My, aren't we clever. He points out that differences in units led to the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment and you chastise him for his spelling.
If you were English then I would expect you to spell the word "metre", but since they use the metric system about as often as you Americans do I would not worry too much about them. The American spelling of the word metre is "meter"; whether it is right or wrong is another matter. All I know is that every textbook I own spells it as meter and not metre.
And by the way, the word is "measurement". You would think that someone this caught up in spelling would be aware of that.
Ugh. Sorry about the cut-and-pasted definition; thank you all for the correction! Back on track...
I think that this is one of those cases where everyday use of a word eventually overtakes its original definition/use/intent, whether it is right or wrong. But just like people mangled the expression "eat your cake and have it too" into "have your cake and eat it too" many moons ago, the entropy=disorder statement is becoming much too prevalent.
We tell beginning chemists/physicists that entropy is chaos, randomness and disorder, because it is easier than expressing it in terms of available states. The problem arises when a student is visualizing this in terms of everyday problems, such as ice cubes in water. Once the ice cubes melt the student thinks that entropy is decreasing because the "disordered" "chaotic" ice cubes melt and become indistinguishable from the rest of the water.
The exact opposite is true because the ice chips constrain the number of ways that the water molecules can arrange themselves, and thus there are less available states for energy distribution.
So just because the dictionary of the day says it is right doesn't mean that the meaning of the word hasn't been hijacked! But as far as the original poster is concerned, it turns out that he did not misuse the word at all! CarlDenny replied to my blurb/rant with a lovely description and you should take a look...
Hmmmm. Very thorough! My lack of knowledge of information theory shines through...
I admit that I did a very half-hearted search for entropy in computing to find that blurb on Shannon, and I apologise for looking like I was trying to come across as a pro!
I thought the original poster was using entropy in the artsy literature sense and got agitated.
But your run-down of Boltzmann's work got me to pick up my stat mech book again, so thanks!
>Essentially, you're increasing the entropy of the file by a fair amount.
Pardon me for being picky and off-topic, but this is a little peeve of mine...
Definition: Entropy
n 1: (thermodynamics) a measure of the amount of energy in a system that is available for doing work; entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity [ant: ectropy]
"Disorder" is a terrible way of describing entropy, and to use the word entropy to describe disorder is even worse. Having said that, in computing the word has long since been hijacked to mean disorder (Shannon's formula?), so I must admit that your use is a little more valid than "My bedroom has a high degree of entropy".
My take on all this is that I will contribute my CPU time to a project that is not receiving a great deal of funding and that will not make one large corporation rich. I would like to see cancer defeated as much as the next person, but there is plenty of money and research in that field.
I was just wondering if you can run two of these applications side-by-side? I briefly tried it out with SETI & Folding, and it seems that one runs at the expense of the other. Anyone try this out?
>IANAL, but if I were you I would steal some ROMS and take your own screenshots. It's better to stay on the safe side of the law.
Heh. Was that an intentional contradiction, or did you not notice that you advised him to make his website pictures legal by stealing the software that produces those pictures?
I wonder if that works in other walks of life: "You are under arrest for stealing this vehicle." "But Officer, I was driving under the speed limit!"
Furthermore, if your system crashes outright you rarely get the opportunity to send an error report...in fact, the only one I could remember was kernel32.dll in Win98, which would crash if I opened WinAmp and two folder windows, taxed the system, or breathed. So I suspect that this number is WAY higher.
Oh I shouldn't have said that. The RIAA will probably claim that one too. Have they set up one of those breeding pits from where they produce all their demonic lawyers in Canada yet?
When the White Rose field is opened and combined with the current Hibernia and Terra Nova oil fields, Newfoundland will produce 1/2 of all light crude in Canada. Despite this, along with the Maritime provinces we have the highest gas prices in Canada. For Newfoundland this is perhaps due to the fact that we don't refine the fuel ourselves; it is processed in New Brunswick.
So the fuel is shipped off the island for refining (despite the fact that we own a refinery, though run-down) and then we pay to ship more in. My bets are on the source being the Middle East:-)
He didn't say Windows is as secure as Linux, you did. He said that he thinks Red Hat 9 is as good as Win95. "Good" is a very subjective term and, in this case, probably reflects his personal PC use. The fact that he admits he is currently learning how to use Linux indicates that he is not fluent and has used (and by extension understands and appreciates) Windows for a while.
Therefore, the fact that "you can play more games on windoze and more devices work on it" has _everything_ to do with how good the OS is. An OS is good if the people who use it think it is good, because good is a personal and subjective evaluation.
Before I had internet access I tried using Linux on my home PC and gave up because there was really no reason for me to switch; everything I needed I could do in Windows with much less effort. Now that my PC is wired up I will pursue Linux again, but for my purposes (where my opinion is based on my previous experiences and knowledge) Linux is NOT as good as WinXP, or 2000, or even 95. It can be as stable as you like, but if I can find an easier alternative that does everything I need/want then I will take that everytime...plus being an avid gamer that is a further reason for me to keep that Windows partition.
And as a side-note, who has been telling you that windows is more secure than linux? I would like to meet these imaginary people...I don't think that anyone who has much of a clue about the OSs will claim that comment for their own. But having said that, security has a great deal to do with how you use your system, and Linux is _never_ as stable and 100% uncrashable as it's zealots claim.
Just my opinion as I sit here straddling the fence.
Muscle uses more energy at rest as well. I think that the rough number is that for every pound of muscle you add your resting metabolic rate increases by about 50 calories a day.
If your diet is only moderately sinful/fatty you can work off your fat over a period of time by simply exercising more, especially for long periods of low intensity. Keep eating what you like so long as you use more than you put in, calorie-wise.
And although the jury is still out on whether caffeine is good for you, if you want to twitch then caffeine certainly helps. I would think that most/.ers are well ahead of the trend in this area:-)
I guess it is worth noting that a slim body does not necessarily equal a healthy body, especially if you are still eating a bag of Doritos, 2 espressos and a 2L Coke a night.
Exactly. For example, many "light" or "reduced salt" soya sauces are merely diluted versions of the original recipe, meaning you pour twice as much sauce on the meal as before, so it just costs you more.
I guess this comment was intended as humor not insult, but...
Like yourself, not everyone here is a Linux user, and not everyone here is especially computer literate. I am not a computer science major and my knowledge of Linux goes as far as getting Slackware on my 486/DX80 to run a few years ago (though when I get home I intend to change that...)
However, I am a die-hard videogame addict, and that is why I am reading this post. If I were at home now I would currently be fuelling this addiction by using these step-by-step instructions because I don't have the expertise. Why would I do this when it is apparent I have a Windows platform? Because I don't know how and I have to change that, I guess. I would love to know how to work my PC properly but I just don't know how, beyond basic maintenance/repair.
THere are indeed good and bad parameters, but if you can't establish a pattern to these parameters then they are useless. What's the point of developing a system that plots the visible spectrum of a compound if you have no way of predicting what you are drawing or no way of correlating one plot to another? The exercise becomes futile because you have to know these factors before you can "predict" them from the graph.
I'm being a little saucy here, but I hope that made sense!
Hmmm...perhaps. But then why do we have the word "materials" in the first place, if it is just an ordering of atoms to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Shouldn't we say "metamolecule"? After all, we don't call polymers "metamonomers". One could correctly argue that is to prevent confusion with dimers, trimers, oligomers for example, but I think that the word "metamaterial" is about as informative as "metamonomer". It's just a material with some rather unconventional properties.
But sticking with the polymers thread (ha I kill me) I think that if we had only discovered polyethylene today it would be known as a metamaterial simply because it has fantastic and novel properties. But at the end of the day it is just a conducting polymer.
I think that everyone knows what they mean when they say "metamaterials", and I guess that in the long run that is of the most importance, but I just see it as a frivolous word that is used to make it sound impressive. For a while there every single grant or research proposal had the lofty end goal of "nanomachines" or "nanotech". After getting into a nasty sarcastic argument with someone that light bulbs are the most impressive nanotech (as in wavelength, of course) we have I developed a sincere hatred for all things buzzword:-)
I think I was just bitchy because I was having a pissy day:-) Thanks for keeping me in line!
"How the HELL did they trick the DoJ into believing Palladium is anything but a megalomaniacle"
Kind of related to the earlier post about mispronunciation of Juarez, I read "Palladium is a Mega Monocle" and thought that maybe MS is taking this whole snooping and spying on their customers a little too seriously...:-)
Sorry, got a little carried away. I'm going to get carried away again, so bear with me (or don't, it is your choice!)
I guess basically the point I was getting at is our constant reference to "the laws of nature" as if they are set in stone, and the jargon that arises from this. For example, "metamaterials" is a silly and inappropriate word that just tries to create a buzz about someone's research. I think that is certainly excusable given the competition for funding and media coverage, but this wouldn't be necessary if people were a little more open-minded about other people's research.
It was impossible for the earth to rotate around the sun a little while ago, and less than 200 years ago atoms looked like balls of dough with raisins stuck in them. Saying that electrons could circle around the atom would violate the laws of nature, since + and - would attract or gravity would pull the electron in, etc etc etc you get the point.
In almost every major discovery or revolution in science, the people who helped build up the old theories do everything they can to shoot down the new ones. There is a fundamental difference between debate and malicious criticism, and the latter has no place in a field that values and demands objectivity and reasoning from it's practitioners.
So to answer your question, I am targeting those people who attack someone's work not because they want to further science or because they want to get the debate right, but because they can't stand to be wrong and can't accept that their theory was revolutionary and necessary for further advances but is now merely a historical instructional tool.
I hope this made sense; I type like I think and my thoughts are odd indeed...
"I think the Germans have a point, and that people who try and shout them down are doing it because they are afraid of the truth they might hear."
No, I think that the people who criticise this action do so because it is a waste of time and money. Repeat after me: TV and video games do not turn you into a sociopath. If they did we would all be pathological killers by now, but we aren't.
I'm sorry, but your post has very little to do with the fact that a video game was taken off the shelf because it promotes violence. If anything, these games show that aggression may eventually lead to a favourable outcome but that casualties and losses are inevitable, and aggression causes retaliation.
Estimating 250 posts on this article with 100 times more readers than posters, as well as further posts relating to the parent comment, I figure that there is
(250 posts + 25000 readers)*7 seconds reading time + (3 posts after this one*25250 readers)*20 seconds reading time = 1691750 seconds
Assuming that I can identify a spam in 1 second and charging you 1 cent per spam, you are directly responsible for $16917.50 in losses. I will forward this total to my Nigerian colleague who will need your bank details to complete the transfer.
Interestingly if you were 1 second less long-winded you would have saved enough money to buy this fantastic penis enlarger that my good friend bigmembernow sent me.
...and Physicists are terrible at English. Seriously guys, put down the calculator and look up some of the words you are using; you are starting to sound like Dubya (He misunderestimated my mathematical abilities!). Once they start reporting that "the discovery filled me with shock and awe and sent me into a regime of extreme delight" I'm gonna start waving a gun around.:-)
Seriously though, just because Joe Physics "proved" something with a number of complex mathematical conjectures and theories 20 years ago, that doesn't mean that all future results that contradict this are "violations of the fundamental properties of Nature". Please get down off your high horse. The universe was not created according to a first-year calculus textbook, and if you disagree with this you have your own regime...sorry...agenda to push, such as having a commonly-accepted theory with your name on it.
Reminds me of a graph published by a fairly respected researcher that one of my profs showed me that modeled the spectroscopic properties of a number of compounds to a tee. A whole lot of work went into this equation, and it was even more impressive when you consider the limited processing power of computers at the time. There was just one catch: the modeling equation had FIVE variables...oh sorry..."correction factors". My friend asked him if they tried fitting the properties of a cup of coffee to the graph as well, because it would probably fit with the proper "correction factors". He thought it was worth a try...but he IS a coffee nut.
Put your cell phone on vibrate. All you have to do is glance at your phone to see who is calling.
I would hope that you would have the foresight to not have your phone playing that "It's gettin' hot in herrrrrrrrre" song on Level 5 ring volume if you are eating/sleeping/meeting/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My, aren't we clever. He points out that differences in units led to the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment and you chastise him for his spelling.
If you were English then I would expect you to spell the word "metre", but since they use the metric system about as often as you Americans do I would not worry too much about them. The American spelling of the word metre is "meter"; whether it is right or wrong is another matter. All I know is that every textbook I own spells it as meter and not metre.
And by the way, the word is "measurement". You would think that someone this caught up in spelling would be aware of that.
Ugh. Sorry about the cut-and-pasted definition; thank you all for the correction! Back on track...
I think that this is one of those cases where everyday use of a word eventually overtakes its original definition/use/intent, whether it is right or wrong. But just like people mangled the expression "eat your cake and have it too" into "have your cake and eat it too" many moons ago, the entropy=disorder statement is becoming much too prevalent.
We tell beginning chemists/physicists that entropy is chaos, randomness and disorder, because it is easier than expressing it in terms of available states. The problem arises when a student is visualizing this in terms of everyday problems, such as ice cubes in water. Once the ice cubes melt the student thinks that entropy is decreasing because the "disordered" "chaotic" ice cubes melt and become indistinguishable from the rest of the water.
The exact opposite is true because the ice chips constrain the number of ways that the water molecules can arrange themselves, and thus there are less available states for energy distribution.
So just because the dictionary of the day says it is right doesn't mean that the meaning of the word hasn't been hijacked! But as far as the original poster is concerned, it turns out that he did not misuse the word at all! CarlDenny replied to my blurb/rant with a lovely description and you should take a look...
Hmmmm. Very thorough! My lack of knowledge of information theory shines through...
I admit that I did a very half-hearted search for entropy in computing to find that blurb on Shannon, and I apologise for looking like I was trying to come across as a pro!
I thought the original poster was using entropy in the artsy literature sense and got agitated.
But your run-down of Boltzmann's work got me to pick up my stat mech book again, so thanks!
>Essentially, you're increasing the entropy of the file by a fair amount.
Pardon me for being picky and off-topic, but this is a little peeve of mine...
Definition: Entropy
n 1: (thermodynamics) a measure of the amount of energy in a system that is available for doing work; entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity [ant: ectropy]
"Disorder" is a terrible way of describing entropy, and to use the word entropy to describe disorder is even worse. Having said that, in computing the word has long since been hijacked to mean disorder (Shannon's formula?), so I must admit that your use is a little more valid than "My bedroom has a high degree of entropy".
Just my 2 cents! (sorry)
My take on all this is that I will contribute my CPU time to a project that is not receiving a great deal of funding and that will not make one large corporation rich. I would like to see cancer defeated as much as the next person, but there is plenty of money and research in that field.
I was just wondering if you can run two of these applications side-by-side? I briefly tried it out with SETI & Folding, and it seems that one runs at the expense of the other. Anyone try this out?
>IANAL, but if I were you I would steal some ROMS and take your own screenshots. It's better to stay on the safe side of the law.
Heh. Was that an intentional contradiction, or did you not notice that you advised him to make his website pictures legal by stealing the software that produces those pictures?
I wonder if that works in other walks of life:
"You are under arrest for stealing this vehicle."
"But Officer, I was driving under the speed limit!"
Furthermore, if your system crashes outright you rarely get the opportunity to send an error report...in fact, the only one I could remember was kernel32.dll in Win98, which would crash if I opened WinAmp and two folder windows, taxed the system, or breathed. So I suspect that this number is WAY higher.
Awesome. That'll be my new sig.
Oh I shouldn't have said that. The RIAA will probably claim that one too. Have they set up one of those breeding pits from where they produce all their demonic lawyers in Canada yet?
Bingo. I remember one of my profs saying that burning gasoline is one of the dumbest things you can do, for that reason and others.
Considering there is an average of 3 of us per square kilometer, you could conceivably kill off an entire family with a nuclear warhead :-)
When the White Rose field is opened and combined with the current Hibernia and Terra Nova oil fields, Newfoundland will produce 1/2 of all light crude in Canada. Despite this, along with the Maritime provinces we have the highest gas prices in Canada. For Newfoundland this is perhaps due to the fact that we don't refine the fuel ourselves; it is processed in New Brunswick.
:-)
So the fuel is shipped off the island for refining (despite the fact that we own a refinery, though run-down) and then we pay to ship more in. My bets are on the source being the Middle East
Apologies to all for feeding the trolls.
He didn't say Windows is as secure as Linux, you did. He said that he thinks Red Hat 9 is as good as Win95. "Good" is a very subjective term and, in this case, probably reflects his personal PC use. The fact that he admits he is currently learning how to use Linux indicates that he is not fluent and has used (and by extension understands and appreciates) Windows for a while.
Therefore, the fact that "you can play more games on windoze and more devices work on it" has _everything_ to do with how good the OS is. An OS is good if the people who use it think it is good, because good is a personal and subjective evaluation.
Before I had internet access I tried using Linux on my home PC and gave up because there was really no reason for me to switch; everything I needed I could do in Windows with much less effort. Now that my PC is wired up I will pursue Linux again, but for my purposes (where my opinion is based on my previous experiences and knowledge) Linux is NOT as good as WinXP, or 2000, or even 95. It can be as stable as you like, but if I can find an easier alternative that does everything I need/want then I will take that everytime...plus being an avid gamer that is a further reason for me to keep that Windows partition.
And as a side-note, who has been telling you that windows is more secure than linux? I would like to meet these imaginary people...I don't think that anyone who has much of a clue about the OSs will claim that comment for their own. But having said that, security has a great deal to do with how you use your system, and Linux is _never_ as stable and 100% uncrashable as it's zealots claim.
Just my opinion as I sit here straddling the fence.
The best cooling fluid will also cost 5x as much and inexplicably be comprised of separate blue, yellow and red fluids.
And everytime the dispenser clogs and you have to do a deep purge your CPU drowns and your case fans spray paint your walls.
Muscle uses more energy at rest as well. I think that the rough number is that for every pound of muscle you add your resting metabolic rate increases by about 50 calories a day.
/.ers are well ahead of the trend in this area :-)
If your diet is only moderately sinful/fatty you can work off your fat over a period of time by simply exercising more, especially for long periods of low intensity. Keep eating what you like so long as you use more than you put in, calorie-wise.
And although the jury is still out on whether caffeine is good for you, if you want to twitch then caffeine certainly helps. I would think that most
I guess it is worth noting that a slim body does not necessarily equal a healthy body, especially if you are still eating a bag of Doritos, 2 espressos and a 2L Coke a night.
Exactly. For example, many "light" or "reduced salt" soya sauces are merely diluted versions of the original recipe, meaning you pour twice as much sauce on the meal as before, so it just costs you more.
RTFIngredientsLabel.
"Now, the real question: who wants to write a whitespace VM in whitespace?"
I won't be happy until I can get my hands on the Whitespace whitespace VM white papers...
I guess this comment was intended as humor not insult, but...
Like yourself, not everyone here is a Linux user, and not everyone here is especially computer literate. I am not a computer science major and my knowledge of Linux goes as far as getting Slackware on my 486/DX80 to run a few years ago (though when I get home I intend to change that...)
However, I am a die-hard videogame addict, and that is why I am reading this post. If I were at home now I would currently be fuelling this addiction by using these step-by-step instructions because I don't have the expertise. Why would I do this when it is apparent I have a Windows platform? Because I don't know how and I have to change that, I guess. I would love to know how to work my PC properly but I just don't know how, beyond basic maintenance/repair.
My 2 cents.
THere are indeed good and bad parameters, but if you can't establish a pattern to these parameters then they are useless. What's the point of developing a system that plots the visible spectrum of a compound if you have no way of predicting what you are drawing or no way of correlating one plot to another? The exercise becomes futile because you have to know these factors before you can "predict" them from the graph.
I'm being a little saucy here, but I hope that made sense!
Hmmm...perhaps. But then why do we have the word "materials" in the first place, if it is just an ordering of atoms to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Shouldn't we say "metamolecule"? After all, we don't call polymers "metamonomers". One could correctly argue that is to prevent confusion with dimers, trimers, oligomers for example, but I think that the word "metamaterial" is about as informative as "metamonomer". It's just a material with some rather unconventional properties.
:-)
:-) Thanks for keeping me in line!
But sticking with the polymers thread (ha I kill me) I think that if we had only discovered polyethylene today it would be known as a metamaterial simply because it has fantastic and novel properties. But at the end of the day it is just a conducting polymer.
I think that everyone knows what they mean when they say "metamaterials", and I guess that in the long run that is of the most importance, but I just see it as a frivolous word that is used to make it sound impressive. For a while there every single grant or research proposal had the lofty end goal of "nanomachines" or "nanotech". After getting into a nasty sarcastic argument with someone that light bulbs are the most impressive nanotech (as in wavelength, of course) we have I developed a sincere hatred for all things buzzword
I think I was just bitchy because I was having a pissy day
"How the HELL did they trick the DoJ into believing Palladium is anything but a megalomaniacle"
Kind of related to the earlier post about mispronunciation of Juarez, I read "Palladium is a Mega Monocle" and thought that maybe MS is taking this whole snooping and spying on their customers a little too seriously...:-)
Sorry, got a little carried away. I'm going to get carried away again, so bear with me (or don't, it is your choice!)
I guess basically the point I was getting at is our constant reference to "the laws of nature" as if they are set in stone, and the jargon that arises from this. For example, "metamaterials" is a silly and inappropriate word that just tries to create a buzz about someone's research. I think that is certainly excusable given the competition for funding and media coverage, but this wouldn't be necessary if people were a little more open-minded about other people's research.
It was impossible for the earth to rotate around the sun a little while ago, and less than 200 years ago atoms looked like balls of dough with raisins stuck in them. Saying that electrons could circle around the atom would violate the laws of nature, since + and - would attract or gravity would pull the electron in, etc etc etc you get the point.
In almost every major discovery or revolution in science, the people who helped build up the old theories do everything they can to shoot down the new ones. There is a fundamental difference between debate and malicious criticism, and the latter has no place in a field that values and demands objectivity and reasoning from it's practitioners.
So to answer your question, I am targeting those people who attack someone's work not because they want to further science or because they want to get the debate right, but because they can't stand to be wrong and can't accept that their theory was revolutionary and necessary for further advances but is now merely a historical instructional tool.
I hope this made sense; I type like I think and my thoughts are odd indeed...
"I think the Germans have a point, and that people who try and shout them down are doing it because they are afraid of the truth they might hear."
No, I think that the people who criticise this action do so because it is a waste of time and money. Repeat after me: TV and video games do not turn you into a sociopath. If they did we would all be pathological killers by now, but we aren't.
I'm sorry, but your post has very little to do with the fact that a video game was taken off the shelf because it promotes violence. If anything, these games show that aggression may eventually lead to a favourable outcome but that casualties and losses are inevitable, and aggression causes retaliation.
I consider the original post to be spam.
Estimating 250 posts on this article with 100 times more readers than posters, as well as further posts relating to the parent comment, I figure that there is
(250 posts + 25000 readers)*7 seconds reading time + (3 posts after this one*25250 readers)*20 seconds reading time
= 1691750 seconds
Assuming that I can identify a spam in 1 second and charging you 1 cent per spam, you are directly responsible for $16917.50 in losses. I will forward this total to my Nigerian colleague who will need your bank details to complete the transfer.
Interestingly if you were 1 second less long-winded you would have saved enough money to buy this fantastic penis enlarger that my good friend bigmembernow sent me.
...and Physicists are terrible at English. Seriously guys, put down the calculator and look up some of the words you are using; you are starting to sound like Dubya (He misunderestimated my mathematical abilities!). Once they start reporting that "the discovery filled me with shock and awe and sent me into a regime of extreme delight" I'm gonna start waving a gun around. :-)
Seriously though, just because Joe Physics "proved" something with a number of complex mathematical conjectures and theories 20 years ago, that doesn't mean that all future results that contradict this are "violations of the fundamental properties of Nature". Please get down off your high horse. The universe was not created according to a first-year calculus textbook, and if you disagree with this you have your own regime...sorry...agenda to push, such as having a commonly-accepted theory with your name on it.
Reminds me of a graph published by a fairly respected researcher that one of my profs showed me that modeled the spectroscopic properties of a number of compounds to a tee. A whole lot of work went into this equation, and it was even more impressive when you consider the limited processing power of computers at the time. There was just one catch: the modeling equation had FIVE variables...oh sorry..."correction factors". My friend asked him if they tried fitting the properties of a cup of coffee to the graph as well, because it would probably fit with the proper "correction factors". He thought it was worth a try...but he IS a coffee nut.
Put your cell phone on vibrate. All you have to do is glance at your phone to see who is calling.
I would hope that you would have the foresight to not have your phone playing that "It's gettin' hot in herrrrrrrrre" song on Level 5 ring volume if you are eating/sleeping/meeting/etc.