Grey? At night? Colors are notoriously hard to see at night.
Colors are indeed hard to see at night. Shades of grey, however, are easy to see. It was grey in appearance.
200 feet? Depth perception at night is hard, and 200 feet is getting near the limit in daylight for binocular stereo depth perception.
I didn't say it was 200 feet away. I have no idea how far away it was, because I don't really know how big it was. But it's altitude was less than 200 feet, because it was just above the apartment building opposite us. It was further away than that apartment building, but by how much I do not know.
Ditto for slow. Anything far away would have a slow angular velocity, and based on your perception of it being only 200 feet away, of course it looked slow.
Again, I make no claims as to its distance. But we watched it for about 30-45 seconds before it turned away and disappeared. In this time it moved maybe 30 degrees. It was slow.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necesarily believe your story *or* the one on space.com, but I don't see what your argument is. Your description sounds like it could easily be a... um... stealth blimp. How else is it going to remain airborne silently?
I guess I would question the physics of such a thing, then. If the DoD craft was kept aloft by a lighter-than-air gas, wouldn't that limit its shape and behavior somewhat? I could see the craft pictured in the article existing, but what I saw was flat and flying perpendicular to the ground. It looked nothing like either of the artists' representations in the article, although this really doesn't say much.
Well, that's certainly a possibility. I agree with you on the pattern-recognition abilities of the brain. However, if it were a passenger jet:
It was flying on its side
It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet
It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before
Again, I am probably wrong, and just got excited about my siting. But I live in a flight path for DFW airport, and I also know how passenger (and private) jets look at night. It didn't look anything like this.
What specifically about the thing that you saw is inconsistent with one of these things?
Mainly its orientation. It was flying on its side, not flat. Again, imagine taking a cardboard triangle and holding it up in front of you, with the point facing to the right. Now slowly turn the point of the cardboard triangle away from you: the triangle gets smaller, then flat. When it turned away from us, it was thin like the cardboard would be, but still vertical. Am I making any kind of sense? I don't feel like I'm describing this very well.
Plus it was very angular. I would expect a blimp to be more rounded.
I was going to post this anonymously, but then decided it would just lessen my credibility.
I saw one of these in (of all places) Denton, Texas in 1992. I was going to the University of North Texas, and was hanging out at this friend of mine's house. We had stayed up all night talking politics and philosophy, and had gone out onto the balcony so I could smoke.
Her apartment was on the second floor, facing the pool, behind which was another two-storey apartment building. We hadn't been out there long when I noticed something moving just above the building opposite us. It was triangular in shape, with lights at each of the points. In appearance it was dark grey, and the lights at the points were just a tad brighter than the stars around the thing. It's orientation was almost completely vertical: imagine holding up a mostly-equilateral triangle in front of you and moving it from left to right, with the point facing right. It was moving very slowly, I would estimate at around 20 or 30 MPH.
I shouted out "Hey, what's that?" It took a short while for her to see it, but eventually she did. We watched it for a minute, chattering excitedly, before it slowly turned away from us and disappeared off to the west.
It didn't make a sound, and it was very big. It was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object. Beyond that I make no claims. But if the DoD can build something like that, then I'm damned impressed.
No, I'm not bullshitting in some weak attempt to get karma. This really did happen to me.
Sure, I've used them in a couple small scripts for parsing text, but if you see the majority of programming requiring regex, you definitely need to put your hammer down and pick up a Makita.
Well, I am certainly not advocating the broad use of regexps in application programming, even though it has been demonstrated to be possible. For me, regexps are an important tool in solving side issues/behind the scenes work, such as formatting a series of configuration files in a given manner, or making broad changes to a set of HTML files, and so forth. I don't do Perl, and don't really like to if I can avoid it, but I still use regular expressions on a daily basis, and have found them to be immensely helpful.
Over the course of my career I have come to the rather firm opinion that you are not worth much as a coder if you do not know regular expressions. I don't care what language(s) you're proficient in, or if you've memorized every single design pattern the GoF has ever conceived, of do 4 foot by 6 foot UML diagrams in your head. If you can't do regexps then you're missing a basic skill. I bought Friedl's book a couple of years ago, and although I wound up not using man of the Perl related stuff the rest of the book helped me out immensely.
A programmer without knowledge of regular expressions is like a carpenter without a hammer.
Stanley Milgram wrote about it in an essay called "The Perils of Obedience." Link. Very scary. People were doing whatever the experiementer told them; only one lady didn't, and she was a holocaust survivor.
Re:You can't even open a file!
on
Eclipse 2.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Part of the reason this is done is because Eclipse maintains a history of your files, a la CVS. So if you want to compare what your file looked like last Thursday to your current version, you can. The import requirement bugged me at first, too, but it's really not that big of a deal, especially once you start doing all of your work with Eclipse. After that you just create files in the project and build an Ant script to push them to wherever they need to go.
First off, nice post. It helps that I agree with just about everything you said. When you compare Eclipse with Netbeans, Eclipse is much faster, no matter how you measure that: load time, compile time, reponsiveness of the GUI, etc. Plus, it doesn't have every single possible bell and whistle available pre-installed. I hate the fact that Netbeans loads every single Java thingamajig that has ever been invented. So Netbeans is out.
I still enjoy Vim, but I have Eclipse configured so that I edit Java files with the Eclipse editor, but XML and.properties files are still opened with Vim. It also helps that ^S not only saves, but compiles the current file. Another strong point of Eclipse is the robust history mechanism is has, sort of a built-in single-user CVS. Want to be able to compare your current code with what you saved last Thursday? No problemo.
All in all, nice IDE. I never liked Netbeans and most of the other free Java editors (such as JEdit) are just enhanced text editors with no real benefits over Vim.
Remember, in conspeak, "objective" is the same thing as "liberal". "Conservative bias" is "objective" now. Do you have an article that tells both sides of the story? That's liberal. Do you have a story that tells the conservative side of the story? That's objective.
"A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant.... [T]he court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination."
This was written by the Department of Justice. In plain English it says that the military may keep someone locked up for as long as they want, without trial. Even if they're an American citizen. Article available here.
And FYI: The recent arrest announced by Ashcroft was against a US citizen who they had kept in custody for over a month before announcing it. All based on their good word.
Which is, I hope you'll agree, somewhat suspect if for no other reason than they are humans, and are therefore fallible.
So yes, in a way, we do sort of condone it, but it's not like prison guards are supposed to let it happen if they see it. It's one of those things that we hope will make people think twice about breaking the law, since prison itself isn't such a great deterrent.
Gee, I think you would have a hard time showing "forced butt rape" to be written in any penal statute anywhere in the nation. People get sentenced to prison, not forced rape. If you want to change the law, then change the law. Until then rape is against the law and should be as vigorously prosecuted as any other.
Can't wait till they haul one of your sons off to jail for something relatively minor, and the next thing you know he's somebody's bitch.
Not that you need much convincing, but this article over at the NYTimes is rather interesting, considering recent events. It talks about the extremely rough times that telecom companies are going through, and leaves open the possibility of a complete meltdown of that market. Scary, because as you said this affects everyone in the tech industry.
Re:Govt. should NOT be paying for this
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 3
You haven't listened to it much, then.
During the debate about campaign finance reform, I heard two Republican senators do opinion pieces where they gave their reasons for opposing the legislation. (I was [innapproriately, yes] screaming "Godwin's Law!" at the radio, because one of them equated CFR with Nazism.) I have never heard a Democratic senator give an opinion piece on NPR.
In your opinion, is unbiased approximately equal to liberal? I keep seeing this term ("liberal") being used, and it seems to be applied to organizations that I consider relatively unbiased. If they are not unbiased, can you list a media organization that deals with current events who you think is?
Arrays use float indices. This is an odd design decision, relevant to DirectX 8 and Nvidia only.
Ummm, what?
I know absolutely nothing about graphics programming. Not ashamed, it's just not my area of specialty. However, I'm intrigued as to why floats would be used for an array index. If anyone can enlighten, I'd be interested to hear.
Look man, you might be educated to be a programmer, but if you are worth anything to your employers then you implement some sort of software design methodology, and that's all XP is: it's a lightweight, high-discipline approach to delivering software to a client.
You can argue whether or not XP works, but if you are ridiculing and avoiding it just because it has the word "extreme" in its title then you are a poor programmer and a fool. Since your entire post consists of mockery you leave no choice but to believe you are both.
The facts that pornography is immoral, offensive to women in that it treats them solely as sex objects, offensive to the viewer in that it implies that their only means of sexual gratification is through watching others(in other words, they lack the social skills to build a relationship and have a healthy sex life, instead they must rely on pictures/movies to satisfy their sex drive), are also important to consider.
While those may be your opinions, they are certainly not facts. My wife and I enjoy watching porn together occasionally, and judging from what I have read we are hardly alone in this. Further, all participants in a porn movie are sex objects; it is, after all, porn, and is all about sex.
Having said this, I agree that some people use porn to the extent that it is harmful to their interpersonal relationships. Porn becomes a surrogate for actually dealing with potential mates; it is far easier to just jack off than it is to have to deal with a real live person.
For reasons which will become obvious shortly, I have to preface this by saying that this is not a troll. It's an honest question.
Why are we so conerned with keeping children away from porn? Let's take a worst-case scenario, and ask what exactly the results are supposed to be if some seven year old girl stumbles across "Debbie Does Dallas"? The unspoken assumption seems to be that she will be irrepairably harmed by such material, but I challenge that statement. I remember running across a Penthouse once when I was a pre-pubescent kid; I thought it was interesting, but after a while I just went back to playing other decidedly non-sexual games.
Now before I start getting flamed to death, I am by no means advocating for Disney to start showing full-penetration in their latest animated release. Further, I believe that child pornography is abhorent and rightfully illegal. My question simply revolves around the claimed ill effects to minors who view porn.
Or see Reno v. ACLU. This was originally ACLU v. Reno, but when the ACLU won in a lower court, the Justice Department appealed. The name's where therefore swtiched.
This is how the case looks whenever a private party brings suit against the federal government over the constitutionality of a law.
Go to Google right now and search for pro-life websites. Go ahead. You know what will show up. There will be about a gajillion different results turned, and 99.9% of those are completely unaffected by this case, nor will they be so affected in the future. It is one thing to promote a certain viewpoint, it is quite another to specifically advocate and celebrate the murder of those who oppose that viewpoint. Such violent advocacy is -- and should be -- against the law.
And by the way, I would be saying the exact same thing were the roles reversed, and it was a pro-choice site advocating the murder of pro-life advocates. (Funny how that never happens, though.)
Aside: GodDAMN I am sick of the term "PC" being thrown around every time a judicial ruling comes down that the neoconservative crowd doesn't like. That is a tired, tired term and doesn't say anything substantial.
This isn't some legislatively requried oath. It's a code of ethics. Sure it's within the realm of physical possibility that someone will require that you stamp 666 on your forehead in order to be a professional coder, but its highly unlikely.
Man, if the parent isn't an example of a slippery slope I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
Grey? At night? Colors are notoriously hard to see at night.
Colors are indeed hard to see at night. Shades of grey, however, are easy to see. It was grey in appearance.
200 feet? Depth perception at night is hard, and 200 feet is getting near the limit in daylight for binocular stereo depth perception.
I didn't say it was 200 feet away. I have no idea how far away it was, because I don't really know how big it was. But it's altitude was less than 200 feet, because it was just above the apartment building opposite us. It was further away than that apartment building, but by how much I do not know.
Ditto for slow. Anything far away would have a slow angular velocity, and based on your perception of it being only 200 feet away, of course it looked slow.
Again, I make no claims as to its distance. But we watched it for about 30-45 seconds before it turned away and disappeared. In this time it moved maybe 30 degrees. It was slow.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necesarily believe your story *or* the one on space.com, but I don't see what your argument is. Your description sounds like it could easily be a... um... stealth blimp. How else is it going to remain airborne silently?
I guess I would question the physics of such a thing, then. If the DoD craft was kept aloft by a lighter-than-air gas, wouldn't that limit its shape and behavior somewhat? I could see the craft pictured in the article existing, but what I saw was flat and flying perpendicular to the ground. It looked nothing like either of the artists' representations in the article, although this really doesn't say much.
Well, that's certainly a possibility. I agree with you on the pattern-recognition abilities of the brain. However, if it were a passenger jet:
It was flying on its side
It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet
It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before
Again, I am probably wrong, and just got excited about my siting. But I live in a flight path for DFW airport, and I also know how passenger (and private) jets look at night. It didn't look anything like this.
What specifically about the thing that you saw is inconsistent with one of these things?
Mainly its orientation. It was flying on its side, not flat. Again, imagine taking a cardboard triangle and holding it up in front of you, with the point facing to the right. Now slowly turn the point of the cardboard triangle away from you: the triangle gets smaller, then flat. When it turned away from us, it was thin like the cardboard would be, but still vertical. Am I making any kind of sense? I don't feel like I'm describing this very well.
Plus it was very angular. I would expect a blimp to be more rounded.
I was going to post this anonymously, but then decided it would just lessen my credibility.
I saw one of these in (of all places) Denton, Texas in 1992. I was going to the University of North Texas, and was hanging out at this friend of mine's house. We had stayed up all night talking politics and philosophy, and had gone out onto the balcony so I could smoke.
Her apartment was on the second floor, facing the pool, behind which was another two-storey apartment building. We hadn't been out there long when I noticed something moving just above the building opposite us. It was triangular in shape, with lights at each of the points. In appearance it was dark grey, and the lights at the points were just a tad brighter than the stars around the thing. It's orientation was almost completely vertical: imagine holding up a mostly-equilateral triangle in front of you and moving it from left to right, with the point facing right. It was moving very slowly, I would estimate at around 20 or 30 MPH.
I shouted out "Hey, what's that?" It took a short while for her to see it, but eventually she did. We watched it for a minute, chattering excitedly, before it slowly turned away from us and disappeared off to the west.
It didn't make a sound, and it was very big. It was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object. Beyond that I make no claims. But if the DoD can build something like that, then I'm damned impressed.
No, I'm not bullshitting in some weak attempt to get karma. This really did happen to me.
Anyone else notice any similarities between GRACE and non-lebsian Ayn Rand? Consider:
- Neither can write
- They both are approximately equal on the 1-10 beauty scale
- Neither is completely human
- Both have worshipful drones who provide for their every need and provide reassurance as to their value and self-esteem
Amazing!Sure, I've used them in a couple small scripts for parsing text, but if you see the majority of programming requiring regex, you definitely need to put your hammer down and pick up a Makita.
Well, I am certainly not advocating the broad use of regexps in application programming, even though it has been demonstrated to be possible. For me, regexps are an important tool in solving side issues/behind the scenes work, such as formatting a series of configuration files in a given manner, or making broad changes to a set of HTML files, and so forth. I don't do Perl, and don't really like to if I can avoid it, but I still use regular expressions on a daily basis, and have found them to be immensely helpful.
Over the course of my career I have come to the rather firm opinion that you are not worth much as a coder if you do not know regular expressions. I don't care what language(s) you're proficient in, or if you've memorized every single design pattern the GoF has ever conceived, of do 4 foot by 6 foot UML diagrams in your head. If you can't do regexps then you're missing a basic skill. I bought Friedl's book a couple of years ago, and although I wound up not using man of the Perl related stuff the rest of the book helped me out immensely.
A programmer without knowledge of regular expressions is like a carpenter without a hammer.
I think CmdrTaco is a big fan of The Who. Probably a Freudian slip, considering the recent death of their bassist. Who knows.
Wait, that was a pun. Hahaha ha. Haha. Ha.
Hmph.Stanley Milgram wrote about it in an essay called "The Perils of Obedience." Link. Very scary. People were doing whatever the experiementer told them; only one lady didn't, and she was a holocaust survivor.
Part of the reason this is done is because Eclipse maintains a history of your files, a la CVS. So if you want to compare what your file looked like last Thursday to your current version, you can. The import requirement bugged me at first, too, but it's really not that big of a deal, especially once you start doing all of your work with Eclipse. After that you just create files in the project and build an Ant script to push them to wherever they need to go.
First off, nice post. It helps that I agree with just about everything you said. When you compare Eclipse with Netbeans, Eclipse is much faster, no matter how you measure that: load time, compile time, reponsiveness of the GUI, etc. Plus, it doesn't have every single possible bell and whistle available pre-installed. I hate the fact that Netbeans loads every single Java thingamajig that has ever been invented. So Netbeans is out.
I still enjoy Vim, but I have Eclipse configured so that I edit Java files with the Eclipse editor, but XML and .properties files are still opened with Vim. It also helps that ^S not only saves, but compiles the current file. Another strong point of Eclipse is the robust history mechanism is has, sort of a built-in single-user CVS. Want to be able to compare your current code with what you saved last Thursday? No problemo.
All in all, nice IDE. I never liked Netbeans and most of the other free Java editors (such as JEdit) are just enhanced text editors with no real benefits over Vim.
Remember, in conspeak, "objective" is the same thing as "liberal". "Conservative bias" is "objective" now. Do you have an article that tells both sides of the story? That's liberal. Do you have a story that tells the conservative side of the story? That's objective.
Simple, really.
Read this:
"A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant. ... [T]he court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination."
This was written by the Department of Justice. In plain English it says that the military may keep someone locked up for as long as they want, without trial. Even if they're an American citizen. Article available here.
And FYI: The recent arrest announced by Ashcroft was against a US citizen who they had kept in custody for over a month before announcing it. All based on their good word.
Which is, I hope you'll agree, somewhat suspect if for no other reason than they are humans, and are therefore fallible.
So yes, in a way, we do sort of condone it, but it's not like prison guards are supposed to let it happen if they see it. It's one of those things that we hope will make people think twice about breaking the law, since prison itself isn't such a great deterrent.
Gee, I think you would have a hard time showing "forced butt rape" to be written in any penal statute anywhere in the nation. People get sentenced to prison, not forced rape. If you want to change the law, then change the law. Until then rape is against the law and should be as vigorously prosecuted as any other.
Can't wait till they haul one of your sons off to jail for something relatively minor, and the next thing you know he's somebody's bitch.
Not that you need much convincing, but this article over at the NYTimes is rather interesting, considering recent events. It talks about the extremely rough times that telecom companies are going through, and leaves open the possibility of a complete meltdown of that market. Scary, because as you said this affects everyone in the tech industry.
You haven't listened to it much, then.
During the debate about campaign finance reform, I heard two Republican senators do opinion pieces where they gave their reasons for opposing the legislation. (I was [innapproriately, yes] screaming "Godwin's Law!" at the radio, because one of them equated CFR with Nazism.) I have never heard a Democratic senator give an opinion piece on NPR.
In your opinion, is unbiased approximately equal to liberal? I keep seeing this term ("liberal") being used, and it seems to be applied to organizations that I consider relatively unbiased. If they are not unbiased, can you list a media organization that deals with current events who you think is?
Arrays use float indices. This is an odd design decision, relevant to DirectX 8 and Nvidia only.
Ummm, what?
I know absolutely nothing about graphics programming. Not ashamed, it's just not my area of specialty. However, I'm intrigued as to why floats would be used for an array index. If anyone can enlighten, I'd be interested to hear.
Look man, you might be educated to be a programmer, but if you are worth anything to your employers then you implement some sort of software design methodology, and that's all XP is: it's a lightweight, high-discipline approach to delivering software to a client.
You can argue whether or not XP works, but if you are ridiculing and avoiding it just because it has the word "extreme" in its title then you are a poor programmer and a fool. Since your entire post consists of mockery you leave no choice but to believe you are both.
He didn't say they were new. He just said that XP "consists of a lot of distinct ideas." Where do you read the word "new" in that sentence?
The facts that pornography is immoral, offensive to women in that it treats them solely as sex objects, offensive to the viewer in that it implies that their only means of sexual gratification is through watching others(in other words, they lack the social skills to build a relationship and have a healthy sex life, instead they must rely on pictures/movies to satisfy their sex drive), are also important to consider.
While those may be your opinions, they are certainly not facts. My wife and I enjoy watching porn together occasionally, and judging from what I have read we are hardly alone in this. Further, all participants in a porn movie are sex objects; it is, after all, porn, and is all about sex.
Having said this, I agree that some people use porn to the extent that it is harmful to their interpersonal relationships. Porn becomes a surrogate for actually dealing with potential mates; it is far easier to just jack off than it is to have to deal with a real live person.
For reasons which will become obvious shortly, I have to preface this by saying that this is not a troll. It's an honest question.
Why are we so conerned with keeping children away from porn? Let's take a worst-case scenario, and ask what exactly the results are supposed to be if some seven year old girl stumbles across "Debbie Does Dallas"? The unspoken assumption seems to be that she will be irrepairably harmed by such material, but I challenge that statement. I remember running across a Penthouse once when I was a pre-pubescent kid; I thought it was interesting, but after a while I just went back to playing other decidedly non-sexual games.
Now before I start getting flamed to death, I am by no means advocating for Disney to start showing full-penetration in their latest animated release. Further, I believe that child pornography is abhorent and rightfully illegal. My question simply revolves around the claimed ill effects to minors who view porn.
Or see Reno v. ACLU. This was originally ACLU v. Reno, but when the ACLU won in a lower court, the Justice Department appealed. The name's where therefore swtiched.
This is how the case looks whenever a private party brings suit against the federal government over the constitutionality of a law.
Bullshit.
Go to Google right now and search for pro-life websites. Go ahead. You know what will show up. There will be about a gajillion different results turned, and 99.9% of those are completely unaffected by this case, nor will they be so affected in the future. It is one thing to promote a certain viewpoint, it is quite another to specifically advocate and celebrate the murder of those who oppose that viewpoint. Such violent advocacy is -- and should be -- against the law.
And by the way, I would be saying the exact same thing were the roles reversed, and it was a pro-choice site advocating the murder of pro-life advocates. (Funny how that never happens, though.)
Aside: GodDAMN I am sick of the term "PC" being thrown around every time a judicial ruling comes down that the neoconservative crowd doesn't like. That is a tired, tired term and doesn't say anything substantial.
This isn't some legislatively requried oath. It's a code of ethics. Sure it's within the realm of physical possibility that someone will require that you stamp 666 on your forehead in order to be a professional coder, but its highly unlikely.
Man, if the parent isn't an example of a slippery slope I don't know what is.