One day a fan on your computer fails, and you never noticed, because you couldn't hear the squealing of the tortured bearings...
The interesting thing is with modern mobos (which control fan speed based on how hard the cpu is working/generating heat) you can actually tell to a point what's going on. I can set a compile going, go sit on the couch and read a book, and tell when it finishes (the cpu fan noise goes down and the hard drive noise goes up briefly - I run Gentoo where it writes the files at the end of the compile/emerge).
I tried out a pair of the Bose headphones once, and they are amazing. A little out of my price range, considering I don't really need them, but on my wish list nonetheless.
Now I need a pair that cancels out the muzak at work but still allows me to hear most everything else. Oh, and they have to be stealth headphones, maybe looking a lot like more modern hearing aids.
/boss "Hearing problems"?
/me "Well...yes. Mostly psychotic, erm, I mean aging, yeah, that's it."
I looks like there's only one other object, 2000 OO67, that is remotely similar in its distance at aphelion, which is an SKBO; 2003 VB12 is half as far away at aphelion.
Doesn't that technically make Sedna an SKBO?
I haven't kept up like I should (work sucks) what *is* the theorized (fuzzy) inner boundary of the Oort cloud's inner members now?
Thank you, I missed the most distant part. Seeing "130 billion km" and thinking "detection at" made my brain stop functioning for a instant, I guess:)
I was just thinking; we detected Sedna at nearly it's closest part in it's orbit (and probably wouldn't have detected it as easily or at all if it had been much further out). Is it just me, or that say something about the statistical distribution of larger bodies at those distances? Either that or it's a helluva coincidence.
(Maybe not, but I'm too work-wiped to do the math right now)
Um, the article said it was 13 billion miles out, not 130 billion (now discovering something that size 130 billion miles out would be a real hell of an achievement:)
There's some theorizing that this may be part of the inner Oort shell; I think it more likely that at that distance it's an outer member of the Kuiper bodies.
Given the highly elliptical orbit, it's size, and it's apparently odd surface color, it's also possible that it's a body captured by the sun some hundreds of millions or billions of years ago. Now *that'd* be neat.
LOL. How come so many people from all over are moving there then? Mexican spanish is well on it's way to becoming the official second language.....
Didn't Rudy Perpich once say something to the effect that Minnesota would become a highly-taxed state when hell froze over?
Well:)
(native MN'n, 32 years there, now living somewhere better. MN used to be a great place to live. Well, I found somewhere better:) and we're saying the same thing about people moving *here*:)
Yeah, it's flyover country. The blackflies, deerflies, and particularly the mosquitoes know that very well. I will never understand how they survive during the 6 months or so of the year that it *is* a frozen, hellish tundra (I've lived in far N. MN and NW MN, I know what I'm talking about:) *grin*
Eh, damned funny post, dude.:) (Yeah, I saw "Fargo" -:) hell, I went to school there briefly. Stupid movie - but funny as hell).
(I do sometimes miss farmland MN...some great people out there, those that are left. I don't miss the stuck-in-the-50s political rapefest a lot of cities/towns are becoming... but that's a whole 'nother rant on it's own )
Jesus, moderators, don't waste your mod points on shit like this. Use them to mod up posts that deserve modding. This dickhead doesn't deserve the recognition that modding him Troll provides him with.
Sigh. Read the moderator guidelines (you know where they are)
Totally agreed. This has nearly ZERO resemblance to Isaac's writing.
It looks to me like just another stupid "technology can be dangerous" clone-script. Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!
Why did they warp it so badly? Is it another of those "public needs violent action movies with no plot" things?
Sheeeeeeeezus. I am most definitely NOT going to pay money to see this movie. I may rent it after the DVD is out - for really cheap - just so I can laugh at it. Argh. This is even worse than Lost in Space was./rant
-Offtopic
Hey, Xine did not want to play this movie (5-10 second choppy stills rather than playing) but mplayer played it just fine. Does anyone know why this is? Both xine and mplayer are up to date versions. This is the first time since a couple years ago I've had this problem wrt to xine and.mov files. It's utterly weird./Offtopic
Not that it was worth the 10 minutes of fucking around just to watch the trailer *grumble* - they have absolutely slaughtered the story. Bastards.
jayhawk88, I'd hope someone with Asimov's estate will get this disassociated from his name. It transcends awful, Will Smith or not. It might do well as a stand-alone plotless action flick, but it's shameful that it's associated with Isaac's book. Dangit, Will is a pretty good actor. He isn't that hard up for parts, is he?
Back in the PII days, maybe. Not anymore. CPUs are becoming sufficiently complex that clock speed simply doesn't mean what it used to. Witness how the lower clocked AMD CPUs are delivering very nearly the same performance as Intels' higher clocked ones.
I find it kind of ironic that Intel is moving to the same scheme that AMD has been upbraided for using....
If SCO/Darl/Chris had approached IBM and politely said "Hey, look, if you give us $X so we can retire we'll give you the rights to our Unixware code, and you can opensource it if you want" I'd bet that IBM would have jumped at it. It would have benefitted IBM and everyone else, and I think it likely that IBM would have realized that (they certainly understand the benefits of supporting opensource).
SCO fucked up badly and has shown just what kind of greedy mofos they are in pursuing this whole business. They are so wrapped up in their own fantasy world of their own importance that they can't even get a whiff of reality. Stupid fools.
Personally, I would end software patents for starters... software is just mathematics, and anyone who says otherwise is spouting nonsense. I do not agree that mathematics should ever be patented. We know that it is not necessary to drive mathematical innovation, after all. Ask Euclid and company. I can only wonder how much mathematical progress would have been lost if all the works of antiquity could not have been preserved... we had all too few copies of the great mathematical works to learn from for too long, after all...
I agree. Software patents are stifling creativity.
I'm going to be a bit of a pedant, however. Code is just mathematics. Software is creation based off that math, more art than anything else. I know a lot of people disagree with that, but think about this: If software *is* art, then copyrights will apply, but patents should not (how can you patent a Mona Lisa?). The act of creating something new using existing tools should be regarded as art rather than as an industrial process and should be copyrightable, but not patentable.
What people didn't realize then, and which many fail to still realize now, is that all of the problems of compatibility, exhangability and interoperatibilty are created by this IP regime to begin with. Only when one sees that these issues are contrived issues, issued which have no technical merit, and are issues which themselves promote and prolong their own very being, does one begin to see how self-servingt the IP regime really is.
That was probably the most insightful paragraph I've ever seen written by a slashdotter. You simply HAVE to repost this elsewhere, somewhere where Anderer will see it - that statement alone might be the clue he and others need to start understanding why people write free software.
I understand your point. However, raising kids is not evolution, and my view on it is that there is far too much emphasis on medication and far too little emphasis on taking responsibility for raising your kids (in this country at least, not sure about elsewhere). Having seen what drugs like Ritalin are doing to the kids of friends of mine, it's something that really pisses me off. I've also heard far too many stories about doctors prescribing this or that to parents who simply can't handle their children, because they aren't willing to try to understand them or to change their stuck-in-the-mud viewpoints about the world.
We have failed if our children are only as intelligent as we are.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. If your kid grows up mentally and emotionally balanced, and makes a good happy life for themselves, what fucking difference does it make how intelligent they are, or how much they "contribute to society" - which is usually what most proponents of enhancing the intelligence of kids mean by their propondering? Have all the child psychs and drugs and all this shit really made kids' lives better?
Look, man, I grew up before this country got overrun by child psychologists and behaviorial modification via prescribed biochemistry. To be perfectly honest I think kids back then were a helluva lot more well off than they are now (and I'm also talking about our fucked up educational system). It used to be anathema to even *consider* letting your kids takes drugs that would alter their behavior:)
Mod parent up (I hate saying that about ACs, but what the hell).
I'm starting to wonder if Anderer wasn't being deliberately obtuse in that statement.
On the one hand, you and others are right about what the language technically means, that he doesn't believe that small companies stand a chance in our lawsuit-happy country. He's probably right about that, unfortunately. Litigious bastards like SCO will always be with us.
OTOH, taken the other way, it does come across as a veiled threat against FOSS, that companies like Microsoft stand to gain from side-funding companies to instigate lawsuits against the FOSS world. Litigious bastards. Fuck them.
The Gripping Hand is that Anderer would be more of a fool than he already is to clarify what he meant publically - he'd be screwed either way - so it'll just stand as more of what it is: FUD.
in general it is natural to do everything we can to improve the lot of our offspring.
That was my point. Unfortunately too many parents nowadays seem to think that making their children smarter/nicer/better-behaved involves drugs and therapy rather than stimulation and involvement. Not everyone, possibly not even a majority, but an awfully high minority do.
Considering the attacks on intelligence in the US media and highschools throughout the Western world, I might even buy it, but it's damn sad that you're promoting it.
What, it's damn sad that I'm promoting parents involving themselves in educating their children, and that I consider it more important than rushing out and giving them every new drug/product that comes along? WTF?
And we do so much to improve ourselves with our technology after birth that it is not a significant stretch to apply technology before birth.
It is a bad stretch when we have no idea what the long term effects of that technology are. I'd even go so far as to call it stupid to do so. Fer fucks' sake, raising reasonably intelligent, decent kids does not require umpteen drugs, supplements, special ed, uber-ed, or whatever. It mostly requires that you be the example they learn from, and that you spend time with them. How the hell do you think it was done before all this extra shit was available? Via Voodoo?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn funny post, irokitt.
One day a fan on your computer fails, and you never noticed, because you couldn't hear the squealing of the tortured bearings...
The interesting thing is with modern mobos (which control fan speed based on how hard the cpu is working/generating heat) you can actually tell to a point what's going on. I can set a compile going, go sit on the couch and read a book, and tell when it finishes (the cpu fan noise goes down and the hard drive noise goes up briefly - I run Gentoo where it writes the files at the end of the compile/emerge).
SB
Now I need a pair that cancels out the muzak at work but still allows me to hear most everything else. Oh, and they have to be stealth headphones, maybe looking a lot like more modern hearing aids.
SB
I looks like there's only one other object, 2000 OO67, that is remotely similar in its distance at aphelion, which is an SKBO; 2003 VB12 is half as far away at aphelion.
Doesn't that technically make Sedna an SKBO?
I haven't kept up like I should (work sucks) what *is* the theorized (fuzzy) inner boundary of the Oort cloud's inner members now?
SB
Oh, and mod parent up further...deserves it for pointing out the distinction (technically we're both right)
SB
Thank you, I missed the most distant part. Seeing "130 billion km" and thinking "detection at" made my brain stop functioning for a instant, I guess :)
I was just thinking; we detected Sedna at nearly it's closest part in it's orbit (and probably wouldn't have detected it as easily or at all if it had been much further out). Is it just me, or that say something about the statistical distribution of larger bodies at those distances? Either that or it's a helluva coincidence.
(Maybe not, but I'm too work-wiped to do the math right now)
SB
Um, the article said it was 13 billion miles out, not 130 billion (now discovering something that size 130 billion miles out would be a real hell of an achievement :)
There's some theorizing that this may be part of the inner Oort shell; I think it more likely that at that distance it's an outer member of the Kuiper bodies.
Given the highly elliptical orbit, it's size, and it's apparently odd surface color, it's also possible that it's a body captured by the sun some hundreds of millions or billions of years ago. Now *that'd* be neat.
SB
I'm going to dig an even deeper borrow!
Dude, getting yourself deeper in debt is NOT a way to stay unnoticed. Just trust me on this.
SB
It can be fun to watch.
I've had rant posts immediately modded flamebait, and 12 hours later they're up to ++ Insightful. And vice versa.
Guess it just shows the diversity of slashdot.
SB
Guess Duke Nukem (Forever) better get out his thermal enviro suit *shudders, lived in N. MN too long*
SB
LOL. How come so many people from all over are moving there then? Mexican spanish is well on it's way to becoming the official second language.....
:)
:) and we're saying the same thing about people moving *here* :)
:) *grin*
:) (Yeah, I saw "Fargo" - :) hell, I went to school there briefly. Stupid movie - but funny as hell).
Didn't Rudy Perpich once say something to the effect that Minnesota would become a highly-taxed state when hell froze over?
Well
(native MN'n, 32 years there, now living somewhere better. MN used to be a great place to live. Well, I found somewhere better
Yeah, it's flyover country. The blackflies, deerflies, and particularly the mosquitoes know that very well. I will never understand how they survive during the 6 months or so of the year that it *is* a frozen, hellish tundra (I've lived in far N. MN and NW MN, I know what I'm talking about
Eh, damned funny post, dude.
(I do sometimes miss farmland MN...some great people out there, those that are left. I don't miss the stuck-in-the-50s political rapefest a lot of cities/towns are becoming... but that's a whole 'nother rant on it's own )
Cheers,
SB
Jesus, moderators, don't waste your mod points on shit like this. Use them to mod up posts that deserve modding. This dickhead doesn't deserve the recognition that modding him Troll provides him with.
Sigh. Read the moderator guidelines (you know where they are)
SB
That would make sense; from my view of the trailer, the only thing the movie has in common with Isaac's stories is the title.
It might make it as a action flick, but an adaptation it's not.
SB
Totally agreed. This has nearly ZERO resemblance to Isaac's writing.
It looks to me like just another stupid "technology can be dangerous" clone-script. Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!
Why did they warp it so badly? Is it another of those "public needs violent action movies with no plot" things?
Sheeeeeeeezus. I am most definitely NOT going to pay money to see this movie. I may rent it after the DVD is out - for really cheap - just so I can laugh at it. Argh. This is even worse than Lost in Space was.
-Offtopic
Hey, Xine did not want to play this movie (5-10 second choppy stills rather than playing) but mplayer played it just fine. Does anyone know why this is? Both xine and mplayer are up to date versions. This is the first time since a couple years ago I've had this problem wrt to xine and
Not that it was worth the 10 minutes of fucking around just to watch the trailer *grumble* - they have absolutely slaughtered the story. Bastards.
jayhawk88, I'd hope someone with Asimov's estate will get this disassociated from his name. It transcends awful, Will Smith or not. It might do well as a stand-alone plotless action flick, but it's shameful that it's associated with Isaac's book. Dangit, Will is a pretty good actor. He isn't that hard up for parts, is he?
SB
How would we notice? All the inertia generated by rotational corpses nowadays is canceling out.
I daresay that it's possible we could use the gravitational vortex being generated by Jefferson's corpse as a time travel device
SB
Yo Mods, I think his comment was supposed to be a funny takeoff on the SCO situation.
If I'm wrong, RickZ, correct me...
SB
I propose that all future cpu ratings use bogomips.
Hey, it's just as accurate as the rest of the numbers...
*ducks*
SB
The MHz race at least had some truth to it.
Back in the PII days, maybe. Not anymore. CPUs are becoming sufficiently complex that clock speed simply doesn't mean what it used to. Witness how the lower clocked AMD CPUs are delivering very nearly the same performance as Intels' higher clocked ones.
I find it kind of ironic that Intel is moving to the same scheme that AMD has been upbraided for using....
SB
Yeah; but Anderer just doesn't get it.
If SCO/Darl/Chris had approached IBM and politely said "Hey, look, if you give us $X so we can retire we'll give you the rights to our Unixware code, and you can opensource it if you want" I'd bet that IBM would have jumped at it. It would have benefitted IBM and everyone else, and I think it likely that IBM would have realized that (they certainly understand the benefits of supporting opensource).
SCO fucked up badly and has shown just what kind of greedy mofos they are in pursuing this whole business. They are so wrapped up in their own fantasy world of their own importance that they can't even get a whiff of reality. Stupid fools.
SB
Personally, I would end software patents for starters... software is just mathematics, and anyone who says otherwise is spouting nonsense. I do not agree that mathematics should ever be patented. We know that it is not necessary to drive mathematical innovation, after all. Ask Euclid and company. I can only wonder how much mathematical progress would have been lost if all the works of antiquity could not have been preserved... we had all too few copies of the great mathematical works to learn from for too long, after all...
I agree. Software patents are stifling creativity.
I'm going to be a bit of a pedant, however. Code is just mathematics. Software is creation based off that math, more art than anything else. I know a lot of people disagree with that, but think about this: If software *is* art, then copyrights will apply, but patents should not (how can you patent a Mona Lisa?). The act of creating something new using existing tools should be regarded as art rather than as an industrial process and should be copyrightable, but not patentable.
Anyway IANAL IANASE and all that
SB
That was one fabulous post.
What people didn't realize then, and which many fail to still realize now, is that all of the problems of compatibility, exhangability and interoperatibilty are created by this IP regime to begin with. Only when one sees that these issues are contrived issues, issued which have no technical merit, and are issues which themselves promote and prolong their own very being, does one begin to see how self-servingt the IP regime really is.
That was probably the most insightful paragraph I've ever seen written by a slashdotter. You simply HAVE to repost this elsewhere, somewhere where Anderer will see it - that statement alone might be the clue he and others need to start understanding why people write free software.
Hats off and deep bow to you, sir.
SB
I understand your point. However, raising kids is not evolution, and my view on it is that there is far too much emphasis on medication and far too little emphasis on taking responsibility for raising your kids (in this country at least, not sure about elsewhere). Having seen what drugs like Ritalin are doing to the kids of friends of mine, it's something that really pisses me off. I've also heard far too many stories about doctors prescribing this or that to parents who simply can't handle their children, because they aren't willing to try to understand them or to change their stuck-in-the-mud viewpoints about the world.
:)
We have failed if our children are only as intelligent as we are.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. If your kid grows up mentally and emotionally balanced, and makes a good happy life for themselves, what fucking difference does it make how intelligent they are, or how much they "contribute to society" - which is usually what most proponents of enhancing the intelligence of kids mean by their propondering? Have all the child psychs and drugs and all this shit really made kids' lives better?
Look, man, I grew up before this country got overrun by child psychologists and behaviorial modification via prescribed biochemistry. To be perfectly honest I think kids back then were a helluva lot more well off than they are now (and I'm also talking about our fucked up educational system). It used to be anathema to even *consider* letting your kids takes drugs that would alter their behavior
Anyway, thanks for some reasonable discourse...
SB
Mod parent up (I hate saying that about ACs, but what the hell).
I'm starting to wonder if Anderer wasn't being deliberately obtuse in that statement.
On the one hand, you and others are right about what the language technically means, that he doesn't believe that small companies stand a chance in our lawsuit-happy country. He's probably right about that, unfortunately. Litigious bastards like SCO will always be with us.
OTOH, taken the other way, it does come across as a veiled threat against FOSS, that companies like Microsoft stand to gain from side-funding companies to instigate lawsuits against the FOSS world. Litigious bastards. Fuck them.
The Gripping Hand is that Anderer would be more of a fool than he already is to clarify what he meant publically - he'd be screwed either way - so it'll just stand as more of what it is: FUD.
SB
n/t
in general it is natural to do everything we can to improve the lot of our offspring.
That was my point. Unfortunately too many parents nowadays seem to think that making their children smarter/nicer/better-behaved involves drugs and therapy rather than stimulation and involvement. Not everyone, possibly not even a majority, but an awfully high minority do.
Considering the attacks on intelligence in the US media and highschools throughout the Western world, I might even buy it, but it's damn sad that you're promoting it.
What, it's damn sad that I'm promoting parents involving themselves in educating their children, and that I consider it more important than rushing out and giving them every new drug/product that comes along? WTF?
And we do so much to improve ourselves with our technology after birth that it is not a significant stretch to apply technology before birth.
It is a bad stretch when we have no idea what the long term effects of that technology are. I'd even go so far as to call it stupid to do so. Fer fucks' sake, raising reasonably intelligent, decent kids does not require umpteen drugs, supplements, special ed, uber-ed, or whatever. It mostly requires that you be the example they learn from, and that you spend time with them. How the hell do you think it was done before all this extra shit was available? Via Voodoo?
SB
we have to take back the vocabulary of nurture: you pay your dues, not get ripped off for taxes
*snort*
Try teaching that to your kids. Hell, try teaching that to most adults.
Give me a break.
SB