I liked the movie, but the whole time they were talking about why they were in the Matrix, the one thought that kept going through my head was "So they found a way around the 2nd law of thermodynamics, huh?"
Perhaps they use the "form of fusion" to supply the power to overcome the increase in entropy.
"Has the balls," or in the more likely case, has the family/school connections to bum enough money off of banks or investors.
Not everyone who starts a business comes from a wealthy background. My friend's dad started out with a donation of 3 buckets of paint and a paint brush. He now owns and runs a very successful business. Most people can get loans from banks if they have a decent business plan. The number of people who can code is far greater than the number of people with a viable business plan.
I like Scilab because it's free, but it isn't a replacement for MATLAB. The toolboxes that are available for MATLAB far surpass anything that Scilab can offer. If you are going to do heavy-duty simulations, MATLAB is for you. If you rarely need to do a simulation and it's not very big, then Scilab should be your choice.
Re:How to bring this up with your boss??
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for pointing that out. To clear things up, some are shitheads, waterheads, airheads and buttheads. Let's remember that there's a diversity of stupidity and a uniformity of idiocy in management.
While managers may not always be technically inclined, that doesn't mean that they are stupid. There are a lot of briliant programmers and engineers that started their own companies and quickly drove them strait into the shitter because they didn't know a damn thing about business.
Why do large campanies have many layers of managers? Because it's necessary. If the top executives thought that the company could be run by two executives, a bunch of engineers and some manufacturing people, then that's what they would do because it would be cheaper. But it doesn't work that way.
I'll admit that there are stupid managers out there. But there are also a lot of really dumb programmers and engineers. Without some sort of management, no product would ever get shipped.
Re:How to bring this up with your boss??
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 1
Now I know that you can get great support from Usenet but that's not good enough for the pinheads who are in upper management at Apple.
So, my question would be, what's the best way for an engineer at a large company to address this issue with the people they report to.
I would think the first step would be to recognize that the people in management aren't pinheads. Showing disrespect to people is generally a good way to ensure that there is no way in hell your idea will be accepted.
Actually I think they did. I remember reading an interview that said something to the effect, "We are working on a great villian for this one. A villian that is as great as Khan."
So here's to hoping that it's true!
Re:What about radiation shielding?
on
Tool Box PC
·
· Score: 1
Radiation would NOT be a problem. I've run plenty of computers with plastic cases and cases with giant open areas. It all boils down to how the system is grounded. If there is a return path for the current, it probably will have low radiated emissions.
For a better description look for online notes for a college EE class on Electromagnetic Compadibility or Signal Integrity.
Air travel is as safe as it gets. Even with the terrorist activity you are MUCH more likely to be in a car crash, or hit a deer, or trip and break your collar bone, than you are to be involved in a deadly crash on an aircraft.
SO YES!!! FLY!!! If you value your safety, you will not drive long distances when you can just as easily take a flight. Plus you'll be saving yourself tons of time. (Ok, so from Heathrow, you'd have to take a boat, but do you really want to take that long? And would it really be safer?)
I don't think this would make a very good Zero-G weapon. Momentum would have to be conserved in the firing of a pellet. If you fired a small pellet at 20 km/s the person firing it would feel a pretty big recoil.
If the pellet is 2 grams and the person firing it is about 100 kg (with equipment and the gun), then the person would have a velocity of 40 m/s in the direction opposite of the pellet. That's a heck of an acceleration for a person to undergo.
Perhaps you could mount it on a space station, but it would still probably give the space staton a pretty good jolt.
The Net is a tool. Nothing more. Looking to the Net for some sort of morality is ridiculous. It like looking to a hammer for some sort of guidance. The net is a powerful communications tool, but it is the people who make the net worthwhile.
As for creating a heaven on earth or the net creating a new revolution, I highly doubt it. To base a revolution on the net is pretty silly for two reasons:
1) People aren't very truthful on the net. That was the first leason I learned back in the days 2400 bps - people says stuff on the internet they don't believe and that they won't act on in real life.
2) You can shut the power off. No electricity, no internet. While I don't think the power is likey to go off and bring the net down, it is possible. Revolutions need a solid base, and that last time I checked, electrons didn't make a good base to build on.
Much of the advantage to politicians is the opportunity to blame low voter turnout on apathy or bland acceptance. If there were some way for the non-voters to communicate their reasons, that advantage disappears. If it is known that a significant portion of the electorate chose not to vote due to an extreme dislike of both candidates, for instance, or in protest of the corporate nature of the campaigns, then the politicians can no longer effectively claim the "will of the people" due to a less-than-50% turnout. And the media would love it.
I think this sounds like a wonderful plan. I think EVERYONE should stay home. infact, I would like everyone to stay home, so that way when I show up, I get to elect whoever I want.
The problem with your plan, is that it doesn't matter if you show up. If fact, for everyone who doesn't show up, my vote counts more. If only two percent of the eligible people showed up, I would have way more influence than if everyone showed up.
I think you made an excellent point that Social Security isn't supposed to be a retirement fund. Though you missed one point about it. It was designed to help, but it wasn't designed to help EVERYONE. The orginal age to collect retirement benefits was 65 (I think), which was greater than the average life expectancy of the population.
Today, it has become an entitlement that we all "deserve" because we've put so much money in. However, the vast majority of people who draw social security benefits end up taking out far more than they ever put in.
Even worse than the piss poor keys on the HP49, is the fact that virtually none of the keys *do* anything directly. It's the same problem that the TI89/92 have: lots of power, but you have to go through 4 menus to do get to it. The HP48GX on the other hand, has lots of keys which directly access functions. Two key strokes and the entire stack of complex numbers is converted from rectagular to polar, and vice versa.
I did a direct comparison with my girlfriend. She had a TI89 and I had an HP48GX. To enter a matrix into her calculator and perform a couple simple operations, took about 20 more key strokes than my mine.
Anyone that actually knows what the hell is going on in calculus class can probably integrate faster by hand than with a calculator.
If you want numerical integration the calculator comes closer to winning, but only on really tough calulus problems. For undergrad math courses the most powerful calculator that anyone should use is a scientific. Graphing calculators may help people get the right answer, but it doesn't make them any smarter. It just lowers the bar for academic achievement. (Then again, that seems to be what achievement is lately, finding new ways to lower the standards.)
Any environmentalist who tells you that the human race is responsible for global warming, is doing nothing more than pushing a personal agenda.
Personally, I say that Global Warming is totally false because of Fargo, North Dakota, or more specifically Fargo's landscape. It's EXTREMELY flat. (There is only about a foot of elevation change ever mile.) This may sound kinda stange, but bear with me for a minute.
Why is Fargo flat? Well, because there was a huge covering the entire Red River Valley (where Fargo is at).
Where did all that water come from? It came for the large glacier that covered a large portion of the northern hemisphere.
When I was golfing last weekend in Fargo it was about 85 degrees out. Now that isn't very hot at all, unless you're a giant sheet of ice. Glaciers don't take well to 85 degree heat. (Even if it is only for 3 months.) So it seems to me, that it's a pretty good bet that at some point in the past the earth as colder. If it was colder then than it is now, it seems to follow pretty logically that there was some sort of warming that was in now way caused by cars, factories or people in general.
For the people who say we are just speeding it up, can you isolate all of the variables involved in gobal climate change? Is the energy output of the sun constant? Has there been slight deviation in the orbit of the earth? Those are just two variables that I can think of off the top of my head. And they would be damn hard to test.
I am a huge fan of pine, but it certainly is not a replacement for Outlook, especially in a business setting. Just simply reading e-mail, it's fine, but dealing with attachments is cumbersom in pine as compared to outlook. (It's not hard, but drag and drop takes a lot less time.)
Outlook makes my job alot easier every day. It does have problems with the VB scripts that piss everyone off, but those are not hard to avoid. Pine was great in the days of text only internet, but it does not fit well with today's workplace or home environment. Trying to make it suit that role is like saying "use lynx instead of Netscape/IE/Opera." It just doesn't work
That's a big negative. The last thing I read, said the Hubble won't be able to see extra-solar planets. There just wouldn't be enough energy being reflected to see it with the Hubble. The next generation of space based telescopes is supposed to be much more sensitive, so we can hope for pictures then.
Besides, in argument over mp3's being in circulation -- not all of us has the money to go buy EVERY album in existence if only there is one song on any given album they enjoy. With high prices (There's no way in hell I'm going to pay the $18/CD that any of the twec stores charge these days) that have been *constant* for the past 4-5 years, not everyone can go out and afford 50,000 cd's. Maybe you can, and if you can, you're lucky. For most of us, we'll try the music first.
1) Just becase you can't afford it, doesn't mean you have the right to steal it. I can't afford to buy a new BMW, but that doesn't give me the right to steal one from the car dealship.
2) If the high prices have been constant for 4-5 years that's amazing. Inflation says they should have gone up in price. CD's are like computers where the technology becomes obsolete.
3) Why do you need 50,000 songs? Assuming each song is 4 minutes long, you would have 138.89 days of music to listen to. If you listen to that music for 8 hours a day (which I would doubt that you do), it would take 1111 days to listen to it all. That's over 3 years of listening to music without hearing the same song twice. For that much music, a lot of people had to put in a lot of time. You don't *deserve* to hear that for free.
Slashdot Mirror
As I right this there are 127 comments and not one mentions the most underappreciated movie of all time
UHF
How can you go wrong with Wierd Al?
"OOhhh, you're a lucky, lucky, lucky little boy. You get to DRINK FROM THE FIREHOUSE!"
Dave,
Do you plan on making the trip to Grand Forks to visit the lift station that was named in your honor?
After your experience with the city-wide pot luck dinner, were you inspired to start something similar in Miami?
I liked the movie, but the whole time they were talking about why they were in the Matrix, the one thought that kept going through my head was "So they found a way around the 2nd law of thermodynamics, huh?"
Perhaps they use the "form of fusion" to supply the power to overcome the increase in entropy.
No. The term trolling is a fishing reference, not a fantacy reference. You put something out there and see if people will bite. Usually people do.
Not everyone who starts a business comes from a wealthy background. My friend's dad started out with a donation of 3 buckets of paint and a paint brush. He now owns and runs a very successful business. Most people can get loans from banks if they have a decent business plan. The number of people who can code is far greater than the number of people with a viable business plan.
I like Scilab because it's free, but it isn't a replacement for MATLAB. The toolboxes that are available for MATLAB far surpass anything that Scilab can offer. If you are going to do heavy-duty simulations, MATLAB is for you. If you rarely need to do a simulation and it's not very big, then Scilab should be your choice.
While managers may not always be technically inclined, that doesn't mean that they are stupid. There are a lot of briliant programmers and engineers that started their own companies and quickly drove them strait into the shitter because they didn't know a damn thing about business.
Why do large campanies have many layers of managers? Because it's necessary. If the top executives thought that the company could be run by two executives, a bunch of engineers and some manufacturing people, then that's what they would do because it would be cheaper. But it doesn't work that way.
I'll admit that there are stupid managers out there. But there are also a lot of really dumb programmers and engineers. Without some sort of management, no product would ever get shipped.
I would think the first step would be to recognize that the people in management aren't pinheads. Showing disrespect to people is generally a good way to ensure that there is no way in hell your idea will be accepted.
Actually I think they did. I remember reading an interview that said something to the effect, "We are working on a great villian for this one. A villian that is as great as Khan."
So here's to hoping that it's true!
Radiation would NOT be a problem. I've run plenty of computers with plastic cases and cases with giant open areas. It all boils down to how the system is grounded. If there is a return path for the current, it probably will have low radiated emissions.
For a better description look for online notes for a college EE class on Electromagnetic Compadibility or Signal Integrity.
Hell Yes!!!
Air travel is as safe as it gets. Even with the terrorist activity you are MUCH more likely to be in a car crash, or hit a deer, or trip and break your collar bone, than you are to be involved in a deadly crash on an aircraft.
SO YES!!! FLY!!! If you value your safety, you will not drive long distances when you can just as easily take a flight. Plus you'll be saving yourself tons of time. (Ok, so from Heathrow, you'd have to take a boat, but do you really want to take that long? And would it really be safer?)
I don't think this would make a very good Zero-G weapon. Momentum would have to be conserved in the firing of a pellet. If you fired a small pellet at 20 km/s the person firing it would feel a pretty big recoil.
If the pellet is 2 grams and the person firing it is about 100 kg (with equipment and the gun), then the person would have a velocity of 40 m/s in the direction opposite of the pellet. That's a heck of an acceleration for a person to undergo.
Perhaps you could mount it on a space station, but it would still probably give the space staton a pretty good jolt.
provolt
To everyone who said that your vote doesn't count... HA! I thank each and every one of you for making my vote count even more. :)
No if I can just get eveyone to not vote... I can vote myself in as dictator...
provolt
The Net is a tool. Nothing more. Looking to the Net for some sort of morality is ridiculous. It like looking to a hammer for some sort of guidance. The net is a powerful communications tool, but it is the people who make the net worthwhile.
As for creating a heaven on earth or the net creating a new revolution, I highly doubt it. To base a revolution on the net is pretty silly for two reasons:
1) People aren't very truthful on the net. That was the first leason I learned back in the days 2400 bps - people says stuff on the internet they don't believe and that they won't act on in real life.
2) You can shut the power off. No electricity, no internet. While I don't think the power is likey to go off and bring the net down, it is possible. Revolutions need a solid base, and that last time I checked, electrons didn't make a good base to build on.
provolt
I think this sounds like a wonderful plan. I think EVERYONE should stay home. infact, I would like everyone to stay home, so that way when I show up, I get to elect whoever I want.
The problem with your plan, is that it doesn't matter if you show up. If fact, for everyone who doesn't show up, my vote counts more. If only two percent of the eligible people showed up, I would have way more influence than if everyone showed up.
provolt
I think you made an excellent point that Social Security isn't supposed to be a retirement fund. Though you missed one point about it. It was designed to help, but it wasn't designed to help EVERYONE. The orginal age to collect retirement benefits was 65 (I think), which was greater than the average life expectancy of the population.
Today, it has become an entitlement that we all "deserve" because we've put so much money in. However, the vast majority of people who draw social security benefits end up taking out far more than they ever put in.
provolt
That is a feature that babelfish really needs.
Katzspeak to English.
Dumbass to English
If we could get the Dolphin to English translator that would be pretty sweet too.
Even worse than the piss poor keys on the HP49, is the fact that virtually none of the keys *do* anything directly. It's the same problem that the TI89/92 have: lots of power, but you have to go through 4 menus to do get to it. The HP48GX on the other hand, has lots of keys which directly access functions. Two key strokes and the entire stack of complex numbers is converted from rectagular to polar, and vice versa.
I did a direct comparison with my girlfriend. She had a TI89 and I had an HP48GX. To enter a matrix into her calculator and perform a couple simple operations, took about 20 more key strokes than my mine.
Anyone that actually knows what the hell is going on in calculus class can probably integrate faster by hand than with a calculator.
If you want numerical integration the calculator comes closer to winning, but only on really tough calulus problems. For undergrad math courses the most powerful calculator that anyone should use is a scientific. Graphing calculators may help people get the right answer, but it doesn't make them any smarter. It just lowers the bar for academic achievement. (Then again, that seems to be what achievement is lately, finding new ways to lower the standards.)
I personally think this experimentation should be done concurently with over experiments on how to survive the spaghetti effect.
provolt
provolt@provolt.net
Any environmentalist who tells you that the human race is responsible for global warming, is doing nothing more than pushing a personal agenda.
Personally, I say that Global Warming is totally false because of Fargo, North Dakota, or more specifically Fargo's landscape. It's EXTREMELY flat. (There is only about a foot of elevation change ever mile.) This may sound kinda stange, but bear with me for a minute.
Why is Fargo flat? Well, because there was a huge covering the entire Red River Valley (where Fargo is at).
Where did all that water come from? It came for the large glacier that covered a large portion of the northern hemisphere.
When I was golfing last weekend in Fargo it was about 85 degrees out. Now that isn't very hot at all, unless you're a giant sheet of ice. Glaciers don't take well to 85 degree heat. (Even if it is only for 3 months.) So it seems to me, that it's a pretty good bet that at some point in the past the earth as colder. If it was colder then than it is now, it seems to follow pretty logically that there was some sort of warming that was in now way caused by cars, factories or people in general.
For the people who say we are just speeding it up, can you isolate all of the variables involved in gobal climate change? Is the energy output of the sun constant? Has there been slight deviation in the orbit of the earth? Those are just two variables that I can think of off the top of my head. And they would be damn hard to test.
provolt
provolt@provolt.net
I am a huge fan of pine, but it certainly is not a replacement for Outlook, especially in a business setting. Just simply reading e-mail, it's fine, but dealing with attachments is cumbersom in pine as compared to outlook. (It's not hard, but drag and drop takes a lot less time.)
Outlook makes my job alot easier every day. It does have problems with the VB scripts that piss everyone off, but those are not hard to avoid. Pine was great in the days of text only internet, but it does not fit well with today's workplace or home environment. Trying to make it suit that role is like saying "use lynx instead of Netscape/IE/Opera." It just doesn't work
provolt
The ACLU is kinda dumb. Need proof, check out the Onion.
ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters
provolt
That's a big negative. The last thing I read, said the Hubble won't be able to see extra-solar planets. There just wouldn't be enough energy being reflected to see it with the Hubble. The next generation of space based telescopes is supposed to be much more sensitive, so we can hope for pictures then.
provolt
1) Just becase you can't afford it, doesn't mean you have the right to steal it. I can't afford to buy a new BMW, but that doesn't give me the right to steal one from the car dealship.
2) If the high prices have been constant for 4-5 years that's amazing. Inflation says they should have gone up in price. CD's are like computers where the technology becomes obsolete.
3) Why do you need 50,000 songs? Assuming each song is 4 minutes long, you would have 138.89 days of music to listen to. If you listen to that music for 8 hours a day (which I would doubt that you do), it would take 1111 days to listen to it all. That's over 3 years of listening to music without hearing the same song twice. For that much music, a lot of people had to put in a lot of time. You don't *deserve* to hear that for free.
provolt