How do you enact these policies? You'd have to pass a law to do it, right? Congress is currently responsible for the passage of laws. How're you going to push that through Congress? They don't want to give up all that money.
Eh, I guess that graphical interfaces just seem easier than text navigation. In fact, they probably are easier. At the very least, I can explore. If I can't see the list of commands to undertake the text navigation, I'm lost.
You're quite right that it could be easier, and I admit, I was wrong to say that emacs wasn't capable of satisfying this need. With Notepad, however, enabling this functionality (it isn't enabled by default in Notepad or emacs) is a simple toggle in Edit -> Settings (I think that's where it is. For some reason, Notepad isn't available on my work terminal, so I can't check for certain)
In addition to this not being true, as other posters have indicated, there is also a corresponding flaw in every Linux text editor I've seen. I am not a coder - I am a writer. I'm trying to write complete paragraphs and such. Using emacs, vi, joe, pico, etc. if I did not manually insert carriage returns, editing the middle of a "line" (which is all the editor treated each paragraph as), required scrolling through the entire line. Up/Down took me to the beginning or end of the paragraph. At least with Notepad, when I press up, it takes the cursor through the middle of the paragraph, for easy editing.
I think that we're approaching artificial intelligence in our desire to create robots to explore other planets. When I think about intelligence, I don't envision the ability perform one or any number of tasks. I envision the ability to teach myself or to be taught to perform tasks I can't currently do. Perhaps you could liken this to the installation of a new program on a computer, but I think it's a shaky analogy. If you were to provide Fritz with the rules of Go or even a game less complex than chess, like checkers or Quarto, would Fritz be able to take that basic information - a set of rules - and extrapolate it to the point where it could play the game? Could it play the game well? These, I think are the hallmarks of intelligence, taking limited information and deriving new information from it and from experience.
For one, it's a very simplistic model. A single dimensionless number is a good start to an effective correlation, but two or three definitely better define the system. You suggested Reynold's number, and I agree, it would be important to know, especially for the case of insect flight, since it is supposed that some insects take advantage of turbulence effects to remain aloft. So between the Strouhal Number and the Reynolds Number, the fluid flow regime and the stroke characteristic have been described. Perhaps create a third dimensionless group describing the size of the bird, non-dimensionalize the mass, volume, and wingspan (or stroke length) of the animal. Then you'd have three dimensionless groups which might yield a more tightly packed cluster of values for efficient flight.
Aside from the fact that the person who submitted this article was pushing the Monty Python reference, I think this is an excellent scientific article. As a chemical engineer, I'm well familiar with the importance of dimensionless numbers. One of the early exercises in teaching them is a correlation between leg length, stride length, stride rate, graviational acceleration and the resulting forward velocity. By developing dimensionless models, conclusions may be drawn about unmeasurable systems. For example, the above mentioned velocity correlation can be used to predict the speed of extinct animals. Similarly, this study of the Strouhal Number may be useful in better understanding flapping-wing flight, in a general sense.
If a nuclear power plant on the moon were to melt down, it wouldn't be a minor event at all. If you want to make possible the future habitation of the moon - even if it is only going to serve as a jumping off point for further explorations, you have to ensure that the moon remains habitable. Okay, I agree, the moon's a big place, and a nuclear meltdown on one side isn't going to hurt the other side much, but let's at least not start with the mentality that the surface of the moon is expendable.
I don't think that it's Joe Dummy that necessarily has the problem (except Joe Dummy might be just afraid of change). For myself, I'm far from a Dummy. If something's going wrong, I may not be able to fix it myself, but I know how to find the answers I need and then I am confident enough to tamper with things to get my problem resolved. The interface of Windows is simple enough that when I manage to generate a problem, which I'm fairly good at not doing, I can dig through help files and the internet to fix it. With windows, I have a moderate degree of authority and a moderate amount of accessability. With Linux, I may have oodles of authority, if I'm root, but the documentation is more complicated and I'm less familiar with the environment, in general. Therefore, I'm more likely to create a problem and less likely to be able to figure how to fix it.
Dark Cloud 2 also had a fun fishing engine. Better than LoZ, I'd certainly say. You had to be careful so that you didn't yank the hook out, which took patience, but if you didn't act fast enough, the fish would wear down the line and it would snap. Definitely a lot of fun. It was pretty easy to level up in DC 2, but if fishing is a valid means of earning one's livelihood in an RPG, by all means, make the leveling requirements more strict.
I think you're quite right about the reception that adult-oriented animation receives. I've tried introducing my mother to Anime several times and she invariably refuses to give it a fair opportunity. If it's a dub, she insists that nobody talks like that and leaves. If it's a sub, she mocks the Japanese language. Often, before I can even get her to sit down in front of the television, she tells it that she's not going to watch any of my dumb cartoons. Some people just aren't ready for exposure to another culture's take on something - in this case, animation.
I only own a PS2, so I can't comment on most of your list of quality, modern games. However, I would certainly like to add Jak and Daxter to the list. It has been ages since I've had that much fun playing a video game. I'd also like to second your mention of Dance Dance Revolution. It really is a revolutionary game - so much so that I'd hardly consider it a "game". As far as I'm concerned, it's the world's most entertaining, interactive workout program. That it is fun causes the player to continue to work out, but had DDR been first marketed as a workout program, rather than as a game, I think it would have reached the same place it is today, albeit it might be taken more seriously than it currently is.
This is not entirely so. The introduction of the Gameboy Advance has introduced a new generation of gamers to 2D gaming. Granted, it's not the most sophisticated gaming platform, but I'm delighted to be able to play Mario Bros. 2, Mario Bros. 3, Advance Wars, and Metroid Fusion - all of which are 2D games. True, the flagship consoles and the high-end computer games are leaving behind 2D gaming, but as long as the Gameboy remains popular, nostalgic gamers will have a reliable, if small-screened outlet for their classic gaming needs.
Thank you, sir, for making this point. For the longest time, all I saw around Slashdot were complaints that you have to buy an entire CD to get the one or two songs you wanted, but that if there were a legal means of getting burned CD's for $1.00 per track, people would be all over it, like white on rice. Now that said legal means is available, people are complaining that it's easier/more effective to buy the CD's and rip their own tracks. If, for one, fully intend to get myself ITunes, once I can get some broadband action going. I might even buy an IPod to take full advantage of it.
According to the paper, itself, they seem to be interested more in powering MEMS. I can imagine many situations in which a chip designed to analyze a fluid wouldn't require a battery because the chip's sensors will be powered by electricity generated as the pressurized fluid traverses an "electrokinetic microchannel battery" at the front end of the chip. If they can increase the efficiency and insure that a thumb-operated pump (like the primer on your lawnmower) would provide sufficient pressure to drive the battery, this could be a really useful innovation.
I find it a whole lot easier to sympathize with the plight of the movie industry when the topic of file sharing is considered. When I buy a movie, I'm getting only the material I want at a price that I feel is reasonable. I'd imagine that a lot more people are involved in the making of a movie, so if I end up paying twenty or thirty dollars for it, that's pretty good. Plus, there's usually a wide selection of used films available, at a good discount. Furthermore, there is a huge industry in movie rental, so if I'm not sure I want to buy a movie, I can almost always rent it first.
Music is often bundled in a way that forces me to buy ten songs I'm not interested in to get the two that I am. Granted, this allows me to listen to music to which I would otherwise not be exposed, but I've observed that it is usually music that I wouldn't have purchased, had I heard it beforehand. Given this, the price of a music CD is too high for the enjoyable content I receive. If I knew I was going to enjoy all twelve tracks (or all 18 tracks, heaven forbid), twenty dollars would be a fine price. Used music is difficult to come by. The local music shoppe has a room devoted to it, but the CD's are often scratched and the selection is very limited. There are also few, if any, avenues for music rental.
Overall, I think that the movie industry has fostered a system that allows me to get the most out of my purchase and still leaves them a profit. The music industry has fostered a system that often causes me to get far less from my purchase, even than I was led to expect I would get.
Just get yourself Apprentice (kept up-to-date at e-league.com) and play for free. Granted, you have to find an iRC room or an online friend to play with, yourself, but that's no big hassle. You play for free and you can construct any deck you want. (Yes, this can lead to powergaming, but there are folks out there who aren't twits). It has functions that generate random cards, if you want to play drafts...all in all, a good program.
The theme of classical literature is seldom hacker/geek, but they are value to anybody with a mind to read them. They're the originals from which todays hackneyed archetypes are spawned. Read The Iliad and The Oddysey (I'm particularly found of Rouse's plain English translation). Read War and Peace, as other posters have suggested. I, myself, am having a summer of Ayn Rand (but as quick as Anthem went by, I might have to find something else to liven this summer). The Divine Comedy is pretty good - at least Inferno and Purgatorio are. Paradiso is a bore. Anything by Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey, Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband) is solid gold. If you're a stoic, try Thomas Hardy. If you prefer contemporary literature, try Catch 22.
If you're truly inclined to be geeky, may I suggest the trilogy, "His Dark Materials" (starting with The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman. The Earthsea Trilogy (starting with A Wizard of Earthsea) by Ursula Leguin is a personal favourite. If you can find the Saga of Pliocene Exile (a four-book series, starting with The Many Coloured Land) by Julian May, it's a very good read (out of print, though; hard to find).
Every time somebody tells me that I "have to" read the Discworld books, I postpone doing so for another six months, just out of spite. Maybe I'm just hurting myself, but I've got plenty of reading material. As it stands, I don't intend to read anything Discworld until 2009.
There's a lot of lead flying around on an FPS. Should the invisibot happen to be in the crossfire of a battle, not only will it get in the way of people's shots, but it will then cause a legitimate player to get booted. You can make it so that people can move through them, but if they can be shot by cheaters (on purpose), they can be shot by legitimate players (on accident)
I think what he's saying is have these images appear beyond the "exterior" walls of the map. It might be easier for the server-side software to identify these. It doesn't sound like a terrible idea, but it also doesn't sound like a great solution either, since it makes gameplay more difficult for a cheater, but really isn't going to prevent the cheater from playing effectively, so long as he can readily recognize the exterior walls or the fake character models (which probably won't be moving the same way that real characters do)
Why in the world would you go "grocery shopping", in the suburban sense? Eating out is cheaper and better. Delivery takes a few minutes. Grocery shopping for most Manhattanites means "olives for the Martini" or maybe "a gourmet salad for after the show/party".
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I enjoy cooking and the results of cooking. It's a very practical and satysfying craft. Why I would want to give up this satisfaction for the supposed convenience of living in a high-density city with plenty of restaurants, but no grocery stores is beyond me.
Even if the mechanism involves reaction with air, as long as the kinetics of the reaction are controlled only by the concentration of the coating on the DVD, then the disc should degrade at the same rate no matter where you are. For concentrations of oxygen that can support human life, it is a relatively safe assumption that oxygen is simply abundant in comparison to the amount of substance that could be contained on a surface the size of a DVD.
Sales tax, as we know it today, has really only come about since the 1930's. Credit/debit cards are certainly younger still, as are computerized records of each transaction. If the conjecture holds true that forcing the cashier to open the till helps to prevent theft, then the idea is still valid. I will admit that I don't have a good reference for this. I have no idea where I heard/read it, so it could be false. But it is not unreasonable.
Re:Instead...
on
Making Change
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They're not trying to fool anybody. At least, that was not the original intent of setting prices at $9.99 instead of $10.00. It was a technique that was intended to help keep cashiers honest. If an item cost exactly $10.00, the cashier didn't need to open the drawer to get change for the customer. At some point, it was determined that cashiers who did not have to open the drawer were statistically more likely to pocket the money themselves than to put it in the register. So prices were dropped by a penny to force the cashier to open up the cash drawer, to get change for the customer, thus increasing the statistical likelihood that company gets its money.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you enact these policies? You'd have to pass a law to do it, right? Congress is currently responsible for the passage of laws. How're you going to push that through Congress? They don't want to give up all that money.
Eh, I guess that graphical interfaces just seem easier than text navigation. In fact, they probably are easier. At the very least, I can explore. If I can't see the list of commands to undertake the text navigation, I'm lost.
You're quite right that it could be easier, and I admit, I was wrong to say that emacs wasn't capable of satisfying this need. With Notepad, however, enabling this functionality (it isn't enabled by default in Notepad or emacs) is a simple toggle in Edit -> Settings (I think that's where it is. For some reason, Notepad isn't available on my work terminal, so I can't check for certain)
In addition to this not being true, as other posters have indicated, there is also a corresponding flaw in every Linux text editor I've seen. I am not a coder - I am a writer. I'm trying to write complete paragraphs and such. Using emacs, vi, joe, pico, etc. if I did not manually insert carriage returns, editing the middle of a "line" (which is all the editor treated each paragraph as), required scrolling through the entire line. Up/Down took me to the beginning or end of the paragraph. At least with Notepad, when I press up, it takes the cursor through the middle of the paragraph, for easy editing.
I think that we're approaching artificial intelligence in our desire to create robots to explore other planets. When I think about intelligence, I don't envision the ability perform one or any number of tasks. I envision the ability to teach myself or to be taught to perform tasks I can't currently do. Perhaps you could liken this to the installation of a new program on a computer, but I think it's a shaky analogy. If you were to provide Fritz with the rules of Go or even a game less complex than chess, like checkers or Quarto, would Fritz be able to take that basic information - a set of rules - and extrapolate it to the point where it could play the game? Could it play the game well? These, I think are the hallmarks of intelligence, taking limited information and deriving new information from it and from experience.
For one, it's a very simplistic model. A single dimensionless number is a good start to an effective correlation, but two or three definitely better define the system. You suggested Reynold's number, and I agree, it would be important to know, especially for the case of insect flight, since it is supposed that some insects take advantage of turbulence effects to remain aloft. So between the Strouhal Number and the Reynolds Number, the fluid flow regime and the stroke characteristic have been described. Perhaps create a third dimensionless group describing the size of the bird, non-dimensionalize the mass, volume, and wingspan (or stroke length) of the animal. Then you'd have three dimensionless groups which might yield a more tightly packed cluster of values for efficient flight.
Aside from the fact that the person who submitted this article was pushing the Monty Python reference, I think this is an excellent scientific article. As a chemical engineer, I'm well familiar with the importance of dimensionless numbers. One of the early exercises in teaching them is a correlation between leg length, stride length, stride rate, graviational acceleration and the resulting forward velocity. By developing dimensionless models, conclusions may be drawn about unmeasurable systems. For example, the above mentioned velocity correlation can be used to predict the speed of extinct animals. Similarly, this study of the Strouhal Number may be useful in better understanding flapping-wing flight, in a general sense.
If a nuclear power plant on the moon were to melt down, it wouldn't be a minor event at all. If you want to make possible the future habitation of the moon - even if it is only going to serve as a jumping off point for further explorations, you have to ensure that the moon remains habitable. Okay, I agree, the moon's a big place, and a nuclear meltdown on one side isn't going to hurt the other side much, but let's at least not start with the mentality that the surface of the moon is expendable.
I don't think that it's Joe Dummy that necessarily has the problem (except Joe Dummy might be just afraid of change). For myself, I'm far from a Dummy. If something's going wrong, I may not be able to fix it myself, but I know how to find the answers I need and then I am confident enough to tamper with things to get my problem resolved. The interface of Windows is simple enough that when I manage to generate a problem, which I'm fairly good at not doing, I can dig through help files and the internet to fix it. With windows, I have a moderate degree of authority and a moderate amount of accessability. With Linux, I may have oodles of authority, if I'm root, but the documentation is more complicated and I'm less familiar with the environment, in general. Therefore, I'm more likely to create a problem and less likely to be able to figure how to fix it.
Dark Cloud 2 also had a fun fishing engine. Better than LoZ, I'd certainly say. You had to be careful so that you didn't yank the hook out, which took patience, but if you didn't act fast enough, the fish would wear down the line and it would snap. Definitely a lot of fun. It was pretty easy to level up in DC 2, but if fishing is a valid means of earning one's livelihood in an RPG, by all means, make the leveling requirements more strict.
I think you're quite right about the reception that adult-oriented animation receives. I've tried introducing my mother to Anime several times and she invariably refuses to give it a fair opportunity. If it's a dub, she insists that nobody talks like that and leaves. If it's a sub, she mocks the Japanese language. Often, before I can even get her to sit down in front of the television, she tells it that she's not going to watch any of my dumb cartoons. Some people just aren't ready for exposure to another culture's take on something - in this case, animation.
I only own a PS2, so I can't comment on most of your list of quality, modern games. However, I would certainly like to add Jak and Daxter to the list. It has been ages since I've had that much fun playing a video game. I'd also like to second your mention of Dance Dance Revolution. It really is a revolutionary game - so much so that I'd hardly consider it a "game". As far as I'm concerned, it's the world's most entertaining, interactive workout program. That it is fun causes the player to continue to work out, but had DDR been first marketed as a workout program, rather than as a game, I think it would have reached the same place it is today, albeit it might be taken more seriously than it currently is.
This is not entirely so. The introduction of the Gameboy Advance has introduced a new generation of gamers to 2D gaming. Granted, it's not the most sophisticated gaming platform, but I'm delighted to be able to play Mario Bros. 2, Mario Bros. 3, Advance Wars, and Metroid Fusion - all of which are 2D games. True, the flagship consoles and the high-end computer games are leaving behind 2D gaming, but as long as the Gameboy remains popular, nostalgic gamers will have a reliable, if small-screened outlet for their classic gaming needs.
Thank you, sir, for making this point. For the longest time, all I saw around Slashdot were complaints that you have to buy an entire CD to get the one or two songs you wanted, but that if there were a legal means of getting burned CD's for $1.00 per track, people would be all over it, like white on rice. Now that said legal means is available, people are complaining that it's easier/more effective to buy the CD's and rip their own tracks. If, for one, fully intend to get myself ITunes, once I can get some broadband action going. I might even buy an IPod to take full advantage of it.
According to the paper, itself, they seem to be interested more in powering MEMS. I can imagine many situations in which a chip designed to analyze a fluid wouldn't require a battery because the chip's sensors will be powered by electricity generated as the pressurized fluid traverses an "electrokinetic microchannel battery" at the front end of the chip. If they can increase the efficiency and insure that a thumb-operated pump (like the primer on your lawnmower) would provide sufficient pressure to drive the battery, this could be a really useful innovation.
I find it a whole lot easier to sympathize with the plight of the movie industry when the topic of file sharing is considered. When I buy a movie, I'm getting only the material I want at a price that I feel is reasonable. I'd imagine that a lot more people are involved in the making of a movie, so if I end up paying twenty or thirty dollars for it, that's pretty good. Plus, there's usually a wide selection of used films available, at a good discount. Furthermore, there is a huge industry in movie rental, so if I'm not sure I want to buy a movie, I can almost always rent it first.
Music is often bundled in a way that forces me to buy ten songs I'm not interested in to get the two that I am. Granted, this allows me to listen to music to which I would otherwise not be exposed, but I've observed that it is usually music that I wouldn't have purchased, had I heard it beforehand. Given this, the price of a music CD is too high for the enjoyable content I receive. If I knew I was going to enjoy all twelve tracks (or all 18 tracks, heaven forbid), twenty dollars would be a fine price. Used music is difficult to come by. The local music shoppe has a room devoted to it, but the CD's are often scratched and the selection is very limited. There are also few, if any, avenues for music rental.
Overall, I think that the movie industry has fostered a system that allows me to get the most out of my purchase and still leaves them a profit. The music industry has fostered a system that often causes me to get far less from my purchase, even than I was led to expect I would get.
Just get yourself Apprentice (kept up-to-date at e-league.com) and play for free. Granted, you have to find an iRC room or an online friend to play with, yourself, but that's no big hassle. You play for free and you can construct any deck you want. (Yes, this can lead to powergaming, but there are folks out there who aren't twits). It has functions that generate random cards, if you want to play drafts...all in all, a good program.
The theme of classical literature is seldom hacker/geek, but they are value to anybody with a mind to read them. They're the originals from which todays hackneyed archetypes are spawned. Read The Iliad and The Oddysey (I'm particularly found of Rouse's plain English translation). Read War and Peace, as other posters have suggested. I, myself, am having a summer of Ayn Rand (but as quick as Anthem went by, I might have to find something else to liven this summer). The Divine Comedy is pretty good - at least Inferno and Purgatorio are. Paradiso is a bore. Anything by Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey, Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband) is solid gold. If you're a stoic, try Thomas Hardy. If you prefer contemporary literature, try Catch 22.
If you're truly inclined to be geeky, may I suggest the trilogy, "His Dark Materials" (starting with The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman. The Earthsea Trilogy (starting with A Wizard of Earthsea) by Ursula Leguin is a personal favourite. If you can find the Saga of Pliocene Exile (a four-book series, starting with The Many Coloured Land) by Julian May, it's a very good read (out of print, though; hard to find).
Every time somebody tells me that I "have to" read the Discworld books, I postpone doing so for another six months, just out of spite. Maybe I'm just hurting myself, but I've got plenty of reading material. As it stands, I don't intend to read anything Discworld until 2009.
There's a lot of lead flying around on an FPS. Should the invisibot happen to be in the crossfire of a battle, not only will it get in the way of people's shots, but it will then cause a legitimate player to get booted. You can make it so that people can move through them, but if they can be shot by cheaters (on purpose), they can be shot by legitimate players (on accident)
I think what he's saying is have these images appear beyond the "exterior" walls of the map. It might be easier for the server-side software to identify these. It doesn't sound like a terrible idea, but it also doesn't sound like a great solution either, since it makes gameplay more difficult for a cheater, but really isn't going to prevent the cheater from playing effectively, so long as he can readily recognize the exterior walls or the fake character models (which probably won't be moving the same way that real characters do)
Why in the world would you go "grocery shopping", in the suburban sense? Eating out is cheaper and better. Delivery takes a few minutes. Grocery shopping for most Manhattanites means "olives for the Martini" or maybe "a gourmet salad for after the show/party".
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I enjoy cooking and the results of cooking. It's a very practical and satysfying craft. Why I would want to give up this satisfaction for the supposed convenience of living in a high-density city with plenty of restaurants, but no grocery stores is beyond me.
Even if the mechanism involves reaction with air, as long as the kinetics of the reaction are controlled only by the concentration of the coating on the DVD, then the disc should degrade at the same rate no matter where you are. For concentrations of oxygen that can support human life, it is a relatively safe assumption that oxygen is simply abundant in comparison to the amount of substance that could be contained on a surface the size of a DVD.
To answer some of the points raised on the commentary to my post, consider this article:
Sales Tax History
Sales tax, as we know it today, has really only come about since the 1930's. Credit/debit cards are certainly younger still, as are computerized records of each transaction. If the conjecture holds true that forcing the cashier to open the till helps to prevent theft, then the idea is still valid. I will admit that I don't have a good reference for this. I have no idea where I heard/read it, so it could be false. But it is not unreasonable.
They're not trying to fool anybody. At least, that was not the original intent of setting prices at $9.99 instead of $10.00. It was a technique that was intended to help keep cashiers honest. If an item cost exactly $10.00, the cashier didn't need to open the drawer to get change for the customer. At some point, it was determined that cashiers who did not have to open the drawer were statistically more likely to pocket the money themselves than to put it in the register. So prices were dropped by a penny to force the cashier to open up the cash drawer, to get change for the customer, thus increasing the statistical likelihood that company gets its money.