Because there isn't anything to "solve". We already know plenty of great ways to move people around faster, and none of them involve running. So if you're going to add the arbitrary restriction that people have to race on foot, what's wrong with a few more rules? While you may find it boring, a lot of people obviously don't. The problem isn't the arbitrary rules, it's the win at all costs mentality. Put it this way -- would chess be more fun if people tried to knock each other's pieces off the board while their back was turned?
(That's not even getting into the health effects of unrestricted doping on the athletes, mind you.)
Is there a way to hide copyright/RIAA/MPAA/piracy stories? They don't seem to show up under any consistent category or author. I know I can just scroll past them, but then I'm still stuck reading the summary of every blow-by-blow account of the copyright wars. I know, the *AAs are evil, copyright terms are too long, yeah, I get it, I got it ten years ago, I don't need to hear it repeated ad nauseum.
It's a bait and switch. The summary and site claim to have comparisons of different schools' curricula, but there aren't any actual comparisons. Some of the courses have copy/pasted excerpts from the course catalog. The bulk of the content is a list of textbooks with Amazon affiliate links. Given the overall sparseness of the site and the fact that textbooks tell you very little about differences between programs, I concluded that the purpose of the site and its Slashdot story was to lure people with false advertising and hope they click on some links. It might as well just be a page full of banner ads.
The linked site doesn't have any actual comparisons of the programs, just a list of textbooks with Amazon affiliate links. It's a scam -- this story should be deleted ASAP.
You're probably thinking of the shell theorem, which says that a uniform sphere of mass is gravitationally equivalent to a point mass located at the center of the sphere. This theorem does imply that a larger radius = less gravity at the surface.
I live in inner-city Houston (the fourth largest city in the U.S.) and commute to the suburbs. Using a car (2007 Honda Civic 4-door sedan) costs me:
$80/month for insurance $0/month for parking $125 last month for gas (~13mi commute one-way) Car payment's a little funny because I'm paying it off well in advance, but probably close to $160/month over an expected ten year lifetime. Maintenance is also a little funny especially since I got a seven year warranty, but so far it's been $100/year ($8/month).
So that's a grand total of $370/month. Not too bad. It might be worse if I had an older car with no warranty. But when you take into account the hours I save not taking public transportation and the added comfort of not waiting out in the oppressive heat, I think it's worth the difference. Plus, the car is mine -- I can store things in it, transport large/heavy items, run it whenever I want, and take it with me if I move.
Of course, since no public transportation goes anywhere near my job it's an academic question to begin with.
Your numbers were overinflated by parking fees, which you should never pay unless you're in New York. FYI, New York is not a good example of city living. It's easily twice the size of the next-largest city (L.A.) and about four times the size of the third (Chicago).
I'm all in favor of courage and self-determination, but you're kidding yourself if you think that open ballots would ever work. There are a couple problems with what you're saying.
First, the perceived value of a single vote is usually much smaller than that of people's lives or well-being (or those of their families), even when that vote could swing the whole election. So once you open up the ballots it's very effective to *add* intimidation and harassment, which can be hard to catch or stop through legal means.
Second, refusing to associate with people because of political differences is way too extreme (and helps creates the problems I mentioned above). What's the point of having a peaceful way of resolving disputes (voting) if you're going to fight anyway? People form political opinions based on a little knowledge and a lot of information, and most of the time there isn't enough confidence to be worth disrupting the rest of your life over. If you take off the political lenses you find that people just aren't that different. And that's not to mention the practical difficulties of finding a new job, new friends, and possibly a new family...
I like to turn off or mute most of the garish syntax highlighting I find. I use a white background, very dark blue for keywords and operators, very dark brown for function names, very dark red for preprocessor directives (in C), light grey for comments, and black for everything else. This provides enough texture to make it easier to scroll through code while still making it easy to read. I especially like the light grey comments because they clearly separate code from non-code and make commented-out code actually look commented-out. Whoever came up with bright green for comments should be shot. Read Tufte's Envisioning Information to learn more about the effective use of color for displaying information.
Just protrons and neutrons. Electrons, quarks, and neutrinos, along with their antiparticles and possibly supersymmetric counterparts and the bosons (photons, etc.) are the most fundamental particles known today.
Because most college students actually are downloading the RIAA's music? I know the less-common case of an innocent person just happening to be on a P2P network is philosophically popular, but the reality is that such people are a tiny minority.
Yeah, it's been a problem with them in the past. I was sad to see Hillary start bringing up video game violence again a year or two ago, as if we don't have anything more important to worry about. But there may be hope -- younger people are a key demographic for the Democrats, and most of us like video games.
IC voltage regulators aren't free, but they aren't that expensive, either -- maybe a couple dollars. I don't know how much mass-produced wall-warts are, but given that there's a transformer inside full of copper and iron I'd be surprised if it was that big a difference. And who doesn't hate those, anyway?
Re:The results don't mean anything!
on
The Red Team Wins
·
· Score: 1
Dustbowl, Gravelpit, and Goldrush are all asymmetrical -- blue is offense and red is defense. They used to be even more unbalanced in favor of defense, but I think Valve has tweaked them over the past several months. The other maps are completely symmetrical.
I agree that more work should be done. It'll be pretty interesting if this turns out to be a real effect.
Re:The results don't mean anything!
on
The Red Team Wins
·
· Score: 1
Valve's TeamFortress 2 stats show the same effect after over many more trials -- 21,000 in the case of 2fort.
I don't think geeks are much more skeptical than other groups of people. Everyone thinks groupthink and bias don't apply to them, but the reality is a lot more subtle. A good book I've found for learning about innate human biases is How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. It's filled with examples of how pattern detection and reasoning are skewed by the same heuristics that make our brains so effective in the first place.
Because photons can't move more than one electron. An electron absorbs a photon, giving it enough energy to move, then whacks another atom, freeing some more electrons in the process. There's a well-known avalance effect in ordinary diodes, so it's not particularly exotic. But the article is talking about lead-selenide crystals, not silicon, so I'm not sure how applicable this finding is to the current generation of solar cells.
Actually, the most likely possibility is that he finds nothing at all, just like everyone else who's tried to develop a magic wand of cheap limitless energy. But hey, at least the labs and grad students and technicians will get some money too.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiplayer gaming takes very little bandwidth. You can play over a modem, remember?
That's still not much of a limit. 250GB/month is over 8GB/day. I don't think I downloaded that much even when I was on a college connection.
Because there isn't anything to "solve". We already know plenty of great ways to move people around faster, and none of them involve running. So if you're going to add the arbitrary restriction that people have to race on foot, what's wrong with a few more rules? While you may find it boring, a lot of people obviously don't. The problem isn't the arbitrary rules, it's the win at all costs mentality. Put it this way -- would chess be more fun if people tried to knock each other's pieces off the board while their back was turned?
(That's not even getting into the health effects of unrestricted doping on the athletes, mind you.)
Is there a way to hide copyright/RIAA/MPAA/piracy stories? They don't seem to show up under any consistent category or author. I know I can just scroll past them, but then I'm still stuck reading the summary of every blow-by-blow account of the copyright wars. I know, the *AAs are evil, copyright terms are too long, yeah, I get it, I got it ten years ago, I don't need to hear it repeated ad nauseum.
(Cue -1, Cares About Quality Of Slashdot mods)
It's a bait and switch. The summary and site claim to have comparisons of different schools' curricula, but there aren't any actual comparisons. Some of the courses have copy/pasted excerpts from the course catalog. The bulk of the content is a list of textbooks with Amazon affiliate links. Given the overall sparseness of the site and the fact that textbooks tell you very little about differences between programs, I concluded that the purpose of the site and its Slashdot story was to lure people with false advertising and hope they click on some links. It might as well just be a page full of banner ads.
I'm on Windows and my text looks nothing like that. What did you do to make that happen?
The linked site doesn't have any actual comparisons of the programs, just a list of textbooks with Amazon affiliate links. It's a scam -- this story should be deleted ASAP.
You're probably thinking of the shell theorem, which says that a uniform sphere of mass is gravitationally equivalent to a point mass located at the center of the sphere. This theorem does imply that a larger radius = less gravity at the surface.
I live in inner-city Houston (the fourth largest city in the U.S.) and commute to the suburbs. Using a car (2007 Honda Civic 4-door sedan) costs me:
$80/month for insurance
$0/month for parking
$125 last month for gas (~13mi commute one-way)
Car payment's a little funny because I'm paying it off well in advance, but probably close to $160/month over an expected ten year lifetime.
Maintenance is also a little funny especially since I got a seven year warranty, but so far it's been $100/year ($8/month).
So that's a grand total of $370/month. Not too bad. It might be worse if I had an older car with no warranty. But when you take into account the hours I save not taking public transportation and the added comfort of not waiting out in the oppressive heat, I think it's worth the difference. Plus, the car is mine -- I can store things in it, transport large/heavy items, run it whenever I want, and take it with me if I move.
Of course, since no public transportation goes anywhere near my job it's an academic question to begin with.
Your numbers were overinflated by parking fees, which you should never pay unless you're in New York. FYI, New York is not a good example of city living. It's easily twice the size of the next-largest city (L.A.) and about four times the size of the third (Chicago).
I'm all in favor of courage and self-determination, but you're kidding yourself if you think that open ballots would ever work. There are a couple problems with what you're saying.
First, the perceived value of a single vote is usually much smaller than that of people's lives or well-being (or those of their families), even when that vote could swing the whole election. So once you open up the ballots it's very effective to *add* intimidation and harassment, which can be hard to catch or stop through legal means.
Second, refusing to associate with people because of political differences is way too extreme (and helps creates the problems I mentioned above). What's the point of having a peaceful way of resolving disputes (voting) if you're going to fight anyway? People form political opinions based on a little knowledge and a lot of information, and most of the time there isn't enough confidence to be worth disrupting the rest of your life over. If you take off the political lenses you find that people just aren't that different. And that's not to mention the practical difficulties of finding a new job, new friends, and possibly a new family...
France is on their fifth constitution since the revolution. Does that really count as a continuing government?
I like to turn off or mute most of the garish syntax highlighting I find. I use a white background, very dark blue for keywords and operators, very dark brown for function names, very dark red for preprocessor directives (in C), light grey for comments, and black for everything else. This provides enough texture to make it easier to scroll through code while still making it easy to read. I especially like the light grey comments because they clearly separate code from non-code and make commented-out code actually look commented-out. Whoever came up with bright green for comments should be shot. Read Tufte's Envisioning Information to learn more about the effective use of color for displaying information.
Just protrons and neutrons. Electrons, quarks, and neutrinos, along with their antiparticles and possibly supersymmetric counterparts and the bosons (photons, etc.) are the most fundamental particles known today.
Electrons and positrons aren't made of quarks. They're fundamental particles.
Because most college students actually are downloading the RIAA's music? I know the less-common case of an innocent person just happening to be on a P2P network is philosophically popular, but the reality is that such people are a tiny minority.
Yeah, it's been a problem with them in the past. I was sad to see Hillary start bringing up video game violence again a year or two ago, as if we don't have anything more important to worry about. But there may be hope -- younger people are a key demographic for the Democrats, and most of us like video games.
You can find Westinghouse LCD monitors at Best Buy.
IC voltage regulators aren't free, but they aren't that expensive, either -- maybe a couple dollars. I don't know how much mass-produced wall-warts are, but given that there's a transformer inside full of copper and iron I'd be surprised if it was that big a difference. And who doesn't hate those, anyway?
Dustbowl, Gravelpit, and Goldrush are all asymmetrical -- blue is offense and red is defense. They used to be even more unbalanced in favor of defense, but I think Valve has tweaked them over the past several months. The other maps are completely symmetrical.
I agree that more work should be done. It'll be pretty interesting if this turns out to be a real effect.
Valve's TeamFortress 2 stats show the same effect after over many more trials -- 21,000 in the case of 2fort.
I don't think geeks are much more skeptical than other groups of people. Everyone thinks groupthink and bias don't apply to them, but the reality is a lot more subtle. A good book I've found for learning about innate human biases is How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. It's filled with examples of how pattern detection and reasoning are skewed by the same heuristics that make our brains so effective in the first place.
As opposed to the old kind of dielectric, silicon dioxide, which is also known as... sand.
What's the advantage of having a telescope on the moon instead of in space?
Because photons can't move more than one electron. An electron absorbs a photon, giving it enough energy to move, then whacks another atom, freeing some more electrons in the process. There's a well-known avalance effect in ordinary diodes, so it's not particularly exotic. But the article is talking about lead-selenide crystals, not silicon, so I'm not sure how applicable this finding is to the current generation of solar cells.
Actually, the most likely possibility is that he finds nothing at all, just like everyone else who's tried to develop a magic wand of cheap limitless energy. But hey, at least the labs and grad students and technicians will get some money too.