I hear there are increasing numbers of people becoming dependent on tuning out the world and only listening to audio signals that are pleasing to their ears. This self-centered madness must stop, before we lose an entire generation to its own self-centredness! Please, for the sake of the children, donate what you can today!
I hear the FBI is using all of its resources to raid legislators' offices right now; I'm sure they'll get back to doing other things once the legislative branch is securely under the thumb of the Executive branch like it's supposed to be.
"Maybe we should delay starting the new oPod group until this thing is over".
oPod? Great, I can just see the commercial...
Dumpy White Guy: I'm a dick.
Buff Metrosexual: I'm an oPod.
Dick: My flexible hardware allows me to interface with software from all over the world.
oPod: That's kinda gross. My rigidly defined hardware is designed around the unique requirements of your software. And with my unique buttonless design, you will never again have to worry about whether you've turned me on - I'm ready to do what you want any time, anywhere, but only when you want me to.
DWG: I'm available in a variety of colors, and I am in fact more compact than you might think!
oPod: I come in only one color - shiny black. Cause, like, ya'know, once you go black....
Uh, yeah. I think I've laboured the point enough. I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with the Apple oPod.
I read about this in this morning's New York Times (here's a link to the on-line article.
I only bring this up because in the Times' article they have the following to say about pricing:
"The service will begin sometime this summer, with prices beginning at about $1 for some television programs and increasing to about the price of a DVD or video rental for full-length movies."
It still sounds pretty restrictive, but the $4-5 I'm guessing they mean ( ~ a Blockbuster rental) is at least close to a reasonable price. Anyone know what the actual pricing scheme is supposed to be?
"Large resolution photos"? Are you kidding? The only photos I could find on the site are small and grainy. I don't care if it's a hoax or the real thing - can't they find someone with a $50 digital camera to take a couple photographs of the hill? What is it with all the crackpot theorists who apparently can't even take a damn picture. Seriously - it's a fricking hill. This isn't the Loch Ness monster, it isn't Bigfoot, it doesn't go anywhere. Why can't the "official site" have even one decent photograph?
You have plenty of choice. A vote for a third candidate does not throw your vote away - even if that candidate is not elected, an increase in other party's showing sends a message to the incumbrents.
Unfortunately, that third candidate is most likely already paid for as well (or will be by the time they come anywhere close to an office).
The problem isn't the parties or the candidates (not specifically, anyway), it is the way campaigns are run and paid for.
I was trying to remember the first time I heard the "Deep Note", but couldn't. The only thing I could think of was "The Digital Experience" intro at the beginning of Jurassic Park (I think the first or at least one of the first movies released using DTS), but I don't think that was quite the same thing. Really cool though, and it was a great opening for the bone-rattling bass in that movie. Anyone know what the first thing the "Deep Note" was attached to?
I don't want nonsense (relative to the game world) about the president of the US, advertising for GLBT guilds, or anything else like that.
So; what sorts of guilds should be allowed to advertise?
If you don't want to deal with anything "like that", maybe you should stay away from MMOGs - because, you know, the whole point of an MMOG is to interact with a community of people, and some of those people might not be just like you. You are basically saying "everyone should want to play the game and interact with the community the way I want to". Maybe you should try single-player games? I hear Oblivion is good...
RTFM? Are you kiding me??? These are MAC people!! It's supposed to JUST WORK!
Seriously, though - this is what happens when a highly-publicized beta falls into the hands of people that probably shouldn't have access to it - one of the comments from the article illustrates the point nicely, I think:
"I don't want solutions that entail using the command line. I would like something from Apple saying that they recognize the problem and are working on it." (emphasis mine)
From what I understand, assuming you format the Windows partition as FAT rather than NTFS you can still access the Windows partition from OS X. Is the reverse not possible? If so, backups aren't a problem (in this case).
From the article: "I don't want solutions that entail using the command line. I would like something from Apple saying that they recognize the problem and are working on it."
Lol! I don't want to fix my problem, I want YOU to fix my problem!
I'm not surprised in the least by this. It is harder and harder to find anti-global warming facts not because there aren't any, but because people who know the facts are afraid to bring them to light.
Could this possibly be because there are neither "anti-global warming facts" nor "pro-global warming facts"? There are only facts (and data, but the two are rarely the same). Everything else is interpretation - but the vast majority of scientists who are actively working on interpreting the facts say that rapid climate change is indeed real, and human activity is probably at least partly to blame.
I don't care either way. I directly finance all the environmental causes I believe in through www.perc.org and that's the way we should be dealing with it. Drop the federal and public-taxpayer funded grants and let each individual focus on what they believe in.
I don't see how this would help in the least. Instead of having scientists with many different viewpoints vying for public funds, you would have many different groups with specific agendas producing research. How exactly is this supposed to help produce unbiased results?
The parent is a bit of a troll, but according to the article part of the regulatory problem was that the Chinese government didn't like the strong encryption RIM uses for communications (suggesting that part of the reason for the delay was in fact that the government wanted to be able to snoop more easily). Of course, this came from an "Ontario government source", so it could just be speculation.
1) Put up a sign reading "Don't go down this road, even if your GPS tells you to; Dangerous conditions ahead".
2) Stabilize the slope above and install a guard rail.
1) good idea - but they're going to also need to provide directions for an alternate route
2) This sounds like a rather remote, extremely lightly travelled route - it may not be economically feasible to install a guard rail and "stabilize the slope" (which could cost tens of thousands or millions of dollars). Sounds like it is just a back-country dirt road that wasn't designed for through traffic.
New Orleans wasn't really the result of climate change, alhtough it does offer a look at what might be expected if the current warming and increasing sea levels continue. NO flooding was the result of 150 years or more of land subsidence, mostly due to the dewatering and resulting decomposition and compaction of the extremely organic-rich Mississippi delta sediments the city was built on (currently a major problem in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta here in California, although mostly affecting agricultural areas). The more immediate cause was the design of and lack of improvement on the city's flood-protection system in the recent past. The only implications this carries for what we may see with global warming is the difficulty and expense of providing flood protection to cities already at or near sea level (which will become lower than sea level as sea level rises, never mind subsidence), and the potential for an increase in the number of severe weather events like hurricanes which push those flood protection systems to (or beyond) their limits.
Also, it illustrates how our "flood protection" systems can actually make matter worse. For example, due to the way water was channeled by the levy system in NO, marsh areas which acted as natural barriers to shield the coast from some of the energy of the storm surge associated with hurricanes, were starved for sediment for a long period of time and subsided well below sea level, destorying their effectiveness.
So, while NO does provide some lessons for what we may see with global climate change, it is perhaps more apt to consider it an example of engineering ourselves into a corner - something the US Army Corps of Engineers is very good at (to be fair, it really isn't their fault - they developed plans and structures for flood control which have largely worked as planned, it is the regional and watershed management/planning that really failed - to quote Jeff Mount, a respected watershed planning scientist, "New Orleans has lost the battle with the inevitable...").
I didn't find the preview feature all that useful - I suppose it might be nice if you were on a slow connection and thus must be sparing in what you click on, but the fact is that most sites these days load just about as fast as the preview does anyway. Couple that with the fact that only a few of their links actually seem to come with the preview feature (are they in the process of creating the previews still? None of the sites when I searched for my name and only about a third of the sites when I searched for "Canadair Regional Jet" had previews).
And is it just me, or did Ask blatantly copy the look of Google? Seriously, compare the layout when you do a search. You get the logo in the exact same spot, the search entry in the same spot with nearly identical links above it (except ask.com has fewer), a colored horizontal bar that says "Web" for google and "Web Search" for ask.com, both giving you the number of results within the horizontal bar. They just look really, really similar - and since google has looked more or less the same for a long time, it appears that ask.com pretty much copied them.
Of course, with the regional jet search above (inspired by picking up a friend yesterday who came in on one, if you're wondering where I pulled that search out of) google reports 469,000 results and ask.com reports 32,900 (out of curiosity I just checked yahoo search - which, by the way, also looks nearly identical - and came up with 172,000 hits).
Wow, I hadn't used anything but google in a while. I hadn't realized all the major search engines seem to look pretty much identical these days (although MSN search does seem to have a somewhat unique look).
-- The teams get the GPS waypoints a few hours before the race. The waypoints are purposefully vague, so the robots have the choice of driving off a cliff (or into one) while still being within GPS parameters. This is supposed to prevent the race from reducing to "Who can follow GPS the best?" The Red Team had a group of what looked like 20 or 30 people who immediately sat down with the waypoints mapped out on satellite imagery, going through and adding waypoints of their own and adding speed commands for their robots. This seems to me to be a big violation of the spirit of the competition.
At first look I tended to agree with you, but after thinking about it for a little while I think the Red Team's strategy actually made a lot of sense for the ostensible goal of the competition. Assuming the purpose of the competition is to develop a system of autonomous supply vehicles for the military, extensive route planning would probably go into any actual operation. Theoretically you would have good imagery of the entire area already, along with intelligence on major obstacles - such as "this bridge is out", or "this road is completely unpassable because of bomb damage". The operator would then plan a fairly detailed route based on the best current intelligence. The whole obstacle detection and avoidance is the real kicker in this scenario - you already basically have a route planned, which you send your convoys along, but you can never be sure that some hazard (disabled vehicle, fallen tree, what have you) hasn't obstructed part of the route. The point isn't to develop a system that can find its own route, it is to develop a system that follows a pre-set route but with enough autonomy to avoid obstacles on the way. While it is a lot of work for the Red Team to prepare for the course, you would only have to do that once, then send however many vehicles you need along that one path.
On the other hand, Stanford's effort would achieve the same ends without as much planning - a more elegant solution. My point is simply that the Red Team's approach does make sense in terms of the goals of the challenge, and I would hardly call it cheating (though the apparent complexity of their system compared to Stanford's does seem to be a strike against them). That said, Stanley was much cooler:)
Something that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!
Seriously though, I'd been hoping someone would be putting together something like this (though I'd been expecting it form Discovery or TLC - yay for public television). Fortunately, it is available online for those of us who missed it.
They were referring to drives with the 1.8" form factor of the Samsung flash drive. The largest drive in this form factor I found in a quickie goole search was actually 60 GB, so 80 GB is probably reasonable. I'm not sure what 1.8" drives are used in - most notebook drives are 2.5" (and are significantly cheaper and offer much larger capacities).
Slashdot Mirror
I hear there are increasing numbers of people becoming dependent on tuning out the world and only listening to audio signals that are pleasing to their ears. This self-centered madness must stop, before we lose an entire generation to its own self-centredness! Please, for the sake of the children, donate what you can today!
I live in California, so I'm pretty sure my PBS station is pwned by the state.
I hear the FBI is using all of its resources to raid legislators' offices right now; I'm sure they'll get back to doing other things once the legislative branch is securely under the thumb of the Executive branch like it's supposed to be.
oPod? Great, I can just see the commercial...
Dumpy White Guy: I'm a dick.
Buff Metrosexual: I'm an oPod.
Dick: My flexible hardware allows me to interface with software from all over the world.
oPod: That's kinda gross. My rigidly defined hardware is designed around the unique requirements of your software. And with my unique buttonless design, you will never again have to worry about whether you've turned me on - I'm ready to do what you want any time, anywhere, but only when you want me to.
DWG: I'm available in a variety of colors, and I am in fact more compact than you might think!
oPod: I come in only one color - shiny black. Cause, like, ya'know, once you go black....
Uh, yeah. I think I've laboured the point enough. I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with the Apple oPod.
I only bring this up because in the Times' article they have the following to say about pricing:
It still sounds pretty restrictive, but the $4-5 I'm guessing they mean ( ~ a Blockbuster rental) is at least close to a reasonable price. Anyone know what the actual pricing scheme is supposed to be?
"Large resolution photos"? Are you kidding? The only photos I could find on the site are small and grainy. I don't care if it's a hoax or the real thing - can't they find someone with a $50 digital camera to take a couple photographs of the hill? What is it with all the crackpot theorists who apparently can't even take a damn picture. Seriously - it's a fricking hill. This isn't the Loch Ness monster, it isn't Bigfoot, it doesn't go anywhere. Why can't the "official site" have even one decent photograph?
Yup, it's inauthentic.
The mindless and meaningless jobs that they hold down working for a multinational corporation.
;)
Because we all know that multinationals have a monopoly on mindless and meaningless make-work
Holy shit, corporations are looking to tap into the desire to escape from the daily workplace? Somebody tell Nintendo!
You have plenty of choice. A vote for a third candidate does not throw your vote away - even if that candidate is not elected, an increase in other party's showing sends a message to the incumbrents.
Unfortunately, that third candidate is most likely already paid for as well (or will be by the time they come anywhere close to an office).
The problem isn't the parties or the candidates (not specifically, anyway), it is the way campaigns are run and paid for.
I meant which movie or trailer - which I should have gotten from the "article" (Return of the Jedi).
I was trying to remember the first time I heard the "Deep Note", but couldn't. The only thing I could think of was "The Digital Experience" intro at the beginning of Jurassic Park (I think the first or at least one of the first movies released using DTS), but I don't think that was quite the same thing. Really cool though, and it was a great opening for the bone-rattling bass in that movie. Anyone know what the first thing the "Deep Note" was attached to?
I don't want nonsense (relative to the game world) about the president of the US, advertising for GLBT guilds, or anything else like that.
So; what sorts of guilds should be allowed to advertise?
If you don't want to deal with anything "like that", maybe you should stay away from MMOGs - because, you know, the whole point of an MMOG is to interact with a community of people, and some of those people might not be just like you. You are basically saying "everyone should want to play the game and interact with the community the way I want to". Maybe you should try single-player games? I hear Oblivion is good...
RTFM? Are you kiding me??? These are MAC people!! It's supposed to JUST WORK!
Seriously, though - this is what happens when a highly-publicized beta falls into the hands of people that probably shouldn't have access to it - one of the comments from the article illustrates the point nicely, I think:
"I don't want solutions that entail using the command line. I would like something from Apple saying that they recognize the problem and are working on it." (emphasis mine)
WTF?
From the article:
"I don't want solutions that entail using the command line. I would like something from Apple saying that they recognize the problem and are working on it."
Lol! I don't want to fix my problem, I want YOU to fix my problem!
Almost. Anyone know how to say "downloader" in Latin? How about "Beta-user"?
Could this possibly be because there are neither "anti-global warming facts" nor "pro-global warming facts"? There are only facts (and data, but the two are rarely the same). Everything else is interpretation - but the vast majority of scientists who are actively working on interpreting the facts say that rapid climate change is indeed real, and human activity is probably at least partly to blame.
I don't see how this would help in the least. Instead of having scientists with many different viewpoints vying for public funds, you would have many different groups with specific agendas producing research. How exactly is this supposed to help produce unbiased results?
The parent is a bit of a troll, but according to the article part of the regulatory problem was that the Chinese government didn't like the strong encryption RIM uses for communications (suggesting that part of the reason for the delay was in fact that the government wanted to be able to snoop more easily). Of course, this came from an "Ontario government source", so it could just be speculation.
2) Stabilize the slope above and install a guard rail.
1) good idea - but they're going to also need to provide directions for an alternate route
2) This sounds like a rather remote, extremely lightly travelled route - it may not be economically feasible to install a guard rail and "stabilize the slope" (which could cost tens of thousands or millions of dollars). Sounds like it is just a back-country dirt road that wasn't designed for through traffic.
New Orleans wasn't really the result of climate change, alhtough it does offer a look at what might be expected if the current warming and increasing sea levels continue. NO flooding was the result of 150 years or more of land subsidence, mostly due to the dewatering and resulting decomposition and compaction of the extremely organic-rich Mississippi delta sediments the city was built on (currently a major problem in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta here in California, although mostly affecting agricultural areas). The more immediate cause was the design of and lack of improvement on the city's flood-protection system in the recent past. The only implications this carries for what we may see with global warming is the difficulty and expense of providing flood protection to cities already at or near sea level (which will become lower than sea level as sea level rises, never mind subsidence), and the potential for an increase in the number of severe weather events like hurricanes which push those flood protection systems to (or beyond) their limits.
Also, it illustrates how our "flood protection" systems can actually make matter worse. For example, due to the way water was channeled by the levy system in NO, marsh areas which acted as natural barriers to shield the coast from some of the energy of the storm surge associated with hurricanes, were starved for sediment for a long period of time and subsided well below sea level, destorying their effectiveness.
So, while NO does provide some lessons for what we may see with global climate change, it is perhaps more apt to consider it an example of engineering ourselves into a corner - something the US Army Corps of Engineers is very good at (to be fair, it really isn't their fault - they developed plans and structures for flood control which have largely worked as planned, it is the regional and watershed management/planning that really failed - to quote Jeff Mount, a respected watershed planning scientist, "New Orleans has lost the battle with the inevitable...").
I didn't find the preview feature all that useful - I suppose it might be nice if you were on a slow connection and thus must be sparing in what you click on, but the fact is that most sites these days load just about as fast as the preview does anyway. Couple that with the fact that only a few of their links actually seem to come with the preview feature (are they in the process of creating the previews still? None of the sites when I searched for my name and only about a third of the sites when I searched for "Canadair Regional Jet" had previews).
And is it just me, or did Ask blatantly copy the look of Google? Seriously, compare the layout when you do a search. You get the logo in the exact same spot, the search entry in the same spot with nearly identical links above it (except ask.com has fewer), a colored horizontal bar that says "Web" for google and "Web Search" for ask.com, both giving you the number of results within the horizontal bar. They just look really, really similar - and since google has looked more or less the same for a long time, it appears that ask.com pretty much copied them.
Of course, with the regional jet search above (inspired by picking up a friend yesterday who came in on one, if you're wondering where I pulled that search out of) google reports 469,000 results and ask.com reports 32,900 (out of curiosity I just checked yahoo search - which, by the way, also looks nearly identical - and came up with 172,000 hits).
Wow, I hadn't used anything but google in a while. I hadn't realized all the major search engines seem to look pretty much identical these days (although MSN search does seem to have a somewhat unique look).
Hey, don't knock them, they're trying. Why, one day they may even provide email access to their agents!
At first look I tended to agree with you, but after thinking about it for a little while I think the Red Team's strategy actually made a lot of sense for the ostensible goal of the competition. Assuming the purpose of the competition is to develop a system of autonomous supply vehicles for the military, extensive route planning would probably go into any actual operation. Theoretically you would have good imagery of the entire area already, along with intelligence on major obstacles - such as "this bridge is out", or "this road is completely unpassable because of bomb damage". The operator would then plan a fairly detailed route based on the best current intelligence. The whole obstacle detection and avoidance is the real kicker in this scenario - you already basically have a route planned, which you send your convoys along, but you can never be sure that some hazard (disabled vehicle, fallen tree, what have you) hasn't obstructed part of the route. The point isn't to develop a system that can find its own route, it is to develop a system that follows a pre-set route but with enough autonomy to avoid obstacles on the way. While it is a lot of work for the Red Team to prepare for the course, you would only have to do that once, then send however many vehicles you need along that one path.
On the other hand, Stanford's effort would achieve the same ends without as much planning - a more elegant solution. My point is simply that the Red Team's approach does make sense in terms of the goals of the challenge, and I would hardly call it cheating (though the apparent complexity of their system compared to Stanford's does seem to be a strike against them). That said, Stanley was much cooler
Something that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!
Seriously though, I'd been hoping someone would be putting together something like this (though I'd been expecting it form Discovery or TLC - yay for public television). Fortunately, it is available online for those of us who missed it.
Duel Boot would be more fun. Whichever OS boots faster gets control of the system, and gets to "reclaim" the filespace occupied by the other.
They were referring to drives with the 1.8" form factor of the Samsung flash drive. The largest drive in this form factor I found in a quickie goole search was actually 60 GB, so 80 GB is probably reasonable. I'm not sure what 1.8" drives are used in - most notebook drives are 2.5" (and are significantly cheaper and offer much larger capacities).