Special interest groups and lobbyists have been around forever. TV hasn't.
Now, everybody watches a couple hours of TV every day, and you don't have a hope of getting elected unless you show up in their faces over and over. That takes big bucks.
Politicians didn't need that much money to get elected in the past. Before people learned to sit back and let all the information they need (or at least, all that they get) effortlessly flow into their brains from the TV, they actually sought out important information like politicians' platforms. Now they just listen to whatever's on the ads and in the news, so if a politician wants a chance in hell, he needs to take millions of dollars from wherever he can get it, whatever he has to do to get it.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Not only was it a good optimizing compiler, but it had some really handy stuff for integrating with assembly routines.
For example, you could specify which arguments go in which registers, which registers would be modified by the operation, and where to expect the return result. The inline assembly stuff was also very handy.
As an added bonus, it came with WASM, so you didn't have to go out and buy TASM.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
When they could get away with it (back in the NES days), they locked developers into contracts so they could only make NES games. Even now, I believe they don't allow straight ports to their platforms. If you want to bring one of your popular games to a Nintendo platform, you have to add at least one special Nintendo feature, so Nintendo can claim that their version is special and unique and worth paying for a second time even if you've already got the original.
They also insist on being "the family video game company", and not having any games that hurt that image. They will tell you that a feature of your game is unacceptable, and you must change it or you can't release. The guys at id Software had a terrible time getting Wolfenstein released for the SNES (I think it was the SNES). They demanded a bunch of goofy changes ("can you change the dogs to rats? It's wrong to shoot dogs.") and generally made a nuisance of themselves.
That kind of thing wasn't uncommon, either. They are a royal pain in the ass.
They'd have to completely change the way they work to even have a chance at getting their old developers back.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...and you thought that stupid paperclip was annoying. Just wait until you have a giant ape constantly throwing barrels that roll along your lines of text to kill your cursor and delete your file if you don't hit the "jump" button just before it hits.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Your logic is quite flawed. It implies that any birth control is highly immoral -- and only the Catholic Church believes that.
Your semantics are quite weak. You treat morality as an absolute, as your chosen morality, whereas I am arguing the characteristics of a certain morality, and the reasons for it to have developed and survived.
You accuse others of logical error for disagreeing with your morality, without providing a logical basis for, or definition of, your morality. Had you defined your use of the word "morality" as the popular, if naive, belief that it is only morally wrong to cause harm to others knowingly or through willful negligence, I would have had no dispute with your conclusion (though I might have argued over your use of the word).
I covered the possibility that a morality may support the encouragement of a childless life. There's nothing wrong with my logic.
Furthermore, I do not even imply "that any birth control is highly immoral". I imply that general disincentives to mate are immoral. It can be entirely moral within in that context to have protected sex or non-productive sex-substitutes like "oral sex" with one's spouse. This is entirely in line with our modern society's best interests in encouraging stable marriages with few children (but not "no children", because that would quickly lead to extinction of those who follow the moral rules), for keeping the population stable and raising healthy and well-educated children.
Pornography arguably interferes with a stable marriage by allowing sexual pleasure that is not immediately associated with one's spouse, weakening the emotional bond that a monopoly on sexual pleasure creates. Furthermore, it displays non-marital sexual behavior as the focus of one's intense pleasure, and thus creates a positive association to non-marital sexual behavior. If society benefits from stable marriages, then pornography is harmful to society in this way (it may also have good effects to society, though, and the net morality may vary between types of pornography).
BTW, strict taboos about sex-related behavior, especially about sex substitutes, are hardly restricted to the Western world. Use of pornography is discouraged and hidden in many cultures. Since you characterized the belief in the immorality of pornography as puritanical, I continued this usage.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Seriously, it's evil. It's a total betrayal of the browser by stealing away control the user should have and giving it to the web developer (when things like advertising put them at cross purposes). We shouldn't legitimize its use by including it "web standards", and any site that uses it shouldn't be called a real website, just another net-downloadable program.
Standards are only a good thing when they standardize on good behavior.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Nuclear power is something which is far too dangerous to tolerate even when it is under the most stringent of security at power plants,
Ughh. Yes, let's go back to using large animals and small piles of wood for our energy need. We can't tolerate dangerous things like a barely controlled continual explosion just feet from your body (i.e. the internal combustion engine in a car). You know how many people those kill every year in spontaneous catastrophic failure, with hundreds of millions in daily use (awful things, they clearly must be banned!).
The nuclear power station for a whole region is analagous to the internal combustion engine for the person, just as nuclear weapons are analogous to personal firearms. Yeah, it's dangerous, if it's made or maintained by an incompetent, or the owner insists on running it without proper maintenance. Yeah, it sounds dangerous if you describe it in terms of what can go wrong. But that doesn't mean it's actually more dangerous than other things.
Any big power source kills lots of people when it goes wrong. Think of dams bursting or coal-mine explosions.
Chernobyl? The world's experts knew it was unsafe. A good argument to listen to your mechanic, and not your pocketbook.
Three Mile Island? Far from a disaster, that was a little hiccup in the early days of nuclear power that lead to even greater modern-day safety.
Compare that to all the people that have died over the years from coal-dust explosions and being burned by petroleum products. And nuclear power becomes better understood and safer with every passing year.
And the rewards... !
If fission power plants were developed to their potential, electricity would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering except for industrial uses. Aluminum would become cheaper than wood, cheaper than good garden dirt. Coal would be left in the ground and nobody would just burn oil. That haze in the sky, whether you're too accustomed to it to notice it or not, would be a thing of the past, as would smog and acid rain.
That's the kind of cheap energy we need to make things like space travel affordable. By the end of the 1960's we had adequate rocket technology for space colonization, if only it was mass-produced with cheap energy and we used small onboard reactors on spacecraft instead of trying to carry up huge amounts of chemical fuel, both for our machines and ourselves.
The only possible justification for not using fission power is the expectation that fusion power will become available shortly. We've pretty much put our civilization on hold waiting that development. Compare the changes in the first 70 years of the 20th century to the latter 30 years: we went from "Bigger, Better, More" to "Smaller, Cheaper, More Efficient." Car and house prices stopped going down, consumer goods became less substantial. We didn't get smarter, we regulated away progress in energy production so this is the only progress we can still have!
but for a company to trade it over the Internet is just asking for trouble! With the trend of backdoor penetrations into ecommerce by hackers over the last few years, I doubt any online site is truly safe from a determined and persistent hacker. And uranium could be a big prize for the right person.
They're finding a buyer over the internet. That's all.
Would it have made you happier if they they did it over the telephone, or with smoke signals?
They will still be meeting with the buyer in real life and going through all the security protocols necessary to transfer the fuel (moving uranium is hardly a simple matter of tossing it on a truck and sending it off). It's not like they're FedExing the package to anyone whose credit card clears.
The internet sale doesn't add the least bit of risk, it's just a natural use of the most efficient mode of communication we have.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think that the thing about waveform is about being able to prove that what came out is what went in. If you drive a car in one end of a mile-long railgun (at 55MPH) and, one second later, a smpking blob of molten metal pops out the other end (again, at 55MPH) , you can try to argue that the car went through the tunnel at 3600MPH. Other people might seriously question the claim.
It's more like driving a 12 foot car through a mile-long railgun, with 3 feet of the car sticking out the far side at the instant that 4 feet of the car have entered the near side.
It might even be like the above scenario, but with 5 feet of the car sticking out the far side at the instant that 4 feet have entered.
Yeah, it's that weird, if you view it as the same pulse/car coming out the far side.
On the other hand, try imagining that the car has an incredibly thin, stiff wire which has the car's plans magnetically encoded on it sticking out the front of it for miles (but which is not visible to the human eye), and the car drives into a car factory. An identical (except for having a shorter wire) car comes driving out the far side just as the car proper enters the near side. So it looks to our eyes as if the car has driven through very fast, or even been stretched or transported in time, but it has only actually been copied from the information on its leading wire. This is both easily understandable and a more accurate analogy.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I thought the point was simply that quantum particles had a nonzero probability of crossing potential barriers that classical particles could not. Is there more to tunneling?
I think the idea is that tunneling takes no time (or at least less time than it takes for a photon to move that far), though the particle is translated in space, resulting in FTL movement of the particle. If the particle can be induced to tunnel a significant portion of the distance it has to travel, it can come to have travelled the distance faster than a photon could have moved through space by its normal means of propagation.
This is not the same thing as "teleportation" through quantum entanglement, which, as you know, involves sending data without the particles themselves.
I have no idea whether it's sensible or not.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
So the thing is acting a little like a LASER, only without a net amplification of the signal, sucking back the energy it gives to the output pulse from the input pulse.
Rather than actually somehow weirdly having precognition of the coming wave, the medium amplifies the leading edge of the pulse with its own energy, creating energy "holes" where it was taken, which collapse in reverse-order and suck away the energy of the rest of the incoming pulse, with the appearance of a backwards wave motion. The interaction of the pulse, the amplification, and the energy holes creates a pulse that very closely matches the shape of the center of the pulse nearer to the leading edge of the pulse, but the leading edge of the pulse isn't transmitted any faster than the speed of light, and the output pulse is different from the input pulse in that its leading edge is closer back to the highest point of the pulse, so it lacks the precursor that would allow the bulk of the output signal to be shifted forward as far second time, so the apparent FTL speed (to a device which can only detect the peak of the pulse) should drop off the longer the "wire" is.
The backward energy-sink "wave" is not truly a chain-of-events wave at all, like sound, but is merely a sequence of disconnected events that occur in wave-like fashion WRT their positions and timing, and is therefore not bounded by the speed of light (just as the area illuminated by a flashlight, or the point at which the blades of a closing pair of scissors meet, can theoretically be moved faster than the speed of light).
That's pretty funky. I can definitely see uses for it, if that's what it does.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Vibration is indeed useful, I never meant to dispute that. However, I still think a pin grid array would be more useful (provided it had high-enough resolution).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I've got a million of these moderately good ideas. If I spent my time trying to patent them, I wouldn't have any to develop my truly brilliant ideas, like safemode, Kiddie Script, and Kill All Humans. Not to mention such important things as posting on/.
<g>
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The problem with mice is that you've always had to execute fine motor control with no tactile feedback. It takes too much concentration and slows everything down. When you can feel a button, it will be much easier.
But vibration is not the ideal way to do it. What would be perfect is instead of the buttons, have a small pin-grid array (like those toys you can press your hand or face onto and they'll retain the contours on the other side) connected to electromagnetic actuators to create a small textured area so you can really feel fine details (especially edges) with your fingertips.
Of course, that would be much more expensive, but would greatly improve the usability of GUIs.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It'll be hard to make a living in a field dominated by people who were actually there and make historical records as a hobby.
Computer people are just like that. They type all day, keep an eye on the developments around them, and have good memories, so it's no big deal for them to sit down one day and type up the highlights of all the developments they have seen (within a narrow focus) in the last 20 years of their career.
I'd as soon start a business based on creating a new desktop OS!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Of course not. But that's not the point: the original poster I was replying to implied that looking for sex on the 'net is a dirty, shameful, bad thing to do. I was actually taking a swipe at his puritanical leanings.
Morality is founded in practical concerns for the larger community.
Everyone using pornography instead of getting married and having real sex resulting in children (or, for that matter, doing anything sex-related except seeking and getting a child-producing marriage) would mean the downfall of a society. That's why it's considered immoral by many (not that they thought it out that way, but through darwinian survival of societies the ones with such "puritanical" morals are more likely to survive, and are thus quite common).
So, depending on how you look at the world, it can be considered a dirty, shameful, bad thing to do. It's a waste of effort and a misdirection of the reproductive drive that is harmful to one's self and to society.
That is, unless you consider misdirection of the reproductive drive and lowering of birth rates as good for society, and therefore moral.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
To celebrate the end of the karma freeze, I posted all the stupid crap with my account that I would normally post with an AC account because it shouldn't even start with a rating of "1".
My karma took a satisfying drop.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency,
No, the percentage that it skims is equal to the efficiency. The percentage that slips by, and doesn't get "skimmed" into work is the complement of the efficiency.
Don't ask how that slipped by me. I am a bear of very little brain.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
...and the Penguin will be driving a tank.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
[hands Shoeboy a chocolate-covered coffee bean]
Nice work, Princess.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Special interest groups and lobbyists have been around forever. TV hasn't.
Now, everybody watches a couple hours of TV every day, and you don't have a hope of getting elected unless you show up in their faces over and over. That takes big bucks.
Politicians didn't need that much money to get elected in the past. Before people learned to sit back and let all the information they need (or at least, all that they get) effortlessly flow into their brains from the TV, they actually sought out important information like politicians' platforms. Now they just listen to whatever's on the ads and in the news, so if a politician wants a chance in hell, he needs to take millions of dollars from wherever he can get it, whatever he has to do to get it.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It was the great game-developer compiler.
Not only was it a good optimizing compiler, but it had some really handy stuff for integrating with assembly routines.
For example, you could specify which arguments go in which registers, which registers would be modified by the operation, and where to expect the return result. The inline assembly stuff was also very handy.
As an added bonus, it came with WASM, so you didn't have to go out and buy TASM.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Are these stories really so urgent that they have to go up without even a spell check?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They are control freaks.
When they could get away with it (back in the NES days), they locked developers into contracts so they could only make NES games. Even now, I believe they don't allow straight ports to their platforms. If you want to bring one of your popular games to a Nintendo platform, you have to add at least one special Nintendo feature, so Nintendo can claim that their version is special and unique and worth paying for a second time even if you've already got the original.
They also insist on being "the family video game company", and not having any games that hurt that image. They will tell you that a feature of your game is unacceptable, and you must change it or you can't release. The guys at id Software had a terrible time getting Wolfenstein released for the SNES (I think it was the SNES). They demanded a bunch of goofy changes ("can you change the dogs to rats? It's wrong to shoot dogs.") and generally made a nuisance of themselves.
That kind of thing wasn't uncommon, either. They are a royal pain in the ass.
They'd have to completely change the way they work to even have a chance at getting their old developers back.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
DonkeyKong Word 2
...and you thought that stupid paperclip was annoying. Just wait until you have a giant ape constantly throwing barrels that roll along your lines of text to kill your cursor and delete your file if you don't hit the "jump" button just before it hits.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Your logic is quite flawed. It implies that any birth control is highly immoral -- and only the Catholic Church believes that.
Your semantics are quite weak. You treat morality as an absolute, as your chosen morality, whereas I am arguing the characteristics of a certain morality, and the reasons for it to have developed and survived.
You accuse others of logical error for disagreeing with your morality, without providing a logical basis for, or definition of, your morality. Had you defined your use of the word "morality" as the popular, if naive, belief that it is only morally wrong to cause harm to others knowingly or through willful negligence, I would have had no dispute with your conclusion (though I might have argued over your use of the word).
I covered the possibility that a morality may support the encouragement of a childless life. There's nothing wrong with my logic.
Furthermore, I do not even imply "that any birth control is highly immoral". I imply that general disincentives to mate are immoral. It can be entirely moral within in that context to have protected sex or non-productive sex-substitutes like "oral sex" with one's spouse. This is entirely in line with our modern society's best interests in encouraging stable marriages with few children (but not "no children", because that would quickly lead to extinction of those who follow the moral rules), for keeping the population stable and raising healthy and well-educated children.
Pornography arguably interferes with a stable marriage by allowing sexual pleasure that is not immediately associated with one's spouse, weakening the emotional bond that a monopoly on sexual pleasure creates. Furthermore, it displays non-marital sexual behavior as the focus of one's intense pleasure, and thus creates a positive association to non-marital sexual behavior. If society benefits from stable marriages, then pornography is harmful to society in this way (it may also have good effects to society, though, and the net morality may vary between types of pornography).
BTW, strict taboos about sex-related behavior, especially about sex substitutes, are hardly restricted to the Western world. Use of pornography is discouraged and hidden in many cultures. Since you characterized the belief in the immorality of pornography as puritanical, I continued this usage.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Javascript is evil. ECMAscript is just JavaScript.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/javascript-is-e vil.htmlJavascript is evil. ECMAscript is just JavaScript.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Standards are not the be-all and end-all of web compatibility.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Seriously, it's evil. It's a total betrayal of the browser by stealing away control the user should have and giving it to the web developer (when things like advertising put them at cross purposes). We shouldn't legitimize its use by including it "web standards", and any site that uses it shouldn't be called a real website, just another net-downloadable program.
Standards are only a good thing when they standardize on good behavior.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Nuclear power is something which is far too dangerous to tolerate even when it is under the most stringent of security at power plants,
Ughh. Yes, let's go back to using large animals and small piles of wood for our energy need. We can't tolerate dangerous things like a barely controlled continual explosion just feet from your body (i.e. the internal combustion engine in a car). You know how many people those kill every year in spontaneous catastrophic failure, with hundreds of millions in daily use (awful things, they clearly must be banned!).
The nuclear power station for a whole region is analagous to the internal combustion engine for the person, just as nuclear weapons are analogous to personal firearms. Yeah, it's dangerous, if it's made or maintained by an incompetent, or the owner insists on running it without proper maintenance. Yeah, it sounds dangerous if you describe it in terms of what can go wrong. But that doesn't mean it's actually more dangerous than other things.
Any big power source kills lots of people when it goes wrong. Think of dams bursting or coal-mine explosions.
Chernobyl? The world's experts knew it was unsafe. A good argument to listen to your mechanic, and not your pocketbook.
Three Mile Island? Far from a disaster, that was a little hiccup in the early days of nuclear power that lead to even greater modern-day safety.
Compare that to all the people that have died over the years from coal-dust explosions and being burned by petroleum products. And nuclear power becomes better understood and safer with every passing year.
And the rewards... !
If fission power plants were developed to their potential, electricity would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering except for industrial uses. Aluminum would become cheaper than wood, cheaper than good garden dirt. Coal would be left in the ground and nobody would just burn oil. That haze in the sky, whether you're too accustomed to it to notice it or not, would be a thing of the past, as would smog and acid rain.
That's the kind of cheap energy we need to make things like space travel affordable. By the end of the 1960's we had adequate rocket technology for space colonization, if only it was mass-produced with cheap energy and we used small onboard reactors on spacecraft instead of trying to carry up huge amounts of chemical fuel, both for our machines and ourselves.
The only possible justification for not using fission power is the expectation that fusion power will become available shortly. We've pretty much put our civilization on hold waiting that development. Compare the changes in the first 70 years of the 20th century to the latter 30 years: we went from "Bigger, Better, More" to "Smaller, Cheaper, More Efficient." Car and house prices stopped going down, consumer goods became less substantial. We didn't get smarter, we regulated away progress in energy production so this is the only progress we can still have!
but for a company to trade it over the Internet is just asking for trouble! With the trend of backdoor penetrations into ecommerce by hackers over the last few years, I doubt any online site is truly safe from a determined and persistent hacker. And uranium could be a big prize for the right person.
They're finding a buyer over the internet. That's all.
Would it have made you happier if they they did it over the telephone, or with smoke signals?
They will still be meeting with the buyer in real life and going through all the security protocols necessary to transfer the fuel (moving uranium is hardly a simple matter of tossing it on a truck and sending it off). It's not like they're FedExing the package to anyone whose credit card clears.
The internet sale doesn't add the least bit of risk, it's just a natural use of the most efficient mode of communication we have.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think that the thing about waveform is about being able to prove that what came out is what went in. If you drive a car in one end of a mile-long railgun (at 55MPH) and, one second later, a smpking blob of molten metal pops out the other end (again, at 55MPH) , you can try to argue that the car went through the tunnel at 3600MPH. Other people might seriously question the claim.
It's more like driving a 12 foot car through a mile-long railgun, with 3 feet of the car sticking out the far side at the instant that 4 feet of the car have entered the near side.
It might even be like the above scenario, but with 5 feet of the car sticking out the far side at the instant that 4 feet have entered.
Yeah, it's that weird, if you view it as the same pulse/car coming out the far side.
On the other hand, try imagining that the car has an incredibly thin, stiff wire which has the car's plans magnetically encoded on it sticking out the front of it for miles (but which is not visible to the human eye), and the car drives into a car factory. An identical (except for having a shorter wire) car comes driving out the far side just as the car proper enters the near side. So it looks to our eyes as if the car has driven through very fast, or even been stretched or transported in time, but it has only actually been copied from the information on its leading wire. This is both easily understandable and a more accurate analogy.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I thought the point was simply that quantum particles had a nonzero probability of crossing potential barriers that classical particles could not. Is there more to tunneling?
I think the idea is that tunneling takes no time (or at least less time than it takes for a photon to move that far), though the particle is translated in space, resulting in FTL movement of the particle. If the particle can be induced to tunnel a significant portion of the distance it has to travel, it can come to have travelled the distance faster than a photon could have moved through space by its normal means of propagation.
This is not the same thing as "teleportation" through quantum entanglement, which, as you know, involves sending data without the particles themselves.
I have no idea whether it's sensible or not.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
So the thing is acting a little like a LASER, only without a net amplification of the signal, sucking back the energy it gives to the output pulse from the input pulse.
Rather than actually somehow weirdly having precognition of the coming wave, the medium amplifies the leading edge of the pulse with its own energy, creating energy "holes" where it was taken, which collapse in reverse-order and suck away the energy of the rest of the incoming pulse, with the appearance of a backwards wave motion. The interaction of the pulse, the amplification, and the energy holes creates a pulse that very closely matches the shape of the center of the pulse nearer to the leading edge of the pulse, but the leading edge of the pulse isn't transmitted any faster than the speed of light, and the output pulse is different from the input pulse in that its leading edge is closer back to the highest point of the pulse, so it lacks the precursor that would allow the bulk of the output signal to be shifted forward as far second time, so the apparent FTL speed (to a device which can only detect the peak of the pulse) should drop off the longer the "wire" is.
The backward energy-sink "wave" is not truly a chain-of-events wave at all, like sound, but is merely a sequence of disconnected events that occur in wave-like fashion WRT their positions and timing, and is therefore not bounded by the speed of light (just as the area illuminated by a flashlight, or the point at which the blades of a closing pair of scissors meet, can theoretically be moved faster than the speed of light).
That's pretty funky. I can definitely see uses for it, if that's what it does.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
This paper is about research like that.
Vibration is indeed useful, I never meant to dispute that. However, I still think a pin grid array would be more useful (provided it had high-enough resolution).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I've got a million of these moderately good ideas. If I spent my time trying to patent them, I wouldn't have any to develop my truly brilliant ideas, like safemode, Kiddie Script, and Kill All Humans. Not to mention such important things as posting on /.
<g>
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The problem with mice is that you've always had to execute fine motor control with no tactile feedback. It takes too much concentration and slows everything down. When you can feel a button, it will be much easier.
But vibration is not the ideal way to do it. What would be perfect is instead of the buttons, have a small pin-grid array (like those toys you can press your hand or face onto and they'll retain the contours on the other side) connected to electromagnetic actuators to create a small textured area so you can really feel fine details (especially edges) with your fingertips.
Of course, that would be much more expensive, but would greatly improve the usability of GUIs.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It'll be hard to make a living in a field dominated by people who were actually there and make historical records as a hobby.
Computer people are just like that. They type all day, keep an eye on the developments around them, and have good memories, so it's no big deal for them to sit down one day and type up the highlights of all the developments they have seen (within a narrow focus) in the last 20 years of their career.
I'd as soon start a business based on creating a new desktop OS!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Yeah, I prefer "his", too. But if you go around correcting all the singular "their"s out there, you won't have time for anything else.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Of course not. But that's not the point: the original poster I was replying to implied that looking for sex on the 'net is a dirty, shameful, bad thing to do. I was actually taking a swipe at his puritanical leanings.
Morality is founded in practical concerns for the larger community.
Everyone using pornography instead of getting married and having real sex resulting in children (or, for that matter, doing anything sex-related except seeking and getting a child-producing marriage) would mean the downfall of a society. That's why it's considered immoral by many (not that they thought it out that way, but through darwinian survival of societies the ones with such "puritanical" morals are more likely to survive, and are thus quite common).
So, depending on how you look at the world, it can be considered a dirty, shameful, bad thing to do. It's a waste of effort and a misdirection of the reproductive drive that is harmful to one's self and to society.
That is, unless you consider misdirection of the reproductive drive and lowering of birth rates as good for society, and therefore moral.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
And in any case, what's wrong with that? Evolution is very efficient at weeding out people who are not interested in sex.
I suspect it will also be efficient at weeding out people who are excessively interested in streams of numbers as substitutes for mates.
Can you honestly say that you think that people who search for "sex" on the internet actually have more sex in real life?
Of course, one might argue that driving down birth rates is a good thing...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I used to think you were funny.
Not when I posted anonymously, I imagine.
To celebrate the end of the karma freeze, I posted all the stupid crap with my account that I would normally post with an AC account because it shouldn't even start with a rating of "1".
My karma took a satisfying drop.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency,
No, the percentage that it skims is equal to the efficiency. The percentage that slips by, and doesn't get "skimmed" into work is the complement of the efficiency.
Don't ask how that slipped by me. I am a bear of very little brain.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.