Yes, it was a result of the Butlerian Jihad. There was a big war about "thinking machines" and they were banned. Thus, mentats. I'm not sure, however, if the machines were combattants in the war, or just the subject of it.
Even Star Trek treats the idea in Insurrection. One of the guys living on the paradise planet says, "When you create a machine to do the work of a man, it diminishes the man".
The people on this project were not mentat-like. They're more like an op-amp in a funky human computer.
I also seem to remember a sci-fi short story that involved a war with mars, missiles, and compuations for guidance.
Nobody knew how to do math. It seems scandal of the story was a man who could do the math without the calculator - so the government wanted him to teach others how to do math so they could put people (expendible) into the rockets, instead of expensive computers.
It's all kind of a vague memory, so the details might be all wrong.
That's pretty much how the US system is supposed to work. The government is only allowed to do the things that are expressly allowed by documents such as constitutions, charters, etc.
Citizens, on the other hand, are permitted to do anything that is not expressly prohibited.
Vague laws and codes, of course, such as "prohibiting creating a public disturbance" allow the government a lot of leeway in curtailing citizens' activities.
But generally, the government is only allowed to do what is expressly permitted. Citizens can do anything that is not expressly prohibited.
What all of you working from the electricity cost issue are missing is that at most universities, money for capital is different than money for operations. Capital money is hard to get. An increase in your operations cost just kind of get ignored if they're not too big.
This has political ramifications.
The goal: get a great, powerful, cluster of compute power.
You can't go to the administration and say, "We need to spend $150k on a compute cluster". The answer will be "we don't have one now, and everything's just fine. No."
So, you, being resourceful, implement this campus-wide cluster system that taps spare resources. Power bills go up a bit - nobody cares.
Now, a couple years later, lots of projects are using the cluster. But the thing isn't working well because the power's not there during normal peak usage.
At his point you go the administration, "we're losing tuition-paying students, and several grants are at risk because our compute cluster is not powerful enough. We need to spend $250k on a new compute cluster.
And THAT is how you manipulate your operations budget to augment your capital budget.
I'm using Qwest for the "wire" and a local ISP for my ISP (Spirit One).
I'm not sure because I haven't tested it, but I don't think I'm getting the full 1.5 down that I'm supposed to. One of these days I'll upload and download a large file to Spirit One - which shouldn't have any congestion from the net, just to see what I get.
My biggest complaint is that they only let you get 1.5 at $33. I moved away for a while and moved back. Before I moved, I could get 256 for $18/month + my own ISP. Now they wont let me get 256 unless I use qwest as my isp. So, I'm paying more than I'd like, but I like having a choice of ISP and the options that allows (I can ssh in on port 80 if I want, etc).
As for quality, the line probably goes down two or 3 times a year for a couple of hours. It's always on qwest's side.
I just watched a great restoration of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal". The commentary showed the improvements, and talked about how labor intensive it is. Then there was the recent article about bad renderings of cartoons - and how the automated scratch-removal system also ate lines and made the movie look bad. That made me think about the possibility of a project like Gutenberg, except for restoring movies.
Once you have a good digital image of a print, the hard work is all the digital restoration. I know there aren't many people who can do a great job, but I'll bet there are people who care enough about specfific films to do a good job.
There could even be a check-out and editor system like the one used by one of the book-scanning projects.
If there's a movie you really like, you can download a few seconds of it, and work on fixing scratches, and re-upload them. Then upload the fixes. The editor makes sure you haven't inserted frames of porn, etc.
It's not entirely irrelevant. A president will normally nominate a judge who has sympathetic political leanings at that time. Bush is not likely to nominate a judge who is demonstrated to be pro abortion and anti-gun.
Of course, once the judge is sworn in, then all bets are off.
I wouldn't be too worried. People who go to live performances will know the difference and realize that there is something in a live performance that doesn't translate to a recording.
In fact, I'd say that live performances are very important to the perception of a musician.
Two of my recent favorites are Jamie Cullum and Madelein Peyroux. They both recently played here in Portland, and I saw both.
I wasn't very familiar with Cullum when I went to his show, but it was one of the most dynamic and amazing performances I've ever seen. I was immediately hooked! Can't stop listening or singing along on my commute.
Peyroux, sadly, was someone I liked a lot before her concert. Now, I don't know if she was just having a bad night, but the concert was very bland for me. I felt like she just came out to play her set and leave. Most of it sounded just like her album. I was very dissappointed and couldn't really stand to listen to her album for quite some time.
As for your point #2, we'll always be able to tell a live performance from a recording. But, is it so bad if a replication of a recording is indistringuishable from the recording itself? I'm not sure I see the harm.
Second the midichlorians provide an important explanation of why Darth Vader had lost much of his power and why Darth Sideous wanted Luke to be his replacement. Anakin had the highest midichlorian count of any Jedi, including Yoda, and he was destined to be the most powerful Jedi of all.
Now it sounds like you're drawing your own conclusions without any real store.
In "real-life", my cholesterol count has nothing to do with the volume of blood in my body. If I have my legs cut off, I lose a lot of blood, but once I stabilize, my cholesterol count will be the same - as it's a ratio.
Now, I'm not going to even pretend that I know if "midichlorian count" is a ratio (like cholestrol, red/white cell count, etc), or a summation of the total number - I don't think it was ever mentioned.
So, without knowing that basic fact of the "science of the force", you can't really make any assumptions about that being why Vader lost his power.
Maybe he was just getting old. Even Yoda died of old age.
Remember, Ben had already been talking with Chewie, so he would have known (surely through his homework of communing with Kwi Gon, or the history with Yoda), that Chewie was okay.
It's obvious, I guess, a lot like common sense. But then again, look at how many people who are unhappy in their jobs and careers. If it was so entirely obvious, I guess more people would do it?
Off the top of my head, the only things I can think of are Intel processors and Micron memories.
And for the life of me, I can't figure out why they aren't actually manufactured off-shore. Well... maybe it's that a wafer fabs cost a lot more to build than a sewing shop.
But again, the chips and memories are just components.
Let's see what's in reach right here: Digital Camera: China CF for Camera: Singapore Batteries for Camera: Singapore Cellphone: Korea Cellphone battery: Korea USB Thumbdrive: Taiwan Monitor: China Scanner: China Digital Metronome: China CDR's: Taiwan Router: China Box Heater: China
The computer I built myself - but made from components that I imagine only the proc was made here in the US. Maybe the case.
I have an MBA... not honors... but got the first two okay.
The trick is to figure out which values each square can NOT be. Once you start doing that, you find that from the ones left, you only get certain answers.
On the one where you see the buildings, you have the whole row that said you could see 4... they could only go 1,2,3,4, going down. You now know that for the other 3 columns, none of the rows can contain another 1,2,3, or 4 (respectively).
So, then look at the 2nd row down, and you have to be able to see 3 going across. Well, that 2 in the 3rd position means only a 4 can be on the right, as if it were any where else, it would block too many. So, the 1st to colunmns in row 2 are either 1, or 3. If you put 3 in front, you can't see 1 and 2 (in the middle), so that row HAS to be 1,3,2,4.
Start applying similar logic to each of the other cells and you'll get it. It can be helpful to write each number 1,2,3,4 in each cell, and cross out the ones it can't be. You soon find that you end up with the only answer it CAN be.
It's not the clutter per se that bothers me at Yahoo. It's all the friggin flashing, blinking, and pop-up ads.
As for google... if they want to put all the stuff I like on one page, more power to them. Just don't clutter it with flashing, blinking, epileptic-fit-inducing ads.
How many people in "real-life" actually act their age well enough to pass off as their actual age?
On a daily basis, I engage in a stupendous effort of suspension of disbelief just to get by. I can handle a few kid actors who are a couple years older than the part they're playing.
However, you should understand that there is a causal relationship between not watching it on TV and the show not lasting.
Actually, it doesn't matter at all if I watch it or not. The only ones that really matter are the people in the sample set for ACNielsen watch it. AC Nielsen makes their money by alleging that their sample set is representative of the entire tv-viewing population.
It's not my job to make sure I conform to that sample set. It's their job to figure out what I'm watching - if they want to be in the business of reporting on what people are watching.
It sounds like these government schools are being a little short-sighted in their reasoning.
The reality is that if a school switches to FOSS and saves $100,000 a year, that much money will just be cut from their budget. It's not like they'll get to keep the money and use it for something else. Why bother.
The flaw in the logic is that the government doesn't see money as a limited resource. They can just raise taxes and fees. (Yes, economically this doesn't make sense - but government's not about making sense). Raise taxes today and we'll have plenty more money. Of course, they don't connect the dots when people move away and the economies suffer and fail.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to get around it, but our company has some kind of automatic proxy. It appears that only programs that know how to use that for requesting access can get out.
So, for browsers and such, I can get out just fine because I copy the location of a.dll and put it into the automatic proxy configuration box.
But other apps can't get out directly, not even on port 80.
To test it, I set my box at home to listen for ssh on port 80, but I still could not get out of my work's configuration.
So, I don't think I'd be able to do vnc going outbound either.
It's especially frustrating when trying to rip mp3s with Audiograbber because I can't figure out how to get it to access FreeDDB to get the tracknames.
If it weren't for the big mountain in the way, I'd bike it myself!
I've tried sleeping on our trains, and I swear, the seats were made by the people who design McDonald's seats. I can't imagine they're comfortable for people of any size. I'm sure that's in order to keep bums from using them as a mobile hotel.
I was more comfortable sleeping, jammed in the back of a c130 for 7 hours with a parachute on my back and my backpack on my lap.
I would guess it's more that I live right on the Interstate just north of downtown. It's easy for me to get into downtown, and then my commute is outbound for the rest of the way - still on the freeway.
Basically, I'm going the opposite direction of most other people.
The trains do help, I'm sure, but they were under-designed and can't have their capacity increased. There can't be more than 2 cars, and apparently the electrical system that runs them can only handle a limited number of trains at a time. So, even though there is much more peak demand, they didn't build the system to handle even half that peak demand. It's sad, because a LOT of money was spent to tunnel through a mountain to build the thing.
On the plus side, the train here does not block too much traffic. On the other hand, they usually choose to destroy a major route to install the train... why not put it over one block and keep the major route intact?
People tend to use it as a database-lite kind of thing (I am guilty of this myself), but in an actual corporation I think this is dangerous to the point of stupidity. Information that can cost or save millions of dollars belongs in a real database, on a real server, not in an XLS file sitting on someone's c: drive.
In my corp, all the real data sits in a huge SAP database. But for whatever reasons, SAP does not provide the reports we want and need in any useable form. When I got to my position, most of my week was consumed by dumping reports of data out of SAP, and then manipulating the data in Excel by hand to get the views we wanted of the data.
I've been slowly writing macros and front-ends to speed up this process and help find ways to automate the procedures.
I keep it in Excel because someday I hope to be in a better job and someone will have to pick up where I left off.
I'd love to have this all happen in SAP... so I could click a button and have the report I want generated. The data is all in there. It SHOULD be able to do it.
But, nobody here seems to know how to do that or that it's even possible. The IT people are too busy to answer my questions, or are insulted that I think SAP should have something added (or they treat me like I don't know anything (I'm an ops analyst with about 10 years of IT/sys-admin/programming experience) and dismiss my requests).
So, I program with macros in Excel.
I'll admit, 6 months ago, I scoffed at Excel just like a lot of people here. "macros?"... but now that I've written quite a few.. and saved hours of time every week, I don't laugh any more.
If IT won't answer my questions about how to get access to the systems in SAP to build reports, how am I ever going to get them to write a new application in a *real* environment?
But, I DO keep my.xls files on my shared drive... and make.zip backups by automated script everytime I log in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it was a result of the Butlerian Jihad. There was a big war about "thinking machines" and they were banned. Thus, mentats. I'm not sure, however, if the machines were combattants in the war, or just the subject of it.
Even Star Trek treats the idea in Insurrection. One of the guys living on the paradise planet says, "When you create a machine to do the work of a man, it diminishes the man".
The people on this project were not mentat-like. They're more like an op-amp in a funky human computer.
I also seem to remember a sci-fi short story that involved a war with mars, missiles, and compuations for guidance.
Nobody knew how to do math. It seems scandal of the story was a man who could do the math without the calculator - so the government wanted him to teach others how to do math so they could put people (expendible) into the rockets, instead of expensive computers.
It's all kind of a vague memory, so the details might be all wrong.
That's pretty much how the US system is supposed to work. The government is only allowed to do the things that are expressly allowed by documents such as constitutions, charters, etc.
Citizens, on the other hand, are permitted to do anything that is not expressly prohibited.
Vague laws and codes, of course, such as "prohibiting creating a public disturbance" allow the government a lot of leeway in curtailing citizens' activities.
But generally, the government is only allowed to do what is expressly permitted. Citizens can do anything that is not expressly prohibited.
What all of you working from the electricity cost issue are missing is that at most universities, money for capital is different than money for operations. Capital money is hard to get. An increase in your operations cost just kind of get ignored if they're not too big.
This has political ramifications.
The goal: get a great, powerful, cluster of compute power.
You can't go to the administration and say, "We need to spend $150k on a compute cluster". The answer will be "we don't have one now, and everything's just fine. No."
So, you, being resourceful, implement this campus-wide cluster system that taps spare resources. Power bills go up a bit - nobody cares.
Now, a couple years later, lots of projects are using the cluster. But the thing isn't working well because the power's not there during normal peak usage.
At his point you go the administration, "we're losing tuition-paying students, and several grants are at risk because our compute cluster is not powerful enough. We need to spend $250k on a new compute cluster.
And THAT is how you manipulate your operations budget to augment your capital budget.
I'm using Qwest for the "wire" and a local ISP for my ISP (Spirit One).
I'm not sure because I haven't tested it, but I don't think I'm getting the full 1.5 down that I'm supposed to. One of these days I'll upload and download a large file to Spirit One - which shouldn't have any congestion from the net, just to see what I get.
My biggest complaint is that they only let you get 1.5 at $33. I moved away for a while and moved back. Before I moved, I could get 256 for $18/month + my own ISP. Now they wont let me get 256 unless I use qwest as my isp. So, I'm paying more than I'd like, but I like having a choice of ISP and the options that allows (I can ssh in on port 80 if I want, etc).
As for quality, the line probably goes down two or 3 times a year for a couple of hours. It's always on qwest's side.
So, overall, I'm pleased.
I just watched a great restoration of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal". The commentary showed the improvements, and talked about how labor intensive it is. Then there was the recent article about bad renderings of cartoons - and how the automated scratch-removal system also ate lines and made the movie look bad. That made me think about the possibility of a project like Gutenberg, except for restoring movies.
Once you have a good digital image of a print, the hard work is all the digital restoration. I know there aren't many people who can do a great job, but I'll bet there are people who care enough about specfific films to do a good job.
There could even be a check-out and editor system like the one used by one of the book-scanning projects.
If there's a movie you really like, you can download a few seconds of it, and work on fixing scratches, and re-upload them. Then upload the fixes. The editor makes sure you haven't inserted frames of porn, etc.
Here's my Qwest DSL bill (I'm cell-only and pay plenty of taxes there too):
Qwest Choice DSL Standalone: $33.00
Federal Universal Serv. Fund Private Line at 11.1%: $3.66
It's not entirely irrelevant. A president will normally nominate a judge who has sympathetic political leanings at that time. Bush is not likely to nominate a judge who is demonstrated to be pro abortion and anti-gun.
Of course, once the judge is sworn in, then all bets are off.
I wouldn't be too worried. People who go to live performances will know the difference and realize that there is something in a live performance that doesn't translate to a recording.
In fact, I'd say that live performances are very important to the perception of a musician.
Two of my recent favorites are Jamie Cullum and Madelein Peyroux. They both recently played here in Portland, and I saw both.
I wasn't very familiar with Cullum when I went to his show, but it was one of the most dynamic and amazing performances I've ever seen. I was immediately hooked! Can't stop listening or singing along on my commute.
Peyroux, sadly, was someone I liked a lot before her concert. Now, I don't know if she was just having a bad night, but the concert was very bland for me. I felt like she just came out to play her set and leave. Most of it sounded just like her album. I was very dissappointed and couldn't really stand to listen to her album for quite some time.
As for your point #2, we'll always be able to tell a live performance from a recording. But, is it so bad if a replication of a recording is indistringuishable from the recording itself? I'm not sure I see the harm.
Second the midichlorians provide an important explanation of why Darth Vader had lost much of his power and why Darth Sideous wanted Luke to be his replacement. Anakin had the highest midichlorian count of any Jedi, including Yoda, and he was destined to be the most powerful Jedi of all.
Now it sounds like you're drawing your own conclusions without any real store.
In "real-life", my cholesterol count has nothing to do with the volume of blood in my body. If I have my legs cut off, I lose a lot of blood, but once I stabilize, my cholesterol count will be the same - as it's a ratio.
Now, I'm not going to even pretend that I know if "midichlorian count" is a ratio (like cholestrol, red/white cell count, etc), or a summation of the total number - I don't think it was ever mentioned.
So, without knowing that basic fact of the "science of the force", you can't really make any assumptions about that being why Vader lost his power.
Maybe he was just getting old. Even Yoda died of old age.
Remember, Ben had already been talking with Chewie, so he would have known (surely through his homework of communing with Kwi Gon, or the history with Yoda), that Chewie was okay.
It's obvious, I guess, a lot like common sense. But then again, look at how many people who are unhappy in their jobs and careers. If it was so entirely obvious, I guess more people would do it?
Yup, and he used his microwave to cook the burrito that provided the engergy he needed to take the child-porn photos.
Clearly, his use of a high-energy radiation device was a part of his crime and he should be convicted as a terrorist.
Off the top of my head, the only things I can think of are Intel processors and Micron memories.
And for the life of me, I can't figure out why they aren't actually manufactured off-shore. Well... maybe it's that a wafer fabs cost a lot more to build than a sewing shop.
But again, the chips and memories are just components.
Let's see what's in reach right here:
Digital Camera: China
CF for Camera: Singapore
Batteries for Camera: Singapore
Cellphone: Korea
Cellphone battery: Korea
USB Thumbdrive: Taiwan
Monitor: China
Scanner: China
Digital Metronome: China
CDR's: Taiwan
Router: China
Box Heater: China
The computer I built myself - but made from components that I imagine only the proc was made here in the US. Maybe the case.
Maybe it was like it was in Contact... they were already building DeathStar II while the first one was being built?
When spending government money, why build only one when you can build two for twice the cost?
For the first problem, the sum of each row and column is 10.
I'm not saying you didn't solve it, but you can come up with that statement simply from the directions.
They say each row/column has a 1,2,3,4. 1+2+3+4 = 10. The trick is knowing what order they go in!
I have an MBA... not honors... but got the first two okay.
The trick is to figure out which values each square can NOT be. Once you start doing that, you find that from the ones left, you only get certain answers.
On the one where you see the buildings, you have the whole row that said you could see 4... they could only go 1,2,3,4, going down. You now know that for the other 3 columns, none of the rows can contain another 1,2,3, or 4 (respectively).
So, then look at the 2nd row down, and you have to be able to see 3 going across. Well, that 2 in the 3rd position means only a 4 can be on the right, as if it were any where else, it would block too many. So, the 1st to colunmns in row 2 are either 1, or 3. If you put 3 in front, you can't see 1 and 2 (in the middle), so that row HAS to be 1,3,2,4.
Start applying similar logic to each of the other cells and you'll get it. It can be helpful to write each number 1,2,3,4 in each cell, and cross out the ones it can't be. You soon find that you end up with the only answer it CAN be.
The 2nd puzzle can be done the same way.
It's not the clutter per se that bothers me at Yahoo. It's all the friggin flashing, blinking, and pop-up ads.
As for google... if they want to put all the stuff I like on one page, more power to them. Just don't clutter it with flashing, blinking, epileptic-fit-inducing ads.
How many people in "real-life" actually act their age well enough to pass off as their actual age?
On a daily basis, I engage in a stupendous effort of suspension of disbelief just to get by. I can handle a few kid actors who are a couple years older than the part they're playing.
However, you should understand that there is a causal relationship between not watching it on TV and the show not lasting.
Actually, it doesn't matter at all if I watch it or not. The only ones that really matter are the people in the sample set for ACNielsen watch it. AC Nielsen makes their money by alleging that their sample set is representative of the entire tv-viewing population.
It's not my job to make sure I conform to that sample set. It's their job to figure out what I'm watching - if they want to be in the business of reporting on what people are watching.
It sounds like these government schools are being a little short-sighted in their reasoning.
The reality is that if a school switches to FOSS and saves $100,000 a year, that much money will just be cut from their budget. It's not like they'll get to keep the money and use it for something else. Why bother.
The flaw in the logic is that the government doesn't see money as a limited resource. They can just raise taxes and fees. (Yes, economically this doesn't make sense - but government's not about making sense). Raise taxes today and we'll have plenty more money. Of course, they don't connect the dots when people move away and the economies suffer and fail.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to get around it, but our company has some kind of automatic proxy. It appears that only programs that know how to use that for requesting access can get out.
.dll and put it into the automatic proxy configuration box.
So, for browsers and such, I can get out just fine because I copy the location of a
But other apps can't get out directly, not even on port 80.
To test it, I set my box at home to listen for ssh on port 80, but I still could not get out of my work's configuration.
So, I don't think I'd be able to do vnc going outbound either.
It's especially frustrating when trying to rip mp3s with Audiograbber because I can't figure out how to get it to access FreeDDB to get the tracknames.
If it weren't for the big mountain in the way, I'd bike it myself!
I've tried sleeping on our trains, and I swear, the seats were made by the people who design McDonald's seats. I can't imagine they're comfortable for people of any size. I'm sure that's in order to keep bums from using them as a mobile hotel.
I was more comfortable sleeping, jammed in the back of a c130 for 7 hours with a parachute on my back and my backpack on my lap.
I would guess it's more that I live right on the Interstate just north of downtown. It's easy for me to get into downtown, and then my commute is outbound for the rest of the way - still on the freeway.
Basically, I'm going the opposite direction of most other people.
The trains do help, I'm sure, but they were under-designed and can't have their capacity increased. There can't be more than 2 cars, and apparently the electrical system that runs them can only handle a limited number of trains at a time. So, even though there is much more peak demand, they didn't build the system to handle even half that peak demand. It's sad, because a LOT of money was spent to tunnel through a mountain to build the thing.
On the plus side, the train here does not block too much traffic. On the other hand, they usually choose to destroy a major route to install the train... why not put it over one block and keep the major route intact?
People tend to use it as a database-lite kind of thing (I am guilty of this myself), but in an actual corporation I think this is dangerous to the point of stupidity. Information that can cost or save millions of dollars belongs in a real database, on a real server, not in an XLS file sitting on someone's c: drive.
... but now that I've written quite a few.. and saved hours of time every week, I don't laugh any more.
.xls files on my shared drive... and make .zip backups by automated script everytime I log in.
In my corp, all the real data sits in a huge SAP database. But for whatever reasons, SAP does not provide the reports we want and need in any useable form. When I got to my position, most of my week was consumed by dumping reports of data out of SAP, and then manipulating the data in Excel by hand to get the views we wanted of the data.
I've been slowly writing macros and front-ends to speed up this process and help find ways to automate the procedures.
I keep it in Excel because someday I hope to be in a better job and someone will have to pick up where I left off.
I'd love to have this all happen in SAP... so I could click a button and have the report I want generated. The data is all in there. It SHOULD be able to do it.
But, nobody here seems to know how to do that or that it's even possible. The IT people are too busy to answer my questions, or are insulted that I think SAP should have something added (or they treat me like I don't know anything (I'm an ops analyst with about 10 years of IT/sys-admin/programming experience) and dismiss my requests).
So, I program with macros in Excel.
I'll admit, 6 months ago, I scoffed at Excel just like a lot of people here. "macros?"
If IT won't answer my questions about how to get access to the systems in SAP to build reports, how am I ever going to get them to write a new application in a *real* environment?
But, I DO keep my