When you've got hot, windy conditions, you have a situation that you can't cope with by sitting on a lawnmower every so often. You can't just cut down every tree in the state. Sparks and cinders get carried a hell of a long way, as we saw here in Australia last February.
The only way to get it under control is to watch out for points of ignition, like carelessly discarded cigarette butts or asswipes who think it's neat to start fires on purpose.
If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits...
Well, you could possibly argue that it isn't. I haven't read bunnie's argument, because his blog is slashdotted at the moment, so here's my reasoning FWIW: OK, it takes 3 codons (base pairs) to make one amino acid, but there are 4 bases in DNA or RNA. So in the first place we are working from a tetragesimal code rather then binary. If we assigned numerical values for these (0 to 3) then you obviously need more than two bits to represent a value of 2 in base 4.
How you can tell when a slashdotter is lying. A 6 digit ID and he claims to have a girlfriend.
Yeah, right. My ID has 6 digits, and I've been married for 20 years. Plenty of time (if I were inclined towards mid-life crises) to get divorced and find another girlfriend.
if a manufacturer can not design a cell phone to withstand normal use by normal people, they should not be the business of manufacturing cell phones.
That seems to be something Motorola has got right. My wife and both have Razr2 V9 phones, and I have always been a bit suspicious of their shininess.
However, a couple of weeks ago, my wife managed to drop her phone in the path of a tractor I was driving. Sure, the glass splintered due to the "external force" as one would expect. But apart from that (and a few scratches), the device is still perfectly functional. Call that an endorsement if you will, but I don't believe the iPhone would stand up to the same treatment.
That's not entirely true. I started out in programming (in Assembler, Fortran and COBOL) when EVERYTHING WAS IN UPPER CASE on the mainframe computers I was using. There was no lower-case option on my punch-cards, and the same goes for my printers. (Though some of them were the fastest printers I have ever worked with, even to this day.)
But I never liked uppercase, and was happy as a pig in shit when I got to play around with C.
That's what I was thinking: Crazy person uses what little power her position has to make life miserable for coworkers. Coworkers complain. Boss decides crazy person is disrupting business.
Agreed, but simple justice suggests that if a complaint is made, the object of the complaint should always be allowed to see the substance of it. Right of reply and all that.
I don't think I would have made a very good Catholic. Apart from the fact that my cultural background is to regard Catholics as idolaters, I prefer my wafers with some nice cheese on them.
I wonder if there is such a thing as an anti-placebo effect. Some time ago, on a visit to my physiotherapy practitioner, the lady offered to try acupuncture as a remedy to my shoulder condition. Since there was no extra charge, I alowed her to go ahead, assuming that although I perceived this kind of treatment as nothing more than mumbo-jumbo, it could at least do no harm.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the treatment was immediately effective. The precept of a placebo effect shouldn't work here, since I was quite hostile to the notion, but the treatment worked anyway.
Back in the day when that was the normal mode of writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar was a lot less consistent then people seem to remember.
I think your timeline is a bit out of whack. I grew up writing with dip-pens and fountain-pens (in as much as I admit to having grown up), and tolerance for aberrations in spelling etc was a lot lower than it is now. For instance, we would have been taken to task for using American language conventions, where nowadays (except in a lot of academic journals) most people would let them pass without comment.
Well, even without knowing how AFM actually works, the pictures are still fairly gobsmackingly awesome. It's quite instructive to see how they show the terminal rings as more "open" due to the way the charges are distributed within the molecule.
I would argue the Industrial Revolution was the last true "revolution", and it's been virtually continuous change ever since then.
Actually, there are many historians who assert that the Industrial Revolution didn't exist; that the idea is a modern construction of how series of events were connected. The revolution (if one must use the term) is all one piece, and pigeonholing history into little boxes like this becomes self-defeating and meaningless.
I was formerly unconvinced of this, but my wife (who happens to be a PhD history academic) pointed me in the direction of lots of papers, and the evidence has led me to change my mind.
Quite possibly. I would suggest reading "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban. He actually manages to turn something like that kind of language into powerful prose.
Actually, I recommend reading all of his books, they're good literature and full of surprises.
Now through the internet, anyone with a will to write can be published.
And, of course, that leads us full-circle to a corollary: If you want to keep a text private, write it with a fountain-pen in a notebook, and keep it in a safe place.
But still, kids are reading a lot more now than they did back when I was young.
Which is exactly the point of the article.;-) Yes, I know this is Slashdot, and etiquette requires that we don't read the article, but this one actually isn't too far off-beam.
But the prof's claim: "As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper." is slightly doubtful.
It might be largely accounted for by the fact that competition for university places is much more intense than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Plus the fact that students are aware that if they have a problem with their writing, most of the more egregious offences are easily picked up by grammar or spell-checkers, which were obviously unavailable to those of us who used dip-pens and inkwells. But I suspect it might only be a matter of time before smileys or other emoticons become manifest in "serious" work.
As she correctly says, it's a matter of knowing your audience. I wouldn't bother with emoticons when I am communicating with someone whom I know will appreciate subtle expressions, say, of wry irony, but some audiences need to be poked in the eye with a ";-)" to get the message across.
All it means is that the good professor Andrea Lunsford has based her conclusions on incomplete data. If she hangs around on Slashdot for a while, she'll realise that literacy is a thing of the past.
Seems like this could be a killer technique for those robot-gladiator competitions, too. Maybe combined with some sort of stiletto to impale its opponent. Maybe it's already been done...
Slashdot Mirror
When you've got hot, windy conditions, you have a situation that you can't cope with by sitting on a lawnmower every so often. You can't just cut down every tree in the state. Sparks and cinders get carried a hell of a long way, as we saw here in Australia last February.
The only way to get it under control is to watch out for points of ignition, like carelessly discarded cigarette butts or asswipes who think it's neat to start fires on purpose.
If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits...
Well, you could possibly argue that it isn't. I haven't read bunnie's argument, because his blog is slashdotted at the moment, so here's my reasoning FWIW: OK, it takes 3 codons (base pairs) to make one amino acid, but there are 4 bases in DNA or RNA. So in the first place we are working from a tetragesimal code rather then binary. If we assigned numerical values for these (0 to 3) then you obviously need more than two bits to represent a value of 2 in base 4.
It's just you. ;-)
How you can tell when a slashdotter is lying. A 6 digit ID and he claims to have a girlfriend.
Yeah, right. My ID has 6 digits, and I've been married for 20 years. Plenty of time (if I were inclined towards mid-life crises) to get divorced and find another girlfriend.
For the rest of the world, even the English speaking world, "ya'll" isn't even a word.
s/even/especially/
Lots of other businesses have "destroy the Earth" in their business plan. Why should commercial space ventures be any different?
Hmmm, let me see... Nothing to do with the fact that they don't have an alternative planet to live on.
...for the entertainment of the Slashbot:
The bee is such a busy soul,
He has no time for birth control.
And that is why, at times like these,
There are so many sons of bees.
if a manufacturer can not design a cell phone to withstand normal use by normal people, they should not be the business of manufacturing cell phones.
That seems to be something Motorola has got right. My wife and both have Razr2 V9 phones, and I have always been a bit suspicious of their shininess.
However, a couple of weeks ago, my wife managed to drop her phone in the path of a tractor I was driving. Sure, the glass splintered due to the "external force" as one would expect. But apart from that (and a few scratches), the device is still perfectly functional. Call that an endorsement if you will, but I don't believe the iPhone would stand up to the same treatment.
You learn to live with it.
That's not entirely true. I started out in programming (in Assembler, Fortran and COBOL) when EVERYTHING WAS IN UPPER CASE on the mainframe computers I was using. There was no lower-case option on my punch-cards, and the same goes for my printers. (Though some of them were the fastest printers I have ever worked with, even to this day.)
But I never liked uppercase, and was happy as a pig in shit when I got to play around with C.
That's what I was thinking: Crazy person uses what little power her position has to make life miserable for coworkers. Coworkers complain. Boss decides crazy person is disrupting business.
Agreed, but simple justice suggests that if a complaint is made, the object of the complaint should always be allowed to see the substance of it. Right of reply and all that.
I don't see this as a story about someone being fired for using caps lock
;-)
Indeed. Even though the use of caps lock merits a summary hanging, it does not merit sacking.
This is a pure UDP implementation, feel the speed!
If you're concerned about speed, I would suggest running trials of the African Swallow vs. the European Swallow.
I don't think I would have made a very good Catholic. Apart from the fact that my cultural background is to regard Catholics as idolaters, I prefer my wafers with some nice cheese on them.
Do not underestimate the power of the placebo.
I wonder if there is such a thing as an anti-placebo effect. Some time ago, on a visit to my physiotherapy practitioner, the lady offered to try acupuncture as a remedy to my shoulder condition. Since there was no extra charge, I alowed her to go ahead, assuming that although I perceived this kind of treatment as nothing more than mumbo-jumbo, it could at least do no harm.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the treatment was immediately effective. The precept of a placebo effect shouldn't work here, since I was quite hostile to the notion, but the treatment worked anyway.
So, how will you ever hook up a computer to your brain?
Who wants to? I can't think of anything dumber.
Back in the day when that was the normal mode of writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar was a lot less consistent then people seem to remember.
I think your timeline is a bit out of whack. I grew up writing with dip-pens and fountain-pens (in as much as I admit to having grown up), and tolerance for aberrations in spelling etc was a lot lower than it is now. For instance, we would have been taken to task for using American language conventions, where nowadays (except in a lot of academic journals) most people would let them pass without comment.
Well, even without knowing how AFM actually works, the pictures are still fairly gobsmackingly awesome. It's quite instructive to see how they show the terminal rings as more "open" due to the way the charges are distributed within the molecule.
I can't think of anything to have come out IN MY LIFETIME (Last 20 years) that's really been WORLD changing for me...
:-D
That is really funny. ROFL. At least it is for someone several times your age. Thing is, you are probably right.
Of course, you are probably too young to remember the iPod coming out.
I would argue the Industrial Revolution was the last true "revolution", and it's been virtually continuous change ever since then.
Actually, there are many historians who assert that the Industrial Revolution didn't exist; that the idea is a modern construction of how series of events were connected. The revolution (if one must use the term) is all one piece, and pigeonholing history into little boxes like this becomes self-defeating and meaningless.
I was formerly unconvinced of this, but my wife (who happens to be a PhD history academic) pointed me in the direction of lots of papers, and the evidence has led me to change my mind.
...and the advertising industry behaving as if it is functionally illiterate AND on drugs.
Are you saying it isn't?
And dis is how people wil writ in da future.
Quite possibly. I would suggest reading "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban. He actually manages to turn something like that kind of language into powerful prose.
Actually, I recommend reading all of his books, they're good literature and full of surprises.
Now through the internet, anyone with a will to write can be published.
And, of course, that leads us full-circle to a corollary: If you want to keep a text private, write it with a fountain-pen in a notebook, and keep it in a safe place.
But still, kids are reading a lot more now than they did back when I was young.
;-) Yes, I know this is Slashdot, and etiquette requires that we don't read the article, but this one actually isn't too far off-beam.
Which is exactly the point of the article.
But the prof's claim: "As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper." is slightly doubtful.
It might be largely accounted for by the fact that competition for university places is much more intense than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Plus the fact that students are aware that if they have a problem with their writing, most of the more egregious offences are easily picked up by grammar or spell-checkers, which were obviously unavailable to those of us who used dip-pens and inkwells. But I suspect it might only be a matter of time before smileys or other emoticons become manifest in "serious" work.
As she correctly says, it's a matter of knowing your audience. I wouldn't bother with emoticons when I am communicating with someone whom I know will appreciate subtle expressions, say, of wry irony, but some audiences need to be poked in the eye with a ";-)" to get the message across.
I can't tell if that's textspeak or retard speak.
;-)
All it means is that the good professor Andrea Lunsford has based her conclusions on incomplete data. If she hangs around on Slashdot for a while, she'll realise that literacy is a thing of the past.
*ducks*
Seems like this could be a killer technique for those robot-gladiator competitions, too. Maybe combined with some sort of stiletto to impale its opponent. Maybe it's already been done...