It's a U.S. trivia gameshow famous for generally academic questions across a broad spectrum of categories. The most recent incarnation of the show has been running for maybe 15 years.
They used to have a 5-show winning streak limit, they'd then take a collection of 5-show winners and play them in a "tournament of champions" for a big pool of cash.
Recently, they lifted the limit, and now this fellow has gone on to win well over a million dollars, maybe two or three million if he's gone on for 75 shows.
The fellow has become a mild celebrity. Almost a throwback to the quiz shows of the 1950s(?).
Now the questions aren't really that hard, the hardest part is knowing just enough about everything... however the questions are phrased in such a way that the answers sound really really impressive. Oh and you have to buzz-in, and you're penalized for wrong answers... so you need to be fast and certain too.
E.g. for a vague category of "powers" you might get a "question" of "1024", the answer being "what is 2 to the power of 10?"*.. to a computer geek, it's mind-numbingly simple... to a first year comp-sci student, they should all know the answer... to a technoboob, you'd seem like a genius.
I don't think the show gets out of the Americas much because many of the questions focus on U.S. politics, history and geography. So the skew on U.S. education is very very heavy... E.g. a question on Africa would probably involve the nile, Madagascar, the Sahara, Indian Ocean, Rift Valley, something really damned obvious... whereas a U.S. geography question would be far more specific involving the individual geography or historically significant sites of individual states.
*Yeah, everything is phrased backwards. The answers are in the form of a question.
Quite right, I was really speaking of the space race in the 20th century. Too much boolean logic:-(
It bugs me when ST makes proud references to 20th century American achievements in space. IIRC, the closest they got to this in TOS was that time-travel episode with the fellow and his cat.
Moore's implication is that Big Bird could have won if Fox reported Big Bird's victory... not that it has anything to do with the votes.
The vote was so mishandled, that the counting could be manipulated to match the media outcome.
My personal take...?
Although it should be more math than art, when an election is that close, it just doesn't matter who's declared victorious, they're both reasonable elected representatives of the system.
Even if every implication Moore makes is true, the corruption only tipped the scales. A very large percentage of the population voted for Bush and the effects of corruption wouldn't have been effective if it were not for such a close race.
As somebody who has nothing to do with the U.S., I do view the Democrats as the lesser of two evils, but they're still both nasty, corrupt and evil parties. The Democrats are milking the "anyone but Bush" campaign a little too hard, and both parties are outrageously opposed to one another.
TOS drew a bit on western plot devices, the romance of WWII submarine warfare, the romance of travel, and with maybe one notable exception, it did this without referencing the 20th century directly and the explosion of the space-race.
The stories addressed complex modern issues, while space was a fantasy backdrop. I say that because the Sci-fi of Trek is quite weak, it's really only there to prop up the fantasy universe.
I think TNG and successors like exist to fill a gap in prime-time television, and primarily uses space and the Trek universe to create PG entertainment suitable for a broad audience.
DS9 did some cool stuff and tried to address contemporary issues, it got back to the roots of the series... including bad episodes amongst good episodes:-)
But what strikes me most about TOS is the link to contemporary issues of the late 1960's, including fairly recent memories of WWII
There should be more ways to lose karma on the site in general. A few ideas:
You lose as much karma as you have unused moderator's points (so you need to moderate to retain high karma)
You lose karma if your moderation results in a meta-moderation (just like having a comment modded down, you can have your mod modded down... so you need to moderate reasonably)
Karma is drained over time e.g. a point every two weeks (so you need to be active to reap the high-karma bennefits).
You could set a 25 point drain limit... draining effects kick in at above 25 points. So all non-posting members drain to 25 over time, those who log in and don't moderate, drain faster, and those who moderate poorly drain faster too.
A bunch of companies tried to kill the floppy with optical drives and those Jazz, Click, Shark, or whatever drives. It seemed that flooding the market with incompatible devices killed them all. Floppies were still used regularly, until email killed the most common uses for the floppy.
Yep, for most people, email replaced the floppy disk.
USB pen drives and stuff look like they're killing floppies, but really they're being used for portable archives, which floppies could never match and email has proven impractical for.
The USB port on Macs made people realize that if they were uncomforatble about not having a floppy drive, they could always go out and buy an external one in the unlikely event that they needed it.
I have to agree. I for one hate the fuzzed out look of antialiased fonts, and ClearType has also gone too heavy on the antialiasing.
I do find that there's one font in the sample images, the third "here" link which has noticable problems with character spacing, have a look at what happens when capital letters stand next to lowercase letters. The lowercase "f" and lowercase "t" also seem messed up. The "f" consistently has too much space on the right, the "t" consistently has too much space on the left... unless it is next to a capital letter.
Yeah, it's hard to make that stuff look correct when you're bounded by dumb fonts with sharp boxes, but the MS core fonts, despite a few small exceptions, really have done a great job of it.
Back to that third image, look at the word "Owner Information". The "O" pretty solidly hits the "w", drawing attention to the space between the "w" and the "n", then it goes along fine until the gap between "fo" and "at". The words in the font look all chopped up and poorly laid out.
The real equation would include the estimated time for the lawsuits to affect income caused by negative public perception and the time before corporate leadership retires.
It really doesn't matter if the company sinks when you're out the door and not legally liable.
The flight crew can't judge the ability of any given device to transmit. In-flight they can go find out who's causing the problem. During landing... the pilot just has to work around it.
I'm offering $2,500 to anyone who can give my a idea that goes on to win. I am also offering $2,500 to anyone who can impliment said idea so that it results in winning the contest. Any takers?
I'd wager that the owner of the ISP who obtains this municipally sanctioned monopoly on WiFi is somehow related to the politicians who are pushing the idea.
"Maybe your expectations are a little lower than mine."
For live music, my expectations are very low, I'm happy with anything really( although covers by non cover-bands aren't too interesting). On the other hand, I'll only buy something which I think has half a chance to sound good on a disk... but I haven't bought anything in a long long time.
I can't judge the mass marketed stuff. It sounds like crap to me, I know I don't like it, I know I REALLY don't like the mass market genres these days... so I REALLY can't judge the quality of it... so it's only subjectively "crap"
Now the question I suppose is, how do you find out about interesting bands if you're not a music junkie with a network of friends plugged into the industry, or throwing away thousands of dollars on "crap" CDs?
Oh, I don't mean to slag the expectation of some small income from the launch of a successful recording. I only mean to say that it is odd that there is such a sharp difference in the goals of the business world and the art world.
While it's logical that the business world would take the profits from the artist's content, it isn't logical that the art world would allow the business world to apply the talents of the marketing world to manipulate, concentrate and target the artist's content so much so that they could be selling almost anything.
Being able to sell anything, the business world chooses to sell as little unique content to as large a market as possible.
The end result for people like me is that I don't buy CD's, I cringe when I hear the radio and I feel my floor shake as hyped up suburban cars mimic images from MTV outside my house. The only place I hear anything good anymore is if I go out to a pub... but the people in the pubs can't get on the radio, nor into record stores because it seems that small markets aren't considered profitable.
Why can't there be a local radio station playing local music which is being played by local bands in local pubs?
...Either way, most of us would rather be paid a little than nothing....
Yeah, if you wanted to make money, you wouldn't be in music, you'd get an degree in Law or something and work for the recording industry. That's where the big bucks are, forget this whole music thing.
Use the existing method of trust and communication. You don't need to send people out, the soldiers should be able to do this themselves. Assign an on-site soldier-representative for each party (chosen by the party.. I mean there MUST be a mildy trustworthy party-faithful for either party in every camp.) The most senior person runs the election, the witnesses ensure that neither party is unfairly tallied and anonymity is preserved.
The normal procedures for secure communciation are used for the officer and trusted party representative soldiers to communicate the totals. The totals are then communciated back to the camp so that they'll know they were counted fairly. After the feedback and no riots, the ballots can be destroyed.
You've given these guys guns and dropped them on foreign soil, they should be at least minimally trustworthy.
Not just boring, but lethally unforgiving. If the normal sci-fi rules were applied to the leap from the pod, or the evacuation of the atomosphere, then it wouldn't seem so desolate and hopeless. Tossing in a crew which gets slaughtered without introduction makes it even more imensely unforgiving.
I think it was a great film, no question at all. It's also probably the only film I know of which tries to get sci-fi accurate rather than cool.
Sure, it gets boring, and the end is just weird, but it makes you think and what it makes you think are not happy escapist pulp-sci-fi thoughts, but frigtening and real thoughts about human purpose and mortality.
"...QED, weak interactions, superfluidity, and the makeup of hadrons..."
Bah, it all pales to the bowling-ball stunt.
non-linear value of money
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A dollar a week is worthless.
A major lottery winning in a lifetime is overwhelmingly valuable.
Factor in entertainment value and social bennefit for the proceeds, and the lottery makes sense.
... not that I play of course:-)
The only silly part is not buying all your tickets in one lump sum. With the odds against you, inflation is against you, and the money does you the most good when you're young.
I think I'll assume I'll live to ~70 or so and go out and buy 52x40 lottery tickets. I'll never have to worry about forgetting to play, and I can claim for a long while at least, that I buy a ticket every week.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a U.S. trivia gameshow famous for generally academic questions across a broad spectrum of categories. The most recent incarnation of the show has been running for maybe 15 years.
They used to have a 5-show winning streak limit, they'd then take a collection of 5-show winners and play them in a "tournament of champions" for a big pool of cash.
Recently, they lifted the limit, and now this fellow has gone on to win well over a million dollars, maybe two or three million if he's gone on for 75 shows.
The fellow has become a mild celebrity. Almost a throwback to the quiz shows of the 1950s(?).
Now the questions aren't really that hard, the hardest part is knowing just enough about everything... however the questions are phrased in such a way that the answers sound really really impressive. Oh and you have to buzz-in, and you're penalized for wrong answers... so you need to be fast and certain too.
E.g. for a vague category of "powers" you might get a "question" of "1024", the answer being "what is 2 to the power of 10?"*.. to a computer geek, it's mind-numbingly simple... to a first year comp-sci student, they should all know the answer... to a technoboob, you'd seem like a genius.
I don't think the show gets out of the Americas much because many of the questions focus on U.S. politics, history and geography. So the skew on U.S. education is very very heavy... E.g. a question on Africa would probably involve the nile, Madagascar, the Sahara, Indian Ocean, Rift Valley, something really damned obvious... whereas a U.S. geography question would be far more specific involving the individual geography or historically significant sites of individual states.
*Yeah, everything is phrased backwards. The answers are in the form of a question.
Quite right, I was really speaking of the space race in the 20th century. Too much boolean logic :-(
It bugs me when ST makes proud references to 20th century American achievements in space. IIRC, the closest they got to this in TOS was that time-travel episode with the fellow and his cat.
affected the voting
Moore's implication is that Big Bird could have won if Fox reported Big Bird's victory... not that it has anything to do with the votes.
The vote was so mishandled, that the counting could be manipulated to match the media outcome.
My personal take...?
Although it should be more math than art, when an election is that close, it just doesn't matter who's declared victorious, they're both reasonable elected representatives of the system.
Even if every implication Moore makes is true, the corruption only tipped the scales. A very large percentage of the population voted for Bush and the effects of corruption wouldn't have been effective if it were not for such a close race.
As somebody who has nothing to do with the U.S., I do view the Democrats as the lesser of two evils, but they're still both nasty, corrupt and evil parties. The Democrats are milking the "anyone but Bush" campaign a little too hard, and both parties are outrageously opposed to one another.
TOS drew a bit on western plot devices, the romance of WWII submarine warfare, the romance of travel, and with maybe one notable exception, it did this without referencing the 20th century directly and the explosion of the space-race.
The stories addressed complex modern issues, while space was a fantasy backdrop. I say that because the Sci-fi of Trek is quite weak, it's really only there to prop up the fantasy universe.
I think TNG and successors like exist to fill a gap in prime-time television, and primarily uses space and the Trek universe to create PG entertainment suitable for a broad audience.
DS9 did some cool stuff and tried to address contemporary issues, it got back to the roots of the series... including bad episodes amongst good episodes :-)
But what strikes me most about TOS is the link to contemporary issues of the late 1960's, including fairly recent memories of WWII
There should be more ways to lose karma on the site in general. A few ideas:
You could set a 25 point drain limit... draining effects kick in at above 25 points. So all non-posting members drain to 25 over time, those who log in and don't moderate, drain faster, and those who moderate poorly drain faster too.
A bunch of companies tried to kill the floppy with optical drives and those Jazz, Click, Shark, or whatever drives. It seemed that flooding the market with incompatible devices killed them all. Floppies were still used regularly, until email killed the most common uses for the floppy.
Yep, for most people, email replaced the floppy disk.
USB pen drives and stuff look like they're killing floppies, but really they're being used for portable archives, which floppies could never match and email has proven impractical for.
The USB port on Macs made people realize that if they were uncomforatble about not having a floppy drive, they could always go out and buy an external one in the unlikely event that they needed it.
I have to agree. I for one hate the fuzzed out look of antialiased fonts, and ClearType has also gone too heavy on the antialiasing.
I do find that there's one font in the sample images, the third "here" link which has noticable problems with character spacing, have a look at what happens when capital letters stand next to lowercase letters. The lowercase "f" and lowercase "t" also seem messed up. The "f" consistently has too much space on the right, the "t" consistently has too much space on the left... unless it is next to a capital letter.
Yeah, it's hard to make that stuff look correct when you're bounded by dumb fonts with sharp boxes, but the MS core fonts, despite a few small exceptions, really have done a great job of it.
Back to that third image, look at the word "Owner Information". The "O" pretty solidly hits the "w", drawing attention to the space between the "w" and the "n", then it goes along fine until the gap between "fo" and "at". The words in the font look all chopped up and poorly laid out.
It's just a private leg-up in the artificial Caller-ID arms race.
The real equation would include the estimated time for the lawsuits to affect income caused by negative public perception and the time before corporate leadership retires.
It really doesn't matter if the company sinks when you're out the door and not legally liable.
It was all posted on Slashdot last year some time...
http://developers.slashdot.org/articles/03/06/10/1 31226.shtml?tid=99
http://www.caa.co.uk/caanews/caanews.asp?nid=669
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/750893.stm
The flight crew can't judge the ability of any given device to transmit. In-flight they can go find out who's causing the problem. During landing... the pilot just has to work around it.
...they'd be glad to charge you the regular rate and not give you a phone.
Maybe the trick is to keep getting the most expensive new phone and changing providers every single time your lock-in period expires?
I'm offering $2,500 to anyone who can give my a idea that goes on to win. I am also offering $2,500 to anyone who can impliment said idea so that it results in winning the contest. Any takers?
<idea>Don't cheat</idea>
Where's my $5k?
I'd wager that the owner of the ISP who obtains this municipally sanctioned monopoly on WiFi is somehow related to the politicians who are pushing the idea.
Looking it up, you're right, but not quite by that much, CDs were adopted in '83, DAT in '87, MD in '88.
I vaguely remember MD and DAT trying to compete with CDs, as CD players were still expensive at the time, and did not have recording capability.
"Maybe your expectations are a little lower than mine."
For live music, my expectations are very low, I'm happy with anything really( although covers by non cover-bands aren't too interesting). On the other hand, I'll only buy something which I think has half a chance to sound good on a disk... but I haven't bought anything in a long long time.
I can't judge the mass marketed stuff. It sounds like crap to me, I know I don't like it, I know I REALLY don't like the mass market genres these days... so I REALLY can't judge the quality of it... so it's only subjectively "crap"
Now the question I suppose is, how do you find out about interesting bands if you're not a music junkie with a network of friends plugged into the industry, or throwing away thousands of dollars on "crap" CDs?
The CD had no contemporary competition to deal with
DAT (recordable, backward compatible) and Minidisc (recordable, more portable)?
Oh, I don't mean to slag the expectation of some small income from the launch of a successful recording. I only mean to say that it is odd that there is such a sharp difference in the goals of the business world and the art world.
While it's logical that the business world would take the profits from the artist's content, it isn't logical that the art world would allow the business world to apply the talents of the marketing world to manipulate, concentrate and target the artist's content so much so that they could be selling almost anything.
Being able to sell anything, the business world chooses to sell as little unique content to as large a market as possible.
The end result for people like me is that I don't buy CD's, I cringe when I hear the radio and I feel my floor shake as hyped up suburban cars mimic images from MTV outside my house. The only place I hear anything good anymore is if I go out to a pub... but the people in the pubs can't get on the radio, nor into record stores because it seems that small markets aren't considered profitable.
Why can't there be a local radio station playing local music which is being played by local bands in local pubs?
Yeah, if you wanted to make money, you wouldn't be in music, you'd get an degree in Law or something and work for the recording industry. That's where the big bucks are, forget this whole music thing.
Nerddom? I thought those were the cool kids!
Hmmm... he could alternatively put $50M in the production of trailers. Then people could think they're getting a big-budget film.
Use the existing method of trust and communication. You don't need to send people out, the soldiers should be able to do this themselves. Assign an on-site soldier-representative for each party (chosen by the party.. I mean there MUST be a mildy trustworthy party-faithful for either party in every camp.) The most senior person runs the election, the witnesses ensure that neither party is unfairly tallied and anonymity is preserved.
The normal procedures for secure communciation are used for the officer and trusted party representative soldiers to communicate the totals. The totals are then communciated back to the camp so that they'll know they were counted fairly. After the feedback and no riots, the ballots can be destroyed.
You've given these guys guns and dropped them on foreign soil, they should be at least minimally trustworthy.
You mean New Austria?
Not just boring, but lethally unforgiving. If the normal sci-fi rules were applied to the leap from the pod, or the evacuation of the atomosphere, then it wouldn't seem so desolate and hopeless. Tossing in a crew which gets slaughtered without introduction makes it even more imensely unforgiving.
I think it was a great film, no question at all. It's also probably the only film I know of which tries to get sci-fi accurate rather than cool.
Sure, it gets boring, and the end is just weird, but it makes you think and what it makes you think are not happy escapist pulp-sci-fi thoughts, but frigtening and real thoughts about human purpose and mortality.
"...QED, weak interactions, superfluidity, and the makeup of hadrons..."
Bah, it all pales to the bowling-ball stunt.
A dollar a week is worthless.
A major lottery winning in a lifetime is overwhelmingly valuable.
Factor in entertainment value and social bennefit for the proceeds, and the lottery makes sense.
... not that I play of course :-)
The only silly part is not buying all your tickets in one lump sum. With the odds against you, inflation is against you, and the money does you the most good when you're young.
I think I'll assume I'll live to ~70 or so and go out and buy 52x40 lottery tickets. I'll never have to worry about forgetting to play, and I can claim for a long while at least, that I buy a ticket every week.