I agree on the 2nd and 3rd item. Whether it's hard to learn is simply a matter of how soon people are taught cursive in relation to (what I call) normal (:) ). It's pretty easy to imagine if cursive was taught first, then the latter may actually be considered to be more difficult.
I have nothing to back this up with, but I am betting cursive came about as a way to reduce the number of times a quill or other type device had to be removed and put back onto a paper. Additionally cursive likely has a much higher potential for max wpm compared to normal writing.
Now I am looking at signatures. These usually rely heavily on cursive, although sometimes they are just fancy letters (which is obviously perfectly fine). How about we pick one of the two, and stick with it? I am personally horrible at cursive, but I think if cursive is all that is ever taught, there is more room for expression in writing. Alternatively, the block format is almost always easier to read. I can hardly read either of my parent's cursive, and they were taught under whip for years. Ever checked out a historical document? The handwriting looks like it was done by a superb laser. Can't read it easily, however.
That first quote you critique'd, "which is loosely a left wing dictatorship, which embraces socialism. " is a description of 1984 w/ big brother (I made a reply about the cutoff first line).
which is loosely a left wing dictatorship, which embraces socialism.
Do remember that socialism is an economic system where most of the industries are monopolized by the government. This is certainly not occurring. One thing that is occurring that is an aspect of socialism is less attention is being paid to the individual, and more is to the group. This happens whenever there is a common goal. Take World War 2 and the 'greatest generation'. It's possible that this was the least selfish time in the US's history, both on an interpersonal social level, and international political level.
On another note I have been questioning this whole "eliminate way of life" argument, the same as was made for WW2. This seems to presume that there is no better social system than the one we have, and none will ever be developed. I cannot think of anything more naÃve, which is so prevalent everywhere: that things taken under a burden of false pride cannot be made better. Like believers of the phrase "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", I find we stuck at a wall created by the public imagination, and if we don't pass it, we will fail.
I agree entirely. It would be awesome if a company would finally release a bunch of screens of different sizes and shapes. Each would take the same kind of memory card, and read books from it. If the tablet PC's were 1 cm thick, that'd be a good source.
I would expect these to be extremely basic, so as to keep the cost low. Perhaps an on/off button, a flip page forward/backwords button, some sort of autogoto, and maybe a touch sensitive screen so you can write on it with any object (and it's saved to the memory).
*sigh*
The humans are not being kept alive for body heat, they are being kept alive because that would have been primary in their programming so they cannot go against it. So how do you take over a planet where you are willfully unable to destroy the dominating species? Imprison them without taking their livelihood.
I disagree on one issue: hydrogen is also everywhere. Wherever you have electricity and water, you can easily make hydrogen, the problem is it is very slow. It is not so slow, however, as to totally refute this concept: Someone who owns a hydrogen powered scooter also has a solar panel on his house/window. This current is put through water, where the hydrogen and oxygen then split between the two leads. The hydrogen is gathered (and compressed?).
Now the tough parts:
Unless it's pure water, it likely wont be pure hydrogen (much like how our gasoline isn't pure), which simply means the scooter would need to be more robust.
If compression is needed, this may need to be done by hand using a bike pump type device, etc.
It's going to take an exceedingly long time to get enough hydrogen out of the water.
These aside, unless I've forgotten something major, we've got your semi-free source of hydrogen. While it's entirely possible to do this on a grand scale, I'd have to wonder if the creation of pure oxygen is at all considered pollution, and what it will form first, be it (in best to worst order) H2O, CO2, CO, or O3.
Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
I wanted to reply to this as well.
His page is perfectly readable, and isn't bogged down by anything. It's pure content and better than most websites out there. The flow of the page is obvious, and I'm not forced to read mulitiple pages for the same article. The only downfall I can possibly see is the page being too much for an old modem to read quickly.
The post office has a monopoly?
They do have a massive infrastructure, and laws to back them up, but I don't agree. You can send regular letters by UPS or Fedex no problem. Now they can't accept stamps (as far as I know), so if you want to say they have a monopoly on that.. sure. The US Postal Service controls the stamp market. (insert scary music)
... is deadlock. Lets say you have two IO devices, for ease we'll call them disk drives, which give exclusive access. Process A grabs one disk drive, then loses their processor turn (happens many times per second). Process B grabs another disk drive, then requests the drive Process A has, and 'blocks'. Process A then requests the drive Process B has, and 'blocks'. This is a very simple example of deadlock. Now if one of these processes is an OS process, well too bad.
There are mitigation strategies, but in short the all suck. You can constantly monitor every piece of hardware to see who has rights to what, and flat out deny access to people when a deadlock may occure. This is slow and isn't very nice to processes who now have to trap twice as many errors for many IO operations.
Another method (in avoidance) is to require all processes to request hardware in a certain order. This prevents all deadlock, but is unrealistic to how a program may function, and may require a programmer to hold onto a hardware device for much longer than actually needed.
The last method is perhaps worst of all: restrict every process to one hardware device at a time.
Can you think of a better strategy? Patent it and make a few billion. The strategy taken by *nix, Mac and Windows is... well to completely ignore it because it very rarely happens, but as processors in the future become faster and faster, they are more apt to run more and more processes at once, increasing the problem significantly.
Note this problem only occures for hold-and-wait devices. Usually any number of programs can read a file for instance, and there is no conflict at all. I find that Operating Systems Concepts (Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne) covers this topic well, and plenty of other hotspots.
Would be to do the same as companies in other endevaurs. Make contests like the car that drove from.. that place in California to.. that other place.. uhh.. Or like the three person spaceship contest.
I personally find those contests very sweet, and certainly could influence people more into that area. I'm not sure what the author means by those little robots, but surely these autonomous soccer robot competitions, etc, are of great help.
I disagree. Or at least, there should be a significant difference. If I expand a directory to see all subdirectories, I most likely do not want every compressed file listed as a directory. You are right that they can be viewed similarly, then again you could use the same argument that executables should be viewed as directories: binary, a table of string literals, and all included media. Obviously this could turn a basic directory listing into a disaster zone.
Kind of stupid that since M$ is evil, you automatically declare everything about them wrong and anything else to be better. M$ has the most understandable file system I have ever seen. Extensions are a huge plus. Drive letters instead of arcane codes specifying various IDE devices, etc. Anyone should be able to use a computer without knowing a damn thing about it, beyond the input and output.
What I don't like about the M$ scheme is that they still wont accept "/" instead of "\", and they have a real boner for treating compressed files as directories.
I went through high school hardly doing a thing, and got an appropriate grade for it. I took the SAT, and scored better than just about everyone. Now I'm in college with a high GPA.
I should be the college board's poster child.
If we had a computer much faster than deep blue, we could use neural network structures, like those available in C++. The program's universe is the game, the input and output being win/lose and board status. It knows the moves.
Pit two against eachother, put them in a closet, come back in a week. Now they need new opponents, or else their strategies will be incredibly dull. Rense, repeat.
When it's finally over, you will have a few superb true-AIist Chess players who may still lose to the world's best, but only for so many games.
By true AIish I mean that there is no free will, but the computer developed all the stragies by itself.
DUDE! I was playing Duke3D for the first time, and I was just about to end the first level, when my Weird Al CD playing (which had "ended" quite a while ago), played a bonus 10 second snippet of weird al screaming and a lot of weird sounds going on.
Scared the shit out of me.
Can anyone trace what these costs actually are? I've looked at the statistics for the US patent, and they all say things like such and such handling fee, etc, etc, amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars per claim.
Is there an actual basis for this? It sounds as if the patent office should be the richest thing I've ever heard of. Hundreds of thousands of patents, times thousands of dollars, with most patents being glanced at and rejected.
As far as I can tell, this is a major force to make sure new companies can't start, as only existing ones can afford such nonsense.
Looking at a phone bill, you are charged for several things that are obviously complete lies--No respresentative at any of the companies is able to break it apart.
Now granted they probably really do need this money, or else they wouldn't make any profit, but why can't they tell the truth about where the money goes? By refusing to say, they're just making themselves look corrupt.
If you base any of your judgement of someone on whether they, their parents, or their parents' parents were genetically modified...
You're crap.
Heck let's take the X-Man approach. Don't like us? We'll make you become us.
(half jokingly)
As long as everything is online, I don't think you need to worry about zoning restrictions.
However, what does your internet access allow? You may need to move over to a business account of somesort.
That is a pretty big debate: Do we ignore the differences, or use them? To use them would be to hire one gender for a job over the other, instead of looking at the individual (at worst case), and if it's ok to do this for gender, who's to stop it from spreading into race.
Another way of looking at it is this. By just about any demographical difference in people, there are differences in performance areas as well, but nothing special needs to be done. If one race or gender is 20% better at something, then an occupation involving this quality will naturally fill out the ranks of this job more, just from interest, or increased prior performace.
Remember that race/gender 1 being x% better at something than race/gender 2, means abosolutely nothing on the person to person level.
Targeting the average girl or woman with a video game is pretty risky, isn't it? If they don't already own the console required, then that game ends up costing the person over $200 USD.
Would it be a good idea to target *couples* first? Note that couples can mean a lot of things. A girl playing DDR with her boyfriend at an arcade is an excellent example. I think things would start easiest at the arcade, because the investment by the players is so small. After spending a hundred dollars in quarters, they might reconsider buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on the 2nd and 3rd item. Whether it's hard to learn is simply a matter of how soon people are taught cursive in relation to (what I call) normal ( :) ). It's pretty easy to imagine if cursive was taught first, then the latter may actually be considered to be more difficult.
I have nothing to back this up with, but I am betting cursive came about as a way to reduce the number of times a quill or other type device had to be removed and put back onto a paper. Additionally cursive likely has a much higher potential for max wpm compared to normal writing.
Now I am looking at signatures. These usually rely heavily on cursive, although sometimes they are just fancy letters (which is obviously perfectly fine). How about we pick one of the two, and stick with it? I am personally horrible at cursive, but I think if cursive is all that is ever taught, there is more room for expression in writing. Alternatively, the block format is almost always easier to read. I can hardly read either of my parent's cursive, and they were taught under whip for years. Ever checked out a historical document? The handwriting looks like it was done by a superb laser. Can't read it easily, however.
That first quote you critique'd, "which is loosely a left wing dictatorship, which embraces socialism. " is a description of 1984 w/ big brother (I made a reply about the cutoff first line).
First line missing:
I believe you are thinking of 1984's big brother left-wing dictatorship
which is loosely a left wing dictatorship, which embraces socialism.
Do remember that socialism is an economic system where most of the industries are monopolized by the government. This is certainly not occurring. One thing that is occurring that is an aspect of socialism is less attention is being paid to the individual, and more is to the group. This happens whenever there is a common goal. Take World War 2 and the 'greatest generation'. It's possible that this was the least selfish time in the US's history, both on an interpersonal social level, and international political level.
On another note I have been questioning this whole "eliminate way of life" argument, the same as was made for WW2. This seems to presume that there is no better social system than the one we have, and none will ever be developed. I cannot think of anything more naÃve, which is so prevalent everywhere: that things taken under a burden of false pride cannot be made better. Like believers of the phrase "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", I find we stuck at a wall created by the public imagination, and if we don't pass it, we will fail.
Then when you consider the 'heat shield' is as strong as aluminum foil...
I agree entirely. It would be awesome if a company would finally release a bunch of screens of different sizes and shapes. Each would take the same kind of memory card, and read books from it. If the tablet PC's were 1 cm thick, that'd be a good source.
I would expect these to be extremely basic, so as to keep the cost low. Perhaps an on/off button, a flip page forward/backwords button, some sort of autogoto, and maybe a touch sensitive screen so you can write on it with any object (and it's saved to the memory).
*sigh*
The humans are not being kept alive for body heat, they are being kept alive because that would have been primary in their programming so they cannot go against it. So how do you take over a planet where you are willfully unable to destroy the dominating species? Imprison them without taking their livelihood.
I disagree on one issue: hydrogen is also everywhere. Wherever you have electricity and water, you can easily make hydrogen, the problem is it is very slow. It is not so slow, however, as to totally refute this concept: Someone who owns a hydrogen powered scooter also has a solar panel on his house/window. This current is put through water, where the hydrogen and oxygen then split between the two leads. The hydrogen is gathered (and compressed?).
Now the tough parts:
Unless it's pure water, it likely wont be pure hydrogen (much like how our gasoline isn't pure), which simply means the scooter would need to be more robust.
If compression is needed, this may need to be done by hand using a bike pump type device, etc.
It's going to take an exceedingly long time to get enough hydrogen out of the water.
These aside, unless I've forgotten something major, we've got your semi-free source of hydrogen. While it's entirely possible to do this on a grand scale, I'd have to wonder if the creation of pure oxygen is at all considered pollution, and what it will form first, be it (in best to worst order) H2O, CO2, CO, or O3.
Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
I wanted to reply to this as well.
His page is perfectly readable, and isn't bogged down by anything. It's pure content and better than most websites out there. The flow of the page is obvious, and I'm not forced to read mulitiple pages for the same article. The only downfall I can possibly see is the page being too much for an old modem to read quickly.
If it breaks open, just smack open a mac lined with ant eaters.
The post office has a monopoly?
They do have a massive infrastructure, and laws to back them up, but I don't agree. You can send regular letters by UPS or Fedex no problem. Now they can't accept stamps (as far as I know), so if you want to say they have a monopoly on that.. sure.
The US Postal Service controls the stamp market. (insert scary music)
... is deadlock. Lets say you have two IO devices, for ease we'll call them disk drives, which give exclusive access. Process A grabs one disk drive, then loses their processor turn (happens many times per second). Process B grabs another disk drive, then requests the drive Process A has, and 'blocks'. Process A then requests the drive Process B has, and 'blocks'. This is a very simple example of deadlock. Now if one of these processes is an OS process, well too bad.
There are mitigation strategies, but in short the all suck. You can constantly monitor every piece of hardware to see who has rights to what, and flat out deny access to people when a deadlock may occure. This is slow and isn't very nice to processes who now have to trap twice as many errors for many IO operations.
Another method (in avoidance) is to require all processes to request hardware in a certain order. This prevents all deadlock, but is unrealistic to how a program may function, and may require a programmer to hold onto a hardware device for much longer than actually needed.
The last method is perhaps worst of all: restrict every process to one hardware device at a time.
Can you think of a better strategy? Patent it and make a few billion. The strategy taken by *nix, Mac and Windows is... well to completely ignore it because it very rarely happens, but as processors in the future become faster and faster, they are more apt to run more and more processes at once, increasing the problem significantly.
Note this problem only occures for hold-and-wait devices. Usually any number of programs can read a file for instance, and there is no conflict at all. I find that Operating Systems Concepts (Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne) covers this topic well, and plenty of other hotspots.
Would be to do the same as companies in other endevaurs. Make contests like the car that drove from.. that place in California to.. that other place.. uhh.. Or like the three person spaceship contest.
I personally find those contests very sweet, and certainly could influence people more into that area. I'm not sure what the author means by those little robots, but surely these autonomous soccer robot competitions, etc, are of great help.
I disagree. Or at least, there should be a significant difference. If I expand a directory to see all subdirectories, I most likely do not want every compressed file listed as a directory. You are right that they can be viewed similarly, then again you could use the same argument that executables should be viewed as directories: binary, a table of string literals, and all included media. Obviously this could turn a basic directory listing into a disaster zone.
Kind of stupid that since M$ is evil, you automatically declare everything about them wrong and anything else to be better. M$ has the most understandable file system I have ever seen. Extensions are a huge plus. Drive letters instead of arcane codes specifying various IDE devices, etc. Anyone should be able to use a computer without knowing a damn thing about it, beyond the input and output.
What I don't like about the M$ scheme is that they still wont accept "/" instead of "\", and they have a real boner for treating compressed files as directories.
I went through high school hardly doing a thing, and got an appropriate grade for it. I took the SAT, and scored better than just about everyone. Now I'm in college with a high GPA. I should be the college board's poster child.
If we had a computer much faster than deep blue, we could use neural network structures, like those available in C++. The program's universe is the game, the input and output being win/lose and board status. It knows the moves.
Pit two against eachother, put them in a closet, come back in a week. Now they need new opponents, or else their strategies will be incredibly dull. Rense, repeat.
When it's finally over, you will have a few superb true-AIist Chess players who may still lose to the world's best, but only for so many games.
By true AIish I mean that there is no free will, but the computer developed all the stragies by itself.
DUDE! I was playing Duke3D for the first time, and I was just about to end the first level, when my Weird Al CD playing (which had "ended" quite a while ago), played a bonus 10 second snippet of weird al screaming and a lot of weird sounds going on.
Scared the shit out of me.
dell's gone up in the same time period, and for one reason or another they are considered prime competitors, so it matters.
Can anyone trace what these costs actually are? I've looked at the statistics for the US patent, and they all say things like such and such handling fee, etc, etc, amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars per claim.
Is there an actual basis for this? It sounds as if the patent office should be the richest thing I've ever heard of. Hundreds of thousands of patents, times thousands of dollars, with most patents being glanced at and rejected.
As far as I can tell, this is a major force to make sure new companies can't start, as only existing ones can afford such nonsense.
Looking at a phone bill, you are charged for several things that are obviously complete lies--No respresentative at any of the companies is able to break it apart.
Now granted they probably really do need this money, or else they wouldn't make any profit, but why can't they tell the truth about where the money goes? By refusing to say, they're just making themselves look corrupt.
If you base any of your judgement of someone on whether they, their parents, or their parents' parents were genetically modified... You're crap. Heck let's take the X-Man approach. Don't like us? We'll make you become us. (half jokingly)
As long as everything is online, I don't think you need to worry about zoning restrictions. However, what does your internet access allow? You may need to move over to a business account of somesort.
That is a pretty big debate: Do we ignore the differences, or use them? To use them would be to hire one gender for a job over the other, instead of looking at the individual (at worst case), and if it's ok to do this for gender, who's to stop it from spreading into race.
Another way of looking at it is this. By just about any demographical difference in people, there are differences in performance areas as well, but nothing special needs to be done. If one race or gender is 20% better at something, then an occupation involving this quality will naturally fill out the ranks of this job more, just from interest, or increased prior performace.
Remember that race/gender 1 being x% better at something than race/gender 2, means abosolutely nothing on the person to person level.
Targeting the average girl or woman with a video game is pretty risky, isn't it? If they don't already own the console required, then that game ends up costing the person over $200 USD.
Would it be a good idea to target *couples* first? Note that couples can mean a lot of things. A girl playing DDR with her boyfriend at an arcade is an excellent example. I think things would start easiest at the arcade, because the investment by the players is so small. After spending a hundred dollars in quarters, they might reconsider buying it.