Don't be a colossal bonehead, do a little research. The Inuit live in the Arctic, and traditionalists can survive on the ice, making things out of bones and gut and skin and snow and eating mammals and fish. They're at just about the pinnacle of paleolithic tech, and I'd like to see any of your grain-munchin' bath-averse bronze-waving ancestors last a season up there.
Heck, throw in our Iron Age ancestors too. The Vikings were chased out of North America by the Inuit (as best as we can tell from surviving writings). There's a good chance they finished off the Greenland settlement too, during the "Little Ice Age". Make things a bit colder, and the Inuit way of life is actually superior.
At the very least, put the stuff you think might be useful outtside or on top of the cans. Down here in New Orleans...often that stuff will disappear overnight. I've left old monitors and computers and gear out overnight for the trash, and very rarely do I ever see it in the morning still on the pile.
That's funny. I used to live in New Orleans back in the late 80's, and that was standard practice then too. If you had an old sofa or TV or something, you'd just leave it out on the curb for any passerby. Its sort of like dontating old stuff to goodwill, without all the work.
Some people might find this kind of apalling, but it was kind of part of the local charm of the place. Its nice to see that the hurricane hasn't totally changed the city.
The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam. If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice.
For those who don't know, when he says "vast" he means it. There used to be multiple bison herds with more more than a million individuals. In a land where you could see to opposite horizons, it was reported that people would see a herd stretch from one to the other with no end in sight on either side. The estimate is that at one point there were nearly 100 million of them in North America. That's (*shock*) roughly the same as the 2008 cattle inventory in the US and Canada combined (110 million head).
There are some points to be made here though. Bison meat is acutally much leaner than typical USDA beef. In fact, its much leaner than chicken or turkey too! Bison are also much better adapted to the colder climate in North America. Its a bit more expensive, but not rediculouly so. So switching to bison is one nice "green" option for those of us who can't stand vegatables.:-)
I just watched a presentation from TED where New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman said that the average American eats 1/2 pound of meat per day (3.5 pounds/week), which is twice the amount recommended by the USDA
If you see Mark Bittman again, tell him to leave me alone. Its tough enough to eat with an audience. Having somone from the Times show up and give a lecture about my selection is just downright rude.
Aside from all the normal vulnerabilities to phishing and such, first and foremost, a good authentication system requires 3 things, something you know (a password), something you have (an ident card), and with today's technology, something you are (biometric scan).
Isn't that really just something you know and *two* things you have (an ident card and your retinas or fingers)? Someone sufficiently motivated can take them. I've seen it in the movies, so it must be true.:-)
What information can someone gather about you when you're playing a game
name, age, gender, email, zipcode, a score for how much time you spend playing
I suppose that's possible. However, what typically seems to be sent is system specifications. Generally devs like to have this information so they can know how to skew future updates (or even future games). If their game is coded to work well on Win2k, but they find next to nobody playing it on Win2k, they might be able to improve things a bit for everyone else in the next patch.
Its debateable how "personal" this information is. Generally what creeps people out is when they don't prominently mention that they are going to do this to you, but just start doing it.
What makes you think the Americans would come to Canada's aid? My money's on them "liberating" us from our evil socialist government some time in the next twenty years or so.
Heh. I don't think so. Canada has a huge territory that would be a major PITA to defend to American standards. But if we owned it, we'd have to do it. Far better to have an inoffensive nonentity presiding over all that useless land.
Even if we did want it, it would be way easier to just funnel money to the Quebecois and when they secceed sccop up the remaining provinces. The western ones would probably come to us and *ask* to join. We wouldn't want Quebec either way. You only have to look to Puerto Rico to see our undying enthusiasm for taking on non-English speaking states.
Anyway, any US invasion force would be stopped dead by laughter when the first Saskatchewan farmer walks up to them and says "What's all this aboot?"
I've taken to calling it the Wally Principle ("If you wait long enough, most problems take care of themselves"), but sadly few others know about it. Its easily more worthy of promotion than the "Dilbert Principle". However, for some strange reason, the Wally Principle's adherents aren't expending any effort to promote it.:-)
If you've got no healthcare, but get sick, you can roll into the ER for free treatment.
Not quite. The hospital still charges everyone. Its just that if you are poor you can't pay. So what you end up doing is declaring bankrupcy. As less and less people have coverage every year, the amount of bankrupcies due to medical bills is skyrocketing. Its now well over half of all bankrupcies.
There's a clear moral problem here. Fortunately, our last "family values" congress saw this and acted quickly. They made personal bankrupcy much harder to declare. Whew! Dodged a moral bullet there.
MAC addresses can be altered utilizing wonderful software out there
Yeah. Its called "the operating system".
On my XP box, its just a matter of going into the device manager, selecting "Properties" for the network adapter, selecting the "Advanced" tab. Then you select "Locally Administered Address" and type in the new MAC. Some cards' drivers don't support this, but the Intel ones generally do, which means probably nearly all laptops. Anyone with admin to their own box can do this easily.
I don't know. I'd much rather chat with intelligent people than the usual idiots I meet. Then again, I find myself attracted to intelligence and wit above anything else, in both types of relationships, platonic and otherwise. At the risk of sounding elitist, I honestly find most people dull.
As a married guy I probably have different goals in meeting people than you. However, I have to say that I find most engineers are dumber than a lot of people would think, and my blue-collar (and no collar) friends are a lot smarter than a lot of people would think. A lot of people don't like to hear this, as it explodes the comfortable myth that we well-paid people somehow innately deserve our better treatment, but its true.
Don't get me wrong, I get along with pretty much everyone. But even at work I enjoy my conversations with the machinists and the janitors a lot more than most of those with my fellow engineers. In fact, the janitors are hands-down the most interesting people here.
I thought the reason public employees weren't paid during the "budget crisis" was that the state had no money to pay them with.
If instead the state can spend tens or hundreds of millions a week paying all its employees minimum, why not just pay them their normal salaries and be done with it?
The problem is that the government only sees the option to pay dozens of old programmers to manipulate the COBOL code instead of paying one hacker for a day to write a Perl script to hard wire all the salary data in the database to minimum wage.
That only addresses the front end of the problem. How about the (supposedly 9 month) job to write code that keeps track of how much should have been paid to everyone in the state, and how much was actually paid, and make up the difference? This may sound simple too, but in the intervening months some people are going to leave, some are going to get hired on, and some are going to go on unpaid leaves for various reasons. There are probably all kinds of other little items the database keeps track of related to pay that will need to be changed on both ends too, perhaps each with their own little rules for how to keep track of in the interim and apply (or not) at the end.
It often suprises people (particularly non-coders) how difficult some seemingly simple sounding tasks can end up being, once you get down into the exact details.
That being said, you can have no doubt that if the politicians in charge really wanted it to happen, they would have told the programmers "just do it", just like we typically get told. Politicians only get on our side when it helps their agenda to do so.
> I am going to go out on a limb and state that the Segway has almost no real legitimate use. > > A bike is able to travel just as fast with little effort, and can travel faster if you want to put that much power into it.
As someone who has done a lot of bicycle commuting, I'd argue the "little effort" part. If its over about 70F outside, then taking a bike more than about a mile or two will make you arrive very sweaty. Given the climate where I live, this means a Segway would be usable as alternate commuting transportation roughly twice as many days of the year as a bicycle.
And lets not even throw the existance of hills into the mix...
I've actually been in the US, in Florida, during summer. Nothing that much terrible that can't be handled by simply having a spare set of clothes for work.
I used to live in Florida too, and biking there was much more feasable. We had maybe a month or two where it was in the 80's in the morning, but the rest of the year it was beautiful. All the streets there had bike lanes too! Then I moved to Oklahoma. Suddenly, unless you work at a stables or a distillery or something, there's also the issue of body odor. Without showers at work, riding a bike here is hopeless all but about 3 months of the year.
Something that requires no exercise but has no climate control (like a Segway or scooter) is still only doable here in the middle of the continental US about 6 months out of the year. I've found that if its over 90F, I sweat like a pig just being out in the sun for more than about 10 minutes (Today its forcast to get to 105). In the Winter, we spend about 3 months under freezing in the mornings. For those "good" months in the Spring and Fall we tend to get torrential downpours. Oh, and *no* streets here have bike lanes. Half don't even have shoulders or sidewalks.
I fail to see how this is relevant to the general slashdot content
You may not have noticed the icons at the top of the story, but this was classified under "Government", "Biotech", and "Science". I think rightly in all 3 cases.
You could perhaps make a case for the argument that the "Government" stuff should not be on slashdot, but the other two categories certianly belong here.
I'd argue you the first one too though. Politics is most assuredly "stuff that matters". And if you don't think political people are "nerds", you clearly have never heard Markos (of DailyKos) speak.
> Wake me up when we have a 3D printer that is capable of printing a 3D printer. Then we'll be on to something.
But if it copied itself, wouldn't the copy that came out be in the process of copying itself? If that happens, then it will become possible for someone to phsyically fork-bomb the universe!
This is just the sort of end to the universe that Douglas Adams would have really appreciated.
I'd love to hear the full story behind the Capitol v. Thomas case mentioned in the article. As near as I can tell from the article, the defendant had an "involuntary lawyer" who tried his damndest to lose the case, and he still won.
The VIA system uses 17.4 more watts while under load than the Intel system. That means if they are under load for one second, the VIA system has used 17.4 more watt-seconds than the Intel. On the other hand, the Intel only uses 0.9 more watts under load than the VIA uses when idle.... This means that to use the same amount of power over the long term, the VIA has to be able to complete tasks in ~5% of the time that the Intel takes.
Your math is good, but I don't think the logic is. Many devices with a user interface spends the vast majority of their time idling. Perhaps it doesn't go for an MP3 player. However, how much time does your cellphone spend turned on, but clipped to your belt (on in your purse, or whatever) waiting for calls to come in? I'd think power at idle would be a *huge* issue.
It's one of the sickest little bits of our culture that prison rape jokes aren't considered offensive.
Actually, its male rape in general. If you watch a lot of B movies, like I do, you may notice a recent trend toward depicting male rape as humorous events, eg: in road trip comedies. I laughed too at the first two or three I saw, but then it started to get more than a little disturbing.
Jesus did not speak out against the Roman Empire. He preached keeping your faith to God and worldly affairs separate
The first sentence is more or less correct (directly at least), the second is completely wrong. Directly speaking against Rome would have cut his ministry way short. However, he was continually speaking out against the upper-class Jewish leaders who were collaborating with the Romans (and thus against the people). They are the bad guys in nearly every story.
A big clue is the story of casting the demons from the possessed man into the sea. Do you think its a total coincidence that the writer named the demons "Legion", the name of the enforcement arm of the Roman Empire in his country? Believe that if you want to, but I don't believe in coincidence.
Atari made analog paddle controllers, but their joystics tended to be digital. However, the Apple ][ had analog joysticks available in 1979, IIRC. (They were a real PITA to use too).
I don't think this is quite as simple as any old analog controller though.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, throw in our Iron Age ancestors too. The Vikings were chased out of North America by the Inuit (as best as we can tell from surviving writings). There's a good chance they finished off the Greenland settlement too, during the "Little Ice Age". Make things a bit colder, and the Inuit way of life is actually superior.
As an Okie, I'm dying to respond to this. But I'd probably better not. :-)
That's funny. I used to live in New Orleans back in the late 80's, and that was standard practice then too. If you had an old sofa or TV or something, you'd just leave it out on the curb for any passerby. Its sort of like dontating old stuff to goodwill, without all the work.
Some people might find this kind of apalling, but it was kind of part of the local charm of the place. Its nice to see that the hurricane hasn't totally changed the city.
For those who don't know, when he says "vast" he means it. There used to be multiple bison herds with more more than a million individuals. In a land where you could see to opposite horizons, it was reported that people would see a herd stretch from one to the other with no end in sight on either side. The estimate is that at one point there were nearly 100 million of them in North America. That's (*shock*) roughly the same as the 2008 cattle inventory in the US and Canada combined (110 million head).
There are some points to be made here though. Bison meat is acutally much leaner than typical USDA beef. In fact, its much leaner than chicken or turkey too! Bison are also much better adapted to the colder climate in North America. Its a bit more expensive, but not rediculouly so. So switching to bison is one nice "green" option for those of us who can't stand vegatables. :-)
If you see Mark Bittman again, tell him to leave me alone. Its tough enough to eat with an audience. Having somone from the Times show up and give a lecture about my selection is just downright rude.
Isn't that really just something you know and *two* things you have (an ident card and your retinas or fingers)? Someone sufficiently motivated can take them. I've seen it in the movies, so it must be true. :-)
I suppose that's possible. However, what typically seems to be sent is system specifications. Generally devs like to have this information so they can know how to skew future updates (or even future games). If their game is coded to work well on Win2k, but they find next to nobody playing it on Win2k, they might be able to improve things a bit for everyone else in the next patch.
Its debateable how "personal" this information is. Generally what creeps people out is when they don't prominently mention that they are going to do this to you, but just start doing it.
Heh. I don't think so. Canada has a huge territory that would be a major PITA to defend to American standards. But if we owned it, we'd have to do it. Far better to have an inoffensive nonentity presiding over all that useless land.
Even if we did want it, it would be way easier to just funnel money to the Quebecois and when they secceed sccop up the remaining provinces. The western ones would probably come to us and *ask* to join. We wouldn't want Quebec either way. You only have to look to Puerto Rico to see our undying enthusiasm for taking on non-English speaking states.
Anyway, any US invasion force would be stopped dead by laughter when the first Saskatchewan farmer walks up to them and says "What's all this aboot?"
Actually, that's the Wally option.
I've taken to calling it the Wally Principle ("If you wait long enough, most problems take care of themselves"), but sadly few others know about it. Its easily more worthy of promotion than the "Dilbert Principle". However, for some strange reason, the Wally Principle's adherents aren't expending any effort to promote it. :-)
Not quite. The hospital still charges everyone. Its just that if you are poor you can't pay. So what you end up doing is declaring bankrupcy. As less and less people have coverage every year, the amount of bankrupcies due to medical bills is skyrocketing. Its now well over half of all bankrupcies.
There's a clear moral problem here. Fortunately, our last "family values" congress saw this and acted quickly. They made personal bankrupcy much harder to declare. Whew! Dodged a moral bullet there.
Yup. And before performing maintenence, always mount a scratch baby
Yeah. Its called "the operating system".
On my XP box, its just a matter of going into the device manager, selecting "Properties" for the network adapter, selecting the "Advanced" tab. Then you select "Locally Administered Address" and type in the new MAC. Some cards' drivers don't support this, but the Intel ones generally do, which means probably nearly all laptops. Anyone with admin to their own box can do this easily.
As a married guy I probably have different goals in meeting people than you. However, I have to say that I find most engineers are dumber than a lot of people would think, and my blue-collar (and no collar) friends are a lot smarter than a lot of people would think. A lot of people don't like to hear this, as it explodes the comfortable myth that we well-paid people somehow innately deserve our better treatment, but its true.
Don't get me wrong, I get along with pretty much everyone. But even at work I enjoy my conversations with the machinists and the janitors a lot more than most of those with my fellow engineers. In fact, the janitors are hands-down the most interesting people here.
Now wait a minute...
I thought the reason public employees weren't paid during the "budget crisis" was that the state had no money to pay them with.
If instead the state can spend tens or hundreds of millions a week paying all its employees minimum, why not just pay them their normal salaries and be done with it?
That only addresses the front end of the problem. How about the (supposedly 9 month) job to write code that keeps track of how much should have been paid to everyone in the state, and how much was actually paid, and make up the difference? This may sound simple too, but in the intervening months some people are going to leave, some are going to get hired on, and some are going to go on unpaid leaves for various reasons. There are probably all kinds of other little items the database keeps track of related to pay that will need to be changed on both ends too, perhaps each with their own little rules for how to keep track of in the interim and apply (or not) at the end.
It often suprises people (particularly non-coders) how difficult some seemingly simple sounding tasks can end up being, once you get down into the exact details.
That being said, you can have no doubt that if the politicians in charge really wanted it to happen, they would have told the programmers "just do it", just like we typically get told. Politicians only get on our side when it helps their agenda to do so.
> I am going to go out on a limb and state that the Segway has almost no real legitimate use.
>
> A bike is able to travel just as fast with little effort, and can travel faster if you want to put that much power into it.
As someone who has done a lot of bicycle commuting, I'd argue the "little effort" part. If its over about 70F outside, then taking a bike more than about a mile or two will make you arrive very sweaty. Given the climate where I live, this means a Segway would be usable as alternate commuting transportation roughly twice as many days of the year as a bicycle.
And lets not even throw the existance of hills into the mix...
I used to live in Florida too, and biking there was much more feasable. We had maybe a month or two where it was in the 80's in the morning, but the rest of the year it was beautiful. All the streets there had bike lanes too! Then I moved to Oklahoma. Suddenly, unless you work at a stables or a distillery or something, there's also the issue of body odor. Without showers at work, riding a bike here is hopeless all but about 3 months of the year.
Something that requires no exercise but has no climate control (like a Segway or scooter) is still only doable here in the middle of the continental US about 6 months out of the year. I've found that if its over 90F, I sweat like a pig just being out in the sun for more than about 10 minutes (Today its forcast to get to 105). In the Winter, we spend about 3 months under freezing in the mornings. For those "good" months in the Spring and Fall we tend to get torrential downpours. Oh, and *no* streets here have bike lanes. Half don't even have shoulders or sidewalks.
You may not have noticed the icons at the top of the story, but this was classified under "Government", "Biotech", and "Science". I think rightly in all 3 cases.
You could perhaps make a case for the argument that the "Government" stuff should not be on slashdot, but the other two categories certianly belong here.
I'd argue you the first one too though. Politics is most assuredly "stuff that matters". And if you don't think political people are "nerds", you clearly have never heard Markos (of DailyKos) speak.
> Wake me up when we have a 3D printer that is capable of printing a 3D printer. Then we'll be on to something.
But if it copied itself, wouldn't the copy that came out be in the process of copying itself? If that happens, then it will become possible for someone to phsyically fork-bomb the universe!
This is just the sort of end to the universe that Douglas Adams would have really appreciated.
I'd love to hear the full story behind the Capitol v. Thomas case mentioned in the article. As near as I can tell from the article, the defendant had an "involuntary lawyer" who tried his damndest to lose the case, and he still won.
Your math is good, but I don't think the logic is. Many devices with a user interface spends the vast majority of their time idling. Perhaps it doesn't go for an MP3 player. However, how much time does your cellphone spend turned on, but clipped to your belt (on in your purse, or whatever) waiting for calls to come in? I'd think power at idle would be a *huge* issue.
Actually, its male rape in general. If you watch a lot of B movies, like I do, you may notice a recent trend toward depicting male rape as humorous events, eg: in road trip comedies. I laughed too at the first two or three I saw, but then it started to get more than a little disturbing.
The first sentence is more or less correct (directly at least), the second is completely wrong. Directly speaking against Rome would have cut his ministry way short. However, he was continually speaking out against the upper-class Jewish leaders who were collaborating with the Romans (and thus against the people). They are the bad guys in nearly every story.
A big clue is the story of casting the demons from the possessed man into the sea. Do you think its a total coincidence that the writer named the demons "Legion", the name of the enforcement arm of the Roman Empire in his country? Believe that if you want to, but I don't believe in coincidence.
Atari made analog paddle controllers, but their joystics tended to be digital. However, the Apple ][ had analog joysticks available in 1979, IIRC. (They were a real PITA to use too).
I don't think this is quite as simple as any old analog controller though.
Does anyone else find it ironic that a (supposedly) Communist country has passed an anti-monopoly law?