I think he was referring to the general concensus among those who've played the game, not the general concensus of humanity. It doesn't really make much sense otherwise. "I've never played that game, but I think it's the greatest game ever!"
They're not court cases against tidbits about Jesus, God, Allah, Buddha, etc. They're court cases against state-sponsored endorsement of a religion. That's quite a major conceptual difference for you to gloss over.
No one's saying that talking about anything should be outlawed. They're saying the government - which represents everyone, not just Christians - shouldn't force people to listen to the views exclusively held by Christians.
Understand the importance? People should feel free to talk about whatever they want. But if the government makes you hear "this country is Christian" every day, then Christians are the only ones who feel free.
You're choking on the words you heard him say and not the meaning behind them. Yes, it is hurtful to have to listen to those words over and over and over - to be forced by the government to listen to them - if you've been brought up in a different belief system.
It's not simply "not having to hear something she doesn't like." The actual thing in question is a state-sponsored endorsement of a particular religious belief and DOES NOT belong in the curriculae of public schools. It's perhaps the issue of deepest meaning to most people, second-graders included. (They're a lot wiser than you appear to think they are.)
I would say, one, what kind of lesson is she learning from having her school pound God into her ears every day, and two, she might actually be better off learning that her government is really capable of listening and responding to the concerns of its individual citizens. That's what I learned and why this decision made me feel happy and hopeful.
I won't make you pray, and you won't stop me from praying.
Well hello, that's what this whole thing is about. One, you nor the government has the right to induce children to say "one nation under God" every morning: "I won't make you pray." Two, there is provided a "moment of silence" during which children are allowed to engage in silent prayer: "you won't stop me from praying." Seems fair to me.
Re:When comments are more than comments...
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
no.. it should be --==:{ Tom 7 was here - 1998}:==--
what the hell are you gonna use the cpu cycles for?
Well, if you downloaded the movie you're watching from kazaa, Brilliant will be happy to take those extra cycles off your hands.
Re:Wrong battery type, missing information
on
24/7 Notebook Power?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're right. And of course I knew that. I'm constantly amazed at how moderation works on slashdot. I have (4, Informative) for that post so far when it was essentially a troll. But people don't seem to have gotten the joke.
What this guy should really be doing is not considering laptops in the first place, but using something like simple, liquid-proof, touchscreen "webpad" terminals (wireless if the hospital allows.) Like the ones used by waiters.
You don't need all the extra junk in a laptop to perform data entry. Not to mention the maintenance headaches, and the practical impossibility of what he wants to do, short of cold fusion. Wouldn't everybody like to have our laptops running 24/7 without ever needing to recharge the batteries?
Laptops are almost ridiculously not suited to this application. To me it sounds like the guy just got his hands on a technology budget for the first time and is itching to spend it. If he's budgeted enough money for a bunch of wireless laptops but not enough to keep the batteries charged (is that really such a huge expense?) something is wrong with the whole picture.
Or maybe the original post was a joke and I didn't get it.
How about motorcycle batteries? They're smaller and lighter than car batteries, and many can probably produce the output you need.
Of course you'd need to buy a bunch of trickle chargers (for plugging in an night.) They can be expensive. If you have any electrical knowledge you could probably build them yourself on the cheap.
You could also get really creative and put some little bicycle generators (the friction kind) on the cart wheels to run some extra power into the batteries during the rounds.
Whatever you do, if it involves lead-acid batteries and a health-care facility, make sure to run the plans by someone with some electrical knowhow to make sure you won't overcharge the batteries and risk spilling or spraying acid all over the place. And keep them in sealed containers in case you do!
The things you gripe about are temporary technological limitations on display and input of data, and not worth discussing because they'll be overcome soon enough. Foldable high-res OLED screens, retinal projection, etc... all close on the horizon.
If you think of all electronic data as 1-dimensional strings of 8-bit characters, your view is severely limited. Ever heard of Unicode? XML? Postscript? SVG? PDF? LaTeX? Visio? Mathematica? Hyperchem? PNG? Graphing calculators? OCR? Voice recognition? Databases? Arrays? Spreadsheets? Expert systems?
Data is data, it's how you manage it that creates the "dimensions."
You should read a basic text on data structures. It'll open your eyes. Everything that you're talking about can be done on a PDA with readily-available software, even if the screens are too small at the moment to view a large bitmap.
Get yourself a linux-capable PDA, learn how to *really* use it as a tool, and go to town. All data is "grep"able in the proper context.
By the way, it would be much easier to get the PDA to "understand" Kurt Vonnegut's relation to Joseph Heller via WWII than to get a piece of paper to understand it. This is perhaps the worst way to make paper look good next to a computer. A dead-simple expert system will keep track of this and 1000000 other relationships in a totally organized way. Take a look at everything2.com and oracleofbacon.org. With the right dataset (which you'd have to enter on paper too, don't forget) you can write something to connect Kurt Vonnegut->WWII->Joseph Heller->Mel Brooks->Gene Wilder->Roald Dahl, and on and on, with a few lines of lisp and a few connection rules. "is like... wrote about... lived with... worked with..." And you'd produce connections which could NEVER be made on paper, or would take years and about a million feet of scotch tape and pencil lead.
Moral: don't force yourself to ride a horse just because a car can't take you to the moon.
I hate to break this to you, but I wasn't claiming PDAs can organize information in magical new ways that can't be done with paper. Where did you read or infer that, exactly?
Of course, you can do a million things with a PDA that you can't do with a notebook. I wasn't even discussing those. I was only countering your somewhat ridiculous idea that it's easier to organize information on paper than on a PDA.
Apples and apples, my friend. I was proposing simple tests for a brand new notebook versus a brand new PDA, your own paper filing system not included. You can't comment on the usefulness of PDAs to other people based on comparison to your own personal filing system: they don't have it!You could perform the tests on your paper filing system versus someone else's PDA filing system which has taken an equal length of time to develop. What you're talking about is how useful a PDA is to you in your current situation which is heavily paper-based. I was talking about a clean slate, controlled situation, equal starting points. Get it?
Once again, it takes you 1/2 second (ahem) to find a diagram in a notebook because you have trained yourself, as most of us have been trained from childhood, to use paper to track things. If you had spent 25 years using a PDA instead of paper to organize things, wouldn't you assume you'd be faster with the PDA? It only makes sense.
Paper has no built-in organizational system. You impose your organizational system on a piece of paper after you use it, same as with digital information. The difference is overhead. What happens if somebody brand new has to find a piece of info in your notes all of a sudden and they don't understand your arcane filing system? If you had it on a PDA, worst case, it could be dumped out and grepped through in a matter of minutes, in the unlikely event you filed it so badly it couldn't be found through the PDA's menus.
Don't even get me started about "when I choose to share I rewrite the notes into a memo." Double work is more efficient? Sure... whatever you say.
I should stop here because it's pretty clear to me that you don't get it on a fundamental level. You've committed yourself to paper because you're uninformed about PDA technology. Bon voyage. I pity the person who succeeds you in your position.
people who were trained to use paper notes are better at finding archived information than the people who were not trained but depend on electronic technology
Why would you make this comparison, especially being a scientist yourself? Shouldn't you compare against people who were trained to archive notes on PDAs?
Because you weren't trained on a PDA, your techniques of working with paper notes appear to work better for you. But here are a few simple, real-world objective tests. Take 1000 notes on paper and 1000 notes on a PDA, using random subjects. Now organize them into a filing system. How long does that take? Now search for references to a certain surname. How long does that take? Search for a phone number. Make 5 copies of only the notes on a certain subject for a colleague, and 20 copies to distribute to other staff members. Get copies of all to a field researcher in Russia. Organize them by subject. Now reorganize them by date. Add markup to 50 without disturbing the originals. Should I go on?
If you don't know how to flip through a set of images to find a certain diagram, have someone show you. I can certainly do that faster with a "back" and "next" button than by sifting through a pile of randomly sized papers.
And how does a piece of paper encourage good practice in regards to its management, compared to even the worst PDA's filing system?
Perhaps you should get a little more experience with a PDA before passing a blanket judgement over those who find them useful as "ignorant of history."
Perhaps it's also time to forget what you learned in the 1990s and catch up with the hundreds of thousands of other scientists and professionals around the world who use electronic information management techniques. Times have changed. And for much, much longer than paper was used, electronic methods will continue to be used in the future. 1000 years from now, electronic systems will have been the dominant way to organize information for twice as long as paper.
Except that the 2200+ does not mean 2.2 GHz, smart guy. And the 2200+ is on a performance par with a 2.4GHz P4 despite running at ~1.9GHz. Jeez, at least read one of the articles before spouting off.
No... you keep it synchronized so that you never lose more than a few hours' work if it dies. Ever lost a paper-based personal organizer? It's much worse even if it's 90% cheaper.
On that note, we are talking about the *ideal* PDA here. See also this thread.
Info such as your checkbok balance has to come across the wire to your PC to get to your PDA anyway. If the 128-bit encryption offered by the bank satisfies you and them enough to use it on the wire, wouldn't the same or better encryption be OK wireless too?
One unified information format already exists. It's called XML.
You're right about peripheral standards. Memory should be MMC, peripherals should be USB or 1394.
Right. Keep taking notes on notepads for a few years, then try to find a crucial bit of info that you don't know where you scribbled. This is why PDAs exist.
Solution: dirt cheap and wireless. Store your data on the server. PDA craps out while you're walking down the street? Toss it in the trash, walk into the convenience store, buy a new one, continue where you left off.
Discriminating between the supercars sounds to me like an OK way to spend a sunday afternoon. Much better than discriminating between coins and bottlecaps behind the sofa cushions.
But did you read the rest of my comment?
I've been in both places (not discriminating-between-supercars rich, but well off) and I can say without hesitation that being well off is better. Your worries become more trivial the richer you get - if you keep your perspective! That's what I was saying.
Of course you are right - it's not easy to keep that perspective. But it is possible!
I would actually like to watch the documentary except I'm in Denmark and there's little chance of it coming on TV here =) or to Blockbuster for that matter.
Well, it would help if you told us where you live.
But really, if you're in the US, it's very unlikely that your neighbors have any legal ground to support their request. In fact, it's legal in most places to videotape people nude in the shower if you can see them from your property. I don't know if you can have friends over for beer and pretzels to watch those tapes, but I assume so. IANAL.
On the other hand, how important is it to you to keep good relations with your neighbors, and is it worth a whole lot of intra-neigbor unpleasantness to keep the houses in the frame?
You could always use webcam software which overlays a transparent graphic over their houses, if the views never change. There's plenty of it available. Google search: webcam software overlay graphics
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was referring to the general concensus among those who've played the game, not the general concensus of humanity. It doesn't really make much sense otherwise. "I've never played that game, but I think it's the greatest game ever!"
They're not court cases against tidbits about Jesus, God, Allah, Buddha, etc. They're court cases against state-sponsored endorsement of a religion. That's quite a major conceptual difference for you to gloss over.
No one's saying that talking about anything should be outlawed. They're saying the government - which represents everyone, not just Christians - shouldn't force people to listen to the views exclusively held by Christians.
Understand the importance? People should feel free to talk about whatever they want. But if the government makes you hear "this country is Christian" every day, then Christians are the only ones who feel free.
You're choking on the words you heard him say and not the meaning behind them. Yes, it is hurtful to have to listen to those words over and over and over - to be forced by the government to listen to them - if you've been brought up in a different belief system.
It's not simply "not having to hear something she doesn't like." The actual thing in question is a state-sponsored endorsement of a particular religious belief and DOES NOT belong in the curriculae of public schools. It's perhaps the issue of deepest meaning to most people, second-graders included. (They're a lot wiser than you appear to think they are.)
I would say, one, what kind of lesson is she learning from having her school pound God into her ears every day, and two, she might actually be better off learning that her government is really capable of listening and responding to the concerns of its individual citizens. That's what I learned and why this decision made me feel happy and hopeful.
I won't make you pray, and you won't stop me from praying.
Well hello, that's what this whole thing is about. One, you nor the government has the right to induce children to say "one nation under God" every morning: "I won't make you pray." Two, there is provided a "moment of silence" during which children are allowed to engage in silent prayer: "you won't stop me from praying." Seems fair to me.
no.. it should be --==:{ Tom 7 was here - 1998}:==--
I'm pretty sure a 200GB hard drive is unattainable today. 160GB is the top end.
Interesting. But couldn't you get the same effect with one monitor by shrinking your head and playing in "widescreen" mode?
Yeah, but you didn't say it, you just typed it. (pause) There, I actually said it. Please transfer mod points to me.
what the hell are you gonna use the cpu cycles for?
Well, if you downloaded the movie you're watching from kazaa, Brilliant will be happy to take those extra cycles off your hands.
You're right. And of course I knew that. I'm constantly amazed at how moderation works on slashdot. I have (4, Informative) for that post so far when it was essentially a troll. But people don't seem to have gotten the joke.
What this guy should really be doing is not considering laptops in the first place, but using something like simple, liquid-proof, touchscreen "webpad" terminals (wireless if the hospital allows.) Like the ones used by waiters.
You don't need all the extra junk in a laptop to perform data entry. Not to mention the maintenance headaches, and the practical impossibility of what he wants to do, short of cold fusion. Wouldn't everybody like to have our laptops running 24/7 without ever needing to recharge the batteries?
Laptops are almost ridiculously not suited to this application. To me it sounds like the guy just got his hands on a technology budget for the first time and is itching to spend it. If he's budgeted enough money for a bunch of wireless laptops but not enough to keep the batteries charged (is that really such a huge expense?) something is wrong with the whole picture.
Or maybe the original post was a joke and I didn't get it.
How about motorcycle batteries? They're smaller and lighter than car batteries, and many can probably produce the output you need.
Of course you'd need to buy a bunch of trickle chargers (for plugging in an night.) They can be expensive. If you have any electrical knowledge you could probably build them yourself on the cheap.
You could also get really creative and put some little bicycle generators (the friction kind) on the cart wheels to run some extra power into the batteries during the rounds.
Whatever you do, if it involves lead-acid batteries and a health-care facility, make sure to run the plans by someone with some electrical knowhow to make sure you won't overcharge the batteries and risk spilling or spraying acid all over the place. And keep them in sealed containers in case you do!
compatibility problems, namely among users trying to receive Microsoft World documents
So... the rumors were true. They've finally seized power! Everyone burn your RHCEs and report to the island of Ballmeria for mandatory dance lessons.
I'm sorry, but this story makes no sense to me.
Gee, I wonder how much "c" is worth. It's not only the name of a language that powers an economy, it also shows up in a good portion of data.
Or "1" and "0"... they're part of "c"... and ALL information! 1 must be worth a shitload!
The things you gripe about are temporary technological limitations on display and input of data, and not worth discussing because they'll be overcome soon enough. Foldable high-res OLED screens, retinal projection, etc... all close on the horizon.
If you think of all electronic data as 1-dimensional strings of 8-bit characters, your view is severely limited. Ever heard of Unicode? XML? Postscript? SVG? PDF? LaTeX? Visio? Mathematica? Hyperchem? PNG? Graphing calculators? OCR? Voice recognition? Databases? Arrays? Spreadsheets? Expert systems?
Data is data, it's how you manage it that creates the "dimensions."
You should read a basic text on data structures. It'll open your eyes. Everything that you're talking about can be done on a PDA with readily-available software, even if the screens are too small at the moment to view a large bitmap.
Get yourself a linux-capable PDA, learn how to *really* use it as a tool, and go to town. All data is "grep"able in the proper context.
By the way, it would be much easier to get the PDA to "understand" Kurt Vonnegut's relation to Joseph Heller via WWII than to get a piece of paper to understand it. This is perhaps the worst way to make paper look good next to a computer. A dead-simple expert system will keep track of this and 1000000 other relationships in a totally organized way. Take a look at everything2.com and oracleofbacon.org. With the right dataset (which you'd have to enter on paper too, don't forget) you can write something to connect Kurt Vonnegut->WWII->Joseph Heller->Mel Brooks->Gene Wilder->Roald Dahl, and on and on, with a few lines of lisp and a few connection rules. "is like... wrote about... lived with... worked with..." And you'd produce connections which could NEVER be made on paper, or would take years and about a million feet of scotch tape and pencil lead.
Moral: don't force yourself to ride a horse just because a car can't take you to the moon.
I hate to break this to you, but I wasn't claiming PDAs can organize information in magical new ways that can't be done with paper. Where did you read or infer that, exactly?
Of course, you can do a million things with a PDA that you can't do with a notebook. I wasn't even discussing those. I was only countering your somewhat ridiculous idea that it's easier to organize information on paper than on a PDA.
Apples and apples, my friend. I was proposing simple tests for a brand new notebook versus a brand new PDA, your own paper filing system not included. You can't comment on the usefulness of PDAs to other people based on comparison to your own personal filing system: they don't have it!You could perform the tests on your paper filing system versus someone else's PDA filing system which has taken an equal length of time to develop. What you're talking about is how useful a PDA is to you in your current situation which is heavily paper-based. I was talking about a clean slate, controlled situation, equal starting points. Get it?
Once again, it takes you 1/2 second (ahem) to find a diagram in a notebook because you have trained yourself, as most of us have been trained from childhood, to use paper to track things. If you had spent 25 years using a PDA instead of paper to organize things, wouldn't you assume you'd be faster with the PDA? It only makes sense.
Paper has no built-in organizational system. You impose your organizational system on a piece of paper after you use it, same as with digital information. The difference is overhead. What happens if somebody brand new has to find a piece of info in your notes all of a sudden and they don't understand your arcane filing system? If you had it on a PDA, worst case, it could be dumped out and grepped through in a matter of minutes, in the unlikely event you filed it so badly it couldn't be found through the PDA's menus.
Don't even get me started about "when I choose to share I rewrite the notes into a memo." Double work is more efficient? Sure... whatever you say.
I should stop here because it's pretty clear to me that you don't get it on a fundamental level. You've committed yourself to paper because you're uninformed about PDA technology. Bon voyage. I pity the person who succeeds you in your position.
Please, I beg you, write an explanation of flugeldufel yourself and post it to your site. Don't spring LucasArts fanfiction on an unsuspecting public.
people who were trained to use paper notes are better at finding archived information than the people who were not trained but depend on electronic technology
Why would you make this comparison, especially being a scientist yourself? Shouldn't you compare against people who were trained to archive notes on PDAs?
Because you weren't trained on a PDA, your techniques of working with paper notes appear to work better for you. But here are a few simple, real-world objective tests. Take 1000 notes on paper and 1000 notes on a PDA, using random subjects. Now organize them into a filing system. How long does that take? Now search for references to a certain surname. How long does that take? Search for a phone number. Make 5 copies of only the notes on a certain subject for a colleague, and 20 copies to distribute to other staff members. Get copies of all to a field researcher in Russia. Organize them by subject. Now reorganize them by date. Add markup to 50 without disturbing the originals. Should I go on?
If you don't know how to flip through a set of images to find a certain diagram, have someone show you. I can certainly do that faster with a "back" and "next" button than by sifting through a pile of randomly sized papers.
And how does a piece of paper encourage good practice in regards to its management, compared to even the worst PDA's filing system?
Perhaps you should get a little more experience with a PDA before passing a blanket judgement over those who find them useful as "ignorant of history."
Perhaps it's also time to forget what you learned in the 1990s and catch up with the hundreds of thousands of other scientists and professionals around the world who use electronic information management techniques. Times have changed. And for much, much longer than paper was used, electronic methods will continue to be used in the future. 1000 years from now, electronic systems will have been the dominant way to organize information for twice as long as paper.
-- Someone who uses both paper and PDA
Except that the 2200+ does not mean 2.2 GHz, smart guy. And the 2200+ is on a performance par with a 2.4GHz P4 despite running at ~1.9GHz. Jeez, at least read one of the articles before spouting off.
Site contains a link to Indiana Jones fan fiction disguised under the heading "the greatest game of all time."
My eyes! It buuuurns!
No... you keep it synchronized so that you never lose more than a few hours' work if it dies. Ever lost a paper-based personal organizer? It's much worse even if it's 90% cheaper.
On that note, we are talking about the *ideal* PDA here. See also this thread.
Info such as your checkbok balance has to come across the wire to your PC to get to your PDA anyway. If the 128-bit encryption offered by the bank satisfies you and them enough to use it on the wire, wouldn't the same or better encryption be OK wireless too?
One unified information format already exists. It's called XML.
You're right about peripheral standards. Memory should be MMC, peripherals should be USB or 1394.
Right. Keep taking notes on notepads for a few years, then try to find a crucial bit of info that you don't know where you scribbled. This is why PDAs exist.
Solution: dirt cheap and wireless. Store your data on the server. PDA craps out while you're walking down the street? Toss it in the trash, walk into the convenience store, buy a new one, continue where you left off.
Discriminating between the supercars sounds to me like an OK way to spend a sunday afternoon. Much better than discriminating between coins and bottlecaps behind the sofa cushions.
But did you read the rest of my comment?
I've been in both places (not discriminating-between-supercars rich, but well off) and I can say without hesitation that being well off is better. Your worries become more trivial the richer you get - if you keep your perspective! That's what I was saying.
Of course you are right - it's not easy to keep that perspective. But it is possible!
I would actually like to watch the documentary except I'm in Denmark and there's little chance of it coming on TV here =) or to Blockbuster for that matter.
Well, it would help if you told us where you live.
But really, if you're in the US, it's very unlikely that your neighbors have any legal ground to support their request. In fact, it's legal in most places to videotape people nude in the shower if you can see them from your property. I don't know if you can have friends over for beer and pretzels to watch those tapes, but I assume so. IANAL.
On the other hand, how important is it to you to keep good relations with your neighbors, and is it worth a whole lot of intra-neigbor unpleasantness to keep the houses in the frame?
You could always use webcam software which overlays a transparent graphic over their houses, if the views never change. There's plenty of it available. Google search: webcam software overlay graphics