This reminds me driving from Chicago with a fellow nerd who was obsessed with our GPS and his PC-based map software. At point he was like "I'm hungry" and I was like "me too, let's go to burger king" and he was like "[looking at his PC] there's none around here." and I was like "uh yeah there is" and he was like "no, I'm looking at the computer and there a no burger kings around here anywhere" and I was like "well, I'm looking out the windshield and I see one," and he was like "oh."
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
Atari's version was caled Touch Me. And it came out before Simon, which was made by Ralph Bear -- who made a pong-like game before Pong. Simon was Ralph's poetic justice success for having Nolan rip him off for Pong.
Just send an email, bccing yourself (or offline account), saying "You're asking me to do something that's illegal and could open the company to significant legal and financial penalties. Are you sure you want to do this?"
There was a period of many years when Steve Jobs was not associated at all with Apple
Yeah, when Apple sucked. I'm not saying Jobs would have done a better job than Scully and his sucessors, but they certainly managed to do an awful job, and simply coast on the "cool" that Jobs and Woz lent to the company.
I agree that the legal definition is incomplete, but you don't have to be crazy to knowingly do wrong. For instance, this morning I ate a poptart, an action I knew was objectively WRONG, given the poptart's lack of nutrition and empty calories, and the fact that I'm overweight. I know it tends to hurt my family because it lowers my life-span. But I assure you, I'm not crazy; I made a bad decision because I cared more about myself (and my desire for a sugar rush) than I did for my family and personal health in that moment. Lots of people who kill people know exactly what they're doing and just how bad it is, they just don't care. Hence, in my book, they're evil, or at the very least, their actions are evil.
They're not always nuts. Sometimes they are just assholes. Like those people who kill their kids to get back at a estranged spouse. Those people aren't crazy by any legal definition: They can tell right from wrong and they know exactly what they're doing; they just happen to be totally evil. (And probably emotionally immature, selfish, asshats.)
Anyway this is a really horrid atrocity, and definitely my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved.
The other thing that makes this question hard to debate is the age/nostalgia thing. For instance, my favorite sci-fi ever was what I read at 14, vecause it was the FIRST sci-fi I read. So, all the mind-expanding concepts of sci-fi were new to me, and evens what others would have considered as cliched crap seemed brilliant to me, if only becuase I hadn't seen the cliches a thousand times before. So, sure, based on that, the simple games of my youth were brilliant! The story in Ultima was transcendental, the action in Xevious or even Pheonix unparalled.
So were those old games better? I think it's almost impossible to evaluate through the dewy-eyed nostalgia filter. The closest comparison to old-school (pre-NES) games are probably the "casual games" of today, and certainly Xevious or Galaga compare well with Heavy Weapon or Bejeweled. But comparing Gauntlet or Ultima to KOTOR or Diablo is like comparing a cave painting to a Picasso. They're so different, and so much products of their time, that it's dfficult to say one is better or worse than the other.
Acoustic couplers! We DREAMPT of Acoustic couplers! We had to send paper tapes back and forth to each other, parcel post.
And paper! LUXURY! On Christmas, we got one sheet, to share among us 11 kids. Other than that we'd station one child by each LED of the Altair and have them yell out it's on-off state.
I don't know sh*t about calculators, but I do know a bit about language, and here's a handy rule for you: the more detailed the word endings and forms, the less word order matters. That's true for almost every language. You can see this both ways in modern English, if you compare it to what I think of as "immigrant English," which frequently eliminates word endings for various reasons.
For instance, I could say, to a native english speaker, "handed me the man did a book" and it basically makes sense, because the word endings/forms are right, while "hand me the man does a book" just doesn't make any sense at all. Signs like "park two dollar" or "no refill outside cup" really rely on word order to make sense in English, because they are totally ungrammatical otherwise,and you need the grammar to work at least one way (word order or endings) to make sense in English. These examples are kind of bad, but you see what I mean (it's also hard for a fluent speaker to even come up with the kind of bad examples that non-fluent speakers come up with). Euro languages have been moving more towards word order being important and less to word endings being important since like, the fall of Rome. I expect the influx of immigrants to English-speaking countries will probably exaserbate that trend in the coming decades, as it seems to be easier to remember word order rules than word form rules.
Although it's possible you found a degenerate case, that Roomba looks broken. Sometimes the wheel sensors get messed up and it does that. It happened to mine once (it can happen if something gets caught in the wheel). iRobot can send you a little usb dongle thingee that can fix it generally. Before I got the fix, it would behave as the one in the video did, even in the middle of the room. In a situation like the one shown in the video, the roomba should eventually try BACKING UP, which yours didn't and it should also eventually realize it's stuck (based on wheel movement) and just stop and start crying for help.
Anyway, I'm not saying they don't break, as noted above, mine did. The battery also eventually died and I had to buy a new one (battery not roomba).
It can frustrating to watch a roomba "miss" a spot, but the roomba algorithm is actually quite sophisticated. I'm not sure you'd want/need better pathfinding. What I'd like is a solution that enabled the roomba to get into tighter corners, but this seems like an engineering challenge too far.
That's what us editors use find-and-replace for. Do whatever works for you. Luckily most modern browsers will only show one space in a row unless you work really hard at it!
Wait... I'm a slob/perfectionist and I like videogames. Actually I have no problem keeping a room clean if I know where everything goes (such as a bathroom, or our TV/family room). It's stuff that I don't have a specific place for (interesting magazine articles, stocking stuffers, videogame tchotskes, mail) that piles up and requires great effort (and great levels of nagging by my SO) to deal with.
I also know why there is only one space after a period -- you don't need two spaces after a period if you're using a porportionally spaced font. See here for more details, esp. as relates to the interwebs. I found that article while I was digging through my desk looking for last year's girl scout cookies.
They hired Dell and Microsoft to do the recover. Why not drivesavers or some other reputable firm that doesn't just run Norton but looks at the physical bits on the disc.
Anyway, what DIDN'T shock me about this story is that after formatting the main disk, the tech immediately (and blissfully) formatted the backup as well. I've seen stuff like that happen like ten times. ("Oh, well, after I replaced the drive, I figured I should replace the backup tapes too, so we could have a fresh start, so I threw them out." or "I figured I should make a backup right away, so I over-wrote the good backup with the new, bad, data.") I don't want to blame the victim, but sometimes it's like the data wants to be destroyed at that point. My favorite was when someone added a second drive to an important source control server to do nightly drive to drive back-ups. Then, they stopped doing tape backups nightly and switched to weekly. Then, they forgot they disconnected a fan during the HDD installation (or it was accidently disconnected -- it remains a debated point), then the server fried itself and the drives. Then everyone lost a day of work rebuilding the source archive based on their local data. Good times.
The way I read it, he's totally fine. The thing is going to just me a model plane right now, and always in his line of sight. It can't even land w/o human help. I've launched rockets that take pix of the ground (blurry, bad, 110 camera film ones), and no one's ever... hold on, there's someone at th-
[no carrier]
(For the record, I think global warming is a real phenominon, although I can't say 100% that humans are the cause of 100% of it.)
I love this post. It shows how scientific hysteria spreads and uses false premises to build on itself.
If there's no such thing as global warming, why are polar bears on the endangered species list?
Why? Because of scientific hysteria, not because they are actually threatened. Then, the fact that they are on the list itself is used as evidence of the threat.
Fact: There are more polar bears alive right now than there have been for scores of years. According to the WWF, there are ~20 polar bear population centers, with a total of about 22K bears alive. Of those, 2 (~17%) are decreasing, 10 (~45%) are stable and another 2 (13%) are increasing (percentages are different because they are counting actual bears). The rest they don't know about.
In February 2005 the Center for Biological Diversity, joined by Greenpeace and Natrul Resources Defense Council filed to make the bears protected because global warming could wipe out the pack ice the bears need to survive by the end of the century. Not because of current threat, but based on the idea that if things keep getting worse at an increasing rate, the bears could be in real trouble in 93 years.
So, global-warming-hysteria triggers save-the-not-super-threatened-bears mania which triggers oh-my-god-the-earth-is-warming-and-all-the-bears-a re-dying panic.
Again, I'm just using this as an example of how scientific hysteria spreads. I am not in favor of hunting bears (unless you're an Inuit or whatever), or being pig headed about global warming, or using CFCs or incandescent light bulbs. I'm as green as the crustiest hippie in the dirtiest gutter, but this hysteria needs to stop.
By the way... here's how you can help save the earth if you live in the US. Turn off your air conditioning. Be hot. Deal.
Except Rendition isn't covered by the Patriot Act. It isn't the catch all for "everything the government does that I think is bad." Read the law and understand it before you use it as the focus for all your energy. The Canadian law is simply much worse.
And if you think the government has its act together enough to try and hassle people who read Howard Zinn books, well, you clearly have no idea how incompetant the government actually is, or how it actually works (or how many members of the government are not Republicans). I hate to break it to you, but the government doesn't really care about you. You're not that special. What's scary isn't the governments evil omnipitance, but its total impotence to do even the most basic functions it's supposed to under the constitution.
Yeah, except the worst element of the PATRIOT Act is they can get librarians to say what books you checked out, without a warrant. The Canadian law allowed compelling witnesses to testify (banned under our fifth amendment) and indefinite detention (banned under some other amendments). The Canadian law was SIGNIFICANTLY more authortarian than the PATRIOT Act.
Although I guess how much people freaked out about the PATRIOT Act, shows just how jealously Americans really do regard their freedom. (Although I suspect most of the people who rail against the PATRIOT act have never read it, and wouldn't have protested nearly as vigorously against it if a Democrat was in the White House.)
Sorry to reply to my own post, but someone down below suggested it may have been a Delta 767. The Song (Delta's low cost brand) airline has the Panasonic eFX IFE which offers what he describes I think in every seat (my bad for not flying Song I guess!). Link here . The story still seems way to slick to me (as a former tester, I would have tried that sequence of events pretty quick), but evidence of an IFE that fits the description makes it inherently more believable.
It sounds good. Too good in fact. In fact, it sounds like BS. It basically reads like an urban myth. Also, given that the max value was 4, its unlikely the field size onscreen would have been big enough to display a 3 digit number. I also can't think of any domestic carrier in 2005 that had a combo touch screen / telephone thingee in the back of every seat. The only one I can think of now is Thai in their Royal Thai section.
Can anyone intuit the airline? Because without an airline name, I call bullshit on this story. I would guess it had to be business class, and probably a foriegn carrier, if the story is to be believed.
Don't count on it. When I was a kid the kids we were told were "autistic" were really severly debilitated, often with no ability to speak, etc. I knew only one autistic kid at my school who could speak pretty well (fun fact: he also had memorized the addresses and phone numbers of everyone in the entire school system).
Today, there's a much wider group of articulate, seemingly reasonably well functioning adults who self-identify as "autistic" and have created what some might think is oxymoronic, a real "autistic community." That community may protest anything that would "fix" them. I think you can see from the posts in this thread that a lot of people think of these super-high-functioning autistics as "assholes looking to justify their assholeness in a way that frees them from responsibility for it, and enables them to play the victimized minority card," but I think that's an over simplistic reading of it.
The one kid I know who falls into this new modern category of autism (I first met him when he was a hyperactive 8 year old with no friends, and last saw him as an "I'm autistic, deal with it" campus crusader type) has found a group of people who he really gets along with, and has a great social scene to interact with. So, is he autistic? Does his ability to fit in with the other self-identified autistic kids make him prima facia non-autistic? I'm not sure. To me, it's like a 12 step group. If it works for you, have at it.
Slashdot Mirror
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
Atari's version was caled Touch Me. And it came out before Simon, which was made by Ralph Bear -- who made a pong-like game before Pong. Simon was Ralph's poetic justice success for having Nolan rip him off for Pong.
They won't.
Yeah, when Apple sucked. I'm not saying Jobs would have done a better job than Scully and his sucessors, but they certainly managed to do an awful job, and simply coast on the "cool" that Jobs and Woz lent to the company.
$20K buys a lot of PS3 games.
I agree that the legal definition is incomplete, but you don't have to be crazy to knowingly do wrong. For instance, this morning I ate a poptart, an action I knew was objectively WRONG, given the poptart's lack of nutrition and empty calories, and the fact that I'm overweight. I know it tends to hurt my family because it lowers my life-span. But I assure you, I'm not crazy; I made a bad decision because I cared more about myself (and my desire for a sugar rush) than I did for my family and personal health in that moment. Lots of people who kill people know exactly what they're doing and just how bad it is, they just don't care. Hence, in my book, they're evil, or at the very least, their actions are evil.
Anyway this is a really horrid atrocity, and definitely my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved.
So were those old games better? I think it's almost impossible to evaluate through the dewy-eyed nostalgia filter. The closest comparison to old-school (pre-NES) games are probably the "casual games" of today, and certainly Xevious or Galaga compare well with Heavy Weapon or Bejeweled. But comparing Gauntlet or Ultima to KOTOR or Diablo is like comparing a cave painting to a Picasso. They're so different, and so much products of their time, that it's dfficult to say one is better or worse than the other.
And paper! LUXURY! On Christmas, we got one sheet, to share among us 11 kids. Other than that we'd station one child by each LED of the Altair and have them yell out it's on-off state.
For instance, I could say, to a native english speaker, "handed me the man did a book" and it basically makes sense, because the word endings/forms are right, while "hand me the man does a book" just doesn't make any sense at all. Signs like "park two dollar" or "no refill outside cup" really rely on word order to make sense in English, because they are totally ungrammatical otherwise,and you need the grammar to work at least one way (word order or endings) to make sense in English. These examples are kind of bad, but you see what I mean (it's also hard for a fluent speaker to even come up with the kind of bad examples that non-fluent speakers come up with). Euro languages have been moving more towards word order being important and less to word endings being important since like, the fall of Rome. I expect the influx of immigrants to English-speaking countries will probably exaserbate that trend in the coming decades, as it seems to be easier to remember word order rules than word form rules.
Christ this off topic, sorry.
Anyway, I'm not saying they don't break, as noted above, mine did. The battery also eventually died and I had to buy a new one (battery not roomba).
It can frustrating to watch a roomba "miss" a spot, but the roomba algorithm is actually quite sophisticated. I'm not sure you'd want/need better pathfinding. What I'd like is a solution that enabled the roomba to get into tighter corners, but this seems like an engineering challenge too far.
That's what us editors use find-and-replace for. Do whatever works for you. Luckily most modern browsers will only show one space in a row unless you work really hard at it!
Wait... I'm a slob/perfectionist and I like videogames. Actually I have no problem keeping a room clean if I know where everything goes (such as a bathroom, or our TV/family room). It's stuff that I don't have a specific place for (interesting magazine articles, stocking stuffers, videogame tchotskes, mail) that piles up and requires great effort (and great levels of nagging by my SO) to deal with. I also know why there is only one space after a period -- you don't need two spaces after a period if you're using a porportionally spaced font. See here for more details, esp. as relates to the interwebs. I found that article while I was digging through my desk looking for last year's girl scout cookies.
Anyway, what DIDN'T shock me about this story is that after formatting the main disk, the tech immediately (and blissfully) formatted the backup as well. I've seen stuff like that happen like ten times. ("Oh, well, after I replaced the drive, I figured I should replace the backup tapes too, so we could have a fresh start, so I threw them out." or "I figured I should make a backup right away, so I over-wrote the good backup with the new, bad, data.") I don't want to blame the victim, but sometimes it's like the data wants to be destroyed at that point. My favorite was when someone added a second drive to an important source control server to do nightly drive to drive back-ups. Then, they stopped doing tape backups nightly and switched to weekly. Then, they forgot they disconnected a fan during the HDD installation (or it was accidently disconnected -- it remains a debated point), then the server fried itself and the drives. Then everyone lost a day of work rebuilding the source archive based on their local data. Good times.
The way I read it, he's totally fine. The thing is going to just me a model plane right now, and always in his line of sight. It can't even land w/o human help. I've launched rockets that take pix of the ground (blurry, bad, 110 camera film ones), and no one's ever... hold on, there's someone at th- [no carrier]
It's just something English people say. Replace it with an American phrase such as "It's on like Donkey Kong" and it suddenly all makes sense.
I love this post. It shows how scientific hysteria spreads and uses false premises to build on itself.
If there's no such thing as global warming, why are polar bears on the endangered species list?
Why? Because of scientific hysteria, not because they are actually threatened. Then, the fact that they are on the list itself is used as evidence of the threat.
Fact: There are more polar bears alive right now than there have been for scores of years. According to the WWF, there are ~20 polar bear population centers, with a total of about 22K bears alive. Of those, 2 (~17%) are decreasing, 10 (~45%) are stable and another 2 (13%) are increasing (percentages are different because they are counting actual bears). The rest they don't know about.
In February 2005 the Center for Biological Diversity, joined by Greenpeace and Natrul Resources Defense Council filed to make the bears protected because global warming could wipe out the pack ice the bears need to survive by the end of the century. Not because of current threat, but based on the idea that if things keep getting worse at an increasing rate, the bears could be in real trouble in 93 years.
So, global-warming-hysteria triggers save-the-not-super-threatened-bears mania which triggers oh-my-god-the-earth-is-warming-and-all-the-bears-a re-dying panic.
Again, I'm just using this as an example of how scientific hysteria spreads. I am not in favor of hunting bears (unless you're an Inuit or whatever), or being pig headed about global warming, or using CFCs or incandescent light bulbs. I'm as green as the crustiest hippie in the dirtiest gutter, but this hysteria needs to stop.
By the way... here's how you can help save the earth if you live in the US. Turn off your air conditioning. Be hot. Deal.
And if you think the government has its act together enough to try and hassle people who read Howard Zinn books, well, you clearly have no idea how incompetant the government actually is, or how it actually works (or how many members of the government are not Republicans). I hate to break it to you, but the government doesn't really care about you. You're not that special. What's scary isn't the governments evil omnipitance, but its total impotence to do even the most basic functions it's supposed to under the constitution.
Although I guess how much people freaked out about the PATRIOT Act, shows just how jealously Americans really do regard their freedom. (Although I suspect most of the people who rail against the PATRIOT act have never read it, and wouldn't have protested nearly as vigorously against it if a Democrat was in the White House.)
Sorry to reply to my own post, but someone down below suggested it may have been a Delta 767. The Song (Delta's low cost brand) airline has the Panasonic eFX IFE which offers what he describes I think in every seat (my bad for not flying Song I guess!). Link here . The story still seems way to slick to me (as a former tester, I would have tried that sequence of events pretty quick), but evidence of an IFE that fits the description makes it inherently more believable.
IFEs are basically like the movie WarGames. The only way to win is not to play. Put it on the map, turn on your iPod, and open a book or DS or PSP.
Can anyone intuit the airline? Because without an airline name, I call bullshit on this story. I would guess it had to be business class, and probably a foriegn carrier, if the story is to be believed.
Today, there's a much wider group of articulate, seemingly reasonably well functioning adults who self-identify as "autistic" and have created what some might think is oxymoronic, a real "autistic community." That community may protest anything that would "fix" them. I think you can see from the posts in this thread that a lot of people think of these super-high-functioning autistics as "assholes looking to justify their assholeness in a way that frees them from responsibility for it, and enables them to play the victimized minority card," but I think that's an over simplistic reading of it.
The one kid I know who falls into this new modern category of autism (I first met him when he was a hyperactive 8 year old with no friends, and last saw him as an "I'm autistic, deal with it" campus crusader type) has found a group of people who he really gets along with, and has a great social scene to interact with. So, is he autistic? Does his ability to fit in with the other self-identified autistic kids make him prima facia non-autistic? I'm not sure. To me, it's like a 12 step group. If it works for you, have at it.
So, um, is your username totally unironic then?