Don't worry -- even if it changes, it'll be reposted next week, and maybe the week after that. This is/., you know. And you can just look at it each time and get an expectation value....
How do you define "important"? Sure, everyone wants information about a particular topic, which may well not be there. But the very fact that there are many articles on one subject seems to imply that people (at least the people with lots of time on their hands, like/. readers) think that those topics are important enough to write about, or edit.
In addition, saying that "[in] a commercial encyclopedia, the full range of human knowledege is covered" is demonstrably bunk. Especially in technical fields, commercial encyclopedias do an OK job of presenting some aspects of subjects, but there are many sub-fields which simply aren't covered. Of course, this is certainly true in wikipedia.org, too, but the potential for quickly expanding subjects seems to be much, much greater at w.org than in a commercial encyclopedia.
Computer games may be *capable* of tackling some topics at certain levels, but one question one must ask is: Is it WORTH it?
This is the same question which must be asked when making a movie, and the reason is this:
When making a movie (or, indeed, a video game, both of which are inherently visual media), one takes what are relatively abstract concepts (scene __x__ looks kind of like this, and maybe thoughts __y__ and __z__ are running through protagonist's head, etc.) with a concrete picture, which everyone is pretty much going to agree upon. There are still lots of degrees of freedom for ways in which the viewer can interpret things, but many of the degrees of freedom in written works (how a name is pronounced, odors, connections with the reader's childhood) will now be gone, or much, much harder to communicate.
Religion has such a visceral connection with people that there is a huge danger in pinning down many degrees of freedom, and presenting just ONE view of it in a game. Is that really what people want? It may, indeed, make a good game, there's no doubt that many good stories have become (to some extent) good games, but how true to original messages (as interpreted by practitioners, maybe) does one have to be?
"An Olympic event is a one-time event, and there are no do-overs," Bob Kiraly, director of broadcast and telecommunications operations at NBC, said in an interview from Athens this week. "Everything we plan for in our networks or our Athens operations center is really based on a failure scenario. You certainly can't tell a marathon runner that you need to run it over [because of a network issue]."
Aww... What is this world coming to? I remember, back in the day, we never complained about having to do the events over for little things like Roman invasions and volcanic eruptions.
"... you killed my fahthair, prepare to die."
BEEP.
"Um, no, sorry, you're not."
"Que? My name Inigo Mon-"
BEEP.
"See, my PDA with built-in arm-scanner says you're not. You're Frank Thompson, from Akron, Ohio. Oh, and your moustache is falling off."
"..."
the first rule of watching 5-year-olds is to make sure that dangerous and fragile items are stuffed in a closet before they arrive.
Seems to me that seriously padding up that closet, maybe drilling in a few air holes... Heck, even getting some heavy-use dollys and cool hockey masks with the bars over the mouths and just sticking several cousins in there at a time, would be easier than eliminating the things that might harm them.
Do you know that many of the most insightful writers will be voraceous readers and will constantly refer to grammar books, dictionaries and other technical resources? It would seem you don't.
Many of the postings say:
1) Fugu is expensive because of the risk of death; a hurt customer closes the restaurant and the chef won't work again;
2) The numbness in one's lips is the only way to tell if it was prepared correctly (with a smidgen of poison).
Accordingly, I predict the rise of pseudo-fugu franchises, which might actually make a bit of money for a few years:
i) Set up, serve known-safe fugu with a bit of local anaesthetic injected into the liver, or wherever;
ii)...
iii) Profit!
Haha. Yeah, and the one he built to melt snow off of driveways is way too heavy and dangerous to use without bolting it to something heavy.
"Honey, seen any snow yet?"
"No, not yet."...
"OK, dear, it's snowing."
"Yay!"
Is the original author going to keep those CDs somewhere else?
Besides, if you're worried about that, then you just get a reallllly long USB2 cable:)
Re:neither one
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For pure bamboozlement, the effect of an ultrasonic parametric array (the things that produce these "directed sound beams") can't be beaten -- I experienced a demonstration of one two years ago at the Physical Acoustics Summer School in California. It's pretty amazing to have the demonstrator up front with a little antenna looking thing, playing music through it... but you can't hear it! However, just one or two people in the audience have this awestruck look on their faces. Then, when he swings the thing about, a line of people will suddenly perk up, as the cone of sound sweeps by. So although the "ultrasound method," as you call it, may not be as practically useful as time-reversal acoustics, it's really going to capture the public's attention.
Also, time-reversal acoustics is nothing new. The concepts have been around for a long, long time. It's just now, though, that digital amplifiers and computers are fast enough to quickly reverse tone bursts -- because sound travels so "slowly", it's difficult to get the "reversed" sound back to its source before conditions really change a lot. With light, though, this has been going on for a long time, because the danged stuff travels so fast (see any nonlinear optics book).
So, you're right: Time-reversal acoustics is "new" in the sense that the technology has almost caught up to the science. Still, practical difficulties exist, and there are a LOT of environments in which it won't be able to be applied. Just like there are a lot of environments in which nonlinear parametric arrays will do you no good because the intrinsic nonlinearity of the medium isn't high enough.
Re:Think of the costs associated...
on
Koalas Gone Wild
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I guarantee that if you put an advert in some hunting magazine, and make a lottery out of it, you'll get people wanting to travel there, and spend their own money to shoot these things. Yes, you'll get some whacko hunter types, but they'll not only spend their own money on airfare, gas, food, ammo, etc., but they'll bring in tourist dollars at the same time.
Also, it's fun to go to a tourist trap, stand around the bottom of a tree and point up at it and walk away once the crowd gathers. Couldn't do that if the Koalas were all dead now, could we?
Why not?
Besides which, now you can have 20,000 tourist traps.
1) Put a stuffed koala waaay up in some random tree (doesn't have to be eucalyptus -- tourists aren't going to care), or on a building, or in the bottom of a pool with cute little SCUBA gear on it.
2)Stand and point.
Oh, yeah...
3)...
I was at a conference of the ASA a year or so ago, and those in the know at the conference stuck around in one particular room for a particular series of talks.
First the internal review committe from Oak Ridge talked about how they couldn't find much evidence that Taleyarkhan and his group had actually produced bubble fusion -- this was pretty deadly in a scientific sense, since their OWN lab was very critical of their work. But then Taleyarkhan talked, and gave careful and convincing evidence to the contrary: His group actually HAD produced bubble fusion. It was a pretty tense afternoon, though everyone seemed to be of relatively good cheer. Fun times!
I hope Taleyarkhan and his group actually do figure a way to produce and control -- and maybe harness the energies produced -- bubble fusion; since I'm in physical acoustics, this means more jobs for me to go into!
Yeah, settle down there, turbo. My Spanish roommate, when he's not quite sure of the English word, picks something close (like 'scale') and does his funky Spanification on it. I'll ask him later, but I'll bet you that 'scale' will turn into 'escalate'. If the other poster is correct about a French parent poster, I see no problem with it. Sure, it's sloppy English, but they're doing a damn sight better than most Americans I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry -- even if it changes, it'll be reposted next week, and maybe the week after that. This is /., you know. And you can just look at it each time and get an expectation value....
How do you define "important"? Sure, everyone wants information about a particular topic, which may well not be there. But the very fact that there are many articles on one subject seems to imply that people (at least the people with lots of time on their hands, like /. readers) think that those topics are important enough to write about, or edit.
In addition, saying that "[in] a commercial encyclopedia, the full range of human knowledege is covered" is demonstrably bunk. Especially in technical fields, commercial encyclopedias do an OK job of presenting some aspects of subjects, but there are many sub-fields which simply aren't covered. Of course, this is certainly true in wikipedia.org, too, but the potential for quickly expanding subjects seems to be much, much greater at w.org than in a commercial encyclopedia.
Computer games may be *capable* of tackling some topics at certain levels, but one question one must ask is: Is it WORTH it?
This is the same question which must be asked when making a movie, and the reason is this:
When making a movie (or, indeed, a video game, both of which are inherently visual media), one takes what are relatively abstract concepts (scene __x__ looks kind of like this, and maybe thoughts __y__ and __z__ are running through protagonist's head, etc.) with a concrete picture, which everyone is pretty much going to agree upon. There are still lots of degrees of freedom for ways in which the viewer can interpret things, but many of the degrees of freedom in written works (how a name is pronounced, odors, connections with the reader's childhood) will now be gone, or much, much harder to communicate.
Religion has such a visceral connection with people that there is a huge danger in pinning down many degrees of freedom, and presenting just ONE view of it in a game. Is that really what people want? It may, indeed, make a good game, there's no doubt that many good stories have become (to some extent) good games, but how true to original messages (as interpreted by practitioners, maybe) does one have to be?
'It's high time that the computer stop lurking in the shadows of dusty computer desks in forgotten rarely-used bedrooms [...]'
"An Olympic event is a one-time event, and there are no do-overs," Bob Kiraly, director of broadcast and telecommunications operations at NBC, said in an interview from Athens this week. "Everything we plan for in our networks or our Athens operations center is really based on a failure scenario. You certainly can't tell a marathon runner that you need to run it over [because of a network issue]. "
Aww... What is this world coming to? I remember, back in the day, we never complained about having to do the events over for little things like Roman invasions and volcanic eruptions.
NBC - 99.99% Reliabe Connection for Athens Olympics
Gee, I'm glad spellchecking is 100% reliabe.
"... you killed my fahthair, prepare to die."
BEEP.
"Um, no, sorry, you're not."
"Que? My name Inigo Mon-"
BEEP.
"See, my PDA with built-in arm-scanner says you're not. You're Frank Thompson, from Akron, Ohio. Oh, and your moustache is falling off."
"..."
Isn't this what happened to those "special" children ('Thirds', were they?) in Ender's Game? And look at what a wonderful dude he turned out to be!
Oh, wait....
A vulnerability exists in Outlook Express that could allow an attacker to cause Outlook Express to fail.
Wait... if OE is one of the major vectors of computer viruses, then how is applying this patch making my system more secure?
the first rule of watching 5-year-olds is to make sure that dangerous and fragile items are stuffed in a closet before they arrive.
Seems to me that seriously padding up that closet, maybe drilling in a few air holes... Heck, even getting some heavy-use dollys and cool hockey masks with the bars over the mouths and just sticking several cousins in there at a time, would be easier than eliminating the things that might harm them.
Do you know that many of the most insightful writers will be voraceous readers and will constantly refer to grammar books, dictionaries and other technical resources? It would seem you don't.
:)
Hmmm.... Pot/kettle?
Gee, I'd think he'd have come up with the alpha-helix structure a lot earlier if he grew up with a sculpture of it right outside his damn house.
Of course, I read on Wikipedia that his father was an "unsuccesful druggie", so my thoughts have very little bearing.
Many of the postings say:
...
1) Fugu is expensive because of the risk of death; a hurt customer closes the restaurant and the chef won't work again;
2) The numbness in one's lips is the only way to tell if it was prepared correctly (with a smidgen of poison).
Accordingly, I predict the rise of pseudo-fugu franchises, which might actually make a bit of money for a few years:
i) Set up, serve known-safe fugu with a bit of local anaesthetic injected into the liver, or wherever;
ii)
iii) Profit!
Haha. Yeah, and the one he built to melt snow off of driveways is way too heavy and dangerous to use without bolting it to something heavy. ...
"Honey, seen any snow yet?"
"No, not yet."
"OK, dear, it's snowing."
"Yay!"
*click.... click*
*WHOO000SH!*
"AIIIIIEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee...........!"
Is the original author going to keep those CDs somewhere else?
:)
Besides, if you're worried about that, then you just get a reallllly long USB2 cable
For pure bamboozlement, the effect of an ultrasonic parametric array (the things that produce these "directed sound beams") can't be beaten -- I experienced a demonstration of one two years ago at the Physical Acoustics Summer School in California. It's pretty amazing to have the demonstrator up front with a little antenna looking thing, playing music through it... but you can't hear it! However, just one or two people in the audience have this awestruck look on their faces. Then, when he swings the thing about, a line of people will suddenly perk up, as the cone of sound sweeps by. So although the "ultrasound method," as you call it, may not be as practically useful as time-reversal acoustics, it's really going to capture the public's attention.
Also, time-reversal acoustics is nothing new. The concepts have been around for a long, long time. It's just now, though, that digital amplifiers and computers are fast enough to quickly reverse tone bursts -- because sound travels so "slowly", it's difficult to get the "reversed" sound back to its source before conditions really change a lot. With light, though, this has been going on for a long time, because the danged stuff travels so fast (see any nonlinear optics book).
So, you're right: Time-reversal acoustics is "new" in the sense that the technology has almost caught up to the science. Still, practical difficulties exist, and there are a LOT of environments in which it won't be able to be applied. Just like there are a lot of environments in which nonlinear parametric arrays will do you no good because the intrinsic nonlinearity of the medium isn't high enough.
I guarantee that if you put an advert in some hunting magazine, and make a lottery out of it, you'll get people wanting to travel there, and spend their own money to shoot these things. Yes, you'll get some whacko hunter types, but they'll not only spend their own money on airfare, gas, food, ammo, etc., but they'll bring in tourist dollars at the same time.
Also, it's fun to go to a tourist trap, stand around the bottom of a tree and point up at it and walk away once the crowd gathers. Couldn't do that if the Koalas were all dead now, could we?
...
Why not?
Besides which, now you can have 20,000 tourist traps.
1) Put a stuffed koala waaay up in some random tree (doesn't have to be eucalyptus -- tourists aren't going to care), or on a building, or in the bottom of a pool with cute little SCUBA gear on it.
2)Stand and point.
Oh, yeah...
3)
4) Profit!
Yes, absolutely. Would love to see 15 clowns fit inside it somehow, popping out at odd times (perhaps in collisions with Segways).
I don't what's wrong (This clause no verb!)
alot (Not a word!)
America is being dumbed down and losing it's focus (Posessive form of "it" is "its")
No wonder people complain that (we -- yes, I'm a scientist) can't communicate well.
Damn, I'm a bastard today.
Ah, so they can't spell, either. Good Science == Bad English?
What kind of graphics card will I need to jack everything off?
Last time I checked, Penthouse was still in a hardcopy edition...
I was at a conference of the ASA a year or so ago, and those in the know at the conference stuck around in one particular room for a particular series of talks.
First the internal review committe from Oak Ridge talked about how they couldn't find much evidence that Taleyarkhan and his group had actually produced bubble fusion -- this was pretty deadly in a scientific sense, since their OWN lab was very critical of their work. But then Taleyarkhan talked, and gave careful and convincing evidence to the contrary: His group actually HAD produced bubble fusion. It was a pretty tense afternoon, though everyone seemed to be of relatively good cheer. Fun times!
I hope Taleyarkhan and his group actually do figure a way to produce and control -- and maybe harness the energies produced -- bubble fusion; since I'm in physical acoustics, this means more jobs for me to go into!
Yeah, settle down there, turbo. My Spanish roommate, when he's not quite sure of the English word, picks something close (like 'scale') and does his funky Spanification on it. I'll ask him later, but I'll bet you that 'scale' will turn into 'escalate'. If the other poster is correct about a French parent poster, I see no problem with it. Sure, it's sloppy English, but they're doing a damn sight better than most Americans I know.