Three agricultural scientists were determined to discover how much a pig could eat before it just had to take a shit. To this end they procured a Yorkshire sow and pushed a large cork into her butt.
After six weeks of force feeding, the sow was the size of the Goodyear airship and threatening to burst. Being humane types, the scientists agreed that the cork must now be removed.
No-one wished to volunteer for the job, however, so in true scientific tradition, they decided to train a monkey for the task and swiftly put a small gibbon through a crash course in cork-pulling.
The day came and the pig was air-lifted out to the desert for safety's sake. Special equipment was set up to monitor the event. Picture the scene: In the middle of the desert, the pig. Behind the pig, the monkey. One mile behind him, the first scientists with a video camera. One mile behind that scientist are the other two scientists with a seismometer. Finally, the monkey reaches up and pulls out the cork. SPLAT!
When the massive geyser has subsided, the two scientists find themselves knee-deep in pigshit. Grabbing shovels they wade forward and dig out the first man who has been buried up to his neck. When they free him they find that he is laughing hysterically.
"What's so funny?" they ask.
"You should have seen the monkey trying to get the cork back in!"
Tassach said:
Hell, *I* am over 35, have lived in the US all my life, and have never been charged with any crime more serious than driving 20mph over the speed limit. I'll wager a week's pay that my knowledge of the Constitution is at least as good as Badnarik's. Therefore, by your standards, I'm as qualified to be President as he is. Vote for Me!
Wager accepted.
Mr. Badnarik has been running for election to a couple different offices since 2000, FYI.
Mr. Badnarik is reported to have been studying the US constitution for 22+ years.
Mr. Badnarik teaches an 8 hour class on the constitution, which just happens to be available online
Please extend any sort of documentation re: relevant experience re: your knowledge of the constitution. I'm willing to bet a week's pay that you're talking out of your ass and probably haven't read the constituion outside of high school, let alone any sort of in depth study on the topic.:)
Otherwise, drop me an email for my mailing address, i'd be happy to accept payment in the form of cashiers check. I'd readily accept paypal as well, a "pay me" link should be available from my website....
Bah, dates were off a month. I knew our quarterly trip to vegas was during the WSOP, but I didn't remember it was at the tail-end. Its been too long since I was involved in the planning of a vegas trip, now I just roll when i'm told to roll and play where I'm told to play. Thats the great part about having a team of friends who all play together...
Obviously (for those who followed my link to the WSOP schedule) won't be buying in to any WSOP tournements this weekend, instead will hopefully be dropping by the final table to take in the action, and then heading over to play at the normal limit tables.
The WSOP finals being in town should mean a great deal of dead money at the tables... should be some excellent action if anyone is around vegas and interested in checking it out.
I'm a big poker geek here
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm a big poker geek. I currently derive a statistically significant portion of my income from playing limit hold-em - the adoption of riverboat gambling and local card rooms with standing limit holdem games has made this possible, along with high-quality internet poker rooms such as UltimateBet.com. I've been building a bankroll for a little over two years and have the current goal of retiring from the day job to play poker full time within the next five years. The influx of interest in the game has made it very easy to win money at poker in a casino setting or online. Lots of people buy in to games that have no real idea what they're doing...
As the submitter mentions, poker (especially limit and no-limit hold'em) is a fantastic combination of skills including your ability to read people and math skills (especially your ability to calculate odds on the fly). It truly is a geek game, with many of the game's top players holding advanced degrees in mathematics, statistics, etc.
In fact, I'll be in Vegas starting this weekend to buy in to one of the $1500 tournaments which make up the World Series. Of course I have very little chance of winning, but I figured it was time to roll up a stake, head to vegas and take my shot!
Not a lot of people know there are 33 separate games making up the World Series, not just the grand $10k buy-in No Limit game you see televised on ESPN/etc. Speaking of which, with all the talk about it, it would have been nice for the submitter to include a link to the official WSOP website.
Required poker reading for those interested in getting dealt in:
CardPlayer.com. Poker news, tips and discussions. One of the best of the best. Includes a really good online odds calculator you can use to double check your own math:)
Doyle Brunson's Super System. Regarded by many as the bible on poker. Much of the information is outdated about specific games (the nature of the game has changed) but any respectable poker player knows this book.
PhilHellmuth.com. Phil is a poker geek himself, one of the best players around (and the youngest to win the world championship). His recent book on poker Play Poker Like the Pros is the best "intermediate" book around in my opinion.
PokerPages.com. Best place to find a game, be it a tournament or local game. Great source of poker news.
Which was the show that fans were raving about? I'm a BNL fan myself and would like to pick up one of these recordings, as much to show my approval of the technology offering as anything else...
Really depends on the quality of your home theater.
With just a high-def big screen, super DVD and good quality six-speaker DTS sound my viewing experience generally exceeds the presentation in your normal superplex. Surround yourself with four or five friends and you've got all the upsides of the theater without any of the downsides, with better presentation and sound quality.
And thats not to mention the guys with the Runco projector and 40k in speakers (i happen to work for such a guy). Their home theater experience beats anything the movie palaces can offer.
Not that I'm opposed to this getting re-released by any means. Just taking exception to "it's a heck of a lot better than watching it at home"
Handspring founders Jeff Hawkins--who invented the first Palm handheld--and former CEO Donna Dubinsky established Palm in 1992, and were the top names at Palm until they left in 1998 to start Handspring. Handspring became one the first outside companies to license Palm's operating system.
Reportadly, Hawkins and Dubinsky will become part of the new management of the combined company and are "expected to help lead the company toward its new goals". With the PalmSource software operation running on its own, Palm--now a hardware company--will focus on bolstering its brand and its market share in the handheld market.
Not every tire produced is a commercial tire for use on the highway.
If this technology can be used to create stickier rubber, it would probably first be applied to r-compound tires, i.e. racing slicks. For example, these Hoosier R3S03 tires that we run on our race car.
The behavior that you describe, your climbing shoes picking up sand/dirt is already typical behavior of existing track rubber - it also picks up small rocks, bits of rubber, small children or pets, etc...
If this technology pans out for tire use, you will probably see it in Formula One followed by trickle down in to less-advanced racing series followed by eventual trickle down to consumer r-compound tires.
Your (or your friend's) hypothesis is an interesting one...
However, I'm not positive, but having seen the movie twice already I'm pretty sure that Agent Smith / Bane is cutting his left hand with the knife held in his right hand - and he shakes Neo's hand with the non-cut right hand.
I understood it to be that he was interested in feeling the pain and seeing the blood, now that he was in the "real world".
I don't agree with the original poster that the sky is clouded just to keep humanity from knowing what year it is.
If anything, if this is a second-layer matrix, I assume the sky is clouded becuase humans expect it to be clouded from when they "darkened the skies" to try to defeat the machines.
Anyways, with my parent post I was just trying to clarify what the original poster was saying, as Miracle69 didn't follow the original poster...
> And I notice they have beautiful high-tech air-traffic control centers, but apparently no one in Zion's ever heard of a freakin' washing machine.
You missed a point - the air-traffic control centers were in a simulation (like the kung fu room in the original, etc). That's why they showed the controllers laying down plugged in to the chairs right before they showed them allowing the ship to enter Zion.
A second viewing tends to make these minor points visible...:)
A couple of vocal people on here share your misconception;)
The battle that they were talking about was humanity's counter attack at a network node. The counter attack failed (due to sabatoge by the agent-Smith-personna-embedded-in-a-human) and the Sentinals wiped out most of the counter attack. Once the counter attack had been wiped out, the Sentinals resumed digging for Zion
If humanity can't see the sky humanity can't calculate the positions of the stars. If humanity can't do that they cannot really tell what time or year it is - i.e. humanity doesn't know how much time has really passed and thus is kept in the dark about the hundred-year cycle
Simple - to force people to save the files and not just "stream" them. So a user who wants a file downloads it once, and generally won't need to download it a second time if they want to watch it again (thus saving potential bandwidth).
I run a website where I offer a number of videos for download and I routinely used to get a number of downloads of the same video from the same IP address, more than could be explained by proxy servers. Once I started zipping the files, a lot of that disappeared... enough to be statistically significant. Enough to make a difference in my bandwidth bill...
LoadStar said "Neither TiVo nor ReplayTV make a cable-compatible PVR with dual tuners."
Mine is.
My cable provider (which is also my phone provider and internet service provider) is a company called Everest, owned by a local utility company.
They offer a PVR that is integrated to the digital cable box, very similar to the DirectTV version.
There are most certainly downsides, as this is a first-gen box and has a lot of issues - UI issues, more than a few bugs in the implementation, no abibility to select recording quality, and more. However, the integration in to the cable service and the dual tuners mean I can record two digital cable channels at once, as originally requested by the parent poster.
{-- Yet Another Fanatical PVR user, despite all the problems in my system
I'd consider myself a hardcore tech, I race myself but I don't like NASCAR. I can barely tolerate it if they're running on a road course.
I understand and can even appreciate NASCAR... I just can't watch the go-straight-turn-left races for longer than 10 minutes without loosing interest. Give me ALMS or Formula One any day.:)
Completely agree re: "the weird dance between tech and mental, especially on an amateur scale". I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of "geeks" who are into (and involved in) the various forms and levels of racing.
I work for a financial institution, so security is paramount.
We found that we had serious security concerns with remote access.
We started using RSASecurID tokens for authentication (and a tie to a database for authorization). That worked well to secure remote access from company owned equiptment (where we could control the security, set standards for antivirus, etc), but left a major exposure:
Specifically, with a VPN we could secure the transmission, but couldn't verify the security of the end point. And a big value of remote access is the ability to let people work from home on their own gear (and the inherrent cost savings to the company).
So we have a multi-tier solution as follows:
All authorized users can use web services. We make available access to the email system, 3270 access to a mainframe, and some internal applications available to authorized and authenicated users over the internet (HTTPS). These web services have the advantage of being very low cost... almost zero incremental cost per user assuming they are not bandwidth intensive.
People with company-owned equiptment (laptops) can use dial-in services, which we provide through Cisco AS-5300's, with strong authentication provided by RSA SecurID. Costs a little to invest in the Cisco gear, and costs a little to support in house.
For those wanting VPN access, we found a company that could address our security concerns... a managed VPN provider called Positive Networks. Positive addresses our security concerns by providing the ability to enforce security policy on the end computer (such as X-brand Antivirus must be installed and running with up-to-date pattern files), as well as providing a managed service at a reasonable cost (its been more effective for us to outsource this big chunk of remote access, rather than staffing for supporting it internally).
I would strongly recommend Positive Networks as a remote access solution.
No affiliation other than a satisfied user (and I'm primarily responsible for our company selecting their product).
I live in Kansas City, and just about a month ago I got connected to this type of service, thanks to a local company called Everest that is owned by local utility company Aquila.
Things that make this service fantastic:
1) Price. No question. I consolodated my monthly phone bill (~$25) plus my monthly cable bill (~$75 for digital + two premium tiers) plus my high-speed internet bill (I was paying $125 for business-class DSL which was the only service provider with a static IP in my area) down to ~$100/month (in a single bill) to a single company
2) Services available. For $100/month I get 1.5 MB (256 kbps upstream) cable with a single static IP, digital cable with two premium tiers (I selected HBO and Skinimax), plus local phone service with $.10/minute long distance. Everest just released a new feature I'm interested in but haven't yet taken the plunge - integrated PVR service. For an extra $20/month you can get an upgraded box with 40gb HDD and Tivo-style PVR service.
3) Customer service. You can call their support number 24x7 and its answered immediately by a real person. Level-2 tech support people who know what they're doing.
4) Let me ditch a few companies I'm happy not to do business with: Time Warner Cable and Southwestern Bell (SBC).
All great stuff, in my opinion. This type of competition is just what these markets need, in my opinion... especially the cable TV market.
Slashdot Mirror
Direct link to "the interview
Three agricultural scientists were determined to discover how much a pig could eat before it just had to take a shit. To this end they procured a Yorkshire sow and pushed a large cork into her butt.
After six weeks of force feeding, the sow was the size of the Goodyear airship and threatening to burst. Being humane types, the scientists agreed that the cork must now be removed.
No-one wished to volunteer for the job, however, so in true scientific tradition, they decided to train a monkey for the task and swiftly put a small gibbon through a crash course in cork-pulling.
The day came and the pig was air-lifted out to the desert for safety's sake. Special equipment was set up to monitor the event. Picture the scene: In the middle of the desert, the pig. Behind the pig, the monkey. One mile behind him, the first scientists with a video camera. One mile behind that scientist are the other two scientists with a seismometer. Finally, the monkey reaches up and pulls out the cork. SPLAT!
When the massive geyser has subsided, the two scientists find themselves knee-deep in pigshit. Grabbing shovels they wade forward and dig out the first man who has been buried up to his neck. When they free him they find that he is laughing hysterically.
"What's so funny?" they ask.
"You should have seen the monkey trying to get the cork back in!"
Wager accepted.
Mr. Badnarik has been running for election to a couple different offices since 2000, FYI.
Mr. Badnarik is reported to have been studying the US constitution for 22+ years.
Mr. Badnarik teaches an 8 hour class on the constitution, which just happens to be available online
:)
/endPokeFun
You may also be interested in some wiki.
Please extend any sort of documentation re: relevant experience re: your knowledge of the constitution. I'm willing to bet a week's pay that you're talking out of your ass and probably haven't read the constituion outside of high school, let alone any sort of in depth study on the topic.
Otherwise, drop me an email for my mailing address, i'd be happy to accept payment in the form of cashiers check. I'd readily accept paypal as well, a "pay me" link should be available from my website....
Bah, dates were off a month. I knew our quarterly trip to vegas was during the WSOP, but I didn't remember it was at the tail-end. Its been too long since I was involved in the planning of a vegas trip, now I just roll when i'm told to roll and play where I'm told to play. Thats the great part about having a team of friends who all play together...
Obviously (for those who followed my link to the WSOP schedule) won't be buying in to any WSOP tournements this weekend, instead will hopefully be dropping by the final table to take in the action, and then heading over to play at the normal limit tables.
The WSOP finals being in town should mean a great deal of dead money at the tables... should be some excellent action if anyone is around vegas and interested in checking it out.
As the submitter mentions, poker (especially limit and no-limit hold'em) is a fantastic combination of skills including your ability to read people and math skills (especially your ability to calculate odds on the fly). It truly is a geek game, with many of the game's top players holding advanced degrees in mathematics, statistics, etc.
In fact, I'll be in Vegas starting this weekend to buy in to one of the $1500 tournaments which make up the World Series. Of course I have very little chance of winning, but I figured it was time to roll up a stake, head to vegas and take my shot!
Not a lot of people know there are 33 separate games making up the World Series, not just the grand $10k buy-in No Limit game you see televised on ESPN/etc. Speaking of which, with all the talk about it, it would have been nice for the submitter to include a link to the official WSOP website.
Required poker reading for those interested in getting dealt in:
CardPlayer.com. Poker news, tips and discussions. One of the best of the best. Includes a really good online odds calculator you can use to double check your own math :)
TwoPlusTwo.com. Website run by some of the smartest guys in gambling, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth. Sklansky has an excellent series of highly-technical poker books for every skill level, including Hold 'Em Poker, Hold'Em Poker for Advanced Players, Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, and The Theory of Poker.
Doyle Brunson's Super System. Regarded by many as the bible on poker. Much of the information is outdated about specific games (the nature of the game has changed) but any respectable poker player knows this book.
PhilHellmuth.com. Phil is a poker geek himself, one of the best players around (and the youngest to win the world championship). His recent book on poker Play Poker Like the Pros is the best "intermediate" book around in my opinion.
PokerPages.com. Best place to find a game, be it a tournament or local game. Great source of poker news.
There are also a great number of high quality poker blogs, including PokerBlog.com, GuinessAndPoker.com and ChrisHalverson.com.
Not to mention of course, the explosion of online poker sites, including UltimateBet.com,
Which was the show that fans were raving about? I'm a BNL fan myself and would like to pick up one of these recordings, as much to show my approval of the technology offering as anything else...
Really depends on the quality of your home theater.
With just a high-def big screen, super DVD and good quality six-speaker DTS sound my viewing experience generally exceeds the presentation in your normal superplex. Surround yourself with four or five friends and you've got all the upsides of the theater without any of the downsides, with better presentation and sound quality.
And thats not to mention the guys with the Runco projector and 40k in speakers (i happen to work for such a guy). Their home theater experience beats anything the movie palaces can offer.
Not that I'm opposed to this getting re-released by any means. Just taking exception to "it's a heck of a lot better than watching it at home"
If you approach an intersection, and see that the traffic lights in all directions are green, use your head and stop, because something's wrong.
/humor
Yeah, something's wrong like "I have suddenly developed x-ray vision and can see traffic lights facing all directions".
i just saw T3 last night.
;)
The quote was
"..it is processing at 60 teraflops a second"
too bad I wasn't in your theater, as I could have laughed at you...
The real question is, what happens if the Burninator attacks the travelator?
Oh, the humanity....
You are correct...
Handspring founders Jeff Hawkins--who invented the first Palm handheld--and former CEO Donna Dubinsky established Palm in 1992, and were the top names at Palm until they left in 1998 to start Handspring. Handspring became one the first outside companies to license Palm's operating system.
Reportadly, Hawkins and Dubinsky will become part of the new management of the combined company and are "expected to help lead the company toward its new goals". With the PalmSource software operation running on its own, Palm--now a hardware company--will focus on bolstering its brand and its market share in the handheld market.
Not every tire produced is a commercial tire for use on the highway.
If this technology can be used to create stickier rubber, it would probably first be applied to r-compound tires, i.e. racing slicks. For example, these Hoosier R3S03 tires that we run on our race car.
The behavior that you describe, your climbing shoes picking up sand/dirt is already typical behavior of existing track rubber - it also picks up small rocks, bits of rubber, small children or pets, etc...
If this technology pans out for tire use, you will probably see it in Formula One followed by trickle down in to less-advanced racing series followed by eventual trickle down to consumer r-compound tires.
Your (or your friend's) hypothesis is an interesting one...
However, I'm not positive, but having seen the movie twice already I'm pretty sure that Agent Smith / Bane is cutting his left hand with the knife held in his right hand - and he shakes Neo's hand with the non-cut right hand.
I understood it to be that he was interested in feeling the pain and seeing the blood, now that he was in the "real world".
No doubt.
I don't agree with the original poster that the sky is clouded just to keep humanity from knowing what year it is.
If anything, if this is a second-layer matrix, I assume the sky is clouded becuase humans expect it to be clouded from when they "darkened the skies" to try to defeat the machines.
Anyways, with my parent post I was just trying to clarify what the original poster was saying, as Miracle69 didn't follow the original poster...
> And I notice they have beautiful high-tech air-traffic control centers, but apparently no one in Zion's ever heard of a freakin' washing machine.
:)
You missed a point - the air-traffic control centers were in a simulation (like the kung fu room in the original, etc). That's why they showed the controllers laying down plugged in to the chairs right before they showed them allowing the ship to enter Zion.
A second viewing tends to make these minor points visible...
The machines haven't yet reached Zion.
;)
A couple of vocal people on here share your misconception
The battle that they were talking about was humanity's counter attack at a network node. The counter attack failed (due to sabatoge by the agent-Smith-personna-embedded-in-a-human) and the Sentinals wiped out most of the counter attack. Once the counter attack had been wiped out, the Sentinals resumed digging for Zion
By "they" the poster means humanity.
Read as: (emphasis mine):
If humanity can't see the sky humanity can't calculate the positions of the stars. If humanity can't do that they cannot really tell what time or year it is - i.e. humanity doesn't know how much time has really passed and thus is kept in the dark about the hundred-year cycle
Simple - to force people to save the files and not just "stream" them. So a user who wants a file downloads it once, and generally won't need to download it a second time if they want to watch it again (thus saving potential bandwidth).
I run a website where I offer a number of videos for download and I routinely used to get a number of downloads of the same video from the same IP address, more than could be explained by proxy servers. Once I started zipping the files, a lot of that disappeared... enough to be statistically significant. Enough to make a difference in my bandwidth bill...
Hi, you must be new here. Welcome to slashdot!
For the record, everything Microsoft does is bad. We protest everything they do. Well, protest is too strong of a word - mostly we just complain.
We like Apple, at least since OS-X.
oh, a sarcasm detector... that's a real useful invention
Mine is.
My cable provider (which is also my phone provider and internet service provider) is a company called Everest, owned by a local utility company.
They offer a PVR that is integrated to the digital cable box, very similar to the DirectTV version.
There are most certainly downsides, as this is a first-gen box and has a lot of issues - UI issues, more than a few bugs in the implementation, no abibility to select recording quality, and more. However, the integration in to the cable service and the dual tuners mean I can record two digital cable channels at once, as originally requested by the parent poster.
{-- Yet Another Fanatical PVR user, despite all the problems in my system
Since the mirror link in the archived slashdot story you posted is broken:
/ 09/www.slashdot.org/
Mirror of the slashdot hack, courtesy attrition.org:
http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/1998/09
Dyslexics of the world, untie !
I guess I fall into a third category.
:)
I'd consider myself a hardcore tech, I race myself but I don't like NASCAR. I can barely tolerate it if they're running on a road course.
I understand and can even appreciate NASCAR... I just can't watch the go-straight-turn-left races for longer than 10 minutes without loosing interest. Give me ALMS or Formula One any day.
Completely agree re: "the weird dance between tech and mental, especially on an amateur scale". I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of "geeks" who are into (and involved in) the various forms and levels of racing.
I work for a financial institution, so security is paramount.
We found that we had serious security concerns with remote access.
We started using RSA SecurID tokens for authentication (and a tie to a database for authorization). That worked well to secure remote access from company owned equiptment (where we could control the security, set standards for antivirus, etc), but left a major exposure:
Specifically, with a VPN we could secure the transmission, but couldn't verify the security of the end point. And a big value of remote access is the ability to let people work from home on their own gear (and the inherrent cost savings to the company).
So we have a multi-tier solution as follows:
All authorized users can use web services. We make available access to the email system, 3270 access to a mainframe, and some internal applications available to authorized and authenicated users over the internet (HTTPS). These web services have the advantage of being very low cost... almost zero incremental cost per user assuming they are not bandwidth intensive.
People with company-owned equiptment (laptops) can use dial-in services, which we provide through Cisco AS-5300's, with strong authentication provided by RSA SecurID. Costs a little to invest in the Cisco gear, and costs a little to support in house.
For those wanting VPN access, we found a company that could address our security concerns... a managed VPN provider called Positive Networks. Positive addresses our security concerns by providing the ability to enforce security policy on the end computer (such as X-brand Antivirus must be installed and running with up-to-date pattern files), as well as providing a managed service at a reasonable cost (its been more effective for us to outsource this big chunk of remote access, rather than staffing for supporting it internally).
I would strongly recommend Positive Networks as a remote access solution.
No affiliation other than a satisfied user (and I'm primarily responsible for our company selecting their product).
I live in Kansas City, and just about a month ago I got connected to this type of service, thanks to a local company called Everest that is owned by local utility company Aquila.
Things that make this service fantastic:
1) Price. No question. I consolodated my monthly phone bill (~$25) plus my monthly cable bill (~$75 for digital + two premium tiers) plus my high-speed internet bill (I was paying $125 for business-class DSL which was the only service provider with a static IP in my area) down to ~$100/month (in a single bill) to a single company
2) Services available. For $100/month I get 1.5 MB (256 kbps upstream) cable with a single static IP, digital cable with two premium tiers (I selected HBO and Skinimax), plus local phone service with $.10/minute long distance. Everest just released a new feature I'm interested in but haven't yet taken the plunge - integrated PVR service. For an extra $20/month you can get an upgraded box with 40gb HDD and Tivo-style PVR service.
3) Customer service. You can call their support number 24x7 and its answered immediately by a real person. Level-2 tech support people who know what they're doing.
4) Let me ditch a few companies I'm happy not to do business with: Time Warner Cable and Southwestern Bell (SBC).
All great stuff, in my opinion. This type of competition is just what these markets need, in my opinion... especially the cable TV market.