The entire plot centers around a magic box for gods sake.
hmm, I think you missed something. The scientist guy had figured out the math needed to factor large polynomials and thus break pretty much anybody's encryption.
The movie would have been pretty boring if the math had been on a peice of paper, and the plot would have been spoiled because they could have made a photocopy of it. So instead, he supposedly programmed it into a chip.
The movie wasn't about the chip, or the box it was in. The movie was about the math.
Those skills will be much in demand where he's going!
As to putting "Applications" on your resume and listing a bunch of programs that you can point and click your way through, I personally don't do it, but I understand why other people do. It's because HR droids are programmed to "look for someone who can use visual studio" and they just throw away all the resumes that don't have that on them. Realistically, you should be looking for someone who knows a particular programming language. They can pick up the IDE in about a week. Nonetheless, listing notepad is kind of lame.
Re:If we're very, very lucky...
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 1
we'll get an actual image of Saturn rising over the horizon.
Well, Titan is tidally locked, so Saturn does not rise or set. It just hangs in the sky. If NASA picked a spot on the Saturn-facing side of the planet, then it might be possible to get Saturn in frame, if NASA didn't pick such a spot, then forget it.
Orientation of Saturn
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Judging by the orientation of Saturn's rings, all of those images show the probe landing near one of Titan's poles. I thought it was going to land closer to the equator - in that case, Saturn's rings would be straight up and down.
I still remember the time, after playing many hours of Quake, that I walked into a door at work. It's a true story. I litterally slammed into the door because I just naturally expected it to open like the doors in the game had done.
I've thought about that a lot and I think I know why it happened. See, I wasn't playing the game at work, so it had been several hours at least since I'd played. But at work, I was deep in concentration and most likely what happened was that my subconcious, instead of staying in real-world, open the door mode, reverted to game-world, just walk through mode.
I bet similar connections are possible while driving, because so much of driving is subconcious
in this case, local access means, "has an account on the machine." Not necessarily, "is standing in front of the machine." So basically we're talking about shell accounts.
those pushing ID have no problem with having evolution thaught as well
I do find that notable. It really gets to the heart of the matter doesn't it. One camp (in this case, the people who are are factually wrong) are not afraid of open discussion. The other camp (as it happens, the ones who are factually correct) seems strangely afraid of the other viewpoint.
Why do they have such a low opinion of kids, that they think the kids will be horribly ruined by one class period discussing ID? I just don't get that.
Personally, I think ID is bunk. It's poetic bunk though. There is a lot of beauty in the universe and maybe it is fun to imagine that beauty is there just for our viewing enjoyment. Nonetheless, evolution adaquately describes the universe and that's good enough for me.
Getting back to the point. ID is really not that complicated. I'm thinking it takes maybe one class period to cover the whole thing. Maybe a 30 minute video and then a class discussion, with the teacher there to emphasis that the majority of scientists disagree with it. Imagine that a high school student spends an entire semester studying biology every single day. And spends exactly one class period learning about ID. Will that high school student explode? Will he be so confused and distraught that he'll be unable to hold down a job? Of course not. Come on. Kids are smart. They can figure this out for themselves.
On the positive side, when you get out into the real world, you are going to meet people with views different from your own. If you have some familiarity with those views, you're more likely to be tolerant.
I just don't see what the big problem with teaching many different views is. I mean, assuming it doesnt detract from the real info. I just don't see what the problem is, other than, like I said, fear that kids will know something you don't want them to know.
To make an analogy, I wouldn't have a problem with a class period being devoted to studying the Apollo Hoax claims either. Show a video, and then let it be debunked in discussion. I trust that kids are smart enough to come to the right conclusions. I'm not afraid of letting them see a viewpoint that is different from mine.
I like the way the Axim looks, and price is ok I guess, but I just hate WinCE. It's mostly personal preference - I grew up on PalmOS, but I just can't learn to love Wince
Just to put the Cassini mission into perspective, no human being in the history of our species has ever seen the surface of Titan. No one, in the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around, has been able to know what we are about to know.
Sure, this sort of thing has happened before - there was the first (and last) picture from the surface Venus, the first image of the far side of the moon, etc. I hope we haven't gotten too accustomed to it, at least not yet. I think we are amazingly fortunate to be able to see and know things that no one before could possibly have known. There is something there. Some people will think it's boring. "It's just rocks and mush," they'll say. But I think it's special. It's a place. It's an actual, real, physical place that is up there, just out of reach until now.
No amount of desire or commitment (or for that matter luck) could have revealed it to our fathers, or their fathers, or their fathers. No matter how badly they might have wanted to know it, it was hidden from them. They had to guess, or fantasize, or just live with the mystery. But we get to see it. We are the first.
And the best part about the universe is, there's always more to see just around the next corner.
I think that the mistake you've made is to believe what a politician says is one of his values. It's true that Democrats say they want to help the poor and disadvantaged, but the truth is (and yes, this applies to Republicans as well) all they really want is power.
A modern politician flips a coin and if it comes up heads he'll be a republican - tails he'll be a democrat. It doesn't matter to them which one they choose; they have about a 50/50 chance of being elected either way. That is the end goal - election - power. How they get there and what party they choose is irrelevant.
So you are saying that they couldn't program enough depth in the game (as in missions, story line, etc) itself?
yeah, but lots of games have "just missions" I guess Rock Star is trying something new. I've never played any of the GTA games, I'm just saying that I'm not going to knock it until I try it.
Anyway, don't worry. I'm sure there is a cheat code in there that will let you turn it off.
any half-decent IT department wipes the disk and installs from a generic image.
That's correct - if you have a site license for office. I was once a halfway descent IT person in a company that did not have site licenses. I had a big binder with every license for every individual peice of software we owned (until Microsoft made that difficult by putting the license on a sticker on the side of the computer). Anyway, we got some new computers, and these actually didn't come with any office suite. I was prepared to put the same version of office on them that we had on every other computer. This was way back in '98 and we were still using the version before office 97. MS no longer sold the CDs but they were willing to sell me just licenses. But get this, they were more expensive than the new version. That was another incentive to upgrade. I bought them anyway and a few weeks later I got 1 (one) peice of paper in the mail from microsoft that said, "license for X copies of office." It didn't even have a cool hologram or anything.
So just to review, I paid hundreds of dollars to Microsoft so they could hit File/Print and stuff it in an envelope. You've got to love a company with a setup like that.
Office has about 100% market share in business. MS is really facing an uphill battle with their new release it has to be better than anything they have released,
I'm sorry, but that is not at all how it works.
MS will stop selling the old version, so when you buy a shiny new computer from Dell, you're going to get the new version of Office. When a business replaces a few of their computers, they will find subtle but noticable differences between the office suites.
Guess who always gets the newest computers. Management. So after a couple of instances where your boss sends you a powerpoint presentation and it doesn't look quite right, you're going to complain that you need the same version he or she has. voila. Everybody has the new version of office. It doesn't matter if it is any better than the old one. Hell, they could intentionally make it worse. It wouldn't matter. Nobody would notice because nobody uses the advanced features.
It always cracks me up when I suggest that someone try oppenoffice. "I don't want to learn something new," they say. But openoffice works exactly like MS office and you go to a new version of it every couple of years.
On the regular VHS version that I have, when R2 pulls up the directions that obiwan will take to the tractor beam thing and the camera zooms to the video screen, C3PO explains what obiwan has to do. "the beam is powered by these three things, and if you take out one the beam will be disabled." But in the widescreen VHS version, that line isn't present.
Not a C3PO line, but in the scene where Adm Tark is told that there is a security alert in the detention area, Darth Vader is there and he says a couple of lines, but then stops talking and continues shaking his finger. It's clear there was more dialog there. This is easily explained though by the fact that all of vader's lines were dubbed.
Remember to count contrails and not chemtrails. ok?
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
Tell me, anyone, what is the lure of console games?
volume.
people who play a lot of games get consoles. I don't understand it myself, but some people will buy or rent a game a week or every two weeks. If you go through that many games you really have to go the console route. You save money and headaches in the long run.
As for me, I play a very few games. I'm very picky. So, I stay with the PC.
1. Everything above the cut would stay in orbit. Everything below the cut would fall to Earth. The base will be on the West side of the Atlantic Ocean and will therefore have hundreds of miles of water to its East. Most of the dangerous things that can cut it are in LEO, which is less than "hundreds of miles" away. So more than likely everything that falls to Earth will fall into the Ocean.
2. Just because the cable has high tensile strength that doesn't mean it is indestructible. You can bind a person's hands with speaker wire and no matter how strong the person is, they wont be able to break free. But that doesn't mean the wire is magically indestructible. It's just wire.
3. In the current issue of Discover Magazine, the concept they write about calls for a cable a few feet across, but only as thick as a sheet of paper. I don't know why so many people assume we are talking about an elevator to lift humans. The first several incarnations will be for light cargo only. Anyway, a cable as thin as a sheet of paper will mostly burn up as it falls through the atmosphere. If any of it survives, it will be shattered into pieces (not together as a whole cable) and will have the same terminal velocity as a sheet of paper. It will just flutter to the ground without hurting anyone. If you are lucky enough to live in the debris path, you can collect the stuff up and sell it on ebay.
So many people make the mistake of assuming that there is some horrible danger that only they will recognize. As if hundreds of scientists around the world are diligently studying this and then Frans Faase of slashdot comes along and says, "what about this problem here?" And all those scientists will just throw up their hands and say "oh god, we all have PhDs but we didn't think of that - we aren't as smart as Frans." Right.
Compare that with how NASA closed ranks and divulged Columbia information with an eye dropper for weeks after the disaster.
Wait a sec. If congress and the press started accusing Rutan of being negligent, you can bet your ass his coworkers would close ranks.
And if something really complicated and non-obvious has occured, they will release the information they learn as they learn it. Today they tell us there was a problem with attitude thrusters. Maybe tomorrow they will learn that the problem was with the main engine gymbal. If that happens, are you going to say they are divulging info with an eye dropper?
Slashdot Mirror
The entire plot centers around a magic box for gods sake.
hmm, I think you missed something. The scientist guy had figured out the math needed to factor large polynomials and thus break pretty much anybody's encryption.
The movie would have been pretty boring if the math had been on a peice of paper, and the plot would have been spoiled because they could have made a photocopy of it. So instead, he supposedly programmed it into a chip.
The movie wasn't about the chip, or the box it was in. The movie was about the math.
I was always a bit surprised that one of these networks didn't actually hire malda et al to do a show on geek life or something.
Also this:
Massage: (503) 287-4812
Those skills will be much in demand where he's going!
As to putting "Applications" on your resume and listing a bunch of programs that you can point and click your way through, I personally don't do it, but I understand why other people do. It's because HR droids are programmed to "look for someone who can use visual studio" and they just throw away all the resumes that don't have that on them. Realistically, you should be looking for someone who knows a particular programming language. They can pick up the IDE in about a week. Nonetheless, listing notepad is kind of lame.
we'll get an actual image of Saturn rising over the horizon.
Well, Titan is tidally locked, so Saturn does not rise or set. It just hangs in the sky. If NASA picked a spot on the Saturn-facing side of the planet, then it might be possible to get Saturn in frame, if NASA didn't pick such a spot, then forget it.
Judging by the orientation of Saturn's rings, all of those images show the probe landing near one of Titan's poles. I thought it was going to land closer to the equator - in that case, Saturn's rings would be straight up and down.
I still remember the time, after playing many hours of Quake, that I walked into a door at work. It's a true story. I litterally slammed into the door because I just naturally expected it to open like the doors in the game had done.
I've thought about that a lot and I think I know why it happened. See, I wasn't playing the game at work, so it had been several hours at least since I'd played. But at work, I was deep in concentration and most likely what happened was that my subconcious, instead of staying in real-world, open the door mode, reverted to game-world, just walk through mode.
I bet similar connections are possible while driving, because so much of driving is subconcious
in this case, local access means, "has an account on the machine." Not necessarily, "is standing in front of the machine." So basically we're talking about shell accounts.
those pushing ID have no problem with having evolution thaught as well
I do find that notable. It really gets to the heart of the matter doesn't it. One camp (in this case, the people who are are factually wrong) are not afraid of open discussion. The other camp (as it happens, the ones who are factually correct) seems strangely afraid of the other viewpoint.
Why do they have such a low opinion of kids, that they think the kids will be horribly ruined by one class period discussing ID? I just don't get that.
Personally, I think ID is bunk. It's poetic bunk though. There is a lot of beauty in the universe and maybe it is fun to imagine that beauty is there just for our viewing enjoyment. Nonetheless, evolution adaquately describes the universe and that's good enough for me.
Getting back to the point. ID is really not that complicated. I'm thinking it takes maybe one class period to cover the whole thing. Maybe a 30 minute video and then a class discussion, with the teacher there to emphasis that the majority of scientists disagree with it. Imagine that a high school student spends an entire semester studying biology every single day. And spends exactly one class period learning about ID. Will that high school student explode? Will he be so confused and distraught that he'll be unable to hold down a job? Of course not. Come on. Kids are smart. They can figure this out for themselves.
On the positive side, when you get out into the real world, you are going to meet people with views different from your own. If you have some familiarity with those views, you're more likely to be tolerant.
I just don't see what the big problem with teaching many different views is. I mean, assuming it doesnt detract from the real info. I just don't see what the problem is, other than, like I said, fear that kids will know something you don't want them to know.
To make an analogy, I wouldn't have a problem with a class period being devoted to studying the Apollo Hoax claims either. Show a video, and then let it be debunked in discussion. I trust that kids are smart enough to come to the right conclusions. I'm not afraid of letting them see a viewpoint that is different from mine.
Did they ever actually manage to live in the thing without outside support in the form of O2 and food?
I like the way the Axim looks, and price is ok I guess, but I just hate WinCE. It's mostly personal preference - I grew up on PalmOS, but I just can't learn to love Wince
Just to put the Cassini mission into perspective, no human being in the history of our species has ever seen the surface of Titan. No one, in the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around, has been able to know what we are about to know.
Sure, this sort of thing has happened before - there was the first (and last) picture from the surface Venus, the first image of the far side of the moon, etc. I hope we haven't gotten too accustomed to it, at least not yet. I think we are amazingly fortunate to be able to see and know things that no one before could possibly have known. There is something there. Some people will think it's boring. "It's just rocks and mush," they'll say. But I think it's special. It's a place. It's an actual, real, physical place that is up there, just out of reach until now.
No amount of desire or commitment (or for that matter luck) could have revealed it to our fathers, or their fathers, or their fathers. No matter how badly they might have wanted to know it, it was hidden from them. They had to guess, or fantasize, or just live with the mystery. But we get to see it. We are the first.
And the best part about the universe is, there's always more to see just around the next corner.
I think that the mistake you've made is to believe what a politician says is one of his values. It's true that Democrats say they want to help the poor and disadvantaged, but the truth is (and yes, this applies to Republicans as well) all they really want is power.
A modern politician flips a coin and if it comes up heads he'll be a republican - tails he'll be a democrat. It doesn't matter to them which one they choose; they have about a 50/50 chance of being elected either way. That is the end goal - election - power. How they get there and what party they choose is irrelevant.
So you are saying that they couldn't program enough depth in the game (as in missions, story line, etc) itself?
yeah, but lots of games have "just missions" I guess Rock Star is trying something new. I've never played any of the GTA games, I'm just saying that I'm not going to knock it until I try it.
Anyway, don't worry. I'm sure there is a cheat code in there that will let you turn it off.
What does eating matter to a game like this?
I guess it's just something else to do to pass the time. You know, depth.
any half-decent IT department wipes the disk and installs from a generic image.
That's correct - if you have a site license for office. I was once a halfway descent IT person in a company that did not have site licenses. I had a big binder with every license for every individual peice of software we owned (until Microsoft made that difficult by putting the license on a sticker on the side of the computer). Anyway, we got some new computers, and these actually didn't come with any office suite. I was prepared to put the same version of office on them that we had on every other computer. This was way back in '98 and we were still using the version before office 97. MS no longer sold the CDs but they were willing to sell me just licenses. But get this, they were more expensive than the new version. That was another incentive to upgrade. I bought them anyway and a few weeks later I got 1 (one) peice of paper in the mail from microsoft that said, "license for X copies of office." It didn't even have a cool hologram or anything.
So just to review, I paid hundreds of dollars to Microsoft so they could hit File/Print and stuff it in an envelope. You've got to love a company with a setup like that.
Office has about 100% market share in business. MS is really facing an uphill battle with their new release it has to be better than anything they have released,
I'm sorry, but that is not at all how it works.
MS will stop selling the old version, so when you buy a shiny new computer from Dell, you're going to get the new version of Office. When a business replaces a few of their computers, they will find subtle but noticable differences between the office suites.
Guess who always gets the newest computers. Management. So after a couple of instances where your boss sends you a powerpoint presentation and it doesn't look quite right, you're going to complain that you need the same version he or she has. voila. Everybody has the new version of office. It doesn't matter if it is any better than the old one. Hell, they could intentionally make it worse. It wouldn't matter. Nobody would notice because nobody uses the advanced features.
It always cracks me up when I suggest that someone try oppenoffice. "I don't want to learn something new," they say. But openoffice works exactly like MS office and you go to a new version of it every couple of years.
C3PO line you think was dropped?
On the regular VHS version that I have, when R2 pulls up the directions that obiwan will take to the tractor beam thing and the camera zooms to the video screen, C3PO explains what obiwan has to do. "the beam is powered by these three things, and if you take out one the beam will be disabled." But in the widescreen VHS version, that line isn't present.
Not a C3PO line, but in the scene where Adm Tark is told that there is a security alert in the detention area, Darth Vader is there and he says a couple of lines, but then stops talking and continues shaking his finger. It's clear there was more dialog there. This is easily explained though by the fact that all of vader's lines were dubbed.
Remember to count contrails and not chemtrails. ok?
Tell me, anyone, what is the lure of console games?
volume.
people who play a lot of games get consoles. I don't understand it myself, but some people will buy or rent a game a week or every two weeks. If you go through that many games you really have to go the console route. You save money and headaches in the long run.
As for me, I play a very few games. I'm very picky. So, I stay with the PC.
And what if the tether breaks and drops on Earth
1. Everything above the cut would stay in orbit. Everything below the cut would fall to Earth. The base will be on the West side of the Atlantic Ocean and will therefore have hundreds of miles of water to its East. Most of the dangerous things that can cut it are in LEO, which is less than "hundreds of miles" away. So more than likely everything that falls to Earth will fall into the Ocean.
2. Just because the cable has high tensile strength that doesn't mean it is indestructible. You can bind a person's hands with speaker wire and no matter how strong the person is, they wont be able to break free. But that doesn't mean the wire is magically indestructible. It's just wire.
3. In the current issue of Discover Magazine, the concept they write about calls for a cable a few feet across, but only as thick as a sheet of paper. I don't know why so many people assume we are talking about an elevator to lift humans. The first several incarnations will be for light cargo only. Anyway, a cable as thin as a sheet of paper will mostly burn up as it falls through the atmosphere. If any of it survives, it will be shattered into pieces (not together as a whole cable) and will have the same terminal velocity as a sheet of paper. It will just flutter to the ground without hurting anyone. If you are lucky enough to live in the debris path, you can collect the stuff up and sell it on ebay.
So many people make the mistake of assuming that there is some horrible danger that only they will recognize. As if hundreds of scientists around the world are diligently studying this and then Frans Faase of slashdot comes along and says, "what about this problem here?" And all those scientists will just throw up their hands and say "oh god, we all have PhDs but we didn't think of that - we aren't as smart as Frans." Right.
there must be a downside to being muscular... I wonder what it is.
Chicks dig the pale glow of a scrawny computer geek.
Compare that with how NASA closed ranks and divulged Columbia information with an eye dropper for weeks after the disaster.
Wait a sec. If congress and the press started accusing Rutan of being negligent, you can bet your ass his coworkers would close ranks.
And if something really complicated and non-obvious has occured, they will release the information they learn as they learn it. Today they tell us there was a problem with attitude thrusters. Maybe tomorrow they will learn that the problem was with the main engine gymbal. If that happens, are you going to say they are divulging info with an eye dropper?
her e you go
because of a wonderful thing called "field of view"
forgive the ignorance. So, these things take 17 years to mature or are they hybernating for that long or what?