You seem to misunderstand - I understood what the summary was TRYING to say. It was simply said poorly.
The terminology seems to be used in the UK, but I have NOT heard it in common usage in the US, and/. is a US site. If the article submitter, or the editors, had bothered to do their job, the summary would have been re-written to make it less shitty, instead of just copy and pasting the article text.
Mating calls from a mule? Mules are sterile, do they even make mating calls? Better question: Do they make mating calls LOUDER THAN A 2-STROKE ENGINE?!?
My dog had his testicles removed before he reached sexual maturity. He still tries to fuck everything in sight (female dogs, male dogs, my cats, my leg, my shoe....)
The difference is - the mule can be switched off at will. If you get within a few miles of an enemy camp you're about to attack, you shut off the machine and hide it, take the gear you'll need for your attack, and leave it behind. With a mule, it always has the chance to start making noise at some random point and alerting an enemy patrol to your position.
Look, I'm not saying this machine is superior in every way to a mule, just that there could be some situations where it has advantages over a live animal. Of course, the/. crowd is so cynical, everyone just wants to show how cool they are by pointing out how stupid this is, instead of admitting that maybe there might be a practical application and for once the gub'ment isn't completely wasting every cent it spends. That would be like admitting Linux isn't perfect, or MS isn't teh $atan
I actually find it rather amusing that everyone is jumping down my throat for the unitless "one in two". Of course I know that one in two is unitless - however, in the US it would generally be worded differently, and indeed the placement in the sentence could be interpreted as the navigable slope being better than what could be hanlded by one out of every two people, for example. The wording is awkward and unnecessary, when there are much easier ways to say the same thing.
My gripe about units was the "slope of 35", which the "editors" didn't bother to check, and the submitter so lazily copy and pasted from TFA that it lost the units and thus the meaning. The guy calling me fucktard actually interpreted the statement from the summary incorrectly, proving my point that the summary needed units. But of course, like usual, a LOT of people on/. don't get the point. I'd fail them, too;)
a - an engine can be turned off at will, and a mule cannot.
b - this is a proof of concept demonstrating the technology. the key here is that it can navigate rough terrain and has good balance. The source of rotational energy is hardly important at this point.
Sand isn't exactly friendly to the lungs of an animal, either, and at least when the robot dies you have a chance of repairing it. Good luck repairing your dead mule.
Actually the 35 was degrees in the article, as another poster pointed out - so perhaps you should RTFA, fucktard. This is EXACTLY why the units are important, to keep from confusing people. By confusing it yourself, you've in fact proven me right.
And "one in two" is shittily worded and unclear - there are much simpler ways to put it without trying to sound technical. This is exactly what I see from my students on a daily basis - an attempt to put style over substance. Clear and concise is the rule of thumb.
Let's see... mules are animals. How could a machine possibly be better than an animal?
A machine won't get spooked by gunfire a machine won't start making mating calls that alert the enemy to your position a machine won't take massive shits that a tracking dog could smell a machine doesn't die if it gets thirsty - you can go get more fuel and come back to it a week later or a month later.
I can see a whole lot of applications where a live animal wouldn't be as useful. Perhaps we should get rid of all the motorcycle police and make them use horses, too?
Units, people, units! "A slope of 35" is almost as useless as "steeper gradient than one in two".
One in two what? Come on, it's not that hard to put some units in there and remove any ambiguity. This is a general interest board, and your terminology is far from clear, especially given that this is a US-centric site and you seem to be using a more UK-like slang.
Zombies you say? Well, I suppose it depends on the type of zombie. If they are Night of the Living Dead style zombies, then removing the head will indeed kill them. However, if they are Return of the Living Dead type, clearly you need to burn the entire botnet. Of course, the ashy packets would then spread to neighboring datacenters and there'd be hell to pay.
This is the exact behavior I got on my box as well - with safe downloads off, even double clicking the zip doesn't open it. You also have to then double click the.mov file. As others have said, this isn't much different from renaming a file to exploit.mov.exe.
I expect Apple to implement some sort of icon glow or the like to identify any executable file as such. Perhaps it would even be wise to popup a warning when a file with an extension not normally associated with applications tries to execut.
Disembodied transport? WHAT? Quantum teleportation is NOTHING like the star trek fantasy these idiots are building it up to. This isn't some matter/energy conversion to move physical objects - it's FRICKIN LASER BEAMS. Fuck do I hate physorg.
Look at the comments, it's all Jim McCanney electric universe and couch potato wannabe philosopher nonsense. Search physorg a bit - you'll see bullshit like alien crash landings and various other nonsense. And look at all the ads. Dear Lord. No scientist I know will go within 10 feet of that heaping pile.
Re:Sounds like non-Newtonian fluid
on
Flexible Body Armor
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's an entire field that deals with studying the properties of these and similar "weird" materials. It's called soft condensed matter. It happens to be the field in which I'm currently working;)
Corn starch is the standard example almost everyone uses when trying to describe our field to laymen. The other one we use a lot is the term "squishy physics", but that one sometimes gets us mocked by the ignorant who think "nuclear physics" is for smart people and "squishy physics" is for the dumbasses.
Googling around a bit, I found reference to an Alex Mayer that was a physics student involved in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in 1999 at NC State, and another in 2001 recieving an undergraduate tutoring award.
This isn't neccesarily the same person, but it sure raises suspicions. Then, I decided to hit google scholar and search for physics articles dealing with gravity with mayer as an author. The only one I found that came close was AB Mayer, and the author of the linked article is AF Mayer.
No listed credentials on the page, no bio, no information about his education, and no publications in the field. Plus, evidence that he might have been an undergraduate as little as five years ago. Yeah, I'm having a bit of a tough time buying this one.
Personally, I'm on year three of my two year associate's degree.
And that's why you don't understand why you need to take a full credit load of classes. Figure in an average undergraduate school, it will take four years to get a BS in physics, if you're taking a full course load. However, to do most things in academia in physics, you'll need a PhD. You can figure on four to five years for that. Of course, if you're planning to eventually go for a tenure-track position in the field, you can't do this fresh off your PhD (you'll be 27 or 28 by this time and have been living on ramen and rice for the last ten years). First, you need to build a name for yourself, get some publications, maybe an assistant professor position at a small college. The best way to get publications is doing a postdoc or two. Those are usually two years long. So now, you might finally get a chance to get a job in your chosen field - after eight to ten years of college, another four years of postdocs, and you're pushing your mid thirties. At this point, you're finally able to (hopefully) get a decently paying job in the field you chose and do the work you like. All of this was while working your ass off fighting to get everything done as quickly as possible. Start screwing around and taking two classes per semester, and you can figure you'll be kicking down middle age's door before you can even consider being able to provide for a family.
IMHO the flag system on craigslist is severly flawed, though - the messages pretty much vanish, and a user who saw a listing one day has no idea why it's gone the next day. Plus, there are entire communities of self-righteous jackasses who patrol craigslist and flag en masse any post that they don't like. I see this a LOT in the pets classifieds, where some have assigned themselves the pet police and go around removing any posts that offend their (usually quite extreme) sensitivities.
As someone who was once a physics student... how the hell do physics undergrads have the time for this stuff? If you have time to do things that are fun, your physics program isn't hard enough;)
If you don't like it, get an account yourself and contribute to the discussions. Get yourself some mod points and go crazy. Or just stay an anonymous troll and refuse to grow a pair. No one is forcing anyone to click my referral links, and if it's such a scam I wouldn't have two free ipods sitting on my desk.
Slashdot Mirror
Quiet you, we'll have no reasonable thoughts in THIS house!
Closed source is teh $at4n... go linux, w00t!
They figured out the real problem isn't pirates... It's ninjas!
Come on, everyone knows the anti-pirate is a lumberjack, not a ninja.
Please go stand by your stairs, so I can protect you.
"Here" being where?
/. is a US site. If the article submitter, or the editors, had bothered to do their job, the summary would have been re-written to make it less shitty, instead of just copy and pasting the article text.
You seem to misunderstand - I understood what the summary was TRYING to say. It was simply said poorly.
The terminology seems to be used in the UK, but I have NOT heard it in common usage in the US, and
Mating calls from a mule? Mules are sterile, do they even make mating calls? Better question: Do they make mating calls LOUDER THAN A 2-STROKE ENGINE?!?
/. crowd is so cynical, everyone just wants to show how cool they are by pointing out how stupid this is, instead of admitting that maybe there might be a practical application and for once the gub'ment isn't completely wasting every cent it spends. That would be like admitting Linux isn't perfect, or MS isn't teh $atan
My dog had his testicles removed before he reached sexual maturity. He still tries to fuck everything in sight (female dogs, male dogs, my cats, my leg, my shoe....)
The difference is - the mule can be switched off at will. If you get within a few miles of an enemy camp you're about to attack, you shut off the machine and hide it, take the gear you'll need for your attack, and leave it behind. With a mule, it always has the chance to start making noise at some random point and alerting an enemy patrol to your position.
Look, I'm not saying this machine is superior in every way to a mule, just that there could be some situations where it has advantages over a live animal. Of course, the
I'm used to getting modded down on /.
/. don't get the point. I'd fail them, too ;)
Valid points have no place in this land.
I actually find it rather amusing that everyone is jumping down my throat for the unitless "one in two". Of course I know that one in two is unitless - however, in the US it would generally be worded differently, and indeed the placement in the sentence could be interpreted as the navigable slope being better than what could be hanlded by one out of every two people, for example. The wording is awkward and unnecessary, when there are much easier ways to say the same thing.
My gripe about units was the "slope of 35", which the "editors" didn't bother to check, and the submitter so lazily copy and pasted from TFA that it lost the units and thus the meaning. The guy calling me fucktard actually interpreted the statement from the summary incorrectly, proving my point that the summary needed units. But of course, like usual, a LOT of people on
a - an engine can be turned off at will, and a mule cannot.
b - this is a proof of concept demonstrating the technology. the key here is that it can navigate rough terrain and has good balance. The source of rotational energy is hardly important at this point.
Sand isn't exactly friendly to the lungs of an animal, either, and at least when the robot dies you have a chance of repairing it. Good luck repairing your dead mule.
Actually the 35 was degrees in the article, as another poster pointed out - so perhaps you should RTFA, fucktard. This is EXACTLY why the units are important, to keep from confusing people. By confusing it yourself, you've in fact proven me right.
And "one in two" is shittily worded and unclear - there are much simpler ways to put it without trying to sound technical. This is exactly what I see from my students on a daily basis - an attempt to put style over substance. Clear and concise is the rule of thumb.
Let's see... mules are animals. How could a machine possibly be better than an animal?
A machine won't get spooked by gunfire
a machine won't start making mating calls that alert the enemy to your position
a machine won't take massive shits that a tracking dog could smell
a machine doesn't die if it gets thirsty - you can go get more fuel and come back to it a week later or a month later.
I can see a whole lot of applications where a live animal wouldn't be as useful. Perhaps we should get rid of all the motorcycle police and make them use horses, too?
Units, people, units! "A slope of 35" is almost as useless as "steeper gradient than one in two".
One in two what? Come on, it's not that hard to put some units in there and remove any ambiguity. This is a general interest board, and your terminology is far from clear, especially given that this is a US-centric site and you seem to be using a more UK-like slang.
Zombies you say? Well, I suppose it depends on the type of zombie. If they are Night of the Living Dead style zombies, then removing the head will indeed kill them. However, if they are Return of the Living Dead type, clearly you need to burn the entire botnet. Of course, the ashy packets would then spread to neighboring datacenters and there'd be hell to pay.
Of course, camfrog requires you to be on a windows computer. So how, exactly, is this a replacement for the highly cross-platform skype?
Good news? PLEASE tell me the National Archives isn't going to be in the form of a suppository.
This is the exact behavior I got on my box as well - with safe downloads off, even double clicking the zip doesn't open it. You also have to then double click the .mov file. As others have said, this isn't much different from renaming a file to exploit.mov.exe.
I expect Apple to implement some sort of icon glow or the like to identify any executable file as such. Perhaps it would even be wise to popup a warning when a file with an extension not normally associated with applications tries to execut.
Let me say "physorg sucks"
This particular quote made me particularly amused...
Telecloning combines cloning (or copying) with teleportation (i.e., disembodied transport). (emphasis mine)
Disembodied transport? WHAT? Quantum teleportation is NOTHING like the star trek fantasy these idiots are building it up to. This isn't some matter/energy conversion to move physical objects - it's FRICKIN LASER BEAMS. Fuck do I hate physorg.
Look at the comments, it's all Jim McCanney electric universe and couch potato wannabe philosopher nonsense. Search physorg a bit - you'll see bullshit like alien crash landings and various other nonsense. And look at all the ads. Dear Lord. No scientist I know will go within 10 feet of that heaping pile.
There's an entire field that deals with studying the properties of these and similar "weird" materials. It's called soft condensed matter. It happens to be the field in which I'm currently working ;)
Corn starch is the standard example almost everyone uses when trying to describe our field to laymen. The other one we use a lot is the term "squishy physics", but that one sometimes gets us mocked by the ignorant who think "nuclear physics" is for smart people and "squishy physics" is for the dumbasses.
I was hoping for the rantings of a half-crazed man who has just figured out that he's lost his mind.
/ 1826257
Wrong article - try this one: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/16
Look, up there in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane...
No, it's the joke, whooshing over your head.
I'd prefer to use one of those foil-bag white zinfandel boxed wines. Much easier to cut and a larger space to work with.
Googling around a bit, I found reference to an Alex Mayer that was a physics student involved in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in 1999 at NC State, and another in 2001 recieving an undergraduate tutoring award.
This isn't neccesarily the same person, but it sure raises suspicions. Then, I decided to hit google scholar and search for physics articles dealing with gravity with mayer as an author. The only one I found that came close was AB Mayer, and the author of the linked article is AF Mayer.
No listed credentials on the page, no bio, no information about his education, and no publications in the field. Plus, evidence that he might have been an undergraduate as little as five years ago. Yeah, I'm having a bit of a tough time buying this one.
Personally, I'm on year three of my two year associate's degree.
And that's why you don't understand why you need to take a full credit load of classes. Figure in an average undergraduate school, it will take four years to get a BS in physics, if you're taking a full course load. However, to do most things in academia in physics, you'll need a PhD. You can figure on four to five years for that. Of course, if you're planning to eventually go for a tenure-track position in the field, you can't do this fresh off your PhD (you'll be 27 or 28 by this time and have been living on ramen and rice for the last ten years). First, you need to build a name for yourself, get some publications, maybe an assistant professor position at a small college. The best way to get publications is doing a postdoc or two. Those are usually two years long. So now, you might finally get a chance to get a job in your chosen field - after eight to ten years of college, another four years of postdocs, and you're pushing your mid thirties. At this point, you're finally able to (hopefully) get a decently paying job in the field you chose and do the work you like. All of this was while working your ass off fighting to get everything done as quickly as possible. Start screwing around and taking two classes per semester, and you can figure you'll be kicking down middle age's door before you can even consider being able to provide for a family.
IMHO the flag system on craigslist is severly flawed, though - the messages pretty much vanish, and a user who saw a listing one day has no idea why it's gone the next day. Plus, there are entire communities of self-righteous jackasses who patrol craigslist and flag en masse any post that they don't like. I see this a LOT in the pets classifieds, where some have assigned themselves the pet police and go around removing any posts that offend their (usually quite extreme) sensitivities.
Ah that makes sense, I was guessing astronomy. *G*
As someone who was once a physics student... how the hell do physics undergrads have the time for this stuff? If you have time to do things that are fun, your physics program isn't hard enough ;)
If you don't like it, get an account yourself and contribute to the discussions. Get yourself some mod points and go crazy. Or just stay an anonymous troll and refuse to grow a pair. No one is forcing anyone to click my referral links, and if it's such a scam I wouldn't have two free ipods sitting on my desk.