this "-1: Troll", rather than "+1:controversial" or "+1:thought provoking" (which you'll note are not options). Yeah and to end this note fork you.
And to get a shuttle into space the USoA straps two missiles to the side of it. What's your point? Yes the Chinese rocket is just an ICBM with a different thing on top. OK there are probably more subtle differences, but in essence a missile designed to launch warheads across space and a rocket designed to put a satellite/person into space are going to br similar.
The Titan rocket is just an altered ICBM, look up the Wikipedia article on it if you don't believe me. Of course you might well counter with the USoA and every other country was just developing launching capability for missile purposes. In which case I'll stop responding and you can move on and try to troll someone else.
It must just be me, but I can think of a quite a few uses for waterproof books, although some of these are more for cheaply available waterproof paper I'm sure the technique can be adapted.
Guidebooks for campers, trails, etc.
any book that people would reasonably want to take outdoors. I.e bird watching books, train spotters, etc.
Maps.
Emergency/First aid manuals.
Books needed on a boat, I'm sure the navy (and probably regular army too) would like to have some oftheir manuals waterproofed.
Porn, shudder
I think it's pretty pointless for regular books and all. Also the porn use is just sad, if you can't direct things sufficiently well to avoid that, then well I'm sorry for you.
This is a perfect slashdot item. It is a subject about which the scientific community knows very little, but the/. community will have very strong views upon. They can spend hours pontificating and arguing about a field of which they have no knowledge (sorry but Freshman Psych. doesn't count).
As memories are so poorly understood they can all feel they are right and merely argue in logical circles on no one with any knowledge will sort them out, as the ones with knowledge will realise their complete lack of knowledge.
It will also allow many of the less secure/.ers to begin quotes with well my memories really good and I remember this. People can also give childhood anecdotes demonstrating their intellecutal superiority over others.
Personally I remember only one thing from before I was 2, that is my conception. I don't remember much, but I distinctly remember my life starting with a bang.
Buy a history book, the Great Leap forward was not about showig the west what they could do. It was an attempt to move their country out of a subsistence agricultural situation. The aim was technical improvement, not dick-waving. I'm not saying your point is wrong; I think it is a mixutre of trust, dependance on Western technology, we can too and other reasons. The "Great Leap Foward" does not aid your thesis though.
I'm a maths grad student and this idea was hatched at the bar during my 2nd last year as an U/G. There is an error in my reasoning which I am about to work out.
I'll put base-10 numbers in square brackets for the rest of this.
Here is a fix, we make a second 5 times as long. There are now [17280] seconds in a day. This is Q000 seconds. We can now decimalize. there are 10 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and Q hours in a day. The problem is a second is now too long being 5=[5] old seconds. I think deca-seconds would become the most useful way of counting. I.e. 1/10=[1/12] of a second. Using this length of second we could count to 10=[12] slowly and actually be able to get good estimates, rather than the current 1-1 thousand and other such schemes.
This is a little different, but still OK. The only other way would be as follows. We make a second 50 times as long, we now have only [1728]=1000 seconds in a day. We could then break down to 10 seconds a minute, 10 minutes an hour and 10 hours a day. Here a more useful scheme of counting would be in centi-seconds, I'm thinking you would just count normally and get a good estimate of length of time.
I can't believe how much time I'm thinking about this, it's such a trivial little problem. but still somehow fascinating. Contemplating putting a HTML page together...
I'll try to explain it, I came up with that on the fly. The issue is our countinig now goes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1Q 1X 20 and so on. It gets exciting from now on.
I'll put our numbers in square brackets and the base 12 in none to make this easier to read. There are currently [60] seconds in a minute, this is [5*12] or 5*10=50. So we have 50 seconds in a minute, we now make a minute twice as long, so there are 100 seconds in a minute, but only [30], which becomes 26 in an hour. If we noe quadruple the length of a....
Oh shit, I made an error - I'm so embarrassed. 26 isn't 1/4 of 100, I'm to damn used to my base. We need to fix this, it deson't work out nice any more. 30 is in fact 1/4 of 100. (Tell me that's not nice:-)). We have some serious problems now...
Just done a quick calculation. We are going to have some alterations. We will leave seconds as they are and have 100 [144] seconds in a minute there are now 420 [600] minutes in a day. It is unavoidable we must change the length of a second to get it to work nicely. The problem is those 5's. 60=5*3*2, the 3 and 2 work nicely, but the 5. Idea.... What if we take 5 seconds into one and then work it out. Oh baby yeah...
Blaming difficult divisions on a system of measurement is stupid. The reason the metric system is so easy is that it mixes with the base we use and we all use base 10.
All of those people arguing that metric is bad due to this difficult division need to realise the problem is base 10.
I will now announce my plan to improve the world. We move to base 12. "How to get there?" you ask. We convert 2 letters to numbers, but which 2.
I propose Q & X. X will be replaced by ECKS and Z where it is necessary. Q by KW, in Iraq is will be replaced by c, ck or maybe rc (Rhymes with arc). This will have several benefits, SEX ==> secks and is thus longer for everyone who speaks English. Keyboards also become smaller. 3 rows of 8, with the numerals stuffed somewhere (not sure about how to solve that).
On the numerical side we can now convince aliens we don't count on our fingers. It will also help to weed out the ignorant (who DO count on their fingers).
There are various benefits in terms of division.
All numbers are now reported in base 12, the numerals are as follows: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X
The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day. We have just decimalised time without significantly changing the base unit. Yeah. The metric system would remain the same, but things will all of course be done in base 12, allthe prefixes still work. I should add this scheme would have put off the millenium bug for about 1000 years. The only thing remaining nondecimal is the year, which short of altering the flight path of the earth will have to remain as is. Of course there are now 275 days or 276 in a year.
Regretfully 5 is no longer a nice number, nor is 10. The only reason we use these though is as our base is 10. Log_10 is now useless, but we add in log_12. Multiplication is easier, i think, I'm not sure of the patterns, but I'm sure multiplication by 3 and 4 is a lot nice. 6 becomes like 5 and is funky. There should be a pattern for 9 and 11 becomes as easy as 9 is currently. 13 is also really easy to multiply by.
Another drawback is that maths will be forced to find a new name for the arbitrary variable. Variables can't just be set to X, that would not work. The multiplaction system should also probably be changed. * could work.
The ultimate plus though is that there are now 20 letters, that respects our base people, beautiful.
You are all idiots, division being ugly is a product of our basis not our measurement system, change to base 12 and then most of what you say becomes true. To divide a kilometre by 3 you get 333 metres and then realise an exact answer is useless as we are dealing with a measurement which is by nature imprecise.
Of course I propose everything be done in terms of 60984. This number is divisible be everything under 12, and is the smallest one. Let's be honest who does any other sort of division.
The issue with metric is conversions are nice, so when I say there are 1,000,000 millimetres it doesn't take very long to work out that is 1 km. Now tell me how many inches in 10 miles and we'll talk.
I can't believe you are trying to argue for the imperial system. That's adorable. I'll tell you how to do it take 33 cm and tehn realise that that's accurate enough and it's a measure so is inherently imprecise. you may go down as many 3's if 2 decimals is not enough precision.
Uniformity is important so that when I tell you it's 100 metres to the nearest wall you don't go bitching at me you could never walk that far.
This isn't about software freedom or any of that garbage. The issue is that some guy is responsible for security. The opinion is that a unix based OS is the only reasonable choice and giving a windows machine access will be a serious security weakness.
Of course you can use whatever you want at home and should be able to. When you are at a work place, it is reasonable to expect to be mandated to use certain equipment. This is particuarly relevant if you are at risk of revealing secure information. Owning one machine on the network, that isn't cordoned off, will allow you to gain access to the rest of the network much more easily than if this vulnerable machine wasn't there.
Quite clearly you are full of shite and have no idea about what the article was talking about. Enjoy your life and mindless zealotry against mindles zealotry, but please try to be mindlessly zealous about people who are being mindlessly zealous and not just those trying to do their job. This simple precaution will allow your mindless zealotry to be much less offensive; it will merely disappear in a thick background of mindless zealotry.
Of course money is the most important thing and as long as someone is making money somewhere it makes it a good idea.
In fact we should all be ashamed that we aren't actively supporting this brilliant money making scheme. We could bring the 3rd world out of it's economic malaise.
The short sightedness of this approach (common to amost things based on someone's making money - so shut up.) might possibly be a problem. Or in fact that we do share one planet and should take a measure of responsability for the continued well being of it.
As for the article holding anything news worthy, you are completely correct. It is not new, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd recommend walking for where the bike is inappropriate. Particuarly if you want to be hanging round pedestrians.
I can't believe someone invented this. Surely you can all walk, no? Testament to how incredibly lazy some people are.
So mention stuff about the old aged and all that garbage, they've already got those dinky little carts.
I'm no material scientist, but you could try putting an AC current through it at a rate that is higher than the eye could distinguish the two colours.
Now, I'll add here that I am no expert on any of these things and this post is just me speaking through my arse.
This is the airline industry, the average USoA citizen will end up paying for this with airline bailouts from their tax dollars.
Congratulations: that is the most blatant example of the misapplication of formulas I have ever seen. Why is it that people don't realise a formula gives a number, but only when used in the right time and place.
Thankyou for providing this, I am going to use this when I teach over the USoA spring semester. I will remember to source it.
Yes, there were two implied groups of people.
/. complainers. All the references to complaining and what people said.
One was the
The other was the USoA and EU.
Nowhere in the original post was there any comment of the USoA or EU reactions or comments on the actions of China.
It's not perfectly clear, but then neither is STFU (start thinking for us).
Damn /. makes me have a body.
It was dry, you have just described a form of humour. What you are describing is satire. Let's take "The Onion", you see the joke coming from around the bend. There is no subtlety of meaning or intent, this is parody.
Satire uses things like irony and wit, which are usually absent from parody (and much of the continental USoA). Any good satire should recieve a few responses falling for the joke, parody should not.
I assure you dry humour can be quite funny, the thing is it doesn't have to rip you a new arsehole telling you how funny it is. Your response is exactly the thing I'm talking about it.
Not talkking about the USoA govt, this is about Slashdot. The question is (fully fleshed out): "Where was the story and comments on /. saying this is a complete waste of time and trying to stick it up the USoA". Sorry if I didn't make myself clear and assumed the reader would be able to handle pronouns.
I second that notion (the moviet that is).
The movie of The Silmarillion could be amazing. Finally someone could find a use for all those abstract 3D effects; the creation of the world from the songs.
The comments of "it's already been done - yeah by us!" and that "they should just use Company X's shit" seem to be bandied about with gay abandon.
There are very good reasons for China to try and develop their own technologies, and for the most part they aren't about ego. More than what follows, but these are a couple.
That's right, the continual we are better than you from the EU and the USoA. Where's the huge stink that the EU is putting up a GPS system when the USoA already has one there. What about all those dickheads in the EU (and some in the USoA) trying to build a new OS, we've already got a great one that is ubiquitous. That's right this is the EU, the EU is advanced and can justify what they are doing. China isn't and can't.
Moderators, here's a tip. This disagrees with the majority opinion and is maybe a little controversial. So you must vote this "-1: Troll", rather than "+1:controversial" or "+1:thought provoking" (which you'll note are not options). Yeah and to end this note fork you.
And to get a shuttle into space the USoA straps two missiles to the side of it. What's your point? Yes the Chinese rocket is just an ICBM with a different thing on top. OK there are probably more subtle differences, but in essence a missile designed to launch warheads across space and a rocket designed to put a satellite/person into space are going to br similar.
The Titan rocket is just an altered ICBM, look up the Wikipedia article on it if you don't believe me. Of course you might well counter with the USoA and every other country was just developing launching capability for missile purposes. In which case I'll stop responding and you can move on and try to troll someone else.
I think it's pretty pointless for regular books and all. Also the porn use is just sad, if you can't direct things sufficiently well to avoid that, then well I'm sorry for you.
This is a perfect slashdot item. It is a subject about which the scientific community knows very little, but the /. community will have very strong views upon. They can spend hours pontificating and arguing about a field of which they have no knowledge (sorry but Freshman Psych. doesn't count).
/.ers to begin quotes with well my memories really good and I remember this. People can also give childhood anecdotes demonstrating their intellecutal superiority over others.
As memories are so poorly understood they can all feel they are right and merely argue in logical circles on no one with any knowledge will sort them out, as the ones with knowledge will realise their complete lack of knowledge.
It will also allow many of the less secure
Personally I remember only one thing from before I was 2, that is my conception. I don't remember much, but I distinctly remember my life starting with a bang.
Yeah you're right, just like the sun.
It's a blackadder quote and meant quite harmlessly.
I love you and want to have your babies.
Great comment.
Buy a history book, the Great Leap forward was not about showig the west what they could do. It was an attempt to move their country out of a subsistence agricultural situation. The aim was technical improvement, not dick-waving. I'm not saying your point is wrong; I think it is a mixutre of trust, dependance on Western technology, we can too and other reasons. The "Great Leap Foward" does not aid your thesis though.
I'm a maths grad student and this idea was hatched at the bar during my 2nd last year as an U/G. There is an error in my reasoning which I am about to work out.
I'll put base-10 numbers in square brackets for the rest of this.
Here is a fix, we make a second 5 times as long. There are now [17280] seconds in a day. This is Q000 seconds. We can now decimalize. there are 10 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and Q hours in a day. The problem is a second is now too long being 5=[5] old seconds. I think deca-seconds would become the most useful way of counting. I.e. 1/10=[1/12] of a second. Using this length of second we could count to 10=[12] slowly and actually be able to get good estimates, rather than the current 1-1 thousand and other such schemes.
This is a little different, but still OK. The only other way would be as follows. We make a second 50 times as long, we now have only [1728]=1000 seconds in a day. We could then break down to 10 seconds a minute, 10 minutes an hour and 10 hours a day. Here a more useful scheme of counting would be in centi-seconds, I'm thinking you would just count normally and get a good estimate of length of time.
I can't believe how much time I'm thinking about this, it's such a trivial little problem. but still somehow fascinating. Contemplating putting a HTML page together...
I'll try to explain it, I came up with that on the fly. The issue is our countinig now goes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1Q 1X 20 and so on. It gets exciting from now on.
....
:-)). We have some serious problems now...
I'll put our numbers in square brackets and the base 12 in none to make this easier to read. There are currently [60] seconds in a minute, this is [5*12] or 5*10=50. So we have 50 seconds in a minute, we now make a minute twice as long, so there are 100 seconds in a minute, but only [30], which becomes 26 in an hour. If we noe quadruple the length of a
Oh shit, I made an error - I'm so embarrassed. 26 isn't 1/4 of 100, I'm to damn used to my base. We need to fix this, it deson't work out nice any more. 30 is in fact 1/4 of 100. (Tell me that's not nice
Just done a quick calculation. We are going to have some alterations. We will leave seconds as they are and have 100 [144] seconds in a minute there are now 420 [600] minutes in a day. It is unavoidable we must change the length of a second to get it to work nicely. The problem is those 5's. 60=5*3*2, the 3 and 2 work nicely, but the 5. Idea.... What if we take 5 seconds into one and then work it out. Oh baby yeah...
I'll stop this comment now and do some calcs.
True, I slipped back into my natural base, must try harder.
Blaming difficult divisions on a system of measurement is stupid. The reason the metric system is so easy is that it mixes with the base we use and we all use base 10.
All of those people arguing that metric is bad due to this difficult division need to realise the problem is base 10.
I will now announce my plan to improve the world. We move to base 12. "How to get there?" you ask. We convert 2 letters to numbers, but which 2.
I propose Q & X. X will be replaced by ECKS and Z where it is necessary. Q by KW, in Iraq is will be replaced by c, ck or maybe rc (Rhymes with arc). This will have several benefits, SEX ==> secks and is thus longer for everyone who speaks English. Keyboards also become smaller. 3 rows of 8, with the numerals stuffed somewhere (not sure about how to solve that).
On the numerical side we can now convince aliens we don't count on our fingers. It will also help to weed out the ignorant (who DO count on their fingers).
There are various benefits in terms of division.
All numbers are now reported in base 12, the numerals are as follows: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X
The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day. We have just decimalised time without significantly changing the base unit. Yeah. The metric system would remain the same, but things will all of course be done in base 12, allthe prefixes still work. I should add this scheme would have put off the millenium bug for about 1000 years. The only thing remaining nondecimal is the year, which short of altering the flight path of the earth will have to remain as is. Of course there are now 275 days or 276 in a year.
Regretfully 5 is no longer a nice number, nor is 10. The only reason we use these though is as our base is 10. Log_10 is now useless, but we add in log_12. Multiplication is easier, i think, I'm not sure of the patterns, but I'm sure multiplication by 3 and 4 is a lot nice. 6 becomes like 5 and is funky. There should be a pattern for 9 and 11 becomes as easy as 9 is currently. 13 is also really easy to multiply by.
Another drawback is that maths will be forced to find a new name for the arbitrary variable. Variables can't just be set to X, that would not work. The multiplaction system should also probably be changed. * could work.
The ultimate plus though is that there are now 20 letters, that respects our base people, beautiful.
I hope you all enjoy that.
You are all idiots, division being ugly is a product of our basis not our measurement system, change to base 12 and then most of what you say becomes true. To divide a kilometre by 3 you get 333 metres and then realise an exact answer is useless as we are dealing with a measurement which is by nature imprecise.
Of course I propose everything be done in terms of 60984. This number is divisible be everything under 12, and is the smallest one. Let's be honest who does any other sort of division.
The issue with metric is conversions are nice, so when I say there are 1,000,000 millimetres it doesn't take very long to work out that is 1 km. Now tell me how many inches in 10 miles and we'll talk.
I can't believe you are trying to argue for the imperial system. That's adorable. I'll tell you how to do it take 33 cm and tehn realise that that's accurate enough and it's a measure so is inherently imprecise. you may go down as many 3's if 2 decimals is not enough precision.
Uniformity is important so that when I tell you it's 100 metres to the nearest wall you don't go bitching at me you could never walk that far.
This isn't about software freedom or any of that garbage. The issue is that some guy is responsible for security. The opinion is that a unix based OS is the only reasonable choice and giving a windows machine access will be a serious security weakness.
Of course you can use whatever you want at home and should be able to. When you are at a work place, it is reasonable to expect to be mandated to use certain equipment. This is particuarly relevant if you are at risk of revealing secure information. Owning one machine on the network, that isn't cordoned off, will allow you to gain access to the rest of the network much more easily than if this vulnerable machine wasn't there.
Quite clearly you are full of shite and have no idea about what the article was talking about. Enjoy your life and mindless zealotry against mindles zealotry, but please try to be mindlessly zealous about people who are being mindlessly zealous and not just those trying to do their job. This simple precaution will allow your mindless zealotry to be much less offensive; it will merely disappear in a thick background of mindless zealotry.
Of course money is the most important thing and as long as someone is making money somewhere it makes it a good idea.
In fact we should all be ashamed that we aren't actively supporting this brilliant money making scheme. We could bring the 3rd world out of it's economic malaise.
The short sightedness of this approach (common to amost things based on someone's making money - so shut up.) might possibly be a problem. Or in fact that we do share one planet and should take a measure of responsability for the continued well being of it.
As for the article holding anything news worthy, you are completely correct. It is not new, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.