Commercial skipping and being able to back shows up to cd/dvd/pc without resorting to hacks. Both together I'd consider well worth the extra money. I already have one of the older replaytv models which allows both, but if that wasn't available I would have put one of these together.
For me, ebooks and notes. I find it nice to have access to a couple novels on the off chance I find myself waiting for someone. And I'm fast enough with a virtual keyboard that it's not much of a problem to take notes in it. It can be really handy having all the class notes from the past year in an easy to carry, keyword searchable format.
Emulated games can be fun too, as well as serving the occasional purpose of distracting girlfriends when one's not in a talkitive mood.
I have an older model ipaq (3650) and for the most part it's fit my needs perfectly. The one thing I've never been able to find though is a nice flashcard/quiz program which I could add or edit definitions in on either the ipaq or on a desktop linux system. The only flash card programs I've been able to find either do not allow editing of the source material on the PocketPC, or can only be used on the desktop in windows, not linux.
And yes, I know it wouldn't be 'that' hard to just write one myself - but I'm really short on free time. I don't suppose anyone knows of a program that would fit these requirements?
And if it doesn't get added, what web designer will use a format that can't be viewed by 93% of their users?
Depends on who the target audience is. I personally wouldn't use a format 93% of the visiters couldn't view. But that's also not much of an issue for me. The only animated content I've ever used on my page is for examples of sprite animation in the format used in an engine I wrote. The somewhat technical content and crossplatform support skewed the viewership heavily away from IE. I scrapped that aspect of the page when mng support was removed from the gecko clients, but before then I think only about 20-30% were using IE. A significant amount, but not enough to bother myself with for something I do for fun. While I agree going the route of apng for a comercial site aimed at the general public would be foolish, thankfully we're not all targeting the general public.
Out of curiosity, did this intervention by the state government make the papers as well? I'm guessing so by the fact that you know about it, but this being slashdot I don't think it's a totally safe assumption that you might not personally know him. I ask because I'm always a little annoyed when papers bring something like this to the public attention, then abandon the fellows when that attention winds up bringing negitive consiquences - themselves often interesting.
I debated answering this, because I know I'm going to be casting myself in a bad light. But, what can I say, these are the experiences I've had. I think the reason this company is reinforcing the stereotype is because there's a large amount of truth to it. Looking over the list of features, my first thought was that it was teaching almost exactly the things a guy needs to learn in order to bullshit his way through a relationship with the average woman. To be fair, your example of the virtual boyfriend too would be a perfect example of the average man as well. Most people, male or female, don't rise very far from their base impulses. They don't like to learn, they lack the willpower to work at improving themselves, their drive to reproduction is the primary motivator in life, and above all they hate anything which is going to require much thought. I'll call them the target audience for action movies (male) and romantic comedies/realityTV (female). The big difference is that for some reason, as uncommon as it is for a man to rise above that, it seems to be even more so for a woman to. The end result is any independently thinking woman having a larger base of potential partners than her male counterpart would. Statistically even an intelligent male is going to almost always wind up with the romantic comedy girl the game is portraying. I don't think it's any surprise that many of us are slightly bitter and jaded as a result.
Or at least that's the theory to explain my own experiences. It's been a very long time since I've dated a girl who didn't fit the description offered by this game almost perfectly. And it's not for lack of experience, there's been a lot. But, as sad as it is, I think it's the reality for most guys out there. While slashdot might not be the best example, take a look at the male to female ratio here. The same seems to hold true for almost anything that requires an entry level of even slightly above average interest and knowledge - no matter if the subject is mechanical, literary or health related. In a perfect world there would be a huge number of woman such as yourself out there, there's not.
Be sure to send your activated killbot to the guy, with a nice note explaining why for legal purposes he will not be able to flip the 'evil' switch off.
I took a look, and I have to say that I'm glad you pointed this out! I'd always wished something like this existed, especially given the horrible selection of radio stations (country,western or country and western) in my area.
I wish the blurb would have mentioned the recent dvd release of How's Your News, which Matt and Trey funded. The basic premise is that a group of people with various mental disabilities go on a tour of America and interview people along the way. They're not prompted at all, they and the people interviewed are the only ones you ever see. Which is one of the cool things about it, they're just out there being themselves and having fun. It's really facinating seeing their reactions and those of the people around them as the interviews progress, or they check into a hotel, or pick up a hitchiker. The movie's not easy to describe as much of it comes down to the tone rather than the premise. There's a link to an interview on This American Life on their site which gives a better picture than I'm able to.
What good do the libertarians do besides being the political equivalent of apple fanboys?
Is there even a point to your posturing and complaining? Doesn't look to me like you guys actually do anything besides complain.
I think you answered your own question. One of the main things the American third parties accomplish at this point is to provide a viewpoint apart from the kneejerk opposite reaction that will be found in the other second party. Much of the party platform of both Republicans and Democrats is formed because it's the opposite of what the other party wants, not on the merit of whatever it actually means. Opinions coming from outside both sides at least have a slightly better chance of getting into consideration than the same idea might have if proposed by whatever party the person in question is in opposition to.
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
I know this is getting a bit off-topic, but I've been pretty impressed with swing latly. Which is pretty amazing considering swing is the reason I stopped coding in java about three years ago. Since then I've made a modest increase in ram (just from 128 to 372), and upgraded to the 1.5 jvm for linux. I don't know if it's the additional ram, the jvm, or a combination of the two, but the swing applications I've played around with are almost exactly as responsive as gtk2 programs. That, combined with potential for also allowing an option to use real gtk2 from SwingWT finally managed to make me look into Java for the next project I'm working on.
Good ol' Jack Chick. I remember seeing photocopies of that strip stuck in AD&D manuals in the bookstore I shopped at in my youth. The only thing scarier than the fact that Chick actually thinks this stuff up, is that there's people who buy into it so strongly as to dedicate significant portions of their life to printing it out and distributing it.
As a sidenote, my second favorite after the Dark Dungeons strip was the one showing how much the devil loved the sitcom bewitched.
Something I find amusing is what I'm assuming is a higher number of gamers who pick up additional languages so they can import games, as opposed to the percentage of religious people who learn another language to get closer to the source material of their faith.
At the CS dept of the school I work at many students associate Linux with sweaty arrogant zealots and loudmouthed dorks and thus don't use it when they can get by without using it
I think when one gets to the point of judging someone by what operating system they use, no matter what it is, they lose the right of acusing anyone of being more of a dork than they are. And the real pity is I'm sure they think they're somehow different than someone who judges anothers character by the brand on their shoes or pants.
The Gnostics believed that it was better to become God than to worship God. This is why they were persecuted by the monotheistic religions.
To be fair, I think that accusing mainstream christianity of being devil worshipers and saying that demons controll the earth had a bit to do with their persecution as well.
This look of disdain is on behalf of every guy who's been dragged to romantic comedy after romantic comedy by their girlfriends. Believe me, it could be far worse than even the lowest rung of horror movies.
I agree, and not just for the reasons you state. I'd like it just because unlike traditional compitition, I might actually find this interesting. Making every match also a proving ground for new and experimental technologies which could some day have a pratical application in my own life would be facinating to observe.
To say "enhanced" would be like slapping the atheletes sayin "You're good, but they're of a different class. We appreciate your years of hardwork, but because of their mutation, they are more entertaining."
Personally, I don't see much difference betwean what you're saying here and the woman's compitions, and they don't seem to have a problem with it. No matter what the field there's always going to be someone whose inate gifts place them at a level the rest of us aren't going to reach, be it from a titanium leg or a y chromosome. I'm not going to shed any more tears for an athelete who can't compete in an "enhanced" league than they are for me not being able to compete against them given my own inate lack of balence.
Out of curiosity, which did you move to? I've been giving some thought into doing so as well after school, and would be interested to hear how your experiences with it have been.
This is why, aside from them giving the Doctor a holo-emitter, and changing Janeway's hairstyle, you can pretty much watch any episode of Voyager, and everybody is exactly the same - no development.
My favorite was when Neelix was raised from the dead by Seven of Nine. You'd think people would be talking about that for years to come on the ship, this is the kind of thing religions are founded on - or at least huge new avenues of medical science. But of course it's never brought up again. What was really disapointing though was that Neelix actually became interesting for an episode as he worked to come to terms with the theological implications. His entire personality changed, but then of course...by the next episode he was as dull as ever.
Slashdot Mirror
So why is this MythTv box worth 400 more?
Commercial skipping and being able to back shows up to cd/dvd/pc without resorting to hacks. Both together I'd consider well worth the extra money. I already have one of the older replaytv models which allows both, but if that wasn't available I would have put one of these together.
I would call it....THE J MAN! Or possibly GeeWhiz.
For me, ebooks and notes. I find it nice to have access to a couple novels on the off chance I find myself waiting for someone. And I'm fast enough with a virtual keyboard that it's not much of a problem to take notes in it. It can be really handy having all the class notes from the past year in an easy to carry, keyword searchable format.
Emulated games can be fun too, as well as serving the occasional purpose of distracting girlfriends when one's not in a talkitive mood.
I have an older model ipaq (3650) and for the most part it's fit my needs perfectly. The one thing I've never been able to find though is a nice flashcard/quiz program which I could add or edit definitions in on either the ipaq or on a desktop linux system. The only flash card programs I've been able to find either do not allow editing of the source material on the PocketPC, or can only be used on the desktop in windows, not linux.
And yes, I know it wouldn't be 'that' hard to just write one myself - but I'm really short on free time. I don't suppose anyone knows of a program that would fit these requirements?
And if it doesn't get added, what web designer will use a format that can't be viewed by 93% of their users?
Depends on who the target audience is. I personally wouldn't use a format 93% of the visiters couldn't view. But that's also not much of an issue for me. The only animated content I've ever used on my page is for examples of sprite animation in the format used in an engine I wrote. The somewhat technical content and crossplatform support skewed the viewership heavily away from IE. I scrapped that aspect of the page when mng support was removed from the gecko clients, but before then I think only about 20-30% were using IE. A significant amount, but not enough to bother myself with for something I do for fun. While I agree going the route of apng for a comercial site aimed at the general public would be foolish, thankfully we're not all targeting the general public.
Out of curiosity, did this intervention by the state government make the papers as well? I'm guessing so by the fact that you know about it, but this being slashdot I don't think it's a totally safe assumption that you might not personally know him. I ask because I'm always a little annoyed when papers bring something like this to the public attention, then abandon the fellows when that attention winds up bringing negitive consiquences - themselves often interesting.
Wow, I usually try to point this out to people as well. I think this is the first time I haven't had to!
I debated answering this, because I know I'm going to be casting myself in a bad light. But, what can I say, these are the experiences I've had. I think the reason this company is reinforcing the stereotype is because there's a large amount of truth to it. Looking over the list of features, my first thought was that it was teaching almost exactly the things a guy needs to learn in order to bullshit his way through a relationship with the average woman. To be fair, your example of the virtual boyfriend too would be a perfect example of the average man as well. Most people, male or female, don't rise very far from their base impulses. They don't like to learn, they lack the willpower to work at improving themselves, their drive to reproduction is the primary motivator in life, and above all they hate anything which is going to require much thought. I'll call them the target audience for action movies (male) and romantic comedies/realityTV (female). The big difference is that for some reason, as uncommon as it is for a man to rise above that, it seems to be even more so for a woman to. The end result is any independently thinking woman having a larger base of potential partners than her male counterpart would. Statistically even an intelligent male is going to almost always wind up with the romantic comedy girl the game is portraying. I don't think it's any surprise that many of us are slightly bitter and jaded as a result.
Or at least that's the theory to explain my own experiences. It's been a very long time since I've dated a girl who didn't fit the description offered by this game almost perfectly. And it's not for lack of experience, there's been a lot. But, as sad as it is, I think it's the reality for most guys out there. While slashdot might not be the best example, take a look at the male to female ratio here. The same seems to hold true for almost anything that requires an entry level of even slightly above average interest and knowledge - no matter if the subject is mechanical, literary or health related. In a perfect world there would be a huge number of woman such as yourself out there, there's not.
I'm not placing any bets on when it'd happen, but I would that the technology would be made illegal in most countries pretty quickly.
Be sure to send your activated killbot to the guy, with a nice note explaining why for legal purposes he will not be able to flip the 'evil' switch off.
I took a look, and I have to say that I'm glad you pointed this out! I'd always wished something like this existed, especially given the horrible selection of radio stations (country,western or country and western) in my area.
I wish the blurb would have mentioned the recent dvd release of How's Your News, which Matt and Trey funded. The basic premise is that a group of people with various mental disabilities go on a tour of America and interview people along the way. They're not prompted at all, they and the people interviewed are the only ones you ever see. Which is one of the cool things about it, they're just out there being themselves and having fun. It's really facinating seeing their reactions and those of the people around them as the interviews progress, or they check into a hotel, or pick up a hitchiker. The movie's not easy to describe as much of it comes down to the tone rather than the premise. There's a link to an interview on This American Life on their site which gives a better picture than I'm able to.
What good do the libertarians do besides being the political equivalent of apple fanboys? Is there even a point to your posturing and complaining? Doesn't look to me like you guys actually do anything besides complain.
I think you answered your own question. One of the main things the American third parties accomplish at this point is to provide a viewpoint apart from the kneejerk opposite reaction that will be found in the other second party. Much of the party platform of both Republicans and Democrats is formed because it's the opposite of what the other party wants, not on the merit of whatever it actually means. Opinions coming from outside both sides at least have a slightly better chance of getting into consideration than the same idea might have if proposed by whatever party the person in question is in opposition to.
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
I know this is getting a bit off-topic, but I've been pretty impressed with swing latly. Which is pretty amazing considering swing is the reason I stopped coding in java about three years ago. Since then I've made a modest increase in ram (just from 128 to 372), and upgraded to the 1.5 jvm for linux. I don't know if it's the additional ram, the jvm, or a combination of the two, but the swing applications I've played around with are almost exactly as responsive as gtk2 programs. That, combined with potential for also allowing an option to use real gtk2 from SwingWT finally managed to make me look into Java for the next project I'm working on.
Good ol' Jack Chick. I remember seeing photocopies of that strip stuck in AD&D manuals in the bookstore I shopped at in my youth. The only thing scarier than the fact that Chick actually thinks this stuff up, is that there's people who buy into it so strongly as to dedicate significant portions of their life to printing it out and distributing it.
As a sidenote, my second favorite after the Dark Dungeons strip was the one showing how much the devil loved the sitcom bewitched.
What is it with all of the versions of the bible?
Something I find amusing is what I'm assuming is a higher number of gamers who pick up additional languages so they can import games, as opposed to the percentage of religious people who learn another language to get closer to the source material of their faith.
At the CS dept of the school I work at many students associate Linux with sweaty arrogant zealots and loudmouthed dorks and thus don't use it when they can get by without using it
I think when one gets to the point of judging someone by what operating system they use, no matter what it is, they lose the right of acusing anyone of being more of a dork than they are. And the real pity is I'm sure they think they're somehow different than someone who judges anothers character by the brand on their shoes or pants.
The Gnostics believed that it was better to become God than to worship God. This is why they were persecuted by the monotheistic religions.
To be fair, I think that accusing mainstream christianity of being devil worshipers and saying that demons controll the earth had a bit to do with their persecution as well.
I seem to be the only Transhumanist who gets this.
Or you're the only one who places much significance on the distinction.
This look of disdain is on behalf of every guy who's been dragged to romantic comedy after romantic comedy by their girlfriends. Believe me, it could be far worse than even the lowest rung of horror movies.
I agree, and not just for the reasons you state. I'd like it just because unlike traditional compitition, I might actually find this interesting. Making every match also a proving ground for new and experimental technologies which could some day have a pratical application in my own life would be facinating to observe.
To say "enhanced" would be like slapping the atheletes sayin "You're good, but they're of a different class. We appreciate your years of hardwork, but because of their mutation, they are more entertaining."
Personally, I don't see much difference betwean what you're saying here and the woman's compitions, and they don't seem to have a problem with it. No matter what the field there's always going to be someone whose inate gifts place them at a level the rest of us aren't going to reach, be it from a titanium leg or a y chromosome. I'm not going to shed any more tears for an athelete who can't compete in an "enhanced" league than they are for me not being able to compete against them given my own inate lack of balence.
I've moved out of the country because of this.
Out of curiosity, which did you move to? I've been giving some thought into doing so as well after school, and would be interested to hear how your experiences with it have been.
This is why, aside from them giving the Doctor a holo-emitter, and changing Janeway's hairstyle, you can pretty much watch any episode of Voyager, and everybody is exactly the same - no development.
My favorite was when Neelix was raised from the dead by Seven of Nine. You'd think people would be talking about that for years to come on the ship, this is the kind of thing religions are founded on - or at least huge new avenues of medical science. But of course it's never brought up again. What was really disapointing though was that Neelix actually became interesting for an episode as he worked to come to terms with the theological implications. His entire personality changed, but then of course...by the next episode he was as dull as ever.