RE: gnoshi sez: The problem is this: they didn't and still don't know what's wrong - just that his symptoms fit a commonly observed pattern, and that there are particular interventions to try to address the associated deficits. [emphasis mine] .
But that's exactly what happened with Parkinson's Disease, and still is happening with Parkinson's Disease. Dr. Parkinson observed a common pattern in a group of patients. These patterns of symptoms and behaviors constituted a syndrome which began to be called "Parkinson's Disease" after Dr. Parkinson died. (I guess he didn't have the ego to name it after himself:>) ) .
There are many many possible causes for Parkinson's (even bad drugs can cause it, which is how they found out a lot about it), and it's taken almost two-hundred years to keep learning about it. All of these various causes end up with the same ultimate (theorized) endpoint: that there is not enough dopamine in a particular part of the brain called the substantia nigra (black substance, or black region). The fact that the real cause of Parkinson's is not known or fully understood even today does not mean that Parkinson's is not a disease. .
The fact that something is not in the DSM manual also does not mean it has been disallowed as a disease: it just means that it is not in that particular and specific compendium. And now, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is saying that the DSM is not the final arbiter of what constitutes a mental disorder or psychiatric disorder. In other words, I also completely agree with your conclusion using different words of my own.:>)
Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour covered that on/. on January 22 of this year, 2013. Combine that with your kiosk like push-button or touch screen menu-entry order system, and la voila !!
Methinks perhaps that the author of TFRA (the effin' referenced article) is very confused about the difference between vocational training (like refrigeration technology and automotive repair) and college education (like computer science and anthropology). .
Vocation training entails learning the specifics about one technology as a depth-first traversal of that one particular topic. .
A college education, whether you major in a liberal arts field or an engineering field or a hard science field, requires learning various other disciplines alongside majoring in one specific discipline: a partial depth-first traversal of the major with a breadth-first traversal of the basic liberal arts or science curriculum. This allows a wide exposure to the "classics" (if you go to UC, the chicago one) or the "basics" or "foundation" (if you go to one of the UCs, the california ones). .
Creating a college major in "software testing" would be as silly as making a college major in "Oracle Database technologies + usurpation of JAVA 2009-present". Too fucking specialized and not generally educative / educational enough. The author did not make the most of her college educational experience herself if she does not recognize this essential difference.
That's a good point you make. Google needs to keep people using email so that google can keep harvesting information out of the email contents, thus it's in google's best interest to keep email looking like a safe venue for communication. I had not thought of that particular aspect. I know that my mom is very circumspect about putting any health related things into email, even though her hospital is pushing her to use email to communicate with patients. She only wants to use it for confirming appointment times and changing appt times to ensure that she doesn't accidentally leak any HIPAA covered private patient health information.
Clippy: Do you want to really say that and be sued? .
It's the same as what happens when there is "open" government. As soom as there are laws and guidelines that governmental and departmental emails must be available for public perusal, suddenly all of the email channels are just filled with happy fluff and declarations of meeting times only and perhaps some birthday greetings. All matters of substance suddenly are done only by direct telephone contact or person-to-person meetings with no notes taken that could be used as evidence or found in discovery. Notice how few top level politicians directly use email, or if they do they tend to use private accounts to conduct gov't business even if that's technically and legally a no-no. .
So google is making a tool to warn people as they type that what they type could be "construed" as a bad statement. It's like Clippy popping up to tell you in a big brother voice "It's looks like you're making a sexually harassing statement or a statement that could put the company at fault. Do you really want to say that?"
re: for many people it's not the main OS but more like a solid reference implementation. .
That others use Debian as their "backroom workshop" does not define Debian's true role, no more than one person using another person as a slave manifests that slavery as being the defining characteristic of that other person. .
I disagree with your statement that debain's role has changed "more towards being a professional backroom workshop for other distributions". Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing. .
I agree that Debian is a solid implementation. But I disagree with your contention that it's more like a solid reference implementation. A "reference implementation" would imply that it is a demo of some of the capabilities of what can be done and that others are to build upon it. (whoops, the second half of that sentence is actually true! That's exactly what GNU's GPL licensing allows!) A "reference implementation" implies that it's built specifically just to be a partial implementation, which debian definitely is not. While others may build atop Debian, that is not Debian's sole purpose. .
For details on Debian's purpose, see Debian's own documentation about their "social contract", or read
about it on articles about it. .
For info about how it started and about Debian's manifesto, read about the
Ian who makes up the "-ian" half of "debian" or read the original Debian Manifesto .
Re: If only the summary was written anywhere near as well as your informative comment. :>)
Why, thank you! They should hire me as an editor, dontcha think?;>)
Re: If only the summary was written anywhere near as well as your informative comment. :>)
Why, thank you! They should hire me as an editor, dontcha think?;>)
So there's an awfully beneficial to the bus company only
contract of adhesion which applies when you purchase a bus ticket from these (IMHO) idiots at Suburban Express. The students seem to be unaware of it when they purchase the tickets, and the "contract" allows suburban express to charge them loads of extra money, or "fines" (ohmigod, they call them fines!) for wierd little things. Then, the company takes the students to court for these fines, and probaby schedules the court dates such that the student could not possibly attend the court action, thereby having the student lose by default. .
There's a very interesting write-up at the Daily Illini about this company and their practices by someone who initially did not believe how bad and wierd (and imho probably illegal) the actions of this bus company were and are:
Suburban Express Causes its Own Problems is the title of the April 25th article by Matt Pasquini, an "Opinions" columnist.
re: We don't define what winning is, how it won, or even what winning is,
.
But usually, the "rules of the game" specifically point out exactly "what winning is". An end goal or an end-state is defined as the desireable outcome, whether it's getting to the end of the squares' sequence in the board game Life or whether it's getting a "higher scoring" hand in poker, the concept of a winning move (or equivalently, a game ending move along with a ranking system that defines who the winner is, e.g. monopoly ends based on money running out for one or all but one player, the rest are ranked by how much money remains). .
I know I sound pedantic, but if the "system" learns the "rules of the game", then it is given a definition of "what winning is." Have I misunderstood what you're trying to say?
Well, if you had a partner with 6 more old phones, you could do the "phone passing" pattern! .
The ancient Egyptians show
here are using mystical orbs (which were used as telephones back in the day as telephone substitutes,ok, i kid) for juggling. No, really, ancient egyptians juggled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling#Ancient_to_20th_century according to an inscription at an egyptian cemetery.
"The poor, as well as the rich, are equally allowed to spend thousands or millions of dollars defending their copyrights and trademarks!" is an update of the old saw
"The rich, as well as the poor, are forbidden from sleeping under bridges."
It's just that the rich don't need to sleep under bridges, whereas the poor sometimes do. So laws against doing things that those without means must do (sleep outdoors, urinate in the park behind trees and shrubs, beg for money) are applied equally to those rich enough that they wouldn't have to break that law in the first place. Sigh.... exasperated sigh....
This is more likely to work better as a "squirrel" vs. "bird" detector, or with good/better datasets, perhaps even as a "cardinal" vs. "bluejay" vs. "mockingbird" vs. "car alarm" detector, especially if the birds are in your front or back yard. But really, the concept of hearing a predator drone is very farfetched, unless the drone is flying super low for some reason! .
Better to use this as an auto-logging device for some birders falling in love with counting how many birdies are coming by, or for recording to the exact micro-second when the
swallows finally
make it back to San Juan Capistrano!
re: While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering. .
But this is where these kinds of tricks work: when the person authorizing the use of these "utilities" is not the one paying them. This kind of disconnect is how the college kids at U.C. Irvine and U.C. San Diego rack up huge credit card bills because mommy and daddy pay for them so the kids don't have to worry about how much they charge. They even use the cards as an "auto ATM": pick up cash from the other student diners and pay for the meal on your/parents' credit card: instant cash in your pocket while the parents just think that the kids had an expensive meal, since momzy and dadzy eat at very expensive restaurants, a chinese restaurant meal for 10 won't even make them blink or question the cost. .
Having health care covered by insurance paid for through work while the covered person doesn't even look at or get to see the bill also leads to the same kind of disconnect: no one tries to minimize cost if the cost burden is not fully borne by them or even made fully known to them. In fact, it's the opposite: look at the people running to spend their health benefits by the end of the fiscal year: they know that if they don't buy those eyeglasses or get the dental cleaning by the end of the year, those benefits just vanish into thin air. This bizarre set up leads to this bizarre behaviour. .
And that's just what will happen at work places or at home for kids: the users of the computers (workers or kids) will okay this cannabilistic/opportunistic software process, while the payer for the electricity consumption (boss/department/company or the parents) won't even see that the overhead costs have jumped up because of this silliness. The costs are lost in the overhead costs' noise!
Re: He stumbled upon it by playing $12 million worth of video poker. .
Good point. Certainly the amount of time he's invested in playing $12M worth of video poker means that he's seen a lot of interesting combinations and tried out multiple variations and permutations of which games to play in which sequence. He's accidentally stumbled upon a way of playing that causes the machine to behave in his favor. Exploiting that, however, is not quite moral, though. And the casino, having allowed erroneous software to pass onto the casino floor in hardware, is also at fault. How did the Gaming Commission allow this to happen? I thought they vetted all of the hardware and software in Vegas?
You left out houses made of "sticks" [there were three little pigs], but otherwise, your analysis is spot-on! But even if they're immune from being blown down, I don't think they'd do a good job of stopping the wolf from getting in. .
Wait, I retract that. If the light is of a high enough intensity, it'd be life a force-field with enough power to burn or vaporize or plasma-ize anything that tries to come in contact with it. Yes, this mysterious 4th pigs "House of Light" would be impervious to the wolf!
re: Distracted driving is distracted driving. .
Yes! The Brady Bunch just had an episode about this over the weekend (well, I guess it's a re-re-re-re-re^{20}-run of a 1970's episode of the Brady Bunch) where Greg Brady almost rear-ends someone on the freeway because he's busy reading the back of a record album he's just purchased! He get's caught because little brother Bobby proudly exclaims how good a driver big brother is in being able to avoid rear ending that truck on the road! So there's no need to specifically blame texting or cell phones. People are just as distracted with radio dials, CD's falling of the seat, hamburgers they're eating, or makeup or maps or newpapers.
re: (Aside: I had composed this in libreoffice (on linux, if that matters). Why's slashdot insisting on turning all the quotes and apostrophes into "Ãf(TM)"? What a PITA! Had to preview this a dozen times finding and correcting them all.)
:>(
Slashdot does not have clean unicode support. Your linux installation probably has the locale set such that the fonts are set for unicode support, thus the fancy double quotes ' " ' are actually unicode fancy curly quotes instead of the simpler straight-line-ASCII code quotes. .
If you hunt around on slashdot, you'll find quite a few comments about how the
Thorn character is not supported, thus pissing off the Icelandic contingent, and various other and sundry characters also cause problems./. should clean up its act and allow unicode and UTF font support.
re: You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure.
.
Amen to that. That's exactly what happened to Wikileaks and the financial blockade forced by the USA government. A little protection racket talk against Visa and Mastercard ("nice little business and cash flow you've got there. You wouldn't want to forfeit all of it by continuing to provide processing and money access to some punks like wikileaks, then, would ya?") and suddenly there was no way for Wikileaks to get any donations from anyone. You are so right about corrupt governments. Sad but true.
re: it has an API so that application specific software can control it.
That is pretty much what I meant by "configurable"! You just expressed it more clearly and specifically, as one ought to in a thesis or in a thesis statement! I strongly agree with you.
My mom's take on medicine, translated by me into "search" speak: medicine is a breadth-first search and investigation of a broad-base of clinically applicable knowledge instead of a depth-first search of a particular specialized field of knowledge that a Ph.D. would have. Breadth-first search instead of depth-first search in a world with huge amounts of medically applicable knowledge means you have to know a tiny bit about almost every medical thing or disease out there. There's no way you could suspect that a person might have disease XYZ_sub_345 if you've never even heard of the disease! (example my mom gave: psittacosis, a disease that you can catch from birds like parrots. thus important to know a patient's household or family routines or items, so you could suspect that they might have a parrot that could have passed on the disease. Or San Joaquin valley fever, from the dust here in California's SJ valley... etc). :>) So yes, sadly, I think doctors have to learn so much different crap that a lot of basics of other things either get pushed out of their head or don't even get a chance to get seated in their brain in the first place! Engineering for me, though my dad says my brain might want medical knowledge later in life...
Thanks for the link to the GPU "on-board" flash memory presentation. Interesting to see that original Apple ][ hardware guru Wozniak is the chief scientist on this for Fusion I O hardware. I hadn't seen that about him on any other sites. Merci!
SDN is the hot new buzzword, just like "cloud" computing has been for the last few years. Buzzwords fly by. I agree with you that he can afford to be honest, but he's not just being honest, he's pointing out the "fuzziness" of what the term "SDN" is being applied to. . I believe he had a fixed and set definition which he must have specified with some detail in his thesis (isn't that what you're supposed to do in a thesis? be specific?), but nowadays everyone and anyone is calling any configurability of the top or higher levels of networking as "Software defined networking".
So every time a snake robot PR blurb is published, a university PR and Patents & Innovation department gets a pat on the back! See a 1993 article about snake-like locomotion in biologically inspired robots .
-- S. Hirose, P. Cave, and C. Goulden, Biologically inspired robots: snake-like locomotors and manipulators, vol. 64. Oxford University Press Oxford, UK, 1993
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboboa = Roboboas has 4 angled body sections, allowing Roboboa to coil by rotating adjacent sections. A motorized tail roller and casters on the midsection allow Roboboa to move in a straight line.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakebot = Snake robots come in all shapes and sizes, from the three meters long, fire fighting snakebot developed by SINTEF,[1] to a medical snakebot developed at Carnegie Mellon University that is thin enough to maneuver around organs inside a human chest cavity. Though snakebots can vary greatly in size and design, there are two qualities that all snakebots share. First, their small cross section to length ratio allows them to move into, and maneuver through, tight spaces. Second, their ability to change the shape of their body allows them to perform a wide range of behaviours, such as climbing stairs or tree trunks.
And my favorite section is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics#Snaking : Several snake robots have been successfully developed. Mimicking the way real snakes move, these robots can navigate very confined spaces, meaning they may one day be used to search for people trapped in collapsed buildings.[72] The Japanese ACM-R5 snake robot[73] can even navigate both on land and in water.[74] [these references are:
It's all good until those mother-fucking robot snakes get on a mother-fucking plane! A drone plane! MF'in' Robot snakes on a Drone plane! And fricking sharks with laser beams --/{vox Samuel Jackson}
"No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes." -- actual quote from
Samuel Jackson [and I assert and deem that those new snakes shall be robotic!!! - gia]
RE: gnoshi sez: The problem is this: they didn't and still don't know what's wrong - just that his symptoms fit a commonly observed pattern, and that there are particular interventions to try to address the associated deficits. [emphasis mine]
.
But that's exactly what happened with Parkinson's Disease, and still is happening with Parkinson's Disease. Dr. Parkinson observed a common pattern in a group of patients. These patterns of symptoms and behaviors constituted a syndrome which began to be called "Parkinson's Disease" after Dr. Parkinson died. (I guess he didn't have the ego to name it after himself :>) )
.
There are many many possible causes for Parkinson's (even bad drugs can cause it, which is how they found out a lot about it), and it's taken almost two-hundred years to keep learning about it. All of these various causes end up with the same ultimate (theorized) endpoint: that there is not enough dopamine in a particular part of the brain called the substantia nigra (black substance, or black region). The fact that the real cause of Parkinson's is not known or fully understood even today does not mean that Parkinson's is not a disease.
.
The fact that something is not in the DSM manual also does not mean it has been disallowed as a disease: it just means that it is not in that particular and specific compendium. And now, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is saying that the DSM is not the final arbiter of what constitutes a mental disorder or psychiatric disorder. In other words, I also completely agree with your conclusion using different words of my own. :>)
Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour covered that on /. on January 22 of this year, 2013. Combine that with your kiosk like push-button or touch screen menu-entry order system, and la voila !!
Methinks perhaps that the author of TFRA (the effin' referenced article) is very confused about the difference between vocational training (like refrigeration technology and automotive repair) and college education (like computer science and anthropology).
.
Vocation training entails learning the specifics about one technology as a depth-first traversal of that one particular topic.
.
A college education, whether you major in a liberal arts field or an engineering field or a hard science field, requires learning various other disciplines alongside majoring in one specific discipline: a partial depth-first traversal of the major with a breadth-first traversal of the basic liberal arts or science curriculum. This allows a wide exposure to the "classics" (if you go to UC, the chicago one) or the "basics" or "foundation" (if you go to one of the UCs, the california ones).
.
Creating a college major in "software testing" would be as silly as making a college major in "Oracle Database technologies + usurpation of JAVA 2009-present". Too fucking specialized and not generally educative / educational enough. The author did not make the most of her college educational experience herself if she does not recognize this essential difference.
That's a good point you make. Google needs to keep people using email so that google can keep harvesting information out of the email contents, thus it's in google's best interest to keep email looking like a safe venue for communication. I had not thought of that particular aspect. I know that my mom is very circumspect about putting any health related things into email, even though her hospital is pushing her to use email to communicate with patients. She only wants to use it for confirming appointment times and changing appt times to ensure that she doesn't accidentally leak any HIPAA covered private patient health information.
Clippy: Do you want to really say that and be sued?
.
It's the same as what happens when there is "open" government. As soom as there are laws and guidelines that governmental and departmental emails must be available for public perusal, suddenly all of the email channels are just filled with happy fluff and declarations of meeting times only and perhaps some birthday greetings. All matters of substance suddenly are done only by direct telephone contact or person-to-person meetings with no notes taken that could be used as evidence or found in discovery. Notice how few top level politicians directly use email, or if they do they tend to use private accounts to conduct gov't business even if that's technically and legally a no-no.
.
So google is making a tool to warn people as they type that what they type could be "construed" as a bad statement. It's like Clippy popping up to tell you in a big brother voice "It's looks like you're making a sexually harassing statement or a statement that could put the company at fault. Do you really want to say that?"
re: for many people it's not the main OS but more like a solid reference implementation.
.
That others use Debian as their "backroom workshop" does not define Debian's true role, no more than one person using another person as a slave manifests that slavery as being the defining characteristic of that other person.
.
I disagree with your statement that debain's role has changed "more towards being a professional backroom workshop for other distributions". Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing.
.
I agree that Debian is a solid implementation. But I disagree with your contention that it's more like a solid reference implementation. A "reference implementation" would imply that it is a demo of some of the capabilities of what can be done and that others are to build upon it. (whoops, the second half of that sentence is actually true! That's exactly what GNU's GPL licensing allows!) A "reference implementation" implies that it's built specifically just to be a partial implementation, which debian definitely is not. While others may build atop Debian, that is not Debian's sole purpose.
.
For details on Debian's purpose, see Debian's own documentation about their "social contract", or read about it on articles about it.
.
For info about how it started and about Debian's manifesto, read about the Ian who makes up the "-ian" half of "debian" or read the original Debian Manifesto .
Re: If only the summary was written anywhere near as well as your informative comment.
:>) ;>)
Why, thank you! They should hire me as an editor, dontcha think?
Re: If only the summary was written anywhere near as well as your informative comment.
:>)
Why, thank you! They should hire me as an editor, dontcha think? ;>)
So there's an awfully beneficial to the bus company only contract of adhesion which applies when you purchase a bus ticket from these (IMHO) idiots at Suburban Express. The students seem to be unaware of it when they purchase the tickets, and the "contract" allows suburban express to charge them loads of extra money, or "fines" (ohmigod, they call them fines!) for wierd little things. Then, the company takes the students to court for these fines, and probaby schedules the court dates such that the student could not possibly attend the court action, thereby having the student lose by default.
.
There's a very interesting write-up at the Daily Illini about this company and their practices by someone who initially did not believe how bad and wierd (and imho probably illegal) the actions of this bus company were and are: Suburban Express Causes its Own Problems is the title of the April 25th article by Matt Pasquini, an "Opinions" columnist.
re: We don't define what winning is, how it won, or even what winning is,
.
But usually, the "rules of the game" specifically point out exactly "what winning is". An end goal or an end-state is defined as the desireable outcome, whether it's getting to the end of the squares' sequence in the board game Life or whether it's getting a "higher scoring" hand in poker, the concept of a winning move (or equivalently, a game ending move along with a ranking system that defines who the winner is, e.g. monopoly ends based on money running out for one or all but one player, the rest are ranked by how much money remains).
.
I know I sound pedantic, but if the "system" learns the "rules of the game", then it is given a definition of "what winning is." Have I misunderstood what you're trying to say?
Well, if you had a partner with 6 more old phones, you could do the "phone passing" pattern!
.
The ancient Egyptians show here are using mystical orbs (which were used as telephones back in the day as telephone substitutes,ok, i kid) for juggling. No, really, ancient egyptians juggled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling#Ancient_to_20th_century according to an inscription at an egyptian cemetery.
It's just that the rich don't need to sleep under bridges, whereas the poor sometimes do. So laws against doing things that those without means must do (sleep outdoors, urinate in the park behind trees and shrubs, beg for money) are applied equally to those rich enough that they wouldn't have to break that law in the first place. Sigh.... exasperated sigh....
This is more likely to work better as a "squirrel" vs. "bird" detector, or with good/better datasets, perhaps even as a "cardinal" vs. "bluejay" vs. "mockingbird" vs. "car alarm" detector, especially if the birds are in your front or back yard. But really, the concept of hearing a predator drone is very farfetched, unless the drone is flying super low for some reason!
.
Better to use this as an auto-logging device for some birders falling in love with counting how many birdies are coming by, or for recording to the exact micro-second when the swallows finally make it back to San Juan Capistrano!
re: While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
.
But this is where these kinds of tricks work: when the person authorizing the use of these "utilities" is not the one paying them. This kind of disconnect is how the college kids at U.C. Irvine and U.C. San Diego rack up huge credit card bills because mommy and daddy pay for them so the kids don't have to worry about how much they charge. They even use the cards as an "auto ATM": pick up cash from the other student diners and pay for the meal on your/parents' credit card: instant cash in your pocket while the parents just think that the kids had an expensive meal, since momzy and dadzy eat at very expensive restaurants, a chinese restaurant meal for 10 won't even make them blink or question the cost.
.
Having health care covered by insurance paid for through work while the covered person doesn't even look at or get to see the bill also leads to the same kind of disconnect: no one tries to minimize cost if the cost burden is not fully borne by them or even made fully known to them. In fact, it's the opposite: look at the people running to spend their health benefits by the end of the fiscal year: they know that if they don't buy those eyeglasses or get the dental cleaning by the end of the year, those benefits just vanish into thin air. This bizarre set up leads to this bizarre behaviour.
.
And that's just what will happen at work places or at home for kids: the users of the computers (workers or kids) will okay this cannabilistic/opportunistic software process, while the payer for the electricity consumption (boss/department/company or the parents) won't even see that the overhead costs have jumped up because of this silliness. The costs are lost in the overhead costs' noise!
Re: He stumbled upon it by playing $12 million worth of video poker.
.
Good point. Certainly the amount of time he's invested in playing $12M worth of video poker means that he's seen a lot of interesting combinations and tried out multiple variations and permutations of which games to play in which sequence. He's accidentally stumbled upon a way of playing that causes the machine to behave in his favor. Exploiting that, however, is not quite moral, though. And the casino, having allowed erroneous software to pass onto the casino floor in hardware, is also at fault. How did the Gaming Commission allow this to happen? I thought they vetted all of the hardware and software in Vegas?
You left out houses made of "sticks" [there were three little pigs], but otherwise, your analysis is spot-on! But even if they're immune from being blown down, I don't think they'd do a good job of stopping the wolf from getting in.
.
Wait, I retract that. If the light is of a high enough intensity, it'd be life a force-field with enough power to burn or vaporize or plasma-ize anything that tries to come in contact with it. Yes, this mysterious 4th pigs "House of Light" would be impervious to the wolf!
re: Distracted driving is distracted driving.
.
Yes! The Brady Bunch just had an episode about this over the weekend (well, I guess it's a re-re-re-re-re^{20}-run of a 1970's episode of the Brady Bunch) where Greg Brady almost rear-ends someone on the freeway because he's busy reading the back of a record album he's just purchased! He get's caught because little brother Bobby proudly exclaims how good a driver big brother is in being able to avoid rear ending that truck on the road! So there's no need to specifically blame texting or cell phones. People are just as distracted with radio dials, CD's falling of the seat, hamburgers they're eating, or makeup or maps or newpapers.
:>( /. should clean up its act and allow unicode and UTF font support.
Slashdot does not have clean unicode support. Your linux installation probably has the locale set such that the fonts are set for unicode support, thus the fancy double quotes ' " ' are actually unicode fancy curly quotes instead of the simpler straight-line-ASCII code quotes.
.
If you hunt around on slashdot, you'll find quite a few comments about how the Thorn character is not supported, thus pissing off the Icelandic contingent, and various other and sundry characters also cause problems.
.
Amen to that. That's exactly what happened to Wikileaks and the financial blockade forced by the USA government. A little protection racket talk against Visa and Mastercard ("nice little business and cash flow you've got there. You wouldn't want to forfeit all of it by continuing to provide processing and money access to some punks like wikileaks, then, would ya?") and suddenly there was no way for Wikileaks to get any donations from anyone. You are so right about corrupt governments. Sad but true.
That is pretty much what I meant by "configurable"! You just expressed it more clearly and specifically, as one ought to in a thesis or in a thesis statement! I strongly agree with you.
My mom's take on medicine, translated by me into "search" speak: medicine is a breadth-first search and investigation of a broad-base of clinically applicable knowledge instead of a depth-first search of a particular specialized field of knowledge that a Ph.D. would have. Breadth-first search instead of depth-first search in a world with huge amounts of medically applicable knowledge means you have to know a tiny bit about almost every medical thing or disease out there. There's no way you could suspect that a person might have disease XYZ_sub_345 if you've never even heard of the disease! (example my mom gave: psittacosis, a disease that you can catch from birds like parrots. thus important to know a patient's household or family routines or items, so you could suspect that they might have a parrot that could have passed on the disease. Or San Joaquin valley fever, from the dust here in California's SJ valley... etc).
:>)
So yes, sadly, I think doctors have to learn so much different crap that a lot of basics of other things either get pushed out of their head or don't even get a chance to get seated in their brain in the first place! Engineering for me, though my dad says my brain might want medical knowledge later in life...
Thanks for the link to the GPU "on-board" flash memory presentation. Interesting to see that original Apple ][ hardware guru Wozniak is the chief scientist on this for Fusion I O hardware. I hadn't seen that about him on any other sites. Merci!
SDN is the hot new buzzword, just like "cloud" computing has been for the last few years. Buzzwords fly by. I agree with you that he can afford to be honest, but he's not just being honest, he's pointing out the "fuzziness" of what the term "SDN" is being applied to.
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I believe he had a fixed and set definition which he must have specified with some detail in his thesis (isn't that what you're supposed to do in a thesis? be specific?), but nowadays everyone and anyone is calling any configurability of the top or higher levels of networking as "Software defined networking".
. -- S. Hirose, P. Cave, and C. Goulden, Biologically inspired robots: snake-like locomotors and manipulators, vol. 64. Oxford University Press Oxford, UK, 1993
[ link found as # 14 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-inspired_robotics ]
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboboa = Roboboas has 4 angled body sections, allowing Roboboa to coil by rotating adjacent sections. A motorized tail roller and casters on the midsection allow Roboboa to move in a straight line.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake-arm_robot
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakebot = Snake robots come in all shapes and sizes, from the three meters long, fire fighting snakebot developed by SINTEF,[1] to a medical snakebot developed at Carnegie Mellon University that is thin enough to maneuver around organs inside a human chest cavity. Though snakebots can vary greatly in size and design, there are two qualities that all snakebots share. First, their small cross section to length ratio allows them to move into, and maneuver through, tight spaces. Second, their ability to change the shape of their body allows them to perform a wide range of behaviours, such as climbing stairs or tree trunks.
And my favorite section is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics#Snaking : Several snake robots have been successfully developed. Mimicking the way real snakes move, these robots can navigate very confined spaces, meaning they may one day be used to search for people trapped in collapsed buildings.[72] The Japanese ACM-R5 snake robot[73] can even navigate both on land and in water.[74] [these references are:72 = http://www.snakerobots.com/
73 = http://www-robot.mes.titech.ac.jp/robot/snake/acm-r5/acm-r5_e.html with cool pictures of swimming snake robots
74 = Swimming snake robot (commentary in Japanese)
It's all good until those mother-fucking robot snakes get on a mother-fucking plane! A drone plane! MF'in' Robot snakes on a Drone plane! And fricking sharks with laser beams -- /{vox Samuel Jackson}
"No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes." -- actual quote from
Samuel Jackson [and I assert and deem that those new snakes shall be robotic!!! - gia]