I'm not sure it's so much of a reward for the nerds. In a lot of cases, by the time they are ready to settle down, women have huge amounts of emotional baggage from all the 'awful, useless' creeps and jerks they have dated and been hurt by.
I'm talking about stuff like being cynical, unable to trust men, becoming manipulative themselves, etc. I am also making generalizations, but many single women in their late 20's to early 30's I have dated have had these issues.
I am a fairly nerdy 29 year old engineer, but I look alright and have decent conversational skills. I can definitely tell when a woman is responding positively to my 'nerdly' traits (honesty, sincerity, unselfishness, kindness), or being turned off by them. I have a good income (which is attractive to anyone), so if I can pretend to be a bit of a alpha-male jerk I can usually attract either type depending on if I'm looking for a relationship or a fling.
If it's broken, or the battery won't charge anymore, trading it in sounds pretty sweet. eBay is too difficult for some people, and it is sometimes a hassle for me as well, even though I've sold over a hundred items there. If you are well-off and just want a new iPod, trading it in may be the way to go.
I currently have a homebrew PC for HTPC functions (PVR, DVD duplicator, media library, etc.) as well as gaming. This machine has a Radeon 9800 Pro with the requisite fan; fanless video cards just will not cut it for the latest games. Yes, there are DIY heatsink systems for video cards, but they are bulky and will not fit in my small HTPC chassis. Eventually, I had to homebrew a clunky rheostat system for adjusting the video card fan noise while not playing games (the cards only really run hot when performing 3D instructions.)
I believe the hardware data indicates that PS3 and XBox 360 games can outperform PC games in every way, turning the tables on the high-end PC video card market. When and if that becomes the case, I will happily purchase a dedicated gaming console, and then downgrade my HTPC video card to something fanless. Of course, I'm assuming the new consoles will be fanless as well. I need HTPC functionality and gaming, but I hate the sound of whirring fans in my living room.
I'm aware of the XBox HTPC project, but it just didn't cut it for my needs (DVD duplication, auto-commercial advance, etc.) Perhaps someone will figure out a way to bring all the HTPC goodness to the PS3 or XBox 360, then I will have only one silent machine to do everything.:)
The building I work in is full of very bright engineers, IT folks, and PhDs. For our main conference room, we just outsourced everything to a professional design firm. For a substantial fee, they did a bang-up job.
It sounds like we would have been able to leverage some of the technical genius we have around here, but putting together a world-class conference room is much, much more about usability and interior design than technology. So much so, that Slashdot isn't even the right place to be asking about it.
First part of the problem is usability. Engineers do not typically understand how to make things easy to use, because they have a much higher tolerance for complexity than the average person. An engineer figures stuff out and gets the job done no matter what. They hardly even notice when something is hard to use or a user interface is clunky. A difficulty that would be a showstopper for a regular user is just background static to an engineer.
Then there is the other side of the problem: the interior design and looks. The average engineer has a superior IQ, but can barely match his belt with his shoes. There is no way they could pick out a color scheme, lighting, furniture, chairs, podiums, desks, etc., and have it all look professional and attractive. People go to school for years to learn how to do that successfully; it is such an intricate and intuitive discipline that most of us cannot even appreciate how difficult it is. We tend to think of interior designers as non-essential and trivial people, but they are very skilled and valuable when needed. I know people who are so technologically inept they cannot send an email even with extensive coaching, yet their house looks straight out of an interior design magazine.
If you want a good conference room, you do need nerds for the equipment selection, installation, and configuration, but they must be kept on a tight leash, subordinate to the interior designers. Engineers are a curious, helpful folk and probably won't be able to understand why they're a liability to the rest of the project.
So you have to spot test the cleaning solution in an unobtrusive place. That's S.O.P. for any type of cleaning product, whether it be for clothes, carpets, floors, upholstery, or whatever.
I think you are making something out of nothing here.
Perhaps it would be easier to alter the digital image of your brain to repair or compensate for the organic damage caused by Alzheimers. You could salvage the retrievable memories, organize them, and restore the mind as much as possible.
The same could be true of personality disorders or insanity. If you downloaded the mind of a serial killer into a computer, you could edit the mind to remove its compulsion to kill others. If someone suffered a severe trauma that they couldn't deal with, and it caused a persistent emotional disorder that was resistant to treatment, perhaps it would be best to simply 'erase' the traumatic experience from the person's mind. Subjectively, it would be as though it never happened to them, and they could get on with their lives.
It's science fiction stuff, but they're interesting ideas nonetheless.
I have one of these recalled Powerbook batteries, and right now it's running at home unsupervised. Great.
I haven't seen anyone else mention it in this thread, but pouring water on burning lithium is an extremely Bad Idea. You'll get an effect similar to pouring gasoline on burning wood.
Most Slashdotters probably know not to pour water on an electrical fire, but I suspect far fewer know burning lithium can use water for a fuel source.
From a FAQ I found about how to handle a lithium fire (this is a google html version since the original was a.Doc file): "Use a graphite powder or a Lith-X (class D) extinguisher to extinguish burning lithium. Don't use water, sand, carbon tetrachloride, carbon dioxide, or soda acid extinguishers in lithium cell fires."
Some of the first technologies were invented to help people kill animals and each other -- spears, axes, knives, etc. It's natural for the desire to kill to drive people to figure out better and newer ways to do it -- new technology. The more enlightened among us can just try to take that war-driven technology and develop it for peaceful purposes.
It would be great if all our technology came from our peaceful desires to explore and understand things, but we also have a darker side to our nature that isn't going to go away just because want it to.
Try rottentomatoes.com. It presents you with a list of movie reviews from many different sources. Last time I checked, Episode III was rated 84% "fresh", meaning 84% of reviewers reviewed it positively.
In any case, if Kevin Smith AND Roger Ebert say it's good, that's enough to convince me to buy a ticket.
The intro to this article made it seem like the 2 guys were actually riding in the balloon. Maybe the hyperbole in the intro was intended to be some kind of failed journalistic technique. Then, I RTFA and saw for sure it was a drone. Even the guys' website sort of makes it seem like they rode in the balloon... the cheesy NASA-ish logo, and no mention of the drone camera until you scroll down the page.
Re:Don't pre-judge the controller, folks
on
PlayStation 3 Unveiled
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What I want to know about the controllers is their battery life. Bluetooth sucks up a decent amount of power. I don't want to be replacing batteries every day.
You're assuming intelligence is hereditary. There may be a correlation, but plenty of bright people come from parents who were not so bright. I think the issue is that intelligence usually leads to wealth, and also the desire have fewer children so as to devote more resources to their upbringing and education. Poorer, unsuccessful people have no such motivation since they cannot provide a superior education to even one child, yet they are actually encouraged to have more children due to increased welfare support.
I've heard that in the original script, that was originally the rationale for the machines creating the Matrix... to use our brains as a distributed information processing network. They decided the concept was too complex for audiences to understand, so it was scrapped in favor of the machines using us for electricity (which makes very little sense, as others have pointed out.)
"A computer on every desk and in every home" - 1977
This wasn't exactly a visionary statement anymore by 1977, what with the Apple (I AND II), the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 all on the market by then...
But only in the homes of nerds... the personal computer wasn't in the mainstream consciousness at that point.
Unfortunately, it's bulky and heavy, and retails for US$1,300. I could see a professional sound engineer justifying the purchase of one of these, but it makes very little sense for anyone else. Then again, neither does dumping your computer in a vat full of oil.:)
Human beings, at least the male ones, are hunters. Our bodies are evolved to chase down herbivores until they can't run anymore, and then slay them with hand to hand weaponry. For most of human history, it was either do that or starve. The men who brought the meat and skins to the tribe (at high risk of personal injury to themselves) were rightly treated with honor and gratitude.
Today, that just isn't the case anymore. We domesticate animals and farm crops for food. People still get an atavistic sense of honor and strength from killing animals for essentially no purpose whatsoever -- neither to eat, nor turn into clothes, nor anything else.
Hunting still has one purpose, which is to maintain populations of herbivores when the natural predators have been driven away or rendered extinct. That should be a JOB, not something that people do for thrills. If you want thrills, make a spear out of a stick and a piece of flint and hunt with that the way our ancestors did. Doing it with a rifle from a hundred yards isn't hunting, it's execution.
I've hiked a lot and seen plenty of deer. All they want to do is eat foliage and make baby deer. I despise the enjoyment that people -- who eat very well by other means -- gain from shooting them. This 'internet hunting' takes it one step further into pure sadism divorced from purpose or reality.
Google has spent years maintaining the highest ethical standards... I don't think they would piss away their credibility for profit, especially since they aren't hurting for cash in the first place.
I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. There are lots of cool things they could do with the information, used in aggregate. They could recommend websites to you by correlating your browsing history with others, kind of the same way Amazon.com recommends products. I for one think that would be cool.
I have to disagree. Access to information is very important to ensuring civil liberties. Strict control over information and communication is the usual tactic of fascist states that need to keep their behavior secret.
You can see in authoritarian states such as China, there is very strict control over the media and the internet. In a free society, all information not related to an individual's privacy ought to be available to everyone. I don't see any problem with government subsidies to make internet access more prevalent among the people. It is a check on the government's power.
That said, the plan in Tempe (my hometown, incidentally) doesn't really do anything to help people who otherwise couldn't afford internet access. If they are going to subsidize, the goal should be getting net access to the poor.
Anyway, everyone pays for the roads but not everyone uses them... everyone pays for Social Security but not everyone uses it... etc, etc. Maybe in a theoretical libertarian society, your argument holds up, but not in the United States, and not anywhere else income taxes are collected.
You're totally right, but you left out an important point. Urbanization itself also reduces population growth, and without anyone needing to be killed.;) Well, perhaps there are more murders in cities, but that's an insignificant factor when calculating population growth rates. The point is, people who live in cities tend to have fewer children.
Eh, they release Tiger to a few Mac zealots who early-ordered it, they tell their friends, it gets into the news, creating a marketing buzz... nothing to see here.
*However*, almost all of the successful TV Cards use the same Brooktree (now Conexant) chipset.
Of the 3 cards reviewed in TFA, only Hauppauge uses Conexant. ATI uses a homegrown chipset, and eVGA uses LSI for the encoder and Philips for the TV decoder.
"Members of the public will be able to buy a kit that contains all the material needed to add their genetic information to the database."
I think they are most interested in indigenous people, but they can get good information from any genetic sample, no matter how shuffled the donor's genes are. My genotype is mostly European, but I have some inheritable characteristics that suggest at least one of my ancestors was from some other part of the world. I'd like to find out if that's true.
Paramount Network Television and the producers of Star Trek: Enterprise are very flattered and impressed by the fans' passionate outpouring of attention for the show and their efforts to raise funds to continue the show's production...but please fuck off already, you fucking nerds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it's so much of a reward for the nerds. In a lot of cases, by the time they are ready to settle down, women have huge amounts of emotional baggage from all the 'awful, useless' creeps and jerks they have dated and been hurt by.
I'm talking about stuff like being cynical, unable to trust men, becoming manipulative themselves, etc. I am also making generalizations, but many single women in their late 20's to early 30's I have dated have had these issues.
I am a fairly nerdy 29 year old engineer, but I look alright and have decent conversational skills. I can definitely tell when a woman is responding positively to my 'nerdly' traits (honesty, sincerity, unselfishness, kindness), or being turned off by them. I have a good income (which is attractive to anyone), so if I can pretend to be a bit of a alpha-male jerk I can usually attract either type depending on if I'm looking for a relationship or a fling.
If it's broken, or the battery won't charge anymore, trading it in sounds pretty sweet. eBay is too difficult for some people, and it is sometimes a hassle for me as well, even though I've sold over a hundred items there. If you are well-off and just want a new iPod, trading it in may be the way to go.
I believe the hardware data indicates that PS3 and XBox 360 games can outperform PC games in every way, turning the tables on the high-end PC video card market. When and if that becomes the case, I will happily purchase a dedicated gaming console, and then downgrade my HTPC video card to something fanless. Of course, I'm assuming the new consoles will be fanless as well. I need HTPC functionality and gaming, but I hate the sound of whirring fans in my living room.
I'm aware of the XBox HTPC project, but it just didn't cut it for my needs (DVD duplication, auto-commercial advance, etc.) Perhaps someone will figure out a way to bring all the HTPC goodness to the PS3 or XBox 360, then I will have only one silent machine to do everything. :)
It sounds like we would have been able to leverage some of the technical genius we have around here, but putting together a world-class conference room is much, much more about usability and interior design than technology. So much so, that Slashdot isn't even the right place to be asking about it.
First part of the problem is usability. Engineers do not typically understand how to make things easy to use, because they have a much higher tolerance for complexity than the average person. An engineer figures stuff out and gets the job done no matter what. They hardly even notice when something is hard to use or a user interface is clunky. A difficulty that would be a showstopper for a regular user is just background static to an engineer.
Then there is the other side of the problem: the interior design and looks. The average engineer has a superior IQ, but can barely match his belt with his shoes. There is no way they could pick out a color scheme, lighting, furniture, chairs, podiums, desks, etc., and have it all look professional and attractive. People go to school for years to learn how to do that successfully; it is such an intricate and intuitive discipline that most of us cannot even appreciate how difficult it is. We tend to think of interior designers as non-essential and trivial people, but they are very skilled and valuable when needed. I know people who are so technologically inept they cannot send an email even with extensive coaching, yet their house looks straight out of an interior design magazine.
If you want a good conference room, you do need nerds for the equipment selection, installation, and configuration, but they must be kept on a tight leash, subordinate to the interior designers. Engineers are a curious, helpful folk and probably won't be able to understand why they're a liability to the rest of the project.
So you have to spot test the cleaning solution in an unobtrusive place. That's S.O.P. for any type of cleaning product, whether it be for clothes, carpets, floors, upholstery, or whatever.
I think you are making something out of nothing here.
Perhaps it would be easier to alter the digital image of your brain to repair or compensate for the organic damage caused by Alzheimers. You could salvage the retrievable memories, organize them, and restore the mind as much as possible.
The same could be true of personality disorders or insanity. If you downloaded the mind of a serial killer into a computer, you could edit the mind to remove its compulsion to kill others. If someone suffered a severe trauma that they couldn't deal with, and it caused a persistent emotional disorder that was resistant to treatment, perhaps it would be best to simply 'erase' the traumatic experience from the person's mind. Subjectively, it would be as though it never happened to them, and they could get on with their lives.
It's science fiction stuff, but they're interesting ideas nonetheless.
I haven't seen anyone else mention it in this thread, but pouring water on burning lithium is an extremely Bad Idea. You'll get an effect similar to pouring gasoline on burning wood.
Most Slashdotters probably know not to pour water on an electrical fire, but I suspect far fewer know burning lithium can use water for a fuel source.
From a FAQ I found about how to handle a lithium fire (this is a google html version since the original was a .Doc file): "Use a graphite powder or a Lith-X (class D) extinguisher to extinguish burning lithium. Don't use water, sand, carbon tetrachloride, carbon dioxide, or soda acid extinguishers in lithium cell fires."
Some of the first technologies were invented to help people kill animals and each other -- spears, axes, knives, etc. It's natural for the desire to kill to drive people to figure out better and newer ways to do it -- new technology. The more enlightened among us can just try to take that war-driven technology and develop it for peaceful purposes.
It would be great if all our technology came from our peaceful desires to explore and understand things, but we also have a darker side to our nature that isn't going to go away just because want it to.
In any case, if Kevin Smith AND Roger Ebert say it's good, that's enough to convince me to buy a ticket.
2 guys stuck a camera and a microcontroller to a weather balloon they just bought, and let it go into the sky. That's neat, but is it news? People do this exact thing with high-end hobby rockets all the time.
What I want to know about the controllers is their battery life. Bluetooth sucks up a decent amount of power. I don't want to be replacing batteries every day.
You're assuming intelligence is hereditary. There may be a correlation, but plenty of bright people come from parents who were not so bright. I think the issue is that intelligence usually leads to wealth, and also the desire have fewer children so as to devote more resources to their upbringing and education. Poorer, unsuccessful people have no such motivation since they cannot provide a superior education to even one child, yet they are actually encouraged to have more children due to increased welfare support.
I've heard that in the original script, that was originally the rationale for the machines creating the Matrix... to use our brains as a distributed information processing network. They decided the concept was too complex for audiences to understand, so it was scrapped in favor of the machines using us for electricity (which makes very little sense, as others have pointed out.)
"A computer on every desk and in every home" - 1977 This wasn't exactly a visionary statement anymore by 1977, what with the Apple (I AND II), the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 all on the market by then... But only in the homes of nerds... the personal computer wasn't in the mainstream consciousness at that point.
Unfortunately, it's bulky and heavy, and retails for US$1,300. I could see a professional sound engineer justifying the purchase of one of these, but it makes very little sense for anyone else. Then again, neither does dumping your computer in a vat full of oil. :)
Human beings, at least the male ones, are hunters. Our bodies are evolved to chase down herbivores until they can't run anymore, and then slay them with hand to hand weaponry. For most of human history, it was either do that or starve. The men who brought the meat and skins to the tribe (at high risk of personal injury to themselves) were rightly treated with honor and gratitude.
Today, that just isn't the case anymore. We domesticate animals and farm crops for food. People still get an atavistic sense of honor and strength from killing animals for essentially no purpose whatsoever -- neither to eat, nor turn into clothes, nor anything else.
Hunting still has one purpose, which is to maintain populations of herbivores when the natural predators have been driven away or rendered extinct. That should be a JOB, not something that people do for thrills. If you want thrills, make a spear out of a stick and a piece of flint and hunt with that the way our ancestors did. Doing it with a rifle from a hundred yards isn't hunting, it's execution.
I've hiked a lot and seen plenty of deer. All they want to do is eat foliage and make baby deer. I despise the enjoyment that people -- who eat very well by other means -- gain from shooting them. This 'internet hunting' takes it one step further into pure sadism divorced from purpose or reality.
President Bush, what have I told you about using the internet without supervision?
Google has spent years maintaining the highest ethical standards... I don't think they would piss away their credibility for profit, especially since they aren't hurting for cash in the first place.
I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. There are lots of cool things they could do with the information, used in aggregate. They could recommend websites to you by correlating your browsing history with others, kind of the same way Amazon.com recommends products. I for one think that would be cool.
I have to disagree. Access to information is very important to ensuring civil liberties. Strict control over information and communication is the usual tactic of fascist states that need to keep their behavior secret.
You can see in authoritarian states such as China, there is very strict control over the media and the internet. In a free society, all information not related to an individual's privacy ought to be available to everyone. I don't see any problem with government subsidies to make internet access more prevalent among the people. It is a check on the government's power.
That said, the plan in Tempe (my hometown, incidentally) doesn't really do anything to help people who otherwise couldn't afford internet access. If they are going to subsidize, the goal should be getting net access to the poor.
Anyway, everyone pays for the roads but not everyone uses them... everyone pays for Social Security but not everyone uses it... etc, etc. Maybe in a theoretical libertarian society, your argument holds up, but not in the United States, and not anywhere else income taxes are collected.
You're totally right, but you left out an important point. Urbanization itself also reduces population growth, and without anyone needing to be killed. ;) Well, perhaps there are more murders in cities, but that's an insignificant factor when calculating population growth rates. The point is, people who live in cities tend to have fewer children.
Eh, they release Tiger to a few Mac zealots who early-ordered it, they tell their friends, it gets into the news, creating a marketing buzz... nothing to see here.
See also: Connecticut legalizes same-sex civil unions. Societal attitudes aren't as black-and-white as you believe.
Of the 3 cards reviewed in TFA, only Hauppauge uses Conexant. ATI uses a homegrown chipset, and eVGA uses LSI for the encoder and Philips for the TV decoder.
"Members of the public will be able to buy a kit that contains all the material needed to add their genetic information to the database."
I think they are most interested in indigenous people, but they can get good information from any genetic sample, no matter how shuffled the donor's genes are. My genotype is mostly European, but I have some inheritable characteristics that suggest at least one of my ancestors was from some other part of the world. I'd like to find out if that's true.
Paramount Network Television and the producers of Star Trek: Enterprise are very flattered and impressed by the fans' passionate outpouring of attention for the show and their efforts to raise funds to continue the show's production... but please fuck off already, you fucking nerds.