Really.. My suggestion would be ant-weights.. ant-weight battlebots are cheap and fun.. there is a ton of practical application on industrial design (i.e. autocad), electronics and soldering, programming can be done as well. And they are remote controlled and are a hell of a lot of fun. Not too mention it is not something they will be made fun of as battlebots are on television all the time:) Here is a few links http://historyagent.com/joeldg/&label=robot
ukresist has some funny images about the PSP
on
PSP Battery Journal
·
· Score: 4, Funny
eve-online is quite a fantastic game.. and it does not surprise me to see it listed here. The entire world has a very rich history and in the game you can actually go sight-seeing and compare to the histories and see all the stuff referenced. If you are a EO gamer, take a jaunt over to New Eden and see some of the huge ancient structures..
The ability to set *huge* projects in motion with these kinds of timespans would be impressive though. Just think what the egyptian kings would have made had they lived that long...:)
Is interesting.. However, I would not worry as you will always have certain portions of the population that will label this the "Mark of the beast" and not partake.. Of course we won't bother shipping any of this to troubled areas like the middle east or Africa.. For any of our enemies.. Reminds me of the Dune and "the spice must flow" etc.. I imagine it will also be priced high-enough that your average garbage man could not afford it.
Control this information.. you control the world. Think about threatening to not ship peoples life extending drugs to a country that is being "bad".. Wow, that would have some quick results.. Or if not, then you could just wait until they die, talk to the new guys.. Easy..
This all kind of reminds me of the Worthing Saga by Orson scott card..
Everyone who uses adsense knows that your listing appears in the order of the amount of money you pay for each click.. Obviously driving up the click-price. Each advertiser also has a daily "limit" they set for the amount they want spent. So. If you want your little cheapo cell-phone or whatever website to be listed at number one for only five cents, you click bomb out the listings above yours and as the guys paying $5 per click drop off and yours shows up then you have just got the top advertising spot for keywords for nothing. By creating an admosphere of competition, a lot of the advertisers are doing this to each-other every day, all day.. This is the primary reason I stopped advertising on adsense.
Yep.. the game rules.. glad they pushed the expansion back though as from reports it needed a bit of polish. exciting now, player owned stations and a whole new set of ships to pilot. fun fun fun.. only thing is all the new skills I have to get. heh
oh wait.. heh.. was just one of the winamp skins I had on xmms, which supports everything winamp did as well..
They did have one truly cool product and that was called AO or something, and you could rearrange the interface while playing music.. it was very cool, buggy, but cool..
water to wine, kerry to bush votes.. yea.. America calls Muslims fanatical..
bah whatever, none of this will matter as Kerry has already given it up..
For fun, just look at the states which voted for kerry, and the ones who were attacked or targeted (i.e. golden gate bridge) on 9/11.. Being targeted for terrorism kind of makes you want to get rid of our fanatical religious leader who,at this moment , is probably trying to figure out when the rapture will be and how best to get armageddon going to get it over with.
So, get over it, Kerry lost because somehow the country went on a religious frenzy and elected a clearly "fanatical religious leader" who has since said that "god" wanted him in office..
Karl Rove wasn't behind your voting both changing your vote.. blame Jesus;)
yep. One of the keys of the game is get into a corporation and help there... The player owned corporations have to be able to offer stuff to newbies or they don't ever grow.. I am in "Eye of God" corp which is an excellent smallish democratic corp. One of my favorite things about eo is the player-run market with buy orders and sell orders etc.. Anyway, right now I am training up all my electronic warfare skills so I can cloak and roam around CA space without fear of being podded.. Though, would kind of like an elite frig before going that route.. I think with all the different skills it would take something like 20 years to train them all even with implants/boosters..
Time-base skills.. The main example I know of is a game I play eve-online.. Basically it is real-time skills with levels, each level of each skill is progressive in taking a longer amount of time. Some users choose miner/builder skills and go that route, other go solid fighting. But you do cap-out and because the times are progressively longer to train everyone at a certain point reach the same level (basically, but in their respective/specialized fields..) After playing some of the others like Lineage and EQ etc.. I think this way is better.. For some skills at huge level they can take days and days to train up (in many cases as long to train up the all the prior levels in that skill).. The game does not require constant play to stay competetive which for me as a programmer is beautiful because I get obsessive over games but still need to maintain a real life.
A new player can come in and be competetive (except actual player skill) with an oldtimer within four months.. Which in other games with players years old is just not even remotely possible..
I used to vote for who would bring the country to revolution the fastest... i.e. who will implode and piss off the world to the point that we start seeing sanctions against us by the rest of the world and where we can't travel freely.
I stopped that.. but now am seeing that maybe some others have picked this route as valid.
Kerry though an 'okay' candidate (admittedly, much better spoken/educated than Bush) would have just been a roadblock to any progress in either direction because of the house/senate etc..
This way, at least Bush will start up a draft, screw people over on civil liberties, tear up the constitution in front of Dan Rather on live television and swing the pedulum so far back that the democrats could put Hillary on the ballot and win in a landslide.
I suppose that is progress, in kind of a sad way.
spam filters will take care of this quickly..
on
Search By.... Email?
·
· Score: 1
heh.. I am not at all worried about this.. mark it as spam in yahoo and gmail, mark it as spam in my filters.. then it will just be another junk mailer with a few people who might use it.
not to mention that yahoo and gmail also happen to be major search engines I doubt I will ever seen one land in an inbox of those web-based accounts.
just add further weight to this argument. I have spent a lot of time surfing when I lived on the west coast. the water there is cold and you have to wear a wetsuit. Normally one degree in temperature is not something people think about. But when you are "IN" it, one degree makes ALL the difference in the world. 52 degrees vs 53 degrees when you are submerged in it makes all the difference in the world. Unfourtunatly in this instance of the articles here, we are all "submerged" in the atmosphere and don't really have any place to go.
I notice most of your work is actually in the past/present and of note, Snow crash and The diamond age are the ones that stick out for me of your works as my personal favorites. I have to admit that I enjoy reading works set in the future to see how an author envisions the future at our current pace. Obviously nanotech is an interest of yours and I admit I would like nanotech books (primers ala diamond age) for any future kids I might have. Are you planning on continued work in the alternative past/present or do you have any plans for future-based works?
Thanks
amazing at the books printed..
on
Web Search Garage
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
it just amazes me that people need to buy a book to learn to type something into a search box and click "search" you know.. idiot-proof something and yet there is still an entire industry out there for explaining the simple.
Having to shutdown a system to maintain it's uptime is first a ridiculous idea.
Second, it took several years to find that bug because most windows machines never made it to that 49.7 days and if they did the users just assumed it was the normal because it is considered normal for windows to "lock up", freeze or whatever.
Third, replacing unix, known for it's stability, with any variant of windows (known for instability) in a system where peoples lives are at stake and then having this happen, the guys at LAX who decided to do this should be fired because they just risked a lot of lives and cause massive delays for travellers. In a political situation they would have to resign.
I remember a similar story about a aegis class cruiser stuck out in the ocean for three days because they decided to use windows. "Yea, that will work great during a war.."
*sigh* Microsoft has good lobby power and hires a fleet of sales people to keep selling their shod-ware that really should just be kept to mom and pop living rooms.
But then, this is the opionion of a guy who works only with linux and is sitting on an uptime on an openmosix cluster-leader (that also is my dev box) that looks like this: 19:03:06 up 319 days, 5:20, 3 users, load average: 1.28, 0.73, 0.37
here is a solution in php. <? $e="718281828459045235360287471352662497 7572470936 99959574966967627724076630353547594571382178525166 42742746639193200305992181741359662904357290033429 52605956307381323286279434907632338298807531952510 19011573834187930702154089149934884167509244761460 66808226480016847741185374234544243710753907774499 20695517027618386062613313845830007520449338265602 9760";
You are spouting what is termed a "slippery slope" argument which is in fact a logic fallacy.
http://www.conservativenest.com/thenest/pol.mini mu m.wage http://members.aol.com/jdhenchman/papers/m inwage.h tml http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/jobs-min-wa ge.ht ml http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum /50y ears.htm etc.. And that is from a basic google search.
Minimum wage laws were first introduced in New Zealand. The chronology of moves to legislate minimum wages is as follows:-
* New Zealand in 1894
* Australian state of Victoria in 1896
* Great Britain in 1909
* North America, the state of Massachusetts in 1912
* 1936 U.S. see also: http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/it/papers/ 0404/04 04005.abs
The MW was 'basically' done during the great depression as a last ditch effort and to show the people the government was trying to do something.
Prior to the stock collapse there was no call for one.
Anyway.. before you go off on "basically wrong" you may want to think about things... You may be working at a MacDonalds for all I know and would not want to uprooted to have to go somewhere else.. but People can and do move and in general, people if given the chance, are actually kind of smart and they figure it out.
I am addressing your issue with the minimum wage: Part of the issue in a free market economy is that if someone isn't paying what you are worth, then you are free to go somewhere else that may pay you. It balances out as people will not work for "pennies" as they would not be able to live, so they would look for work elsewhere. For areas where there is a high cost of living (cities) the minimum wage actually hurt people. Basically, if companies don't pay people a decent salary they don't have any employees, with a minimum wage it does not matter where Joe highschool kid works because every place pays the same. The reason we had a MW in the first place is large-scale collusion between companies who got sick of competing for workers and decided to just set sub-standard low wages (this also cemented a few unions as well). With current laws, that would get curbed and the workers would be re-empowered, instead of being peon's. Why do you think that companies (like macdonalds and pepsi, who own kfc, and others) lobby against the removal of the minimum wage, it places them at a disadvange in getting new workers.
actually 8,000 pounds = 4 tons. (2k per ton) that is per year. since the early 90's I guess 91 when it started that would only be about 56-60 tons since the start of the war twelve or so years ago. I am not sure where you are talking about 800 tons, but let me say that iraq is the size of a state here in the US and having 50 some odd tons of uranium about on the surface all over. When you are mining the stuff, it has not been refined/enriched, spent and then put into a bomb with the obvious intended effect of "harm". You were also most likely checked daily for radiation and were in a highly controlled environment. A lot of materials here on earth are radioactive, hell, living in a brick house shortens your lifespan by several years. Anyway, I assume you were more responding to the article and not my post which I thought was some interesting properties of Uranium (which I had not known before) and thought how perfect a material with those properties are for bombs, and if you wanted to seriously weaken a country, radiation is a great way because it fries the genes, screws up births, causes a lot of hospital side-issues, need for medication, shorter/sick lives etc.. Let that smoulder for a few years and there is no resistance. It is the equavalent of an intentional "lead for rome" (in reference to the lead in the aqueducts that poisoned rome).. Poison an entire country indirectly. Not saying that this is some vast conspiracy, but our military guys are very, very good at their jobs and anyone who can read knows the middle east is a big thorn in the side of the world. In war, residual long term effects (salt the fields of the enemy lands) is a time honored tradition in warfare and is the reason for looting, rape, burning etc in the first place..
Slashdot Mirror
Really.. :)t
My suggestion would be ant-weights..
ant-weight battlebots are cheap and fun..
there is a ton of practical application on industrial design (i.e. autocad), electronics and soldering, programming can be done as well. And they are remote controlled and are a hell of a lot of fun. Not too mention it is not something they will be made fun of as battlebots are on television all the time
Here is a few links
http://historyagent.com/joeldg/&label=robo
http://ukresistance.co.uk/e .jpg
I love the people packing around the car batteries to be able to use their PSP's hah.
direct link to images:
http://ukresistance.co.uk/pics2/pspbattery.jpg
http://ukresistance.co.uk/pics2/somepossiblefutur
I think everyone is afraid he is going to die before he finishes it..
Then we would all be just stuck here wondering what the hell...
eve-online is quite a fantastic game.. and it does not surprise me to see it listed here.
The entire world has a very rich history and in the game you can actually go sight-seeing and compare to the histories and see all the stuff referenced.
If you are a EO gamer, take a jaunt over to New Eden and see some of the huge ancient structures..
The ability to set *huge* projects in motion with these kinds of timespans would be impressive though. :)
Just think what the egyptian kings would have made had they lived that long...
Is interesting.. However, I would not worry as you will always have certain portions of the population that will label this the "Mark of the beast" and not partake.. Of course we won't bother shipping any of this to troubled areas like the middle east or Africa.. For any of our enemies.. Reminds me of the Dune and "the spice must flow" etc.. I imagine it will also be priced high-enough that your average garbage man could not afford it.
Control this information.. you control the world.
Think about threatening to not ship peoples life extending drugs to a country that is being "bad".. Wow, that would have some quick results.. Or if not, then you could just wait until they die, talk to the new guys.. Easy..
This all kind of reminds me of the Worthing Saga by Orson scott card..
Everyone who uses adsense knows that your listing appears in the order of the amount of money you pay for each click.. Obviously driving up the click-price. Each advertiser also has a daily "limit" they set for the amount they want spent.
So. If you want your little cheapo cell-phone or whatever website to be listed at number one for only five cents, you click bomb out the listings above yours and as the guys paying $5 per click drop off and yours shows up then you have just got the top advertising spot for keywords for nothing.
By creating an admosphere of competition, a lot of the advertisers are doing this to each-other every day, all day..
This is the primary reason I stopped advertising on adsense.
Yep.. the game rules..
glad they pushed the expansion back though as from reports it needed a bit of polish.
exciting now, player owned stations and a whole new set of ships to pilot.
fun fun fun..
only thing is all the new skills I have to get. heh
eve-online is also doing their huge expansion titled "exodus" today as well..
One of the most anticipated expansions in MM games for a while... large download (519M) but not as large as WoW which is 2.1GB
xmms is closing.?!?.
oh wait.. heh.. was just one of the winamp skins I had on xmms, which supports everything winamp did as well..
They did have one truly cool product and that was called AO or something, and you could rearrange the interface while playing music.. it was very cool, buggy, but cool..
your sig..
:)
took me a second..
"Better off dead"
ahh.. one of the best movies of all time that so few people seem to have ever seen.
obviously, it is his fault.. ;)
;)
water to wine, kerry to bush votes..
yea.. America calls Muslims fanatical..
bah
whatever, none of this will matter as Kerry has already given it up..
For fun, just look at the states which voted for kerry, and the ones who were attacked or targeted (i.e. golden gate bridge) on 9/11.. Being targeted for terrorism kind of makes you want to get rid of our fanatical religious leader who,at this moment , is probably trying to figure out when the rapture will be and how best to get armageddon going to get it over with.
So, get over it, Kerry lost because somehow the country went on a religious frenzy and elected a clearly "fanatical religious leader" who has since said that "god" wanted him in office..
Karl Rove wasn't behind your voting both changing your vote.. blame Jesus
yep.
One of the keys of the game is get into a corporation and help there... The player owned corporations have to be able to offer stuff to newbies or they don't ever grow.. I am in "Eye of God" corp which is an excellent smallish democratic corp.
One of my favorite things about eo is the player-run market with buy orders and sell orders etc..
Anyway, right now I am training up all my electronic warfare skills so I can cloak and roam around CA space without fear of being podded.. Though, would kind of like an elite frig before going that route..
I think with all the different skills it would take something like 20 years to train them all even with implants/boosters..
Time-base skills..
The main example I know of is a game I play eve-online..
Basically it is real-time skills with levels, each level of each skill is progressive in taking a longer amount of time.
Some users choose miner/builder skills and go that route, other go solid fighting. But you do cap-out and because the times are progressively longer to train everyone at a certain point reach the same level (basically, but in their respective/specialized fields..)
After playing some of the others like Lineage and EQ etc.. I think this way is better..
For some skills at huge level they can take days and days to train up (in many cases as long to train up the all the prior levels in that skill).. The game does not require constant play to stay competetive which for me as a programmer is beautiful because I get obsessive over games but still need to maintain a real life.
A new player can come in and be competetive (except actual player skill) with an oldtimer within four months.. Which in other games with players years old is just not even remotely possible..
Anyway, good game
I used to vote for who would bring the country to revolution the fastest... i.e. who will implode and piss off the world to the point that we start seeing sanctions against us by the rest of the world and where we can't travel freely.
I stopped that.. but now am seeing that maybe some others have picked this route as valid.
Kerry though an 'okay' candidate (admittedly, much better spoken/educated than Bush) would have just been a roadblock to any progress in either direction because of the house/senate etc..
This way, at least Bush will start up a draft, screw people over on civil liberties, tear up the constitution in front of Dan Rather on live television and swing the pedulum so far back that the democrats could put Hillary on the ballot and win in a landslide.
I suppose that is progress, in kind of a sad way.
heh..
I am not at all worried about this.. mark it as spam in yahoo and gmail, mark it as spam in my filters..
then it will just be another junk mailer with a few people who might use it.
not to mention that yahoo and gmail also happen to be major search engines I doubt I will ever seen one land in an inbox of those web-based accounts.
next...
just add further weight to this argument.
I have spent a lot of time surfing when I lived on the west coast.
the water there is cold and you have to wear a wetsuit.
Normally one degree in temperature is not something people think about. But when you are "IN" it, one degree makes ALL the difference in the world. 52 degrees vs 53 degrees when you are submerged in it makes all the difference in the world.
Unfourtunatly in this instance of the articles here, we are all "submerged" in the atmosphere and don't really have any place to go.
I notice most of your work is actually in the past/present and of note, Snow crash and The diamond age are the ones that stick out for me of your works as my personal favorites.
I have to admit that I enjoy reading works set in the future to see how an author envisions the future at our current pace.
Obviously nanotech is an interest of yours and I admit I would like nanotech books (primers ala diamond age) for any future kids I might have.
Are you planning on continued work in the alternative past/present or do you have any plans for future-based works?
Thanks
it just amazes me that people need to buy a book to learn to type something into a search box and click "search"
you know.. idiot-proof something and yet there is still an entire industry out there for explaining the simple.
Having to shutdown a system to maintain it's uptime is first a ridiculous idea.
Second, it took several years to find that bug because most windows machines never made it to that 49.7 days and if they did the users just assumed it was the normal because it is considered normal for windows to "lock up", freeze or whatever.
Third, replacing unix, known for it's stability, with any variant of windows (known for instability) in a system where peoples lives are at stake and then having this happen, the guys at LAX who decided to do this should be fired because they just risked a lot of lives and cause massive delays for travellers. In a political situation they would have to resign.
I remember a similar story about a aegis class cruiser stuck out in the ocean for three days because they decided to use windows. "Yea, that will work great during a war.."
*sigh* Microsoft has good lobby power and hires a fleet of sales people to keep selling their shod-ware that really should just be kept to mom and pop living rooms.
But then, this is the opionion of a guy who works only with linux and is sitting on an uptime on an openmosix cluster-leader (that also is my dev box) that looks like this:
19:03:06 up 319 days, 5:20, 3 users, load average: 1.28, 0.73, 0.37
eat your heart out LAX.. you got punk'd
here is a solution in php.7 7572470936 99959574966967627724076630353547594571382178525166 42742746639193200305992181741359662904357290033429 52605956307381323286279434907632338298807531952510 19011573834187930702154089149934884167509244761460 66808226480016847741185374234544243710753907774499 20695517027618386062613313845830007520449338265602 9760";
<?
$e="71828182845904523536028747135266249
for($a=0;$astrlen($e);$a++){
$chunk = substr($e, $a, 10);
$tot = 0;
for($z=0;$zstrlen($chunk);$z++){
$tot = $chunk{$z} + $tot;
}
if($tot == 49){
echo $chunk."\n";
}
}
?>
Reminds me of joining #windows on IRC and saying
"press Alt+F4 for ops"
You would suddenly see about 150 users disconnect (Client Quit)
The funny thing was, that you could go back in an hour and do the same thing again..
I am gonna say "no" ..
but then, the article is slashdotted..
You are spouting what is termed a "slippery slope" argument which is in fact a logic fallacy.
i mu m.wagem inwage.h tmla ge.ht mlm /50y ears.htm
/ 0404/04 04005.abs
http://www.conservativenest.com/thenest/pol.min
http://members.aol.com/jdhenchman/papers/
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/jobs-min-w
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimu
etc..
And that is from a basic google search.
Minimum wage laws were first introduced in New Zealand. The chronology of moves to legislate minimum wages is as follows:-
* New Zealand in 1894
* Australian state of Victoria in 1896
* Great Britain in 1909
* North America, the state of Massachusetts in 1912
* 1936 U.S.
see also:
http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/it/papers
The MW was 'basically' done during the great depression as a last ditch effort and to show the people the government was trying to do something.
Prior to the stock collapse there was no call for one.
Anyway.. before you go off on "basically wrong" you may want to think about things...
You may be working at a MacDonalds for all I know and would not want to uprooted to have to go somewhere else.. but People can and do move and in general, people if given the chance, are actually kind of smart and they figure it out.
I am addressing your issue with the minimum wage:
Part of the issue in a free market economy is that if someone isn't paying what you are worth, then you are free to go somewhere else that may pay you.
It balances out as people will not work for "pennies" as they would not be able to live, so they would look for work elsewhere. For areas where there is a high cost of living (cities) the minimum wage actually hurt people.
Basically, if companies don't pay people a decent salary they don't have any employees, with a minimum wage it does not matter where Joe highschool kid works because every place pays the same. The reason we had a MW in the first place is large-scale collusion between companies who got sick of competing for workers and decided to just set sub-standard low wages (this also cemented a few unions as well). With current laws, that would get curbed and the workers would be re-empowered, instead of being peon's.
Why do you think that companies (like macdonalds and pepsi, who own kfc, and others) lobby against the removal of the minimum wage, it places them at a disadvange in getting new workers.
just some thoughts.
actually 8,000 pounds = 4 tons. (2k per ton)
that is per year.
since the early 90's I guess 91 when it started that would only be about 56-60 tons since the start of the war twelve or so years ago.
I am not sure where you are talking about 800 tons, but let me say that iraq is the size of a state here in the US and having 50 some odd tons of uranium about on the surface all over.
When you are mining the stuff, it has not been refined/enriched, spent and then put into a bomb with the obvious intended effect of "harm".
You were also most likely checked daily for radiation and were in a highly controlled environment.
A lot of materials here on earth are radioactive, hell, living in a brick house shortens your lifespan by several years.
Anyway, I assume you were more responding to the article and not my post which I thought was some interesting properties of Uranium (which I had not known before) and thought how perfect a material with those properties are for bombs, and if you wanted to seriously weaken a country, radiation is a great way because it fries the genes, screws up births, causes a lot of hospital side-issues, need for medication, shorter/sick lives etc.. Let that smoulder for a few years and there is no resistance. It is the equavalent of an intentional "lead for rome" (in reference to the lead in the aqueducts that poisoned rome)..
Poison an entire country indirectly.
Not saying that this is some vast conspiracy, but our military guys are very, very good at their jobs and anyone who can read knows the middle east is a big thorn in the side of the world. In war, residual long term effects (salt the fields of the enemy lands) is a time honored tradition in warfare and is the reason for looting, rape, burning etc in the first place..