Still not comfortable with our African ancestry I see.
Nah, it's called using dramatic device to make a point:) I have no problems with our ancestry because if we go back far enough, we all come from the same puddle of slime.
The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early. The earliest known sign of human habitation in Europe is only ca. 40k years old.
There's too much speculation. "No evidence of human habitation" doesn't mean there absolutely were no humans, only that we haven't found settlements. I for one would be much more comfortable with an undiscovered Greek sea-faring civilization engaging in island-hopping trade among islands within sight of each other than a mysterious African tribe that suddenly invented the boat to colonize the island they had somehow heard about "over the horizon". Occam's razor, and all that. Obviously if a single discovery can completely "revolutionize" archaeological thought like this, then the "facts" and "evidence" are fairly shaky at best and I wouldn't back a claim that "Greece was uninhabited" is set in stone.
condensed water at the voltages you find in an iPhone means very, very little conduction.
Considering this is coming from a person who believes air is "plenty conductive" while water is "pretty conductive" has just disqualified you from the pool of rational people I am willing to converse with. You're just a vulgar peasant pretending to be smart by reading "the nerd site". If the big numbers hurt your brain, you don't HAVE to come here.
I know you'll dismiss that, since you're obviously devoid of empathy and compassion, but I thought I'd try to enlighten you anyway.
No I'm more of a results oriented person who believes that dwelling on the past is not constructive to future progress. The past exists to be learned from, not lived in. My own past is full of very real nightmares and ghosts, things have happened to me that make everyone who finds out gasp in amazement. The key to survival is getting over it, not using it as an excuse for a "handicap". A person who has so called "math anxiety" and is determined enough can get past it. Or they can wallow in it and use it as an excuse to lead mediocre lives following the path of least resistance. Life is full of choices. Perhaps I am educating YOU.
Just an anecdote but oddly enough most of the people I know that have gone on to high level math (>>Calc 3) tend not to be terribly good at doing basic math in their heads.
Heh, I'm just the opposite. I'm very good at mental arithmetic, and I can multiply 4 digit numbers in my head usually faster than someone who reaches for a calculator, but I absolutely suck at math - especially trig (Calculus not so much). However I chalk it up to carelessness because I understand the concepts fine but I keep dropping or changing a sign here and there when I'm working out a problem. Which is why I went into a field in the biological sciences. Pretty much all the numbers are positive! Now my most complicated "formula" is "ok the kid weighs 8kg and the dose is 40mg/kg so 320mg per day divided by 3 is (rounding and adjusting up to the next dose easiest to dispense) 120mg 3 times a day... (scribble scribble scribble) here you go, call me in 3 days".
Psychologists are great at making excuses for everything. Especially when the probable "solution" is going to be - THERAPY! Wow I didn't see that one coming. No conflict of interest whatsoever.
The bottom line is if you can't count, you can't count. AND practice makes perfect. Oh and guess what - doing something over and over also reduces anxiety. Hey, maybe those people are "anxious" about math because they're the ones that never did their math homework! Maybe doing math homework and doing the "extra credit" problems and oh I will go all out here - doing the EVEN numbered problems even when your teacher only assigned the ODD numbered problems, and WITHOUT looking at the answers in the back of the book, help build confidence and reduce anxiety.
Call me when they pass a law banning math classes because they are a form of emotional "child abuse". No child left behind.
While your beer/soda anecdotes might be quite entertaining, the poster I was responding to compared the conductivity of water to the conductivity of air.
Now since this is a site for nerds, we don't need to resort to anecdotes to make points. There exists an SI unit for conductivity called the Siemens per meter (S/m).
While it's true that clean fresh water has a LOW conductivity (around 5 x 10^-2 to 5x10^6 (your deionized water) S/m), and while this is less than sea water which comes in at 5 S/m, and while I agree that this is several orders of magnitude less than say aluminum at roughly 40 S/m, air has a conductivity of 3 x 10^-15 S/m which is QUITE a difference. In fact it's 9 orders of magnitude less than the "purest" most "non conducting" water, compared to from aluminum to fresh water being only 4 orders of magnitude.
I don't concentrate on deionized water because first you won't find it outside of a lab and secondly even in a lab it won't stay deionized for much more than an hour once you expose it to air.
However let's be more practical. Again, feel free to prove your theory that water is not a conductor by standing in a puddle barefoot and electrocuting yourself. Remember to ensure that your last thought be "I'll be ok, water doesn't conduct electricity". And please name me as the beneficiary of your life insurance policy before you do this. Water is a BAD conductor, but it is a conductor nonetheless and you may feel free to plunge your electronics in it. However I shall pass.
A good OS uses all the RAM, and allocates available free blocks of RAM to the programs as required.
However using the greater part of a gigabyte plus paging to the hard drive just to display the desktop and run the low level functions is inexcusable and points to either a) memory leak b) the OS is doing something legitimate you are unaware of, like indexing files, etc c) the OS is doing something illegitimate like sending the contents of your hard drive to someone in Redmond, the NSA/FBI or the RIAA/MPAA or d) your system has been compromised by a virus. I can't really think of any other possibility.
Pure or distilled water can't hurt an electric device any more than air could.
Good luck finding "pure" water anywhere on PLANET EARTH. I am fed up with this internet myth. The people who go around claiming that "pure" water doesn't conduct electricity don't remember that water SELF IONIZES to H+ and OH-. Which is why "pure" water has a pH of roughly 7. Oh what does pH mean again? It's the negative log base 10 of the molar concentration of Hydrogen IONS. So in every mole of "pure" water, you will actually have 10-7 moles of hydrogen ions and 10-7 moles of hydroxide ions and GUESS WHAT? They are charged and conduct electricity!
The fact that water is not a "good" conductor can only fool idiots into thinking that it's an INSULATOR (ie "pure water doesn't conduct electricity"). For all these idiots I invite you to use water immersion cooling methods for your computers, because after all who wants to deal with all that icky mineral oil... or better still, stand in a puddle of "pure water" on a "clean" conducting surface, and put your fingers in a 240V socket.
Pure or distilled water can't hurt an electric device any more than air could.
Yes keep thinking that and keep wondering why your electric devices keep frying when they shouldn't be, instead of learning some damned chemistry.
And I see them as an exercise in creative pharmacology, shaping your body with hormones while trying to stay one step ahead of innovations in screening. Remember it's only wrong if you get caught, right?
You put it in and it snaps shots of the 6 sides of the cube. Those are interpreted by the computer which probably uses a standard solving algorithm. The solution is translated into movements for the robot, and off it goes.
I'm stunned. And here I was thinking it worked by magic. Is that REALLY how it's done?
Sorry, I'm just feeling rather cynical today. Pffft.
Yes, thank you "Please Rob Me" _his_ LED TV really is awesome. Shouldn't have tweeted about the job you just did from the other side of town, dimwit. Expect a surprise when you get home...
Now, you could give someone else your phone or laptop to tweet with, but then you'd have a hard time explaining that.
Why? Is it suddenly illegal to lend someone in another state/country your telephone? Is there a law stating that everything you write on the internet must be "the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth"? You can't invite someone into your house and then bash them over the head in "self defense". However if they force entry, it really doesn't matter WHAT you wrote. IANAL but I assume that the law draws a line at the point where the guy actually takes a crowbar to your front door. "He made me do it" doesn't work. You can't take break into people's houses unless you have a damned good reason that will convince a judge and jury, like a firefighter trying to save someone's life or property.
IANAL but I would think that the creators of this application have just made themselves wide open for anything from civil lawsuits to criminal charges (aiding and abetting?)...
They actually have the RIGHT to make $UNLIMITED a quarter, if the market will support it
Firstly I want you to know I wholeheartedly agree with your post - but I can't resist an attempt at humor:
Whoa there! You obviously have never heard of governments and taxes... The minute they make more than $[Magic Trigger Number], they will find themselves legislated and subject to very special taxes. Because after all capitalism can only stand so much profit before big brother wants a piece of it. After all, the government works so hard to get it.
And that's just a single game and these are huge publishers. Selling 82 million copies between all their games isn't as large amount as you think.
But wait - you forgot to apply the 15% metric to modern warfare 2. Since 85% of sales are lost to piracy, Modern Warfare "should" have sold $13.3 billion dollars, right? Or do people only pirate Ubisoft games?
So let's see, Modern Warfare 2 should have sold not 15 million copies but 100 million copies, right? Wait, since Modern Warfare 2 doesn't use Ubisoft's draconian DRM but plain old secuROM AND it was available on the internet BEFORE the launch, this must mean that even MORE "sales were lost", right? Perhaps the real sales figure should have been closer to 500 million? 1 billion copies? Maybe everyone on the planet was going to buy it?
The truth is that games go stale very quickly on the shelf. Within a year, prices get slashed. After a couple years, you can usually pick them up for under $10. After 5 years or so, you have to bundle them with other software to move them at all. So I encourage you to hold the price constant while you multiply it by the "number of copies sold" and invent imaginary numbers to try to justify your claim. But just like Hollywood movies - if you didn't make the money in the first few weeks, you're probably not going to make much more. The income/time curve looks like 1/x. I assure you "Modern Warfare 2" is not going to make ANOTHER billion over its lifetime. Everyone who was desperate for a copy already has one, and now it's up to impulse sales.
Plus we were talking about PC sales (which is where DRM is required and "piracy" happens), but the Modern Warfare figure is TOTAL sales on all platforms. Very much an apples:oranges comparison.
So basically they underestimated the bandwidth that would be required on the network access they provided, and therefore felt that gave them the right to interfere with communications on the network and actually trick the users into downloading unwanted content? Nice. Yes this helps the Microsoft image no end. No wonder they have this attitude that your computer belongs to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Still not comfortable with our African ancestry I see.
Nah, it's called using dramatic device to make a point :) I have no problems with our ancestry because if we go back far enough, we all come from the same puddle of slime.
Sure, if you can smuggle the mathematical concept of infinity in you can always get absurd results. :)
There's no need. I always carry a zero with me. (Eyes glaze over) "Stay away! I have a zero and I'm not afraid to use it!"
The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early. The earliest known sign of human habitation in Europe is only ca. 40k years old.
There's too much speculation. "No evidence of human habitation" doesn't mean there absolutely were no humans, only that we haven't found settlements. I for one would be much more comfortable with an undiscovered Greek sea-faring civilization engaging in island-hopping trade among islands within sight of each other than a mysterious African tribe that suddenly invented the boat to colonize the island they had somehow heard about "over the horizon". Occam's razor, and all that. Obviously if a single discovery can completely "revolutionize" archaeological thought like this, then the "facts" and "evidence" are fairly shaky at best and I wouldn't back a claim that "Greece was uninhabited" is set in stone.
condensed water at the voltages you find in an iPhone means very, very little conduction.
Considering this is coming from a person who believes air is "plenty conductive" while water is "pretty conductive" has just disqualified you from the pool of rational people I am willing to converse with. You're just a vulgar peasant pretending to be smart by reading "the nerd site". If the big numbers hurt your brain, you don't HAVE to come here.
I know you'll dismiss that, since you're obviously devoid of empathy and compassion, but I thought I'd try to enlighten you anyway.
No I'm more of a results oriented person who believes that dwelling on the past is not constructive to future progress. The past exists to be learned from, not lived in. My own past is full of very real nightmares and ghosts, things have happened to me that make everyone who finds out gasp in amazement. The key to survival is getting over it, not using it as an excuse for a "handicap". A person who has so called "math anxiety" and is determined enough can get past it. Or they can wallow in it and use it as an excuse to lead mediocre lives following the path of least resistance. Life is full of choices. Perhaps I am educating YOU.
Just an anecdote but oddly enough most of the people I know that have gone on to high level math (>>Calc 3) tend not to be terribly good at doing basic math in their heads.
Heh, I'm just the opposite. I'm very good at mental arithmetic, and I can multiply 4 digit numbers in my head usually faster than someone who reaches for a calculator, but I absolutely suck at math - especially trig (Calculus not so much). However I chalk it up to carelessness because I understand the concepts fine but I keep dropping or changing a sign here and there when I'm working out a problem. Which is why I went into a field in the biological sciences. Pretty much all the numbers are positive! Now my most complicated "formula" is "ok the kid weighs 8kg and the dose is 40mg/kg so 320mg per day divided by 3 is (rounding and adjusting up to the next dose easiest to dispense) 120mg 3 times a day... (scribble scribble scribble) here you go, call me in 3 days".
Psychologists are great at making excuses for everything. Especially when the probable "solution" is going to be - THERAPY! Wow I didn't see that one coming. No conflict of interest whatsoever.
The bottom line is if you can't count, you can't count. AND practice makes perfect. Oh and guess what - doing something over and over also reduces anxiety. Hey, maybe those people are "anxious" about math because they're the ones that never did their math homework! Maybe doing math homework and doing the "extra credit" problems and oh I will go all out here - doing the EVEN numbered problems even when your teacher only assigned the ODD numbered problems, and WITHOUT looking at the answers in the back of the book, help build confidence and reduce anxiety.
Call me when they pass a law banning math classes because they are a form of emotional "child abuse". No child left behind.
Please tell these people that you read on the internet somewhere that water doesn't conduct electricity.
While your beer/soda anecdotes might be quite entertaining, the poster I was responding to compared the conductivity of water to the conductivity of air.
Now since this is a site for nerds, we don't need to resort to anecdotes to make points. There exists an SI unit for conductivity called the Siemens per meter (S/m).
While it's true that clean fresh water has a LOW conductivity (around 5 x 10^-2 to 5x10^6 (your deionized water) S/m), and while this is less than sea water which comes in at 5 S/m, and while I agree that this is several orders of magnitude less than say aluminum at roughly 40 S/m, air has a conductivity of 3 x 10^-15 S/m which is QUITE a difference. In fact it's 9 orders of magnitude less than the "purest" most "non conducting" water, compared to from aluminum to fresh water being only 4 orders of magnitude.
I don't concentrate on deionized water because first you won't find it outside of a lab and secondly even in a lab it won't stay deionized for much more than an hour once you expose it to air.
However let's be more practical. Again, feel free to prove your theory that water is not a conductor by standing in a puddle barefoot and electrocuting yourself. Remember to ensure that your last thought be "I'll be ok, water doesn't conduct electricity". And please name me as the beneficiary of your life insurance policy before you do this. Water is a BAD conductor, but it is a conductor nonetheless and you may feel free to plunge your electronics in it. However I shall pass.
A good OS uses all the RAM, and allocates available free blocks of RAM to the programs as required.
However using the greater part of a gigabyte plus paging to the hard drive just to display the desktop and run the low level functions is inexcusable and points to either a) memory leak b) the OS is doing something legitimate you are unaware of, like indexing files, etc c) the OS is doing something illegitimate like sending the contents of your hard drive to someone in Redmond, the NSA/FBI or the RIAA/MPAA or d) your system has been compromised by a virus. I can't really think of any other possibility.
Pure or distilled water can't hurt an electric device any more than air could.
Good luck finding "pure" water anywhere on PLANET EARTH. I am fed up with this internet myth. The people who go around claiming that "pure" water doesn't conduct electricity don't remember that water SELF IONIZES to H+ and OH-. Which is why "pure" water has a pH of roughly 7. Oh what does pH mean again? It's the negative log base 10 of the molar concentration of Hydrogen IONS. So in every mole of "pure" water, you will actually have 10-7 moles of hydrogen ions and 10-7 moles of hydroxide ions and GUESS WHAT? They are charged and conduct electricity!
The fact that water is not a "good" conductor can only fool idiots into thinking that it's an INSULATOR (ie "pure water doesn't conduct electricity"). For all these idiots I invite you to use water immersion cooling methods for your computers, because after all who wants to deal with all that icky mineral oil... or better still, stand in a puddle of "pure water" on a "clean" conducting surface, and put your fingers in a 240V socket.
Pure or distilled water can't hurt an electric device any more than air could.
Yes keep thinking that and keep wondering why your electric devices keep frying when they shouldn't be, instead of learning some damned chemistry.
Welcome to the global warming era, where we leave out any inconvenient truth that is, well, inconvenient to the point we want to make.
White boards are slightly more effective than chalk boards; they're a technological improvement.
Yes they are. Chalk dust would give you allergies, while marker fumes will get you high. Vast improvement.
Dude when you're done loading that game can I borrow the cassette tape?
And I see them as an exercise in creative pharmacology, shaping your body with hormones while trying to stay one step ahead of innovations in screening. Remember it's only wrong if you get caught, right?
You put it in and it snaps shots of the 6 sides of the cube. Those are interpreted by the computer which probably uses a standard solving algorithm. The solution is translated into movements for the robot, and off it goes.
I'm stunned. And here I was thinking it worked by magic. Is that REALLY how it's done?
Sorry, I'm just feeling rather cynical today. Pffft.
I have one I HAVEN'T solved in 30 years. Young kids, always wanting to do everything in a rush...
I can't wait for the stellar decision:
"Students have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes"
If you pirate a game, then by definition you're not a client, right???
Nah, in the shady underground digital distribution word, you earn yourself the name "leech" :)
Yes, thank you "Please Rob Me" _his_ LED TV really is awesome. Shouldn't have tweeted about the job you just did from the other side of town, dimwit. Expect a surprise when you get home...
Now, you could give someone else your phone or laptop to tweet with, but then you'd have a hard time explaining that.
Why? Is it suddenly illegal to lend someone in another state/country your telephone? Is there a law stating that everything you write on the internet must be "the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth"? You can't invite someone into your house and then bash them over the head in "self defense". However if they force entry, it really doesn't matter WHAT you wrote. IANAL but I assume that the law draws a line at the point where the guy actually takes a crowbar to your front door. "He made me do it" doesn't work. You can't take break into people's houses unless you have a damned good reason that will convince a judge and jury, like a firefighter trying to save someone's life or property.
IANAL but I would think that the creators of this application have just made themselves wide open for anything from civil lawsuits to criminal charges (aiding and abetting?)...
They actually have the RIGHT to make $UNLIMITED a quarter, if the market will support it
Firstly I want you to know I wholeheartedly agree with your post - but I can't resist an attempt at humor:
Whoa there! You obviously have never heard of governments and taxes... The minute they make more than $[Magic Trigger Number], they will find themselves legislated and subject to very special taxes. Because after all capitalism can only stand so much profit before big brother wants a piece of it. After all, the government works so hard to get it.
And that's just a single game and these are huge publishers. Selling 82 million copies between all their games isn't as large amount as you think.
But wait - you forgot to apply the 15% metric to modern warfare 2. Since 85% of sales are lost to piracy, Modern Warfare "should" have sold $13.3 billion dollars, right? Or do people only pirate Ubisoft games?
So let's see, Modern Warfare 2 should have sold not 15 million copies but 100 million copies, right? Wait, since Modern Warfare 2 doesn't use Ubisoft's draconian DRM but plain old secuROM AND it was available on the internet BEFORE the launch, this must mean that even MORE "sales were lost", right? Perhaps the real sales figure should have been closer to 500 million? 1 billion copies? Maybe everyone on the planet was going to buy it?
The truth is that games go stale very quickly on the shelf. Within a year, prices get slashed. After a couple years, you can usually pick them up for under $10. After 5 years or so, you have to bundle them with other software to move them at all. So I encourage you to hold the price constant while you multiply it by the "number of copies sold" and invent imaginary numbers to try to justify your claim. But just like Hollywood movies - if you didn't make the money in the first few weeks, you're probably not going to make much more. The income/time curve looks like 1/x. I assure you "Modern Warfare 2" is not going to make ANOTHER billion over its lifetime. Everyone who was desperate for a copy already has one, and now it's up to impulse sales.
Plus we were talking about PC sales (which is where DRM is required and "piracy" happens), but the Modern Warfare figure is TOTAL sales on all platforms. Very much an apples:oranges comparison.
So basically they underestimated the bandwidth that would be required on the network access they provided, and therefore felt that gave them the right to interfere with communications on the network and actually trick the users into downloading unwanted content? Nice. Yes this helps the Microsoft image no end. No wonder they have this attitude that your computer belongs to them.