The close vote is intentional. The leaders realize that this is a once in a generation opportunity to reform healthcare, so they're going to push that reform as far as they can. They could propose some really minor changes that everybody agrees with. They could propose some really radical changes that almost nobody agrees with. Or they could push the biggest change they could get without failing.
As for the party split, the Constitution does not entitle all political parties to equal happiness. In a time when reality has a liberal bias, the wishes of the electorate are reflected in the composition of the legislative bodies. Aside from their role in achieving a majority of votes in Congress, the Republicans are no more entitled to appeasement than are the Greens, Libertarians, or Communists.
Lasers have been used for many years to label regular manufactured objects like bottles and bumpers. I'm sure somebody wanted to laser label fruit sooner, but it took a while to get cheap and effective technology to identify and target every single fruit as thousands per minute pass on a conveyor. Natural objects have a bunch more variability than manufactured ones.
I've heard of developers making lasers that can shoot female mosquitoes in flight to stop reproduction and reduce the spread of malaria. I've also heard of researchers developing the ability to identify individual cancer cells floating through the bloodstream. If you could identify, target, and shoot cancer cells then you might help stop a cancer from metastasizing while the main tumor is attacked by conventional means. And if you could shrink the system into an implantable device, you might leave it as a sentry in a person with a history of cancer.
So the economic forces that lead to laser etching for fruits just might lead to applications you find less frivolous.
Don't give them any ideas. In the morning they'll plow a field with the exhaust tilled back into the dirt. In they afternoon they'll plow a field and release the exhaust into the air. Then they'll note that the air temperature was warmer in the afternoon and declare that exhaust tilling cures global warming.
I'm having a hard time following your logic. You seem to be saying that CO2 reduction is a wasted effort, because we'd spend at least as much energy converting CO2 to benign forms as we did from burning the fossil fuel in the first place.
But conservation of energy only holds in closed systems. My house is not a closed system, my car is not a closed system, and my body is not a closed system.
I could burn a log of wood, let the CO2 float up into the atmosphere, and in 10,000 years it might be absorbed by a growing tree in a peat bog. In the meantime, it'll warm the atmosphere a smidgen.
Or I could burn a log of wood, bubble the CO2 through an algae pond, and let them confine it to a bed of gunk at the bottom. Sure they need energy for that process, but they can use solar energy that I don't have the technology to use myself. So I personally could still come out ahead on the energy balance and simultaneously avert the atmospheric warming.
Or I could put the CO2 in a balloon and leave it as a problem for later. Maybe my great^N grandchildren could pop the balloon when the next ice age hits.
Of course burning diesel and then using the energy of combustion to synthesize diesel from the exhaust would be a waste of effort. But burning diesel and putting the exhaust in a place or a form that hurts me less needn't be a net loss of energy for me.
I want to know where this idea has come from that making music should make you a millionaire.
The ability to easily reproduce and distribute to a global audience.
There are only a few "the best" in any field. If you have access to the global best, why would you want anything your local best? Thus the money chases a limited number of stars, and as the audience expands globally, the stars get richer and richer.
Also, fame attracts fame. Especially when communication and publicity is global, a few acts will start rising and the feedback of fame will shoot them to the stars. This can concentrate attention and money on some acts, even when quality alone isn't enough to justify the focus.
This concentration on stars actually reduces the economic viability for all the smaller artists. It becomes like professional sports. A million kids want to be a star football player. Only a handful of them will ever make money at it, but because the dollar amounts are so huge it drives them all to work at it for free.
How would you solve this in the music industry? If you cut the money across the board, then you cut off the pipeline of struggling artists that produce the stars. If the local artists can't even make a little money moonlighting as musicians, then they'll have a hard time surviving long enough to get good and famous. And if there's not a chance of a big payoff, then they won't even try. Saying that an artist is unjustified in making $10 from an album just because it can be mass produced for less, means that any artist who's not already being mass produced never will.
Making music takes an incredible amount of time and effort. There has to be some economic incentive to make it happen or else the potential musicians will be too busy struggling with the other necessities of life. If you want to have thriving small-time musicians around the world, then ban the Internet, television, radio, and records.
It helps to realize that evolution works by modifying code, not output. You can imagine physiological development as a main program calling a bunch of functions, and each of those functions calling others many levels deep. The code is the genes. Toss in some function parameters (cell environment), global variables (hormones), and input (external environment, including the environment of gestation). Run it through quality control (gestation and childhood) and see how well the modified code does at making copies of itself (reproduction).
So you're not likely to get five-fold symmetry for one feature on a human. Such symmetry exists in other creatures, like starfish. But if a human's symmetry function mutated to five-fold, then it'd likely get applied to heads, hearts, and other parts as well as breasts; and that fetus probably wouldn't survive to birth, much less reproduction. Mutating a new symmetry function for just one body part would be hard to do without a bunch of intermediate and beneficial small steps.
Oh, by "infinite music" I thought they meant algorithmically generated music. Like this piece of music from the Metamath Music Page.
A golden age for that? Were there breakthroughs in artificial neural networks I hadn't heard of? Or have musical expectations fallen just that low?
I do wonder what would happen if you took the output from a random number generator to make a valid MP3 file and then played back that MP3 through an Autotuner.
I am baffled by this paragraph from the Apple review:
But in other areas the MacBook merely mimics Windows' offerings: media software offers little functionality that isnt available elsewhere, and Apple's office applications can't compete with even Microsoft Works.
Are they complaining that the Mac can do some things that Windows can do too? Are they ignoring nice features of iTunes like the Store, Genius, sharing, podcast subscriptions, and online radio?
And how exactly does iWork fail to compete with Microsoft Works? Keynote is great presentation software. Pages is a solid word processor / page layout application. And Numbers can do common spreadsheet stuff. (Although its chart capabilities are pretty useless, at least in the '08 version I use.)
this means that any hope of a "DS2" just got pushed back to at least 2011
This is a really minor upgrade. It's almost like a "speed bump" on a Macbook. I wouldn't see that as a sign that Apple wasn't going to release a new device in the next year.
Doesn't Nintendo keep selling the old console for a while after a new console is released? After all, that old console has an enormous library so there might still be some buyers left, or some fans needing to replace/duplicate/upgrade their old unit. So maybe this is the model that will remain in production for a couple years after the Nintendo TS is released in 201X.
What is it that makes a copper less likely to be distracted by a hand held device than you or me?
Experience. And maybe specific training.
I don't know how professionals deal with multiple radio calls, complex driving situations, and keeping an eye on their surroundings all at the same time. I have to turn my radio off in unfamiliar areas and ask my passengers to be quiet when approaching busy interchanges.
So I'll grant that emergency personnel, truck drivers, and cab drivers have more robust driving skills than me.
1) The numbers on that web page don't look like real data or even realistic data. A pilot earns $100 to $400? All certified flight instructors earn exactly $25? And no GIV CAPTAIN (whatever that is) earns less than $130,000 or more than $180,000?
2) The average they show is not median but mode, which is a crappy way to estimate what a member of a group will earn:
Ten guys earn $30,000 a year. One of them gets promoted into a special position with the same job title and earns $90,000. Wow, all those other guys just got a raise to $60,000! Then ten more guys get hired at $30,000. The average is still $60,000.
Median, unlike mode, can be a good average to use in discussing salaries. But I don't see a median salary listed for actual airline pilots on any of the sites cited in this discussion.
Firing the offender over an incident like this usually misses the real cause of the problem.
Maybe the radio system is designed in a way that makes it too easy to ignore - there's no special alert to say 'hey, buddy, this message is for YOU'.
Maybe the scheduling software is too complicated, counterintuitive, buggy, and slow, giving pilots a powerful motivation to spend a lot of time on the computer rather than flying. I fear that this effect will hit doctor's offices with the focus on electronic medical records.
Maybe the pilots weren't given enough training time for something so important as determining when, where, and with whom they will be working.
Maybe cockpits lack information, communications, and capabilities that pilots really need. And that's why they had personal laptops in the cockpit in the first place.
So my first reaction when an incident like this occurs is to ask what's wrong with the system that allowed and encouraged it to happen? Go after fixing that. The offenders probably require some sort of disciplinary action. But unless they're real morons who escaped detection for a long time, then their probably just average individuals for their profession who did what many other individuals are on the verge of doing every day. Firing them will just mean replacement with rookies who are even less skilled and experienced with the broken system.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only person making this kind of spelling mistake in an otherwise intelligent post.
I like to believe that written language is different than spoken language, and is in fact richer in content since many written words render to the same spoken sound. As a person who reads and writes more than he speaks, I'd expect that my brain could keep homonyms straight with ease. But then my fingers go and type a word that sounds like the word I was thinking but is spelled differently and has a totally different meaning.
For knows/nose, I could at least suppose that part of your brain was composing an ending to that sentence involving 'knowledge' and volunteered that spelling when another part of your brain settled on the 'nose will tell you' phrase.
What is this, digg? Cracked joke pages don't belong here.
So you're saying that an idea should rejected because of its source, regardless of the value of the idea itself?
I think the title of the Cracked article is indeed interesting: What would happen if the Internet disappeared? Many of the Slashdot commenters here are responding with insight and information. And many of the doctored photos are insightful themselves: garage sales and newspapers would regain importance, brick-and-mortar stores would regain power, and lonely people would stop meeting fabulous mates online.
Personally, I felt the need for something like the Internet when I was in high school (late 1980's in a town with 18,000 residents). I hated how hard it was to find information about local events. Or how you were limited to music played by your crappy local radio station or tiny college record shop. Magazines were gold mines of information for special interests like computers and rocketry because there were just not enough knowledgeable people locally. Mail order was as important for worldly and niche interests as much as online ordering is today.
Some commenters say that the Internet can't be uninvented. But what if it becomes subject to widespread censorship? Or pay-per-byte? Or 90% of Earth's population dies from a new plague and maintaining an open, high-speed digital network surpasses the survivors' capabilities and priorities.
I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly don't like to be perceived as stingy
Who's gonna know? In public, you have to deal with the cashier, your companions, and any other customers nearby. Online it'll all be handled by computers unless someone with permission specifically looks at your purchase. Otherwise they'll just track statistics of everybody's purchases.
It might be wise to post a scrolling list of recent purchases with real names. Pay the retail price and get the game anonymously. Or pay a lower price at the extra cost of a little publicity. Actually, you should have the option to be public if you pay more than retail so you can bask in your own generosity.
It's a shame that [unknown caveman] didn't have permanent paints or we would marvel at his landscapes from the last ice age. [Unknown Middle Ages musician] is really underrated just because there was no technology to record his performances. [Grainy, degrading silent film] had a wonderful story, brilliant actors, and a moving soundtrack; but it's hard to appreciate it with the blurred faces and death of the organist.
HIgher resolution alone won't make most games better. But the ability to maintain a higher framerate, more complex 3D models, and richer textures really could improve some existing Wii games and make some currently impractical ideas enjoyable.
Now, I just wish TFA actually gave a bit more information on the limit instead of just saying 10 quintillion times faster than todays computers.
Agreed. I'd like to see a performance factor that relates any real computer to the theoretical maximum.
I have toyed with defining such a factor myself. I was thinking of setting zero as the computational performance of ENIAC and 100 as the performance of the ultimate computer. Then any computer with performance between the two would be placed along a logarithmic scale. In addition to computational speed of the device, it would have to account of its mass/energy expenditure to keep the comparison balanced.
Then you could say "The new Mac Pro Dodecapod has a computational performance of 6.5". I wonder just how far we are along that scale. I think it would give new appreciation for how primitive our computer technology is compared to Nature's abilities.
(If somebody takes this idea and defines such a factor, you could do me the honor of calling it the Wagner factor.)
Twitter and Facebook will replace email just like email replaced the telephone. And the telephone replaced paper mail.
Seriously. We still use those older technologies for certain things. But some of the jobs they were asked to perform before have been reassigned to new tools.
Telephone was better than paper mail for conversations that needed lots of back-and-forth communication. Email was better than telephone for correspondence that was detailed yet not time-critical. Facebook is better than email for updates that will interest your friends if they have a spare moment but aren't worth bothering everybody in your address book or starting an accidental reply-all storm.
So I think the author is right that we've reached the end of the era when every communication task will get shoehorned into email. But email will continue to do what it's best at (and a few things it's not) for a long time to come.
Yeah, I think you'd still have to fast and purge with whatever unpleasant substance the colorectal surgeon chooses to torture you with. The actual colonoscopy isn't painful or anything since you're sedated, it's just a hassle needing a ride home and a break from mental responsibilities.
But wouldn't you also have to stick around a doctor's office while you wait for the robot to get into position? Or would the robot be controlled really remotely, like by a technician in India while you're walking around the grocery store? And wouldn't you have to restrict your diet while you waited for the robot to pass? And wouldn't you have to collect the robot for return/disposal after you've both done your business?
I have a hypothesis for how it might work. It's completely unsupported by any knowledge of reality, but the study hasn't passed peer review so we're on even footing.
Early 2008 - Epidemiologists make a guess for what flu variants will be common during the following winter.
Late 2008 - Many people get vaccinated for the upcoming seasonal flu.
Early 2009 - Seasonal flu peaks. It's not quite what was in the vaccine, but it's close enough that most of those vaccinated are protected. Many who weren't vaccinated get seasonal flu and become naturally immune to it. One of those people infected is also infected with a swine virus and those viruses combine into swine flu.
Mid 2009 - Swine flu begins circulating. People who had the previous seasonal flu already have antibodies that help with the swine flu. Those who were vaccinated for the previous seasonal flu have antibodies that are less accurate since the vaccine didn't perfectly match the circulating virus. Thus they are less protected from the swine flu.
Moral of the story - What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Avoiding getting almost killed once leaves you less prepared for a similar attack later. But it might still have been worth dodging the first bullet if that bullet had your name on it and instead you live to fight another day.
Oversensitive much? The article explains that researchers wanted to study the testosterone effect from sports. But physical activity itself raises testosterone, so they needed a sedentary form of competition and turned to videogames. The research doesn't remotely say that playing videogames makes you mean to people. It says that humans are mean to strangers and show restraint against non-strangers.
From the article, it doesn't sound like they specifically recruited guys who were already playing online games. They recruited students, and then assigned them to play a multiplayer videogame. And each team sat together within earshot of their opposition.
So I see no reason to dismiss the effect as a selection bias.
Agreed, Jaime, and just to be clear, the people reportedly looking at porn were NSF staffers, not scientists. The NSF administers funding for basic research, but doesn't conduct it directly. The work is usually done at universities.
And we all know that grad students stuck in the lab at 11:00 PM waiting for a run to finish never look at porn.
On an unrelated note, I had a habit of washing my hands immediately after using certain computers at school. You never know what "chemicals" might have gotten spilled on the keyboard. And I avoided looking at the browser history so I wouldn't accidentally discover some confidential intellectual property that my classmates were researching.
I love RPN and I have a HP 32 S II (~1994) that I treasure. I keep that at work and wanted another for home.
The closest I could find was an HP 35s which I hate. It requires scrolling just to see the exponent on anything but simple fractions. The STO button requires an extra shift and lacks a variable label. Common operations and constant are scattered irrationally around the keyboard.
Is there a modern calculator that can match the simple elegance of my HP 32 S II?
Slashdot Mirror
The close vote is intentional. The leaders realize that this is a once in a generation opportunity to reform healthcare, so they're going to push that reform as far as they can. They could propose some really minor changes that everybody agrees with. They could propose some really radical changes that almost nobody agrees with. Or they could push the biggest change they could get without failing.
As for the party split, the Constitution does not entitle all political parties to equal happiness. In a time when reality has a liberal bias, the wishes of the electorate are reflected in the composition of the legislative bodies. Aside from their role in achieving a majority of votes in Congress, the Republicans are no more entitled to appeasement than are the Greens, Libertarians, or Communists.
Lasers have been used for many years to label regular manufactured objects like bottles and bumpers. I'm sure somebody wanted to laser label fruit sooner, but it took a while to get cheap and effective technology to identify and target every single fruit as thousands per minute pass on a conveyor. Natural objects have a bunch more variability than manufactured ones.
I've heard of developers making lasers that can shoot female mosquitoes in flight to stop reproduction and reduce the spread of malaria. I've also heard of researchers developing the ability to identify individual cancer cells floating through the bloodstream. If you could identify, target, and shoot cancer cells then you might help stop a cancer from metastasizing while the main tumor is attacked by conventional means. And if you could shrink the system into an implantable device, you might leave it as a sentry in a person with a history of cancer.
So the economic forces that lead to laser etching for fruits just might lead to applications you find less frivolous.
Don't give them any ideas. In the morning they'll plow a field with the exhaust tilled back into the dirt. In they afternoon they'll plow a field and release the exhaust into the air. Then they'll note that the air temperature was warmer in the afternoon and declare that exhaust tilling cures global warming.
I'm having a hard time following your logic. You seem to be saying that CO2 reduction is a wasted effort, because we'd spend at least as much energy converting CO2 to benign forms as we did from burning the fossil fuel in the first place.
But conservation of energy only holds in closed systems. My house is not a closed system, my car is not a closed system, and my body is not a closed system.
I could burn a log of wood, let the CO2 float up into the atmosphere, and in 10,000 years it might be absorbed by a growing tree in a peat bog. In the meantime, it'll warm the atmosphere a smidgen.
Or I could burn a log of wood, bubble the CO2 through an algae pond, and let them confine it to a bed of gunk at the bottom. Sure they need energy for that process, but they can use solar energy that I don't have the technology to use myself. So I personally could still come out ahead on the energy balance and simultaneously avert the atmospheric warming.
Or I could put the CO2 in a balloon and leave it as a problem for later. Maybe my great^N grandchildren could pop the balloon when the next ice age hits.
Of course burning diesel and then using the energy of combustion to synthesize diesel from the exhaust would be a waste of effort. But burning diesel and putting the exhaust in a place or a form that hurts me less needn't be a net loss of energy for me.
The ability to easily reproduce and distribute to a global audience.
There are only a few "the best" in any field. If you have access to the global best, why would you want anything your local best? Thus the money chases a limited number of stars, and as the audience expands globally, the stars get richer and richer.
Also, fame attracts fame. Especially when communication and publicity is global, a few acts will start rising and the feedback of fame will shoot them to the stars. This can concentrate attention and money on some acts, even when quality alone isn't enough to justify the focus.
This concentration on stars actually reduces the economic viability for all the smaller artists. It becomes like professional sports. A million kids want to be a star football player. Only a handful of them will ever make money at it, but because the dollar amounts are so huge it drives them all to work at it for free.
How would you solve this in the music industry? If you cut the money across the board, then you cut off the pipeline of struggling artists that produce the stars. If the local artists can't even make a little money moonlighting as musicians, then they'll have a hard time surviving long enough to get good and famous. And if there's not a chance of a big payoff, then they won't even try. Saying that an artist is unjustified in making $10 from an album just because it can be mass produced for less, means that any artist who's not already being mass produced never will.
Making music takes an incredible amount of time and effort. There has to be some economic incentive to make it happen or else the potential musicians will be too busy struggling with the other necessities of life. If you want to have thriving small-time musicians around the world, then ban the Internet, television, radio, and records.
It helps to realize that evolution works by modifying code, not output. You can imagine physiological development as a main program calling a bunch of functions, and each of those functions calling others many levels deep. The code is the genes. Toss in some function parameters (cell environment), global variables (hormones), and input (external environment, including the environment of gestation). Run it through quality control (gestation and childhood) and see how well the modified code does at making copies of itself (reproduction).
So you're not likely to get five-fold symmetry for one feature on a human. Such symmetry exists in other creatures, like starfish. But if a human's symmetry function mutated to five-fold, then it'd likely get applied to heads, hearts, and other parts as well as breasts; and that fetus probably wouldn't survive to birth, much less reproduction. Mutating a new symmetry function for just one body part would be hard to do without a bunch of intermediate and beneficial small steps.
Oh, by "infinite music" I thought they meant algorithmically generated music. Like this piece of music from the Metamath Music Page.
A golden age for that? Were there breakthroughs in artificial neural networks I hadn't heard of? Or have musical expectations fallen just that low?
I do wonder what would happen if you took the output from a random number generator to make a valid MP3 file and then played back that MP3 through an Autotuner.
I am baffled by this paragraph from the Apple review:
Are they complaining that the Mac can do some things that Windows can do too? Are they ignoring nice features of iTunes like the Store, Genius, sharing, podcast subscriptions, and online radio?
And how exactly does iWork fail to compete with Microsoft Works? Keynote is great presentation software. Pages is a solid word processor / page layout application. And Numbers can do common spreadsheet stuff. (Although its chart capabilities are pretty useless, at least in the '08 version I use.)
Nice analysis, but I wonder about one point:
This is a really minor upgrade. It's almost like a "speed bump" on a Macbook. I wouldn't see that as a sign that Apple wasn't going to release a new device in the next year.
Doesn't Nintendo keep selling the old console for a while after a new console is released? After all, that old console has an enormous library so there might still be some buyers left, or some fans needing to replace/duplicate/upgrade their old unit. So maybe this is the model that will remain in production for a couple years after the Nintendo TS is released in 201X.
Experience. And maybe specific training.
I don't know how professionals deal with multiple radio calls, complex driving situations, and keeping an eye on their surroundings all at the same time. I have to turn my radio off in unfamiliar areas and ask my passengers to be quiet when approaching busy interchanges.
So I'll grant that emergency personnel, truck drivers, and cab drivers have more robust driving skills than me.
1) The numbers on that web page don't look like real data or even realistic data. A pilot earns $100 to $400? All certified flight instructors earn exactly $25? And no GIV CAPTAIN (whatever that is) earns less than $130,000 or more than $180,000?
2) The average they show is not median but mode, which is a crappy way to estimate what a member of a group will earn:
Ten guys earn $30,000 a year. One of them gets promoted into a special position with the same job title and earns $90,000. Wow, all those other guys just got a raise to $60,000! Then ten more guys get hired at $30,000. The average is still $60,000.
Median, unlike mode, can be a good average to use in discussing salaries. But I don't see a median salary listed for actual airline pilots on any of the sites cited in this discussion.
Firing the offender over an incident like this usually misses the real cause of the problem.
Maybe the radio system is designed in a way that makes it too easy to ignore - there's no special alert to say 'hey, buddy, this message is for YOU'.
Maybe the scheduling software is too complicated, counterintuitive, buggy, and slow, giving pilots a powerful motivation to spend a lot of time on the computer rather than flying. I fear that this effect will hit doctor's offices with the focus on electronic medical records.
Maybe the pilots weren't given enough training time for something so important as determining when, where, and with whom they will be working.
Maybe cockpits lack information, communications, and capabilities that pilots really need. And that's why they had personal laptops in the cockpit in the first place.
So my first reaction when an incident like this occurs is to ask what's wrong with the system that allowed and encouraged it to happen? Go after fixing that. The offenders probably require some sort of disciplinary action. But unless they're real morons who escaped detection for a long time, then their probably just average individuals for their profession who did what many other individuals are on the verge of doing every day. Firing them will just mean replacement with rookies who are even less skilled and experienced with the broken system.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only person making this kind of spelling mistake in an otherwise intelligent post.
I like to believe that written language is different than spoken language, and is in fact richer in content since many written words render to the same spoken sound. As a person who reads and writes more than he speaks, I'd expect that my brain could keep homonyms straight with ease. But then my fingers go and type a word that sounds like the word I was thinking but is spelled differently and has a totally different meaning.
For knows/nose, I could at least suppose that part of your brain was composing an ending to that sentence involving 'knowledge' and volunteered that spelling when another part of your brain settled on the 'nose will tell you' phrase.
So you're saying that an idea should rejected because of its source, regardless of the value of the idea itself?
I think the title of the Cracked article is indeed interesting: What would happen if the Internet disappeared? Many of the Slashdot commenters here are responding with insight and information. And many of the doctored photos are insightful themselves: garage sales and newspapers would regain importance, brick-and-mortar stores would regain power, and lonely people would stop meeting fabulous mates online.
Personally, I felt the need for something like the Internet when I was in high school (late 1980's in a town with 18,000 residents). I hated how hard it was to find information about local events. Or how you were limited to music played by your crappy local radio station or tiny college record shop. Magazines were gold mines of information for special interests like computers and rocketry because there were just not enough knowledgeable people locally. Mail order was as important for worldly and niche interests as much as online ordering is today.
Some commenters say that the Internet can't be uninvented. But what if it becomes subject to widespread censorship? Or pay-per-byte? Or 90% of Earth's population dies from a new plague and maintaining an open, high-speed digital network surpasses the survivors' capabilities and priorities.
Also: It's funny. Laugh.
Who's gonna know? In public, you have to deal with the cashier, your companions, and any other customers nearby. Online it'll all be handled by computers unless someone with permission specifically looks at your purchase. Otherwise they'll just track statistics of everybody's purchases.
It might be wise to post a scrolling list of recent purchases with real names. Pay the retail price and get the game anonymously. Or pay a lower price at the extra cost of a little publicity. Actually, you should have the option to be public if you pay more than retail so you can bask in your own generosity.
It's a shame that [unknown caveman] didn't have permanent paints or we would marvel at his landscapes from the last ice age. [Unknown Middle Ages musician] is really underrated just because there was no technology to record his performances. [Grainy, degrading silent film] had a wonderful story, brilliant actors, and a moving soundtrack; but it's hard to appreciate it with the blurred faces and death of the organist.
HIgher resolution alone won't make most games better. But the ability to maintain a higher framerate, more complex 3D models, and richer textures really could improve some existing Wii games and make some currently impractical ideas enjoyable.
Agreed. I'd like to see a performance factor that relates any real computer to the theoretical maximum.
I have toyed with defining such a factor myself. I was thinking of setting zero as the computational performance of ENIAC and 100 as the performance of the ultimate computer. Then any computer with performance between the two would be placed along a logarithmic scale. In addition to computational speed of the device, it would have to account of its mass/energy expenditure to keep the comparison balanced.
Then you could say "The new Mac Pro Dodecapod has a computational performance of 6.5". I wonder just how far we are along that scale. I think it would give new appreciation for how primitive our computer technology is compared to Nature's abilities.
(If somebody takes this idea and defines such a factor, you could do me the honor of calling it the Wagner factor.)
Twitter and Facebook will replace email just like email replaced the telephone. And the telephone replaced paper mail.
Seriously. We still use those older technologies for certain things. But some of the jobs they were asked to perform before have been reassigned to new tools.
Telephone was better than paper mail for conversations that needed lots of back-and-forth communication. Email was better than telephone for correspondence that was detailed yet not time-critical. Facebook is better than email for updates that will interest your friends if they have a spare moment but aren't worth bothering everybody in your address book or starting an accidental reply-all storm.
So I think the author is right that we've reached the end of the era when every communication task will get shoehorned into email. But email will continue to do what it's best at (and a few things it's not) for a long time to come.
Yeah, I think you'd still have to fast and purge with whatever unpleasant substance the colorectal surgeon chooses to torture you with. The actual colonoscopy isn't painful or anything since you're sedated, it's just a hassle needing a ride home and a break from mental responsibilities.
But wouldn't you also have to stick around a doctor's office while you wait for the robot to get into position? Or would the robot be controlled really remotely, like by a technician in India while you're walking around the grocery store? And wouldn't you have to restrict your diet while you waited for the robot to pass? And wouldn't you have to collect the robot for return/disposal after you've both done your business?
I have a hypothesis for how it might work. It's completely unsupported by any knowledge of reality, but the study hasn't passed peer review so we're on even footing.
Early 2008 - Epidemiologists make a guess for what flu variants will be common during the following winter.
Late 2008 - Many people get vaccinated for the upcoming seasonal flu.
Early 2009 - Seasonal flu peaks. It's not quite what was in the vaccine, but it's close enough that most of those vaccinated are protected. Many who weren't vaccinated get seasonal flu and become naturally immune to it. One of those people infected is also infected with a swine virus and those viruses combine into swine flu.
Mid 2009 - Swine flu begins circulating. People who had the previous seasonal flu already have antibodies that help with the swine flu. Those who were vaccinated for the previous seasonal flu have antibodies that are less accurate since the vaccine didn't perfectly match the circulating virus. Thus they are less protected from the swine flu.
Moral of the story - What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Avoiding getting almost killed once leaves you less prepared for a similar attack later. But it might still have been worth dodging the first bullet if that bullet had your name on it and instead you live to fight another day.
Oversensitive much? The article explains that researchers wanted to study the testosterone effect from sports. But physical activity itself raises testosterone, so they needed a sedentary form of competition and turned to videogames. The research doesn't remotely say that playing videogames makes you mean to people. It says that humans are mean to strangers and show restraint against non-strangers.
From the article, it doesn't sound like they specifically recruited guys who were already playing online games. They recruited students, and then assigned them to play a multiplayer videogame. And each team sat together within earshot of their opposition.
So I see no reason to dismiss the effect as a selection bias.
And we all know that grad students stuck in the lab at 11:00 PM waiting for a run to finish never look at porn.
On an unrelated note, I had a habit of washing my hands immediately after using certain computers at school. You never know what "chemicals" might have gotten spilled on the keyboard. And I avoided looking at the browser history so I wouldn't accidentally discover some confidential intellectual property that my classmates were researching.
But it's not cheap plastic. It's genuine authentic 100% imported faux space-age thermopolymers!
I love RPN and I have a HP 32 S II (~1994) that I treasure. I keep that at work and wanted another for home.
The closest I could find was an HP 35s which I hate. It requires scrolling just to see the exponent on anything but simple fractions. The STO button requires an extra shift and lacks a variable label. Common operations and constant are scattered irrationally around the keyboard.
Is there a modern calculator that can match the simple elegance of my HP 32 S II?