My impression of MySpace is basically the same as my impression of Livejournal, except I've never seen a MySpace page that wasn't visually obnoxious.
I've used LiveJournal for about four years now as a way to keep up with all my non-local friends and occasionally share stuff, and more recently as an RSS/news feed reader. I know it's not the most popular way to handle blogs, but it works for me. I have always had the tasteful default scheme, and I never visit anyone's personal LJ page. I just see their entries in a nice format.
MySpace, I suspect, is much the same. Largely idiots, but I have a number of non-idiot friends, and some of them are on MySpace. It clearly works as a way to find people, if that's what you want; I've found interesting and intelligent people on Livejournal as well.
MySpace is a community. It has a visually obnoxious format, and since it encourages socializing it attracts all manner of teens, who then characterize it. It doesn't mean you can't use MySpace for intelligent, grown-up social networking, I'm sure. It's just that people who are neither intelligent nor grown up still socialize, and it's just as good (if not better) a tool for unintelligent immature socilalization. As with LJ, that makes up the bulk.
And as for finding people -- when I want to look someone up around campus or at another school, I use Facebook. Most of my friends are college-age and on there. And, thank god, Facebook doesn't allow custom themes, colors, or formats. If it didn't exist, I'd have to look people up on MySpace. But it does, so I don't need to go there yet.
On the computer I'm using right now, the mouse and keyboard are both out-of-sight in the tray. And I can't imagine looking at my mouse frequently while I'm using it.
However, having it flash while I'm across the room could be worthwhile, so I wouldn't have to have the screen on to check basic stuff like that. Still, seems marginally useful to me.
However, someone (jokingly) mentioned vibration. This seems like a really good idea to me, using more human input channels, with the one drawback that I bet a vibrating mouse is much harder to steer.
It varies with discharge rates, of course, but you can do a bunch of very public tests in different applications and come up with some total energy numbers.
Every time I see that ad that says "if you think all batteries are the same, consider this:" I always get excited, thinking they're actually gonna show me some, however biased, numbers. But they just say "famous person x trusts these batteries." It seems that if there's really a difference between duracel and energizer and the off-brands, whoever has more energy would quantify and advertise it. But they don't think it's a good idea, for whatever reason.
customers don't see them the same way and won't pay the same price for them, and no amount of wishful thinking will make them change their minds.
Man. If only we had some sort of a SYSTEM for determining what things should be priced, some sort of an open market in which companies could set prices and see how many people are willing to pay that price. That would be great.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
I picked one up from, I believe, the internet, for a robotics project. I think it was before the ads; I had never seen one. I found it by searching for wireless cameras on some search engine. The project stalled years ago, and the camera sits unused on my shelf, only pulled down occasionally to explore vent ducts on the back of an R/C car or serve as a makeshift 'see another part of the apartment' system when I (very rarely) need that.
The weird thing is that the dinosaur in question found to eat grass was the T-Rex, deeply confusing both sides in the "vicious hunter or cowardly scavenger" argument.
Oh, general relativity is absolutely quite complicated, as is the issue of reference frames. I'm just saying that what I saw as the question at hand -- "how can you say the earth is spinning and not everything else?" -- is pretty simple.
It's not even so much relativity at all; these principles were understood before 1900. If you're in a spinning reference frame, things work differently. Spinning your reference frame is not the same as moving it at a constant velocity -- while you can't tell how fast you are moving in the absolute sense, you can tell precisely how fast you are spinning.
GP is needlessly complicated. All he needs to say is that spinning reference frames are not on the same footing as non-spinning ones. Stand on a merry-go-round with a toddler and film him trying to walk around and you'll see that there's definitely a difference between spinning frames and stationary ones. Also, you'll see a toddler fall over, which is always funny.
Your sig mentions "funniest slashdot comment ever" but just gives the number. I can't figure out how to find a comment without the story ID, though the comment numbers are unique. Help?
Solving WITHOUT algorithms (even unconscious) is just the 100k monkeys approach...
Last time I checked, which was a couple years ago, I could solve any rubik's cube in roughly 1:30 or less.
That said, one thing I've never really understood was people who say "oh, yeah, took me weeks and I only ever solved it once or twice."
Trial-and-error, with a very few exceptions for very clever people, just doesn't seem realistic. When you get it to the point where you have nearly every piece done, there are generally long and extremely complicated sequences to move the last few pieces without disturbing anything. I understand a lot of people are smarter than me, but I could never get anywhere NEAR getting the final sections without looking at sets of instructions. It seems likely to me that a handful of people studied it very hard and worked out various move sequences, and those got passed around in instruction guides and booklets and were eventually built on by enthusiasts, leading to the guides that I learned.
But: I'm a reasonably smart guy with an eye for puzzles (who has been messing with Rubik's cubes for years), and I just can't imagine toying with the cube for a couple days -- having been told nothing about it -- and stumbling upon a whole set of final sequences to get the last few parts of the cube done.
So, question to Slashdot: Has anyone here, who considers themselves a fairly normal albeit intelligent person, solved the cube by just messing around with it for a while, having been told nothing about it? It seems like a semi-guided trial-and-error approach is like finding a needle in a haystack*, **. Every time someone says "oh yeah, I solved it a few times back when, but it took me days" I just can't quite believe it. But maybe I'm wrong.
* Or, for the modern day, breaking an SHA-1 hash in only 2^40 operations.
** Tangent: I've heard it said that looking for porn on the internet is like looking for hay in a haystack.
Everyone's dad has made the 'peel the stickers off and put them back' joke on seeing a Rubik's cube, usually more than once. Among other things, it's not usually possible. On most cubes, the stickers tear or come up in layers or lose their adhesion.
If you want to get a cube in order, the sub-cubes actually pop out quite easily if you twist it right, and you can without difficulty fit it back together in the proper order.
Just wait till 2006 when the Kansas State Board of Education will have to face the voters on this issue.
You mean if they had to face your vote.
These are the people who were voted in. They are more than likely representative of those who voted for them the first time.
When people say "wait 'til they have to face the voters on this" with pride in the democratic method, what they usually mean is "Wouldn't it be nice if, in the upcoming election, everyone agreed with me. Then the democratic method would be awesome."
Everyone's in favor of democracy, and everyone gets caught on the wrong end of it without realizing it sometimes.
(Disclaimer: I'm a physics dude. I hate religion barging into science class. I also shouldn't have to put this disclaimer here, but moderation is also democratic. Ironic, huh?)
The goal of ITER is to construct a large Tokamak, and after that, a demonstration of the use of the technology in a commercially attractive power plant. I questioned the guy during the talk and was surprised to learn that there don't appear to be any huge theoretical leaps required for this to work.
IIRC, in 2003 ITER was named by some major government list as the #1 priority of 28 for energy research for the future.
So, what I have learned: Tokamaks are getting really good, and they hold a lot of promise in the next number of years. Interesting note: the efficiency, roughly the ratio of power out to power in, scales with size. That's why they're building the ITER tokemak to be monstrously huge.
Now, if you go into any particular IRC room... even a "tech" room... the noise level dwarfs the signal...
Or, as they always have, the people who want to have a high-signal conversation go somewhere quiet. I have little experience with the broader IRC, mostly for the reasons you cite. But for the past five or so years I've been active on a private network of technical people and the like, many of whom know each other in real life. There are no ops, no spam, and very little noise. Ask any question and someone is an expert. It's exactly what I imagine IRC should be.
I think it's just that these groups are drifting out of the main networks once the networks get large enough.
'My Windows 98 computer tells lies and often forces me to shut down improperly. Such behaviour in a human would be called neurotic.'
This glass of contaminated water is deceptive in appearance and often causes death. Such behavior in a human would be called sociopathic and homicidal.
From the article: "Do you share my concern at the decision of Rockstar to publish a new game called Bully? If you don't, I'll beat you up after gym class!"
Slashdot Mirror
Kind sirs,
Please in your good graces mod parent funny.
Kindest regards,
some random dude who talks like a wanker.
Perhaps the factor in question is the global decrease in number of pirates?
My impression of MySpace is basically the same as my impression of Livejournal, except I've never seen a MySpace page that wasn't visually obnoxious.
I've used LiveJournal for about four years now as a way to keep up with all my non-local friends and occasionally share stuff, and more recently as an RSS/news feed reader. I know it's not the most popular way to handle blogs, but it works for me. I have always had the tasteful default scheme, and I never visit anyone's personal LJ page. I just see their entries in a nice format.
MySpace, I suspect, is much the same. Largely idiots, but I have a number of non-idiot friends, and some of them are on MySpace. It clearly works as a way to find people, if that's what you want; I've found interesting and intelligent people on Livejournal as well.
MySpace is a community. It has a visually obnoxious format, and since it encourages socializing it attracts all manner of teens, who then characterize it. It doesn't mean you can't use MySpace for intelligent, grown-up social networking, I'm sure. It's just that people who are neither intelligent nor grown up still socialize, and it's just as good (if not better) a tool for unintelligent immature socilalization. As with LJ, that makes up the bulk.
And as for finding people -- when I want to look someone up around campus or at another school, I use Facebook. Most of my friends are college-age and on there. And, thank god, Facebook doesn't allow custom themes, colors, or formats. If it didn't exist, I'd have to look people up on MySpace. But it does, so I don't need to go there yet.
"There's no accounting for taste" is often the best attitude to take.
On the computer I'm using right now, the mouse and keyboard are both out-of-sight in the tray. And I can't imagine looking at my mouse frequently while I'm using it.
However, having it flash while I'm across the room could be worthwhile, so I wouldn't have to have the screen on to check basic stuff like that. Still, seems marginally useful to me.
However, someone (jokingly) mentioned vibration. This seems like a really good idea to me, using more human input channels, with the one drawback that I bet a vibrating mouse is much harder to steer.
Experts: We don't believe in hypnosis.
Hypnotists: Yes, you do.
Experts: Okay.
What battery has the most energy in it? (AA, AAA)
It varies with discharge rates, of course, but you can do a bunch of very public tests in different applications and come up with some total energy numbers.
Every time I see that ad that says "if you think all batteries are the same, consider this:" I always get excited, thinking they're actually gonna show me some, however biased, numbers. But they just say "famous person x trusts these batteries." It seems that if there's really a difference between duracel and energizer and the off-brands, whoever has more energy would quantify and advertise it. But they don't think it's a good idea, for whatever reason.
Wanna do it for them?
Mod parent beige.
customers don't see them the same way and won't pay the same price for them, and no amount of wishful thinking will make them change their minds.
Man. If only we had some sort of a SYSTEM for determining what things should be priced, some sort of an open market in which companies could set prices and see how many people are willing to pay that price. That would be great.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
I picked one up from, I believe, the internet, for a robotics project. I think it was before the ads; I had never seen one. I found it by searching for wireless cameras on some search engine. The project stalled years ago, and the camera sits unused on my shelf, only pulled down occasionally to explore vent ducts on the back of an R/C car or serve as a makeshift 'see another part of the apartment' system when I (very rarely) need that.
That's what he's saying. A full song is impractical as a ring tone, but full songs are all he has. He's not stupidly berating the technology.
The weird thing is that the dinosaur in question found to eat grass was the T-Rex, deeply confusing both sides in the "vicious hunter or cowardly scavenger" argument.
Oh, general relativity is absolutely quite complicated, as is the issue of reference frames. I'm just saying that what I saw as the question at hand -- "how can you say the earth is spinning and not everything else?" -- is pretty simple.
It's not even so much relativity at all; these principles were understood before 1900. If you're in a spinning reference frame, things work differently. Spinning your reference frame is not the same as moving it at a constant velocity -- while you can't tell how fast you are moving in the absolute sense, you can tell precisely how fast you are spinning.
GP is needlessly complicated. All he needs to say is that spinning reference frames are not on the same footing as non-spinning ones. Stand on a merry-go-round with a toddler and film him trying to walk around and you'll see that there's definitely a difference between spinning frames and stationary ones. Also, you'll see a toddler fall over, which is always funny.
Your sig mentions "funniest slashdot comment ever" but just gives the number. I can't figure out how to find a comment without the story ID, though the comment numbers are unique. Help?
This is very important!
Solving WITHOUT algorithms (even unconscious) is just the 100k monkeys approach...
Last time I checked, which was a couple years ago, I could solve any rubik's cube in roughly 1:30 or less.
That said, one thing I've never really understood was people who say "oh, yeah, took me weeks and I only ever solved it once or twice."
Trial-and-error, with a very few exceptions for very clever people, just doesn't seem realistic. When you get it to the point where you have nearly every piece done, there are generally long and extremely complicated sequences to move the last few pieces without disturbing anything. I understand a lot of people are smarter than me, but I could never get anywhere NEAR getting the final sections without looking at sets of instructions. It seems likely to me that a handful of people studied it very hard and worked out various move sequences, and those got passed around in instruction guides and booklets and were eventually built on by enthusiasts, leading to the guides that I learned.
But: I'm a reasonably smart guy with an eye for puzzles (who has been messing with Rubik's cubes for years), and I just can't imagine toying with the cube for a couple days -- having been told nothing about it -- and stumbling upon a whole set of final sequences to get the last few parts of the cube done.
So, question to Slashdot: Has anyone here, who considers themselves a fairly normal albeit intelligent person, solved the cube by just messing around with it for a while, having been told nothing about it? It seems like a semi-guided trial-and-error approach is like finding a needle in a haystack*, **. Every time someone says "oh yeah, I solved it a few times back when, but it took me days" I just can't quite believe it. But maybe I'm wrong.
* Or, for the modern day, breaking an SHA-1 hash in only 2^40 operations.
** Tangent: I've heard it said that looking for porn on the internet is like looking for hay in a haystack.
Everyone's dad has made the 'peel the stickers off and put them back' joke on seeing a Rubik's cube, usually more than once. Among other things, it's not usually possible. On most cubes, the stickers tear or come up in layers or lose their adhesion.
If you want to get a cube in order, the sub-cubes actually pop out quite easily if you twist it right, and you can without difficulty fit it back together in the proper order.
Just wait till 2006 when the Kansas State Board of Education will have to face the voters on this issue.
You mean if they had to face your vote.
These are the people who were voted in. They are more than likely representative of those who voted for them the first time.
When people say "wait 'til they have to face the voters on this" with pride in the democratic method, what they usually mean is "Wouldn't it be nice if, in the upcoming election, everyone agreed with me. Then the democratic method would be awesome."
Everyone's in favor of democracy, and everyone gets caught on the wrong end of it without realizing it sometimes.
(Disclaimer: I'm a physics dude. I hate religion barging into science class. I also shouldn't have to put this disclaimer here, but moderation is also democratic. Ironic, huh?)
"Going for a science degree, huh? From Kansas, are you?"
"Okay, you're gonna want to sit down for this."
the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
I just attended a talk on Tokamaks and ITER by one of the major guys working at a Tokamak on the west coast somewhere. It really gave me a lot of interesting information -- namely, that they hold a lot of promise. The US recently rejoined ITER, an international collaberation between China, Russia, Japan, the EU, France, and (I hear) soon India.
The goal of ITER is to construct a large Tokamak, and after that, a demonstration of the use of the technology in a commercially attractive power plant. I questioned the guy during the talk and was surprised to learn that there don't appear to be any huge theoretical leaps required for this to work.
IIRC, in 2003 ITER was named by some major government list as the #1 priority of 28 for energy research for the future.
So, what I have learned: Tokamaks are getting really good, and they hold a lot of promise in the next number of years. Interesting note: the efficiency, roughly the ratio of power out to power in, scales with size. That's why they're building the ITER tokemak to be monstrously huge.
Does this mean that I can't have my wireless encrypted and put the password on a lawn sign? Maybe it does.
Does it mean I can't make friends with everyone who drives by and THEN tell them the password?
First there was the Very Large Telescope.
Then there was the Extremely Large Telescope.
As of a year or so ago, no kidding, they're building the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (official name).
So what name does this one get?
The Staggeringly Large Telescope? Not as big as "overwhelming". The Astonishingly Large Telescope? Also too small. Ditto for "Frighteningly".
Stupefyingly? Or perhaps the Surpassingly Large Telescope?
The Horrifyingly Large Telescope?
Possibly The Nightmarishly Huge Telescope. Or the Blood-Curdlingly Large Telescope.
Now, if you go into any particular IRC room... even a "tech" room... the noise level dwarfs the signal...
Or, as they always have, the people who want to have a high-signal conversation go somewhere quiet. I have little experience with the broader IRC, mostly for the reasons you cite. But for the past five or so years I've been active on a private network of technical people and the like, many of whom know each other in real life. There are no ops, no spam, and very little noise. Ask any question and someone is an expert. It's exactly what I imagine IRC should be.
I think it's just that these groups are drifting out of the main networks once the networks get large enough.
Or maybe we're the only ones.
'My Windows 98 computer tells lies and often forces me to shut down improperly. Such behaviour in a human would be called neurotic.'
This glass of contaminated water is deceptive in appearance and often causes death. Such behavior in a human would be called sociopathic and homicidal.
From the article: "Do you share my concern at the decision of Rockstar to publish a new game called Bully? If you don't, I'll beat you up after gym class!"