Personally I think the internet is very slowly beginning to change that. When you have immediate access to information on practially anything -- and especially technical topics -- it becomes a lot less painful to fulfill that momentary impulse to learn. You don't have to go to a library, you don't have to find an expert, and you can read as much or as little as you like. "More than you want to know about just about anything" is just a HowStuffWorks, Wikipedia, or Google query away.
Yes, yes, yes. Truer words were never spoken, and so on. That is usually my pitch for Wikipedia; I've never been more curious about obscure topics than now.
Computers just aren't appliances yet. As such, it's often much easier to work with them if you have some understanding of their internals. This can be shallow, you don't have to be able to, you know, built a computer from scratch. Analogies are bound to be flawed, like your washing machine analogy, but a better one might be a car... it helps to understand that it contains a motor which combusts the fuel you put in it, when you've got a manual transmission it helps to know what that is all about and so on. This is especially true in case the car breaks down, which, famously, they don't do as often as computers.
There are appliances that do a subset of what computers (or PCs) do. Web terminals for surfing, consoles for gaming, media players for MP3 and movie playback (often backed up by a PC). Network routers (usually Linux based). As far as I'm aware MS Office doesn't really have an appliance alternative, though.
Just to echo the other poster, yes, this should work. I've never done it myself, but I've heard of people doing it. Search around, I'm sure you'll find someone.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Neat. I never knew Python had list comprehensions. My Haskell programming class (nominally compiler design - hah!) was pretty mind bending, but I admit that FP has some fun parts.
Re:No language that I like better
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
(one of the most abused language features ever, especially in Java)
Care to elaborate? You mean because people write inheriting classes that overwrite functions and violate their contracts?
That's exactly what I do. Well, actually I was using a metal business card holder for a while to hold my cards - driver's license, student id, stuff like that. I don't even have a wallet... It just has the added benefit of stopping RFID tags, and it looks far less geeky. The only problem is that it's at full capacity already, there's positively no room left.
You'll have a hard time creating a scenario where a coal power plant puts out more radioactivity than estimated in those sources. It's not that difficult for nuclear power plants - in fact I think it might have happened before. Of course modern technology will save us from all sources of problems apart from those we couldn't think of, especially since gross human negligence and malice has been proven again and again to be a total non-issue.
Haha. What's next, saying that you need permanent porch lights to combat terrorism? Or maybe drugs? Listen I have nothing against lighting up the night when it's useful to someone, so hook them up to some sort of IR motion detection and you're good. Sensible people already do that anway, it's not like I'm even thinking outside the box here. And if you're relying on permanent porch lights to fight crime, well, you're insane.
Burning coal puts more uranium into the atmosphere than nuclear power does.
Here's a bit of trivia. "These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment. For the average citizen, the radiation dose from coal burning is considerably less." "On this plot, the average population dose attributed to coal burning is included under the consumer products category and is much less than 1 percent of the total dose." "Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm." (Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance)
I do agree that this is somewhat of an issue, though, in that essay that pops up everywhere now (even though it's really old), Gabbard does raise some points, especially with respect to long term accumulation of hazardous materials. But I'm not a chemist, this might be a non-issue. I've briefly searched for more recent material, but so far haven't come up with anything.
You can adequately light a large room with about 200 W of incandescent light. It takes about a quarter of that with compact fluorescent lights, and even less with new linear fluorescent tubes.
I agree, it would be a great start if more people used other means of lighting their homes beside incandescent.
How much electricity do you think it takes to heat a home?
Close to none, hopefully, because there are few worse ways of heating a home than electrical heating. Besides maybe, you know, setting it on fire, that'd be worse. Still more energy efficient though!
You can't just place all the blame on your neighbor for not turning off his porch light at night.
Obviously you can't - who is suggesting that? Straw man attack. I'm still annoyed by people who leave on their porch light all night. It is a waste of power, even if they use fluorescents, and it's also annoying, I'd prefer nights to be dark. Of course that's just my opinion. They should put street lights on motion activation - now wouldn't that be fun?
There are devices that attach to a PC which sync the clock via radio - haven't seen one for USB yet, but I'm sure they exist. They're not very cheap, though, while internet syncing is free and easily accurate enough for most applications.
Heh, Slashdot rules. I checked it out, and 1) it does seem to work, 2) it just monitors your movement, that's all. If you're moving, you're probably not in a state of deep sleep and are more easily woken up. Interesting, but still too expensive (if not quite as much as I'd have thought). Oh and 3) it's just a wrist watch, so not that annoying to wear, I guess.
There was a story about some sleep researchers from MIT having developed an alarm clock that monitors your sleep and wakes you up at a time when you're most likely to be well rested (outside a REM phase or whatever). Of course that meant you couldn't enter the exact time to wake up, just an approximate. I still thought this sounded awesome, and they were going to commercialise it, but even if they did I guess it's really expensive and also, sleeping with sensors attached is bound to be annoying.
It's not high voltage. I don't know about Apple plugs, but my laptop runs off a 19V power supply. That's not a dangerous voltage when you touch it with skin (don't try chewing on it). Obligatory warning: I'm not an EE, this is not electrical advice.
They are hardly hard to find, every retailer sells them. Dell sells them. You are right though that the general direction seems to be towards widescreen... *glances fondly at FPW2005*
I always considered that a feature, and missed it in my laptop. Routing cables around the laptop because there are only ports on one side, that's ugly.
The new "MacBook Pro" - what a dumb name for a nice laptop - is supposed to ship in February, that's right. But the new Intel-based iMacs are supposed start shipping tomorrow.
Correct; and, we do occasionally try to defuse the crackpots, it just doesn't usually work and it takes a lot of time. This story is one example!
This echos what the other guy wrote, but just so you know, stories like these or posts to CmdrTaco's journal do help a lot. Most of us are reasonable, I don't believe in any of the various Slashdot conspiracy theories, but it's still nice to see you guys even notice the issues some people have. I won't comment on the issue itself because I think every suggestion I can think of has already been made about 40 times.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think the internet is very slowly beginning to change that. When you have immediate access to information on practially anything -- and especially technical topics -- it becomes a lot less painful to fulfill that momentary impulse to learn. You don't have to go to a library, you don't have to find an expert, and you can read as much or as little as you like. "More than you want to know about just about anything" is just a HowStuffWorks, Wikipedia, or Google query away.
Yes, yes, yes. Truer words were never spoken, and so on. That is usually my pitch for Wikipedia; I've never been more curious about obscure topics than now.
Computers just aren't appliances yet. As such, it's often much easier to work with them if you have some understanding of their internals. This can be shallow, you don't have to be able to, you know, built a computer from scratch. Analogies are bound to be flawed, like your washing machine analogy, but a better one might be a car... it helps to understand that it contains a motor which combusts the fuel you put in it, when you've got a manual transmission it helps to know what that is all about and so on. This is especially true in case the car breaks down, which, famously, they don't do as often as computers.
There are appliances that do a subset of what computers (or PCs) do. Web terminals for surfing, consoles for gaming, media players for MP3 and movie playback (often backed up by a PC). Network routers (usually Linux based). As far as I'm aware MS Office doesn't really have an appliance alternative, though.
Just to echo the other poster, yes, this should work. I've never done it myself, but I've heard of people doing it. Search around, I'm sure you'll find someone.
Neat. I never knew Python had list comprehensions. My Haskell programming class (nominally compiler design - hah!) was pretty mind bending, but I admit that FP has some fun parts.
(one of the most abused language features ever, especially in Java)
Care to elaborate? You mean because people write inheriting classes that overwrite functions and violate their contracts?
That's exactly what I do. Well, actually I was using a metal business card holder for a while to hold my cards - driver's license, student id, stuff like that. I don't even have a wallet... It just has the added benefit of stopping RFID tags, and it looks far less geeky. The only problem is that it's at full capacity already, there's positively no room left.
You're late to the discussion, we already did this point.
When did I ever cite Chernobyl? And 12 people died? Hilarious. Also, way to ignore the remainder of my post.
You'll have a hard time creating a scenario where a coal power plant puts out more radioactivity than estimated in those sources. It's not that difficult for nuclear power plants - in fact I think it might have happened before. Of course modern technology will save us from all sources of problems apart from those we couldn't think of, especially since gross human negligence and malice has been proven again and again to be a total non-issue.
Haha. What's next, saying that you need permanent porch lights to combat terrorism? Or maybe drugs? Listen I have nothing against lighting up the night when it's useful to someone, so hook them up to some sort of IR motion detection and you're good. Sensible people already do that anway, it's not like I'm even thinking outside the box here. And if you're relying on permanent porch lights to fight crime, well, you're insane.
Burning coal puts more uranium into the atmosphere than nuclear power does.
Here's a bit of trivia. "These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment. For the average citizen, the radiation dose from coal burning is considerably less." "On this plot, the average population dose attributed to coal burning is included under the consumer products category and is much less than 1 percent of the total dose." "Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm." ( Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance )
I do agree that this is somewhat of an issue, though, in that essay that pops up everywhere now (even though it's really old), Gabbard does raise some points, especially with respect to long term accumulation of hazardous materials. But I'm not a chemist, this might be a non-issue. I've briefly searched for more recent material, but so far haven't come up with anything.
You can adequately light a large room with about 200 W of incandescent light. It takes about a quarter of that with compact fluorescent lights, and even less with new linear fluorescent tubes.
I agree, it would be a great start if more people used other means of lighting their homes beside incandescent.
How much electricity do you think it takes to heat a home?
Close to none, hopefully, because there are few worse ways of heating a home than electrical heating. Besides maybe, you know, setting it on fire, that'd be worse. Still more energy efficient though!
You can't just place all the blame on your neighbor for not turning off his porch light at night.
Obviously you can't - who is suggesting that? Straw man attack. I'm still annoyed by people who leave on their porch light all night. It is a waste of power, even if they use fluorescents, and it's also annoying, I'd prefer nights to be dark. Of course that's just my opinion. They should put street lights on motion activation - now wouldn't that be fun?
There are devices that attach to a PC which sync the clock via radio - haven't seen one for USB yet, but I'm sure they exist. They're not very cheap, though, while internet syncing is free and easily accurate enough for most applications.
I also looked for a setting in Firefox that would disable HTML sound sources and couldn't find anything. Amazing/strange. I checked about:config, too.
I think it's just a farily zealous way to prevent a Slashdotting.
You're right, they're faster than the grandparent makes them out to be. But 16 MB/s is still only a third to a fifth of a fairly ordinary desktop HD.
Heh, Slashdot rules. I checked it out, and 1) it does seem to work, 2) it just monitors your movement, that's all. If you're moving, you're probably not in a state of deep sleep and are more easily woken up. Interesting, but still too expensive (if not quite as much as I'd have thought). Oh and 3) it's just a wrist watch, so not that annoying to wear, I guess.
There was a story about some sleep researchers from MIT having developed an alarm clock that monitors your sleep and wakes you up at a time when you're most likely to be well rested (outside a REM phase or whatever). Of course that meant you couldn't enter the exact time to wake up, just an approximate. I still thought this sounded awesome, and they were going to commercialise it, but even if they did I guess it's really expensive and also, sleeping with sensors attached is bound to be annoying.
It's not high voltage. I don't know about Apple plugs, but my laptop runs off a 19V power supply. That's not a dangerous voltage when you touch it with skin (don't try chewing on it). Obligatory warning: I'm not an EE, this is not electrical advice.
They are hardly hard to find, every retailer sells them. Dell sells them. You are right though that the general direction seems to be towards widescreen... *glances fondly at FPW2005*
Yes, it is. Thanks, I never knew that.
The fact that there is a scientific explanation for these things does not disprove the existence of God.
Right. And in a similar vein, the fact that there is no scientific explanation for some things does not prove the existence of a God.
I always considered that a feature, and missed it in my laptop. Routing cables around the laptop because there are only ports on one side, that's ugly.
The new "MacBook Pro" - what a dumb name for a nice laptop - is supposed to ship in February, that's right. But the new Intel-based iMacs are supposed start shipping tomorrow.
Correct; and, we do occasionally try to defuse the crackpots, it just doesn't usually work and it takes a lot of time. This story is one example!
This echos what the other guy wrote, but just so you know, stories like these or posts to CmdrTaco's journal do help a lot. Most of us are reasonable, I don't believe in any of the various Slashdot conspiracy theories, but it's still nice to see you guys even notice the issues some people have. I won't comment on the issue itself because I think every suggestion I can think of has already been made about 40 times.