At one school I attended prior to college, the Library had these little Macintosh machines running UNIX terminal sessions. In the middle of searching for a book you could just hit the escape character (control and one of the [ ] keys; I forget which at the moment) and get yourself a Telnet> prompt, and from there you could use telnet commands to manipulate the system, including getting access to a very well-priveleged shell.
You're a little off in your assessment; I haven't been in highschool for more than 7 years, and I've had enough college to satisfy me for now. What I do have, however, is younger brothers, and they're going through the same stuff I did, day in, day out. It's hard to forget about the bad parts of highschool when the people you care about are going through the same BS themselves and are able to offer you a daily reminder of the double-standard that "we the people" provide to "them the children."
The solution is to bring the double standard to an end and concede that no matter somebody's age, they have responsibilities, rights and freedoms. Since schools are tax-funded, they should be operated on the same principles of freedom as our government, no? Our government which is also tax-funded? Or is this like some loophole, kind of like the oil for food program, where we give money to people to run dictatorial institutions void of freedom? The double standard needs to go.
You don't really need to generate the energy at all. The solar constant describes how much radiated energy from the sun reaches the upper atmosphere and this value is more than 1350W/m2. Now, let's consider something for a moment. Solar panels are 20% efficient, tops. I'm talking about the good ones, too. The ones that NASA uses. Solar panels are horribly inefficient, in other words, especially when we compare them to the use of the solar energy from the sun directly. All you need to do is collimate a large amount of light into a very narrow beam. at 1.3 kilowatts/m2, you'd be looking at a 60,000 square meter array of (polycarbonate) lenses, but then you get a free 60 megawatt here-to-mars-beam any time you need it. Out in Mars territory you could have a large parabolic reflector for slowing you down. Since the amount of sunlight reaching Mars is less than Earth, you'd have to build a much larger reflector near Mars.
I'll try to summarize this since I managed to read the first few pages before the horde of slashdot ate the website.
You take two plates of metal and hold them parallel (not with your hands, they're going to be electrified!) underwater. Electrify the plates and the positive ions in the water will collect at the negative terminal and the negative ions will collect at the positive terminal. By adding some salt to the water however, you can encourage a chemical reaction to happen at a given electrode. By covering the metal with paint or duct tape, you insulate it from this effect. So what they're doing is, essentially, painting around the hole they want to cut, leaving the hole itself barren, then submerging it in saltwater and electrifying it, causing the exposed metal to oxidize and be eaten away.
It's roughly the opposite of electroplating, which is the procedure which this technique is likened to in the article. Instead of trying to accumulate more on a given electrode you're trying to reduce the amount of matter present there.
If more than half of your waking hours were dominated by something which dictated every last bit of what you think, read, eat, and do, I'm fairly certain that you yourself may start to have democratic doubts. When it comes to work, you can pick your job and quit at any time. School isn't like that; it's like prison. You have to go. You have to go no matter how much that kid keeps punching you in the halls and the administration turns the other cheek. You have to go no matter how much anxiety you have about the way Mr. so-and-so looks up your skirt whenever you have to pick up a pencil. You can't quit, like you can with a job. You can't just get fed up with the bullshit and say "hey, had enough bullshit over here."
No, as a child you have no rights and you just have to keep bending over and taking whatever the world wants to thrust at you. They think that we don't live in a democracy because they don't live in a democracy. Their parents are dictatorial, their school administration are dictatorial. The environment in which they exist is rigid and controlled. On virtue of being young they're denied opportunity and, when they're old enough, given higher insurance rates. How much does this really feel like freedom when you're a kid? It doesn't. It feels like prison. You know, prison, the place where we send the bad people to. And here's all of our children, herded up into buses with no seatbelts (they'll buckle up convicts, but not kids. think about that one) and collected in a location where dogma can be endlessly drilled into their heads for six hours or so, then they're sent home so they can cry a little bit before they're made to do it again. Is this how you want to introduce a consciousness to life? "Here, go do spmething you hate every weekday no matter what."
Actually, a great deal of wisdom comes from experience. Take the color green, for example. Suppose you're locked in a room from birth and green light is filtered out of all the light sources available to you, and you've never really seen green. You've read about it, you know what green is and what things are green. You know what wavelength the light is. But you haven't actually experienced green.
How much understanding of green can you have without experiencing it? Similarly, how much understanding can anyone be expected to have in a given subject without any experience in that subject?
Kids can't speak their mind anywhere. Not at home to mom and dad, and certainly not at school. Kids can't put whatever they want in their writing. Kids don't have any rights, so I find it to be of trivial importance that they don't know what their rights are. Technically, a kid going to the corner store and buying a candy bar is illegal because a minor cannot legally enter into a binding contract, and the exchange of goods or services for money is a legally binding contract of sorts. Once they're in college and they take a Law class or a Political Science class, then they'll start to learn about their rights, because they'll be able to exercise them.
Tangentially, I think that the decline of America is rooted in the public school system. Kids aren't taught democracy by example, they're taught dictatorship by example. They aren't taught about justice and fairness or a right to counsel, they're taught that those in power do whatever the fuck they want. Kids aren't encouraged to speak freely or to assemble in groups at whatever point they see fit; they're taught to walk in straight lines and fit into neatly categorized boxes. Kids are largely treated like sheep ("sheeple") and we're wondering why they don't understand the constitution? We don't even grant them the rights established by the constitution until they're 18! That's kind of like asking a 22 year old how he feels about having alzheimers. It's a totally unreasonable question because he doesn't have it yet; give him some time, then ask again. Similarly with the constitution question, ask people in their mid-twenties what their constitutional rights are and you'll find that in the years following highschool, some people have wisened up a bit.
You aren't being insightful, you're trying to say that book smarts are all that matters and experience is of negligible value, and that simply isn't true, rather it's the complete opposite which is true.
Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny
on
Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Since I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft work environments as that's where I'm sitting right at this very moment, I'll enlighten you about the good parts, and the bad. (Disclaimer: I am not employed by Microsoft; however I am on a contract at their Redmond location, and for anybody keeping track: I'm on lunch right now.:p )
First, there's the free drinks. Every building has at least one Kitchen. In my building, on my floor alone, there are 2. On floors 2 and 3 there are 2 more kitchens each, for a total of 6 in the building. In each kitchen is the type of floor-standing refrigerator you'd see at the grocery store or a 7-11, the kind they keep soft drinks in. Well, much like the grocery store or 7-11, just about every soft drink you could want is in there. Every "Coke" and "Pepsi" variant, Root Beer, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, different juices (cranberry, grapefruit, grape, apple, orange, V8), skim/2%/whole/chocolate milk, a variety of Talking Rain, and so forth. Not to mention the 12 flavors of Tea and a similarly diverse variety of coffee. Are you powered by mountain dew? Your batteries will never run low at Microsoft.
Second, there's the hours. Want to come in at 10am? ok, come in at 10. Want to work the weekend? no prob, you've got 24 hour building access thanks to your security badge. When you get sick of sitting at your desk, you can walk down the hall to a fooseball or ping-pong table and take a breather. Or, if you're in a building with an atrium (like mine) you can go sit there and read for a while. They don't micro-manage you, they like assigning people tasks and then letting those people handle those tasks independently.
So I'm a perl wizard (I have a beard and a hat too!) and I can do things with perl that is beyond the comprehension of most of the people I work with. Which is absolutely fine, really, because it takes me about an hour to accomplish something that would take 4 hours for them to do by hand. I tell them it'll take two hours and I've still got an extra hour to read slashdot.
I've never once had somebody look over my shoulder, and I work in a cube farm. There's 40 cubes in this room, and they aren't even cubes so much as the partitioned desks you see in a call center. Nobody is walking up behind me to check in on me. I produce my deliverables and they show me their gratitude.
Now, the downsides... Nothing works, and that's OK. Or rather, when something doesn't work the way it SHOULD work, people just shrug it off and accept it. The internal network can at some times be as slow as a 56k modem, and that's OK. (I'm not making this up, I speed-tested it) When the tools crash persistently day after day? That's OK. There's a standard of established mediocrity within the company's internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
A minor downside is the "independent work" thing I mentioned above. Sometimes tasks get subdivided to the point where you've got 4 people working on a one-man job and the only way to accomplish anything is to have all 4 of those people in the same room at the same time, which can be a daunting task to accomplish. But this is really quite trivial compared to the acceptance of mediocrity that seems to pervade the campus.
Actually, just because I don't go there on holiday, or live there, or have anything to do with there, does indeed make it right to ignore it. They are their own people with their own problems. If they can't be civil amongst themselves and bring themselves out of their pit of despair, are we supposed to go in and rescue them? How many times? Once? Twice? Every day? There's an old addage: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. They don't need us to give them food or shelter, what they need is good old fashioned knowledge, education, wisdom, and all of that so that they can do their own farming, build their own houses, and so forth. Until they're ready to start being members of the civilized world, though, those that think they're helping out will keep giving them the fish, furthering their (the Sudanese people) dependence on us. We do more harm than good when we think we're helping. Ignore it. They'll either solve their problems themselves or somebody who has the right idea will come along and help to pull them past their challenges, but they'll do it themselves and there's a certain amount of pride to be had by a nation for doing such a thing; we should not rob them of that. We robbed Afghanistan of that; we robbed Iraq of that.
Just leave people alone I say, unless they ask for our help. But then, you need to help them, don't just serve them or make them dependent. You need to actually do your part if it is requested, but stay the hell out otherwise.
Actually, the better question would be "Would you say the same of letting couples give birth to children that their doctor has determined to be deformed/malformed prior to birth?"
The thing I find funny is that the exact same story was submitted yesterday. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl ?sid=05/01/2 6/2319240&tid=91&tid=14
I mean it's the exact same story.
The link in the blurb is the same. The blurb itself is the same. The submitter is the same. EVEN THE POSTER IS THE SAME.
Last time it was in "digital" and "science" and this time it's in the same sections (which are, relatedly, a totally wrong categorization, for which samzenpus should be flogged with a bundle of cat5 ethernet cables)
I emailed daddypants@slashdot.org about this, to no avail; the dupe got posted anyhow.
Re:Maximum Functionality at Minimal Price Point
on
Cell Phone On A Chip
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· Score: 1
Go here: http://liquidmetal.com/news/dsp.multimedia.asp
View their "Ball Bouncer Demonstration"
I have a hunch that these "singing magnets" are coated with a Liquidmetal-like material which preserves some 99% of the impact force and returns it quite energetically, causing the magnets to come together, be pushed apart, come together, be pushed apart, fast enough to create a "tone" of sorts.
When the ball gets to the end of the ball bouncer demonstration, it does largely what the original poster was asking about with regard to the sound it produces.
I think, however, that this just illustrates that people in large groups tend to be stupid...
This is mostly unrelated to your post, but I found it interesting. I read somewhere recently that it's been statistically proven that smarter people tend to select partners of similar intellectual capacity and raising offspring of even greater intellectual aptitude. Seems like good news, right? Well it is, until you get to the part where all the dumber people are all getting together with one another and producing even dumber children.
For this reason, I think it should be illegal to keep dumb people of opposite genders near one another.
Man, you're a selfish dumbass. You're like a horse wearing blinders.
People can get into all sorts of messes that aren't their fault. Bus blows a red light and hits you while you legally use a crosswalk, rendering you a quadriplegic for the rest of your life, in a chair just like ol' Superman himself. Suddenly you can't work, you're in your house all by yourself in your chair, unable to even unzip your own pants and take a leak...what do you do, just wait to starve and die? According to your plan, that's the only option left for anybody who is crippled or handicapped.
In the real world, Social Security comes along and recognizes the contributions you've already made to society and the taxes you've provided to the government, and they help you out with a stipend in your time of unfortunate circumstances. I realise that there are a lot of crack whores and heroin addicts on social security because they've ruined their lives and haven't contributed, but there are plenty of people out there with sociological disorders or physical disabilities who have contributed to our fine nation and deserve to have those contributions returned. I agree that the process for determining who does and does not receive social security needs revamping, but I do not believe that all misfortune is caused by the one experiencing it, because that is totally idiotic.
You've got the same mindset that every other person in perfect health has: "No mercy for the weak, it's their fault for being weak." Well, I call bullshit on that mindset. Loads of it--I can smell it from here.
If you want an OGG player then get off your ass and start writing letters to microchip companies asking them to make a chip that can encode/decode OGG. The entirety of this mp3-player-in-a-tin project is centered around a very specific mp3 decoder chip. That's right, the MP3 decoder is a piece of hardware.
This isn't "just another Look what I can cram into a small case!"
This is: - An inspiration for female EE's the world over (yes, the creator of this project is female, and from the looks of it she's a very intelligent one at that) - A stepping stone for others to create their own DIY projects around this decoder chip (using an ATA interface to pull data from storage means that while it does work with compactflash, it could also work with a microdrive or a DVD-R drive...) - A framework for other people to format their DIY/Howto articles around (I like the left nav thing and how it's broken into sections) - Really fucking cool.
Fine, the altoids tin doesn't trip your trigger: how about 40 gigs of music inside a teddy bear? Give that one to your kids (or what-have-you) for christmas and they'll love you forever... And hey, you'll be able to make one yourself, because Limor told you how to do so on her cool webpage about the DIY mp3 player she built. Squeeze the left hand to go back a track, the right hand to go forward, push the nose to play/pause, headphones plug into the base of his neck (in the back)...c'mon, the thing is almost building itself while you read this.
I think it's worth pointing out that a girl-geek is responsible for this mp3 player creation. The username in the URL is what tipped me off, and the bio page seems to confirm it.
For extra points, anybody want to venture a guess where the name "Limor" originates from?
So why don't we just encrypt everything (including filenames) so nobody can tell who is downloading what? It sounds like big business wants an ISP to track suspicious activity and report back if they see anybody transferring copyrighted materials. Well if everything was encrypted, only the people who are supposed to know what's being transferred will ever know that it is actually BEING transferred.
In writing a hello world program, all you need is direct access to the framebuffer, which any language worth its salt will provide. Regarding your "thousands of drivers" remark, again, you don't really need all this: just the framebuffer and a screen. You don't need sound or floating point support, just you and the framebuffer. I know you were being a smartass, but everything you need for "Hello World" is in the BIOS, from the character set to interfacing with the framebuffer, and "Hello World" can be accomplished but a few dozen more bytes than there are in the string "Hello World."
You know what happens when you don't totally reinvent a chunk of code but instead write a chunk of code suited directly to your specific goals? The file size shrinks and it does only what you want it to. Sounds good to me.
For a look at what writing everything from scratch gets you, look at this demo: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=482 It 's a flythrough of the first level of Descent (remember Descent?) in 4096 bytes, including a MIDI soundtrack. Not 4096k, but 4096 bytes, or 4 kilobytes. 4k. Four K!
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they rewrote code more often to directly suit a certain goal, instead of just building up on top of what they already have. I want the next release of Windows to have a *smaller* footprint than XP. heh.
I think you're mistaken. It's not the inability to hear themselves which makes them speak louder, it's their inability to hear the other caller. The other caller is quiet and they think they've got a bad connection so they speak up. And of course, why won't they hear the other caller? Well because some smart guy decided he'd put the volume adjust buttons where people hold the phone, and the unobservant end up turning down their own volume without noticing it every time they pick up their phone.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, because I use ssh....
secure shell > telnet.
Also: nerds use their brains, geeks use what's around them. I'm a geek, not a nerd.
At one school I attended prior to college, the Library had these little Macintosh machines running UNIX terminal sessions. In the middle of searching for a book you could just hit the escape character (control and one of the [ ] keys; I forget which at the moment) and get yourself a Telnet> prompt, and from there you could use telnet commands to manipulate the system, including getting access to a very well-priveleged shell.
I'm pretty sure we're RDS-less.
You're a little off in your assessment; I haven't been in highschool for more than 7 years, and I've had enough college to satisfy me for now. What I do have, however, is younger brothers, and they're going through the same stuff I did, day in, day out. It's hard to forget about the bad parts of highschool when the people you care about are going through the same BS themselves and are able to offer you a daily reminder of the double-standard that "we the people" provide to "them the children."
The solution is to bring the double standard to an end and concede that no matter somebody's age, they have responsibilities, rights and freedoms. Since schools are tax-funded, they should be operated on the same principles of freedom as our government, no? Our government which is also tax-funded? Or is this like some loophole, kind of like the oil for food program, where we give money to people to run dictatorial institutions void of freedom? The double standard needs to go.
You don't really need to generate the energy at all. The solar constant describes how much radiated energy from the sun reaches the upper atmosphere and this value is more than 1350W/m2. Now, let's consider something for a moment. Solar panels are 20% efficient, tops. I'm talking about the good ones, too. The ones that NASA uses. Solar panels are horribly inefficient, in other words, especially when we compare them to the use of the solar energy from the sun directly. All you need to do is collimate a large amount of light into a very narrow beam. at 1.3 kilowatts/m2, you'd be looking at a 60,000 square meter array of (polycarbonate) lenses, but then you get a free 60 megawatt here-to-mars-beam any time you need it. Out in Mars territory you could have a large parabolic reflector for slowing you down. Since the amount of sunlight reaching Mars is less than Earth, you'd have to build a much larger reflector near Mars.
I'll try to summarize this since I managed to read the first few pages before the horde of slashdot ate the website.
You take two plates of metal and hold them parallel (not with your hands, they're going to be electrified!) underwater. Electrify the plates and the positive ions in the water will collect at the negative terminal and the negative ions will collect at the positive terminal. By adding some salt to the water however, you can encourage a chemical reaction to happen at a given electrode. By covering the metal with paint or duct tape, you insulate it from this effect. So what they're doing is, essentially, painting around the hole they want to cut, leaving the hole itself barren, then submerging it in saltwater and electrifying it, causing the exposed metal to oxidize and be eaten away.
It's roughly the opposite of electroplating, which is the procedure which this technique is likened to in the article. Instead of trying to accumulate more on a given electrode you're trying to reduce the amount of matter present there.
If more than half of your waking hours were dominated by something which dictated every last bit of what you think, read, eat, and do, I'm fairly certain that you yourself may start to have democratic doubts. When it comes to work, you can pick your job and quit at any time. School isn't like that; it's like prison. You have to go. You have to go no matter how much that kid keeps punching you in the halls and the administration turns the other cheek. You have to go no matter how much anxiety you have about the way Mr. so-and-so looks up your skirt whenever you have to pick up a pencil. You can't quit, like you can with a job. You can't just get fed up with the bullshit and say "hey, had enough bullshit over here."
No, as a child you have no rights and you just have to keep bending over and taking whatever the world wants to thrust at you. They think that we don't live in a democracy because they don't live in a democracy. Their parents are dictatorial, their school administration are dictatorial. The environment in which they exist is rigid and controlled. On virtue of being young they're denied opportunity and, when they're old enough, given higher insurance rates. How much does this really feel like freedom when you're a kid? It doesn't. It feels like prison. You know, prison, the place where we send the bad people to. And here's all of our children, herded up into buses with no seatbelts (they'll buckle up convicts, but not kids. think about that one) and collected in a location where dogma can be endlessly drilled into their heads for six hours or so, then they're sent home so they can cry a little bit before they're made to do it again. Is this how you want to introduce a consciousness to life? "Here, go do spmething you hate every weekday no matter what."
Actually, a great deal of wisdom comes from experience. Take the color green, for example. Suppose you're locked in a room from birth and green light is filtered out of all the light sources available to you, and you've never really seen green. You've read about it, you know what green is and what things are green. You know what wavelength the light is. But you haven't actually experienced green.
How much understanding of green can you have without experiencing it? Similarly, how much understanding can anyone be expected to have in a given subject without any experience in that subject?
Kids can't speak their mind anywhere. Not at home to mom and dad, and certainly not at school. Kids can't put whatever they want in their writing. Kids don't have any rights, so I find it to be of trivial importance that they don't know what their rights are. Technically, a kid going to the corner store and buying a candy bar is illegal because a minor cannot legally enter into a binding contract, and the exchange of goods or services for money is a legally binding contract of sorts. Once they're in college and they take a Law class or a Political Science class, then they'll start to learn about their rights, because they'll be able to exercise them.
Tangentially, I think that the decline of America is rooted in the public school system. Kids aren't taught democracy by example, they're taught dictatorship by example. They aren't taught about justice and fairness or a right to counsel, they're taught that those in power do whatever the fuck they want. Kids aren't encouraged to speak freely or to assemble in groups at whatever point they see fit; they're taught to walk in straight lines and fit into neatly categorized boxes. Kids are largely treated like sheep ("sheeple") and we're wondering why they don't understand the constitution? We don't even grant them the rights established by the constitution until they're 18! That's kind of like asking a 22 year old how he feels about having alzheimers. It's a totally unreasonable question because he doesn't have it yet; give him some time, then ask again. Similarly with the constitution question, ask people in their mid-twenties what their constitutional rights are and you'll find that in the years following highschool, some people have wisened up a bit.
You aren't being insightful, you're trying to say that book smarts are all that matters and experience is of negligible value, and that simply isn't true, rather it's the complete opposite which is true.
Since I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft work environments as that's where I'm sitting right at this very moment, I'll enlighten you about the good parts, and the bad. (Disclaimer: I am not employed by Microsoft; however I am on a contract at their Redmond location, and for anybody keeping track: I'm on lunch right now. :p )
First, there's the free drinks. Every building has at least one Kitchen. In my building, on my floor alone, there are 2. On floors 2 and 3 there are 2 more kitchens each, for a total of 6 in the building. In each kitchen is the type of floor-standing refrigerator you'd see at the grocery store or a 7-11, the kind they keep soft drinks in. Well, much like the grocery store or 7-11, just about every soft drink you could want is in there. Every "Coke" and "Pepsi" variant, Root Beer, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, different juices (cranberry, grapefruit, grape, apple, orange, V8), skim/2%/whole/chocolate milk, a variety of Talking Rain, and so forth. Not to mention the 12 flavors of Tea and a similarly diverse variety of coffee. Are you powered by mountain dew? Your batteries will never run low at Microsoft.
Second, there's the hours. Want to come in at 10am? ok, come in at 10. Want to work the weekend? no prob, you've got 24 hour building access thanks to your security badge. When you get sick of sitting at your desk, you can walk down the hall to a fooseball or ping-pong table and take a breather. Or, if you're in a building with an atrium (like mine) you can go sit there and read for a while. They don't micro-manage you, they like assigning people tasks and then letting those people handle those tasks independently.
So I'm a perl wizard (I have a beard and a hat too!) and I can do things with perl that is beyond the comprehension of most of the people I work with. Which is absolutely fine, really, because it takes me about an hour to accomplish something that would take 4 hours for them to do by hand. I tell them it'll take two hours and I've still got an extra hour to read slashdot.
I've never once had somebody look over my shoulder, and I work in a cube farm. There's 40 cubes in this room, and they aren't even cubes so much as the partitioned desks you see in a call center. Nobody is walking up behind me to check in on me. I produce my deliverables and they show me their gratitude.
Now, the downsides... Nothing works, and that's OK. Or rather, when something doesn't work the way it SHOULD work, people just shrug it off and accept it. The internal network can at some times be as slow as a 56k modem, and that's OK. (I'm not making this up, I speed-tested it) When the tools crash persistently day after day? That's OK. There's a standard of established mediocrity within the company's internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
A minor downside is the "independent work" thing I mentioned above. Sometimes tasks get subdivided to the point where you've got 4 people working on a one-man job and the only way to accomplish anything is to have all 4 of those people in the same room at the same time, which can be a daunting task to accomplish. But this is really quite trivial compared to the acceptance of mediocrity that seems to pervade the campus.
Actually, just because I don't go there on holiday, or live there, or have anything to do with there, does indeed make it right to ignore it. They are their own people with their own problems. If they can't be civil amongst themselves and bring themselves out of their pit of despair, are we supposed to go in and rescue them? How many times? Once? Twice? Every day? There's an old addage: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. They don't need us to give them food or shelter, what they need is good old fashioned knowledge, education, wisdom, and all of that so that they can do their own farming, build their own houses, and so forth. Until they're ready to start being members of the civilized world, though, those that think they're helping out will keep giving them the fish, furthering their (the Sudanese people) dependence on us. We do more harm than good when we think we're helping. Ignore it. They'll either solve their problems themselves or somebody who has the right idea will come along and help to pull them past their challenges, but they'll do it themselves and there's a certain amount of pride to be had by a nation for doing such a thing; we should not rob them of that. We robbed Afghanistan of that; we robbed Iraq of that.
Just leave people alone I say, unless they ask for our help. But then, you need to help them, don't just serve them or make them dependent. You need to actually do your part if it is requested, but stay the hell out otherwise.
So I guess you don't like Battlestar Galactica?
Actually, the better question would be "Would you say the same of letting couples give birth to children that their doctor has determined to be deformed/malformed prior to birth?"
One of the many over-used sci-fi plots has been "man makes creature, creature tries to destroy man." ... it'll be nice to actually see it happen.
The thing I find funny is that the exact same story was submitted yesterday.l ?sid=05/01/2 6/2319240&tid=91&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.p
I mean it's the exact same story.
The link in the blurb is the same.
The blurb itself is the same.
The submitter is the same.
EVEN THE POSTER IS THE SAME.
Last time it was in "digital" and "science" and this time it's in the same sections (which are, relatedly, a totally wrong categorization, for which samzenpus should be flogged with a bundle of cat5 ethernet cables)
I emailed daddypants@slashdot.org about this, to no avail; the dupe got posted anyhow.
They already do this; it's called the Xbox.
Go here: http://liquidmetal.com/news/dsp.multimedia.asp
View their "Ball Bouncer Demonstration"
I have a hunch that these "singing magnets" are coated with a Liquidmetal-like material which preserves some 99% of the impact force and returns it quite energetically, causing the magnets to come together, be pushed apart, come together, be pushed apart, fast enough to create a "tone" of sorts.
When the ball gets to the end of the ball bouncer demonstration, it does largely what the original poster was asking about with regard to the sound it produces.
I think, however, that this just illustrates that people in large groups tend to be stupid...
This is mostly unrelated to your post, but I found it interesting. I read somewhere recently that it's been statistically proven that smarter people tend to select partners of similar intellectual capacity and raising offspring of even greater intellectual aptitude. Seems like good news, right? Well it is, until you get to the part where all the dumber people are all getting together with one another and producing even dumber children.
For this reason, I think it should be illegal to keep dumb people of opposite genders near one another.
Man, you're a selfish dumbass. You're like a horse wearing blinders.
People can get into all sorts of messes that aren't their fault. Bus blows a red light and hits you while you legally use a crosswalk, rendering you a quadriplegic for the rest of your life, in a chair just like ol' Superman himself. Suddenly you can't work, you're in your house all by yourself in your chair, unable to even unzip your own pants and take a leak...what do you do, just wait to starve and die? According to your plan, that's the only option left for anybody who is crippled or handicapped.
In the real world, Social Security comes along and recognizes the contributions you've already made to society and the taxes you've provided to the government, and they help you out with a stipend in your time of unfortunate circumstances. I realise that there are a lot of crack whores and heroin addicts on social security because they've ruined their lives and haven't contributed, but there are plenty of people out there with sociological disorders or physical disabilities who have contributed to our fine nation and deserve to have those contributions returned. I agree that the process for determining who does and does not receive social security needs revamping, but I do not believe that all misfortune is caused by the one experiencing it, because that is totally idiotic.
You've got the same mindset that every other person in perfect health has: "No mercy for the weak, it's their fault for being weak." Well, I call bullshit on that mindset. Loads of it--I can smell it from here.
If you want an OGG player then get off your ass and start writing letters to microchip companies asking them to make a chip that can encode/decode OGG. The entirety of this mp3-player-in-a-tin project is centered around a very specific mp3 decoder chip. That's right, the MP3 decoder is a piece of hardware.
This isn't "just another Look what I can cram into a small case!"
This is:
- An inspiration for female EE's the world over (yes, the creator of this project is female, and from the looks of it she's a very intelligent one at that)
- A stepping stone for others to create their own DIY projects around this decoder chip (using an ATA interface to pull data from storage means that while it does work with compactflash, it could also work with a microdrive or a DVD-R drive...)
- A framework for other people to format their DIY/Howto articles around (I like the left nav thing and how it's broken into sections)
- Really fucking cool.
Fine, the altoids tin doesn't trip your trigger: how about 40 gigs of music inside a teddy bear? Give that one to your kids (or what-have-you) for christmas and they'll love you forever... And hey, you'll be able to make one yourself, because Limor told you how to do so on her cool webpage about the DIY mp3 player she built. Squeeze the left hand to go back a track, the right hand to go forward, push the nose to play/pause, headphones plug into the base of his neck (in the back)...c'mon, the thing is almost building itself while you read this.
I think it's worth pointing out that a girl-geek is responsible for this mp3 player creation. The username in the URL is what tipped me off, and the bio page seems to confirm it.
For extra points, anybody want to venture a guess where the name "Limor" originates from?
Because it's free. Enemy Territory is free, the mod is free. Free is good, slashdot likes free.
So why don't we just encrypt everything (including filenames) so nobody can tell who is downloading what? It sounds like big business wants an ISP to track suspicious activity and report back if they see anybody transferring copyrighted materials. Well if everything was encrypted, only the people who are supposed to know what's being transferred will ever know that it is actually BEING transferred.
In writing a hello world program, all you need is direct access to the framebuffer, which any language worth its salt will provide. Regarding your "thousands of drivers" remark, again, you don't really need all this: just the framebuffer and a screen. You don't need sound or floating point support, just you and the framebuffer. I know you were being a smartass, but everything you need for "Hello World" is in the BIOS, from the character set to interfacing with the framebuffer, and "Hello World" can be accomplished but a few dozen more bytes than there are in the string "Hello World."
t 's a flythrough of the first level of Descent (remember Descent?) in 4096 bytes, including a MIDI soundtrack. Not 4096k, but 4096 bytes, or 4 kilobytes. 4k. Four K!
You know what happens when you don't totally reinvent a chunk of code but instead write a chunk of code suited directly to your specific goals? The file size shrinks and it does only what you want it to. Sounds good to me.
For a look at what writing everything from scratch gets you, look at this demo:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=482
I
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they rewrote code more often to directly suit a certain goal, instead of just building up on top of what they already have. I want the next release of Windows to have a *smaller* footprint than XP. heh.
Oh yes, publishing an email address in more than one location on the web is always a good idea! Let's give them a slashdotting AND a ton of spam!
I think you're mistaken. It's not the inability to hear themselves which makes them speak louder, it's their inability to hear the other caller. The other caller is quiet and they think they've got a bad connection so they speak up. And of course, why won't they hear the other caller? Well because some smart guy decided he'd put the volume adjust buttons where people hold the phone, and the unobservant end up turning down their own volume without noticing it every time they pick up their phone.