That reminds me of something that happened to me back in elementary school. We had a computer lab with a bunch of old macs running system 7, and we were told to open a certain "educational program". Mine wouldn't run, because there wasn't enough memory. So, inquisitive child that I was, I went and turned on virtual memory. Only a megabyte, but after that the program worked fine. Only thing was, the teacher found out about it, gave me a little lecture about how I could have messed something up very very badly (I knew what I was doing damn it!) and then she moved me to a different computer where the teachers could keep an eye on me to make sure I was doing only what I was supposed to. That sucked, but that school was better than most.
But it was needed very much near the end, when Ender was commanding the fleet against the fleets of the buggers. It helped to be a good tactician in order to get near enough to the bugger planet that he could use Dr. Device.
But you're right: anybody could probably have done the last part (or maybe not; I think it took some good maneuvering to get close enough).
Three things, in combination, really bother me about this. The first one if that the spesifics of the blocking are kept secret for stupid reasons ("disseminating pornography", indeed. I'll disseminatepornography!). The second reason is that the secret blocked sites are being chosen by the state government, which I wouldn't trust at all, especially if you think of all the underhanded things people have done to get elected. Finally, I'm just against censoring the internet for anybody other than yourself.
Imagine using this for more than just text editors. Take spreadsheets, for instance. They're a great way to organize information about lots of things---financial information, lists of people, et cetera---but they don't scale very well, so they get replaced by such things as web interfaces to a database. I'm doing something like that myself, so I know that this can entail quite a bit of work. Imagine if multiple people could edit a spreadsheet at the same time.
Doesn't this seem a little early to be making real programming languages for quantum computers? I was thinking that the first languages would be things that quantum computer researchers just sort of hack up quickly, and then when quantum computers are here they'll get decent languages. Suppose that these people spend a whole lot of effort on these first-generation languages---will they want to discover that a different approach is better, and wish they had taken it from the start?
From personal experience with a movie theater with an unreliable projector, I can say that the sequance of events will be something like this:
Movie stops, people groan.
People start talking all at once, and the theater gets pretty noisy. People sit there for a little while though.
People take advantage of the pause in the movie to use the restrooms, get popcorn, talk about whatever it is they talk about, and demand their money back.
Im 100% behind the idea that GNU/Linux should become the most dazzling and impressive computer platform... when presented to people, they should be knocked over how 'cool' it behaves and looks.
Hear hear! I've seen some pretty nice KDE themes (I haven't used GNOME recently, so I don't know about it), like the Aqua theme, and it is really fun to use. I love eye candy. But still, there should be non-eye-candy programs like emacs/vi/whatever for doing stuff simply.
2. Making the lasers shoot at a slow enough velocity so that you can actually watch it travel from the end of the barrel to the target in no less than 0.4 seconds. This way massive hallway gun-fights involving garbage-shoot-getaways look that much cooler.
They'll also have to make the laser much less laserish for this to happen, since you can't see a laser beam. Perhaps they should toss smoke canisters into any battle before they start shooting these things, so that light that collides with the smoke particles can be partially scattered and you can see the cool effects.
I believe that this still requires some imporatant bits of hardware, and I only know of one place to get the processor (I'm probably just ignorant): Motorola. Are there lots of different choices for places to get the hardware? Can you plug in dirt cheap PC parts? Could this help people who want to run a mac but don't want to pay the hardware premium?
Where can you get the hardware for this? And, somewhat less importantly, can you do case mods on these things?
This can't turn people into food. This can do a bang-up job of turning people into water, minerals, clean-burning gas (not gasoline), and very light crude oil. Soylent brown is more like it. But we shouldn't have to end up feeding people to this thing, since it can handle all sorts of things. It's really neat that it can handle chicken guts, corpses of people, and old plastic pop bottles with the same process.
Same here; this isn't an april fools day article. Which, in a way, is a pretty funny joke to play for april fools day: insert a serious story that will seem incredible. Perhaps we should have a dupe on another day so that people will realize that it is serious if they disregard all april first articles.
I do feel slightly guilty sometimes about all the use I've gotten from emacs for free, but since its primary author is heppy to let me use it I might as well.
Don't feel guilty. If you want to repay RMS and the rest of the emacs community for all the use you've gotten out of emacs (a great text editor IMO), you should just try to help other emacs users. Make a cool mode for editing some odd language, or something. Any debt you might feel would then be gone, and people would then be indebted to you!
Speaking of things slashdot needs, I have an idea for an improvement to the moderation system: flag moderations. These would be like the normal moderations (eg, Troll, Funny), but they wouldn't affect the score of the comment in question. People could then change their preferences to change the scores of all the comments the way they wanted. This would be useful for knocking comments like yours down to -1, since I would set my preferences to subtract a lot of points from anthing with a "Slashdotted Already" moderation.
That's why you keep organisms that you make carefully contained. You observe them very carefully before even considering taking them out of quarentine. And as for mutations, perhaps you've been watching too many movies that use "mutation" as the convenient ominous and ill-defined bad thing.
At least Quenya wasn't made mandatory in the first age by some annoying king who tried to set an impossible task for the suitor of his daughter just because he wasn't an elf!
Sometimes it is better to do something and fail than never to have tried at all. One such area is science, in which any blind alley is one less that someone will have to go down. I think this is similar. Smart displays may or may not pay off, but there's a good chance that they will yield something worthwhile. Who knows?
I should have qualified my question: how does doing arithmetic by hand in high school, after you already know (presumably) how to do all the usual arithmetic, make people smarter? I wasn't arguing that calculators should be used as a substitute for learning arithmetic. In my physics example, there are two main kinds of problems. The first kind is the king that can be solved easily by just punching the numbers into the right formula, perhaps with some algebra done mentally (some of that good symbolic manipulation, which is a nice way of expressing a vague concept I have, thanks). The other kind is the fun kind, where you may have to combine vectors , friction, and a host of other things. These are great if you have symbolic manipulation skills and can see what formulas fo use, since you can put the thing together in a neat way, with numbers flitting in and out of your calculator, being double checked if they look different from what was expected, and eventually coming up with the right answer.
I'm all for thinking and understanding. I just think that once you have thinking and understanding of arithmetic you can use a calculator to get the arithmetic out of the way and let you think and understand what you're doing now.
That reminds me of an experiment we did in eighth grade science class. The teacher had us all making bubbles on the tables and observing the colors. She had us note that as the bubbles got bigger and thinner, the colors changed, and then we had to record the sequence of colors. Finish. No explanation, nothing. I asked why the colors did that, and it turned out that the teacher didn't know and didn't know why we would want to know. It wasn't until senior year in high school that the few people who took physics learned that it was caused by interference from the light reflected by the outer and inner surfaces of the bubble.
Science, as with most things, is more meaningful when you can see the point.
Although you claim not to be a troll, you don't lend much credibility to this assertion with explanation. I'll bite. In High School, you shouldn't have to worry about arithmetic. That's the sort of stuff you do in elementary school and some of junior high. In high school, you should be focusing on Algebra at the very least. How does having to do arithmetic by hand make people smarter? Are you some elitist arithmetic whiz who sucks at higher math and bitterly asserts that you are still better at math because you don't need a calculator? Are you just trolling? I'll bet you're just trolling, and I'll assume it until you come up with some real argument to back your position.
In Physics, as an example of a class that uses calculators heavily, we could just punch numbers in the calculator and not worry too much about rounding or tedious long division. We also got to use the metric system and not worry about the Imperial system, which had a very similar effect on unit conversions. Is the metric system "detrimental to high school education"?
What kind of evidence could you have to prove that someone planted something on you?
This sentence really rubs me the wrong way. Nothing personal toward anyone (I'm going to rant at the world in general here), but This sentence should be "What kind of evidence could the prosecution have that someone didn't plant something on you?". The idea is that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. "Your word against the arresting officer" should result in a tie, which will then let you get off. It is better to let a few criminals go unpunished than to punish a few innocent people. False positives are bad.
And any court that will punish someone when they don't have good evidence (better than a police officer's say-so) is a BUNCH OF STUPID ASSHATS!
I can see that these would be cool---for someone who's never seen an iMac. I remember when I first saw an iMac. It was cool. I could see through the case. But are there any advantages to these cases other than looking cool? I'd prefer to have a compact case that I could fit a lot of computer in. There was a project a while ago to make small computers that would fit in a small brick and run quietly. Quiet, small, low heat computers are what I'd like to see. Unfortunately this might now look as cool if you look in a transparent case.
Are there any neat things you would like to see in a case?
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of something that happened to me back in elementary school. We had a computer lab with a bunch of old macs running system 7, and we were told to open a certain "educational program". Mine wouldn't run, because there wasn't enough memory. So, inquisitive child that I was, I went and turned on virtual memory. Only a megabyte, but after that the program worked fine. Only thing was, the teacher found out about it, gave me a little lecture about how I could have messed something up very very badly (I knew what I was doing damn it!) and then she moved me to a different computer where the teachers could keep an eye on me to make sure I was doing only what I was supposed to. That sucked, but that school was better than most.
But you're right: anybody could probably have done the last part (or maybe not; I think it took some good maneuvering to get close enough).
Three things, in combination, really bother me about this. The first one if that the spesifics of the blocking are kept secret for stupid reasons ("disseminating pornography", indeed. I'll disseminate pornography!). The second reason is that the secret blocked sites are being chosen by the state government, which I wouldn't trust at all, especially if you think of all the underhanded things people have done to get elected. Finally, I'm just against censoring the internet for anybody other than yourself.
Imagine using this for more than just text editors. Take spreadsheets, for instance. They're a great way to organize information about lots of things---financial information, lists of people, et cetera---but they don't scale very well, so they get replaced by such things as web interfaces to a database. I'm doing something like that myself, so I know that this can entail quite a bit of work. Imagine if multiple people could edit a spreadsheet at the same time.
Gradual development....
It's already been done. Ghostscript is available for windows, and it includes ps2pdf, which does the conversion nicely.
Hear hear! I've seen some pretty nice KDE themes (I haven't used GNOME recently, so I don't know about it), like the Aqua theme, and it is really fun to use. I love eye candy. But still, there should be non-eye-candy programs like emacs/vi/whatever for doing stuff simply.
They'll also have to make the laser much less laserish for this to happen, since you can't see a laser beam. Perhaps they should toss smoke canisters into any battle before they start shooting these things, so that light that collides with the smoke particles can be partially scattered and you can see the cool effects.
Where can you get the hardware for this? And, somewhat less importantly, can you do case mods on these things?
This can't turn people into food. This can do a bang-up job of turning people into water, minerals, clean-burning gas (not gasoline), and very light crude oil. Soylent brown is more like it. But we shouldn't have to end up feeding people to this thing, since it can handle all sorts of things. It's really neat that it can handle chicken guts, corpses of people, and old plastic pop bottles with the same process.
Same here; this isn't an april fools day article. Which, in a way, is a pretty funny joke to play for april fools day: insert a serious story that will seem incredible. Perhaps we should have a dupe on another day so that people will realize that it is serious if they disregard all april first articles.
Don't feel guilty. If you want to repay RMS and the rest of the emacs community for all the use you've gotten out of emacs (a great text editor IMO), you should just try to help other emacs users. Make a cool mode for editing some odd language, or something. Any debt you might feel would then be gone, and people would then be indebted to you!
The possibilities are endless!
That's why you keep organisms that you make carefully contained. You observe them very carefully before even considering taking them out of quarentine. And as for mutations, perhaps you've been watching too many movies that use "mutation" as the convenient ominous and ill-defined bad thing.
Speaking of "playing God", why shouldn't we?
There is significance in this date. Let this RFC be a warning to all who think that XML is the right tool for everything.
No no,
In Soviet Russia Microsoft makes hackers extinct!
Wow, a millenia old flame war.... :-)
Anyway, there may be some applications....
I'm all for thinking and understanding. I just think that once you have thinking and understanding of arithmetic you can use a calculator to get the arithmetic out of the way and let you think and understand what you're doing now.
Science, as with most things, is more meaningful when you can see the point.
In Physics, as an example of a class that uses calculators heavily, we could just punch numbers in the calculator and not worry too much about rounding or tedious long division. We also got to use the metric system and not worry about the Imperial system, which had a very similar effect on unit conversions. Is the metric system "detrimental to high school education"?
This sentence really rubs me the wrong way. Nothing personal toward anyone (I'm going to rant at the world in general here), but This sentence should be "What kind of evidence could the prosecution have that someone didn't plant something on you?". The idea is that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. "Your word against the arresting officer" should result in a tie, which will then let you get off. It is better to let a few criminals go unpunished than to punish a few innocent people. False positives are bad.
And any court that will punish someone when they don't have good evidence (better than a police officer's say-so) is a BUNCH OF STUPID ASSHATS!
</rant>
Are there any neat things you would like to see in a case?