Although lucid dreaming is not exactly the same as dream control, it does give you the ability to control your OWN ACTIONS in a dream. The advantage of lucid dreaming is that you don't have to buy any gizmos to make it work (although some people do sell things to help you achieve lucidity). The disadvantages are, as I mentioned, the fact that you only control yourself and not necessarily your surroundings and it takes some time to learn the skill of becoming lucid in a dream.
Lucid dreaming is basically a technique for becoming conscious that you are in a dream without actually waking from that dream. It takes some work, believe me. We're talking months here. But it is kinda cool. Once I realize that I'm dreaming, I usually take advantage of that fact by blasting any enemies around me with a Godzilla-like breath weapon! While this is admittedly pretty geeky, I can say that here without being laughed at (right?) because we're all geeks. Plus, it's pretty neat to see Bill Gates go up in flames!
Another advantage of lucid dreaming is that it's a proven technique whereas this new gizmo is just something that someone is trying to sell you.
This is an excellent example of how easy it is to dupe the public into believing something that is not entirely factual. It also drives home the importance of our taking what we hear on radio/TV and what we read in the newspapers with a very big grain of salt.
I think what irritates people such much about this is that this time it was the PRESS in a BLATANT attempt at disception. People like to believe that even though commericals are filled with lies and deceipt and politicans' televised speeches are full of fabrications that somehow the press is above all this and has a responsiblity to be as open and honest with their audience as possible. Now, you and I and most slashdotters know better. But the average person really trusts the media to keep them informed. Sure, this is a relatively small breech of trust. "Who cares?" you might be tempted to ask. And, yes, the actual location of some TV personality doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. However, the very idea that this station is involved in deception and, when caught, claim there is nothing wrong with what they are doing is what upsets people so much.
That is the typical wisdom... more muscles, more weight loss. However, most people don't look at this solution for the long run.
One thing that is helpful to note is that tuxette is a dedicated weight trainer (she's mentioned that she powerlifts in previous posts) so she is looking at it in the long run.
More muscle also means more maintenance. If you can bench press 300, you'd better be at the gym 5 days a week to maintain that muscle. If you don't, you'll lose the muscle and it'll just turn into... fat.
I didn't realize this myth was still around! Seriously, all you'd have to do is take 30 seconds to do a google search and you'd see this has been debunked a long time ago. Regarding your assertion that advanced bodybuilders need to go to the gym more often than novices, that is also false but for different reasons. Once you get to the point where you are benching 300, most of your "easy gaining" years are behind you. You need to be much more careful about maintaing a balance between actually lifting weights (which causes microscoping damage to the muscles) and rest (which will allow you body to rebuild the muscles so they are stronger than they were before). You need to spend less time in the gym as you get more advanced, not more. Of course, the time you spend in the gym has to be damn intense. But building muscle on a body that already thinks it has enough is more about quality of effort than quantity.
All that having been said, if your motivation for lifting weights is solely to lose fat then you probably are wasting your time. You do have to work to maintain any muscle you build. Not because it will turn into fat but because your body will tear down the protein stores and burn that for energy. However, the effort you have to put into maintaining is not all that much and certainly doesn't require you to go to the gym 5 days a week. That's just crazy.
"We take the guilt out of gaming and put the fun back into exercise," said company spokesman Chuck Martinez.
AntiOrganic asks "Why all the gimmickry?" I think the above quote from the article answers that nicely. No one who has given more than a few moments thought to this would ever dream of suggesting that pushing hard on a joystick is some form of exercise. But if you are looking for an excuse to do something you enjoy doing, it's fairly easy to say "Well, I'm going to play videogames anyhow so might as well play one that it kinda good for me." Of course, the amount that this is "good for you" is so insignficant that it doesn't mean anything but that's thinking rationally about it.
So much of what goes on these days is simply marketing trying to help us alleviate our guilt about what we choose to do. There are fat-free cookies and fat-free potato chips. Subway is advertising some new wrap sandwhich that is chock full of bacon and ranch dressing with the name "Atkins' friendly" plastered all over it as if to suggest that a sandwhich filled with hydrogenated and saturated fats is some kind of health food. Hell, even KFC was recently advertising their extra-super-deep-fried chicken as healthy until public outcry finally got too much.
One of my big pet peeves is when people think they are accomplishing something when in fact they are not. Some of the blame has to go to the marketers who try ever so desperately to claim any kind of benefit to using or consuming their products. But a lot of the blame has to go towards the buying public who are so desperate to alleviate their guilt for not doing "what they're supposed to be doing" that they are willing to eat up this blatantly bullshit advertising. Like Yoda says: do or do not do. Don't try to fool yourself by pretending that some joystick is going to solve your athletic or health goals.
Unless you mean the prequels made you realize how lame the series already was by episode 6. How hokey episode 4 was, and how the pinnacle of the series was directed and largely rewritten by people other than Lucas. That could understandably rob you of fond memories. Of course, just watching them again older and wiser would probably have done that.
I hate to tell you this but I *have* watched the original trilogy since I was a kid. In fact, I probably watch the original trilogy about 3 times every year. I still enjoy them. You may argue that my positive feelings about those films are because I'm remembering my childhood or something. But I think they were substancially different than the new stuff.
Why? The characters. The original trilogy had likeable characters who were really giving it their all to take back the galaxy. Solo was a great guy. You could feel for what Luke was going through. Leia was clearly struggling with how to give all the parts of herself equal time. The rebellion doesn't have much but, boy, do they have heart! The Jedi, on the other hand, strike me as really a bunch or arrogant elite who seem to not be doing a very good job of anything. Anakin is just a spoiled brat. Obi Wan seems to have some ability but he never gets awfully worked up about anything. Yoda and Mace just sit around looking pensive and occasionally whip out their lightsabres. I wouldn't want to sit down and have a beer with any of those guys. They're just do damn boring.
Now let's look at the villans. Sure, in the original series the stormtroopers could never shoot straight but you knew that Vader was running the show most of the times and so it seemed like the Empire had a real chance of crushing the freedom fighters. In Ep 6 we see that Vader is starting to weaken a bit but then we're introduced to the Emperor who is even more powerful than Vader. *This* guy really knows his shit and he seems to delight in tormenting Luke. To put it simply, the bad guys were fearsome and competant. Now look at the bad guys from Ep 1 and 2. Darth Maul was cool but never really given a chance to say much. The Viceroy and the other Trade Federation weenies seem utterly incompetant. And Palpatine and Dooku have yet to do anything really horribly dispicable. It's hard to get worked up about these bad guys.
So there you have my theory. Characters are what makes the difference between the old and the new trilogy. Basically the old one had characters you could love and hate. The new one just has a bunch of guys dancing around in a CGI videogame.
Oh man. So I was a grad student, right? I was always trying to portray myself as a very serious, dedicated student to my thesis advisor. And he had the fastest computer in the department (a Sparc10!) and he gave me permission to use it for batch runs. So I pretty much kept one of my xterms as a remote terminal to his machine.
Anyhow, one day I found this funny.au (sound) file and wanted to play it for my office mates. So I did a 'cat naked.au >/dev/audio'. Nothing happened. So I turned up the volume and tried it again. Still nothing. Then I screached in horror! I was typing this command in on the xterm I use for my advisor's machine! Sure enough, two seconds later an email comes trickling in from my advisor stating 'Please note that you are logged into my machine so your sound file is coming through my speakers.'
So what was this sound file that I had inadvertently played for my advisor?
OMG, you're right! Well, we might as well do nothing then, rather than take incremental steps to make things that much harder for people to slip through. After all, you wouldn't design a computer network with more than one level of security, why try to protect your borders that way?
If you re-read my post you'll see there are TWO parts to what I was saying. The first is that the system will not catch 100% of terrorists. In fact if some nerd like myself can see a flaw within 5 minutes, I'm sure that the actual effectiveness with be considerably less than 100%.
The second part of my post is prefaced with the words "On a related note" meaning that you are supposed to consider this in conjunction with the first point. The second point is that there WILL be false positives. Some innocents are going to get labeled as terrorists. And that's not too much fun for whoever gets the unlucky draw.
This pervasive "well, it's better than nothing!" mindset that I see so much of these days regarding our counter-terror efforts really spooks me. It sounds as though you're perfectly happy to disregard all those false positives as no big deal or, perhaps, an acceptable cost for some feeling of safety. In designing a system, an engineer will look carefully at the trade off of Pcc (probability of correct classification) versus Pfa (false alarms). Then it comes down to a judgement call, of course. What tradeoff are you willing to live with. The purpose of my original post was to ask if anyone has any feeling for what those numbers are! If we don't, then we're just doing a bunch of bullshit to make ourselves feel good.
And, personally, I won't be feeling too good about sending innocent people to Gitmo.
But you should be a citizen of one of those 28 to get excluded, if I've understood correctly. AFAIK, the Sept 11th terrorists weren't, although they'd lived in Europe.
You're missing the point. All the terrorists have to do is get a forged passport from one of those countries and they'll slip through. A security net with tons of holes doesn't do any good.
On a related topic, does anyone know what the Pfa (probability of false alarm) for fingerprint matches is? It would be interesting to take this number, multiply it by the number of people coming into the country every day (subtracing out those from the magic 28 countries) and figure out how many jet-lag weary travelers are going to be in for one hell of a rude shock when they get to America.
This AC makes a good point that you can't lump all carbs together. What really causes the problem in today's diets is that most food is processed very heavily. Grain products have the bran and germ (the most nutritious parts) stripped out of them. Fats have been extracted from their raw sources using heat and chemical solvents which fundamentally change the character of the fatty acids (typically breaking down any double bonds between carbon atoms and allowing more hydrogen to get attached leading to saturated fats). Grain products that retain most of the original nutrition such as barley, wild rice, whole wheat bread, etc. should not be lumped together in the class of 'evil' carbs. The heavily processed sugars and starches in our typical diet are bad because they are simply empty calories.
A balanced diet really is the way to go because your body needs so damn many things to work well and counteract the effects of other things you eat. I know some people don't bother eating fruits because they 'can get their vitamins from a pill'. Fruits provide much more than vitamins, however. Pectin, for example, helps your body deal with excess cholesterol. Atkins' dieters love to eat tons of fat and brag about how healthy they are. I know someone who eats fried eggs and bacon every morning for breakfast. Listen, that is not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. First of all, frying eggs hydrogenates them (if you love eggs, try soft-boiling them so that they yolk isn't exposed to the air). Bacon is cured and processed and filled with saturated fats. Good nutritional practices are not as simple as 'eat more fat and less carbs'.
Many of us have seen first hand how people follwing the Atkins and other fad diets lose weight. But the real key to being healthy (as opposed to just fat loss) is to eat a balanced diet filled with fresh, nutrient-dense foods. You can eat a fair meat of meat on such a diet but you had better (a) trim off excess visible fat, and (b) suppliment with essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6 acids found in flax oil, hemp oil, nuts, seeds) to provide your body with the ability to deal with all the cholesterol and saturated fats you'll be taking in. Don't shy away from all carbs but make sure that any carbs you DO decide to take in are from nutrient dense sources. Never eat any type of bread except for 100% whole wheat. Don't use jasmine, white, basmanti or other highly processed rice -- use brown rice, wild rice, or barley. Skip pasta. Don't go crazy on fruits but definitely include some of those every day. And vegetables are essential. That's probably the most nutritious stuff you can find.
Bottom line: good nutrition is quite complicated. Much more so than you will ever hear about in USA Today or CNN. The best thing you can do is eat a balanced diet and reduce your consumption of highly processed foods. I'm not saying you have to run out and starting buying organic produce (lord knows I sure don't) but do realize that our modern society has traded nutrient value of foods for ease of processing and consumption.
The current owners will have absolute control, and won't have to follow the whims of anyone else.
That only works if the current owners always vote together as one entity. I doubt there is company that has ever put up more than 49% of their stock in an IPO. They always figure that they have 'absolute control'. But things never stay that way indefinitely.
Going public basically takes power out of the hands of employees and private investors, who probably care about the long-term health of a company, and puts it in the hands of the public (including market timers and mutual fund managers) who may not care what the hell happens to the stock price two quarters into the future.
I can't see how an IPO is good for the company. Good for the employees, but not good for the company.
It's a one-time huge infusion of cash into the company. That money can be used to purchase equipment and hire new employees. So there can be plenty of good for the company.
The bad news is that you have to sell your soul to get the money. As I mentioned above, you are no longer in complete control of your destiny. I'm worried what will happen to google. Did they really need the money that badly?
Is there anyone else here who is thinking that having such an invaluable internet tool now subject to the whims of public investors is not such a great thing? I would have rathered that Google stay private forever. That way they can make decisions based on what they think is best, not what will increase their stock price the most next quarter.
And these days, Champagne is for people who want to look exclusive and upper class, when truth be told, actually they're tosspots;) Red wine or real ale anyday...
I'm not sure if you're trolling or what but here goes. Champagne is somewhat unique in that it is a fantastic accompanyment to almost any type of food. It goes well with appetizers, the main course, or dessert. You can have it with dinner, at a party, or even for breakfast. There really isn't any other kind of wine that is as versitile as champagne. You mention red wine in your post. There are great reds, to be sure, but if you are going to be eating a delicate whitefish, you would probably not want to be serving a Cabernet Sauvignon with that since the wine will easily overpower the food. In fact just the other day I caught From Russia With Love and Bond realizes that the chap who is dining with him is not an agent but is an assassin instead because he's inexperienced enough to order a red Chianti with fish. That pairing just doesn't go very well. You want to select a beverage that will enhance and compliment the food, not overpower it.
Champagne is well suited for this purpose because of the bubbles. The 'fizz', if you want to call it that, help cleanse the palatte between mouthfuls so that you can get the full taste sensation from the 20th bite as you did with the 1st. You can also achieve this effect by using a toothbrush during a meal and cleansing your tongue that way (try it when you're alone some time!) but that looks rather silly. I'm not at all surprised that smaller bubbles are better (in fact, I thought that was common knowledge) because smaller bubbles means you can get more contact surface area (more bubbles) on the tongue and that should increase the cleansing effect.
Of course, there are different types of champagne (differing levels of sweetness) but for the most part you really can't go wrong with champagne. It goes with everything. Something that most certainly cannot be said of red wine or ale.
I was reading an article in a recent issue of DefenseNews recently where they were reporting that a lot of TIA isn't being scraped, it's being given over to private contractors to perform. The feds still think it's a wonderful idea to track everything we do, they just don't want to so directly involved for political reasons. Private companies are not subject to these sorts of pressures and have considerable leeway on how much tracking of customer information they perform. So DARPA is looking to them to do most of the work and simply provide the government with the processed information.
Remember folks, just because CNN says that TIA is over doesn't make it so, necessarily. The privacy vs. terrorist-defense war isn't over -- it's just beginning. And next time, the government won't be so bloody obvious about what it's trying to do.
I have written an adolescent novel and am having trouble getting it published.
Trafford looks legitimate and offers a discount for those who do the layout themselves (I would use LaTeX).
How many equations are you planning on putting in this 'adolescent novel' anyhow? And you're wondering why you're 'having trouble getting it published'?
"I'm not so sure we should be doing this. We'd better turn back!" Molly exclaimed.
Sarah curled her lip in her characteristic unconscious show of displeasure. "I can't believe our one weekend away from our parents and you want to stop now! If you want to chicken out then go right ahead! But I'm going to \partial \rho \over \partial t + \nabla \dot u = 0 and that's all there is to it!"
GMD
Ads will HAVE to become better very soon
on
10 Ads The US Won't See
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· Score: 5, Insightful
don't welcome any new ads. The only good ad is the blocked/skipped ad.
Yeah, but I hate to break it to you: you're not the majority. How many non-football fans watch the SuperBowl each year because of the commericials? A lot. That's because it's the one time of the year that you can be guaranteed that advertisers are honestly trying to catch your attention. So much of the other advertisements are bland and uninteresting. They're just not trying.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to take off there is going to be more and more pressure placed on adverising companies to come up with innovative ads that people won't mind sitting through. The real pickle for these companies is constantly coming up with new ads that are entertaining and push the limits and still not offensive to the majority of the American public. When I was younger I often wondered why ads suck so much. Surely there are tons of witty people who could write clever ads! Why aren't they being given the chance? Well, as I grew older I started to realize that a lot of humor is actually borderline offensive to a lot of people. Or they're simply too slow to 'get' the joke. Humor is, of course, the cheapest way to construct an interesting commerical. Other ways include novel imagery but this takes more talent and, arguably, more money.
Anyhow, I'm thinking that in the next 5 years we're going to see an improvement in the quality of advertisements to the point that they start to become entertainment in their own right. If companies do not do this, their ads are simply going to get blocked/skipped by an increasingly dissatisfied viewing public.
Dear Slashdot,
I am looking for a way to secretly do something at work that I am not supposed to be doing. My job entails the operations of heavy machinery that has been entrusted to me. These people also tip me for taking such good care of their vehicles. Can you please help me?
Thanks!
P.S.: I would also like whatever is suggested to be comfortable as well. And not too expensive, either.
"Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media...
Hmmm. Funny thing is that I've always considered those buzz-phrases that are so often bandied about by 'various media' as Information Pollution in their own right. The by-products of processing good information down into a more-assimilabable (but less rich) format for consumption by the masses.
It's unfortunate that this guy is racking up some Troll and Flamebait mods since he's making a good point, albeit a bit inelegantly. There's a now-infamous poll that was given to Americans in 1995 which asked "Name a Famous Japanese Person". The results? #1: (Chinese martial artist) Bruce Lee. #2: (American-born) Yoko Ono. #3: Godzilla. I'm not kidding! I wish a good link to give you but if you're interested a bit of goolging will help you find people referring to this study.
Okay, so that was back in 1995. Ancient history, right? Give me a break. I bet if you give this question to 'the man on the street' again you'd get pretty much the same result. Obviously Japanese has made some incredible contributions to world culture. But until the day you can show the average American a photo of some famous Japanese celebrity and they can instantly recognize them, we should probably use a word other than "empire" to describe their impact in America.
Right now CGI is still expensive enough that most independents and hobbyists don't include it in their films. Affordable, rapid CGI could be a possible killer-ap for high-performance hardware. Currently, professional moviemakers must agonize over the creation of any CGI effect. It's a tedious process that involves using wire-frame animation, rendering and so on. If this process could be speeded up and simplifed, it might encourage more widespread adoption of CGI effects among hobbyists, giving them the ability to make movies they never could have before with their limited budgets.
Imagine being able to 'direct' a VR character almost as easily as you would direct a real life actor. When the technology gets to that level, we could see an explosion of new movies by people outside the Hollywood cookie cutter. Filmmakers with radicially new ideas who are too young to have developed a 'rep' in Hollywood could be creating some very professional looking films. Think of it this way: right now there are lots of people who write fanfics of their favorite movies or TV shows. But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now. With improved technology, perhaps these creative individuals might very well be able to make their own episodes, largely using CGI. Imagine taking a sci-fi movie that you like for the most part but hated the ending of. You load your CGI software with images of the main characters and battleships from the DVD and create CGI models of them. Now you can create a new ending that's more to your liking. Better yet, you can burn the new version of the movie with your ending (forget the "Director's Cut", this is "Mike's Cut") onto DVD and trade with your friends.
Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like. Very soon, the balance of power will shift and creative individuals who have lots of ideas but budgets nowhere near those of studios will be able to create some very impressive looking films. And then Hollywood will have to get their ass in gear and show us something that we couldn't do ourselves in our own living room.
GMD
P.S.: Several people have mentioned that pornography has historically been a big driver of technology. Can you imagine that boom that the adult market will get when people can make their own adult films using CGI characters? Think plots of porn flicks are stupid? Wish for something better? Hell, just load your CGI software with images of Jenna Jameson and make your own film with her as the star.
Actually, i was hoping one of these websites would tell me how to spoof the OnStar system of all the hot chicks so that when they try to go to some hot dance club all dolled up they'd end up at my apartment instead.
"Hey, babes! You look like you're ready to part-ay! C'mon in! I've got rum-n-cokes, well actually they're rum and Diet Caffeine Free Dr. Pepper, some Blatz on tap and some CDs of ABBA going already! Now, who wants to do the Macarena with me?"
You don't have to be old and retired to be seduced by people promising you 500% returns on $50,000 investments. Twenty-somethings will fall for it if you use enough marketspeak.
There were all sorts of people who lost tons of money in the dot-com bubble, old and young. But here's the thing: when you're young you can risk more in exchange for the potential of higher growth. This is very basic finanical planning: younger people have a much longer horizon and can afford a much more aggressive investing strategy. So it makes sense that twentysomethings would get excited by the possibility of a 500% return. Once you get older, however, any financial planner will advise you to limit your exposure to stocks and start shifting towards more conservative investments. When you're older, you can't be taking wild risks like when you did when you were much younger.
Comparing this idiot with younger people who lost money in the dot-com era is just not right. In this crazy world, none of us can be all too sure of a great many things. I invested in a mix of aggressive growth internet stocks and some nice, stable, reputable mutual funds. So although I lost some money, I didn't come out all that bad. But that's just because I'm a pretty cautious guy. I have some friends my age who lost considerably more because they didn't balance risk. So they didn't come out so well but that's okay because they've got decades in which they might end up blowing me away in terms of life savings. I don't think they're stupid at all, they just have a different outlook on investing than I do. However, those people in the 50s and 60s who lost a shitload of money in the dot-com era deserve my distain as much as this scam guy. When you are getting that close to retirement you just don't take crazy chances like that! That's just being greedy.
So please spare us this supposedly Insightful comment of yours that this scam victim is somehow just like the rest of us. He isn't. He's greedy and he's stupid. And now he's flat broke and I'm not gonna shed one single tear for him.
Ah yes, another blast from the past. This system consisted of a keyboard, a CPU/drive box, and a daisy-wheel printer. And guess where the power switch for the entire system was? On the printer. I shit you not. So, if your printer ever broke down and needed repair (a not-to-uncommon occurance for daisy-wheel printers), you were SOL for however long it took them to fix the problem and mail your printer back to you. You couldn't even play your Buck Rodgers game. Who the hell puts the system power switch on the PRINTER???
I know most slashdotters are too young to remember this marvel. First, it had a lovely membrane keyboard. Second, its memory was so low that every time you typed a character the entire screen had to noticably refresh which was really hard to look at. My friends and I were kids at the time and all getting our parents to buy us computers. Well, except for one of us. So, being kids, the rest of us made fun of him because he didn't have a VIC-20 or TI/99-4A like we did. He begged and begged his parents to get him a computer so he wouldn't be the odd man out. They finally relented and bought him... a Timex Sinclair! Oh boy, if you thought we teased him badly before...
Slashdot Mirror
Although lucid dreaming is not exactly the same as dream control, it does give you the ability to control your OWN ACTIONS in a dream. The advantage of lucid dreaming is that you don't have to buy any gizmos to make it work (although some people do sell things to help you achieve lucidity). The disadvantages are, as I mentioned, the fact that you only control yourself and not necessarily your surroundings and it takes some time to learn the skill of becoming lucid in a dream.
Lucid dreaming is basically a technique for becoming conscious that you are in a dream without actually waking from that dream. It takes some work, believe me. We're talking months here. But it is kinda cool. Once I realize that I'm dreaming, I usually take advantage of that fact by blasting any enemies around me with a Godzilla-like breath weapon! While this is admittedly pretty geeky, I can say that here without being laughed at (right?) because we're all geeks. Plus, it's pretty neat to see Bill Gates go up in flames!
Another advantage of lucid dreaming is that it's a proven technique whereas this new gizmo is just something that someone is trying to sell you.
GMD
This is an excellent example of how easy it is to dupe the public into believing something that is not entirely factual. It also drives home the importance of our taking what we hear on radio/TV and what we read in the newspapers with a very big grain of salt.
I think what irritates people such much about this is that this time it was the PRESS in a BLATANT attempt at disception. People like to believe that even though commericals are filled with lies and deceipt and politicans' televised speeches are full of fabrications that somehow the press is above all this and has a responsiblity to be as open and honest with their audience as possible. Now, you and I and most slashdotters know better. But the average person really trusts the media to keep them informed. Sure, this is a relatively small breech of trust. "Who cares?" you might be tempted to ask. And, yes, the actual location of some TV personality doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. However, the very idea that this station is involved in deception and, when caught, claim there is nothing wrong with what they are doing is what upsets people so much.
GMD
That is the typical wisdom... more muscles, more weight loss. However, most people don't look at this solution for the long run.
One thing that is helpful to note is that tuxette is a dedicated weight trainer (she's mentioned that she powerlifts in previous posts) so she is looking at it in the long run.
More muscle also means more maintenance. If you can bench press 300, you'd better be at the gym 5 days a week to maintain that muscle. If you don't, you'll lose the muscle and it'll just turn into... fat.
I didn't realize this myth was still around! Seriously, all you'd have to do is take 30 seconds to do a google search and you'd see this has been debunked a long time ago. Regarding your assertion that advanced bodybuilders need to go to the gym more often than novices, that is also false but for different reasons. Once you get to the point where you are benching 300, most of your "easy gaining" years are behind you. You need to be much more careful about maintaing a balance between actually lifting weights (which causes microscoping damage to the muscles) and rest (which will allow you body to rebuild the muscles so they are stronger than they were before). You need to spend less time in the gym as you get more advanced, not more. Of course, the time you spend in the gym has to be damn intense. But building muscle on a body that already thinks it has enough is more about quality of effort than quantity.
All that having been said, if your motivation for lifting weights is solely to lose fat then you probably are wasting your time. You do have to work to maintain any muscle you build. Not because it will turn into fat but because your body will tear down the protein stores and burn that for energy. However, the effort you have to put into maintaining is not all that much and certainly doesn't require you to go to the gym 5 days a week. That's just crazy.
GMD
"We take the guilt out of gaming and put the fun back into exercise," said company spokesman Chuck Martinez.
AntiOrganic asks "Why all the gimmickry?" I think the above quote from the article answers that nicely. No one who has given more than a few moments thought to this would ever dream of suggesting that pushing hard on a joystick is some form of exercise. But if you are looking for an excuse to do something you enjoy doing, it's fairly easy to say "Well, I'm going to play videogames anyhow so might as well play one that it kinda good for me." Of course, the amount that this is "good for you" is so insignficant that it doesn't mean anything but that's thinking rationally about it.
So much of what goes on these days is simply marketing trying to help us alleviate our guilt about what we choose to do. There are fat-free cookies and fat-free potato chips. Subway is advertising some new wrap sandwhich that is chock full of bacon and ranch dressing with the name "Atkins' friendly" plastered all over it as if to suggest that a sandwhich filled with hydrogenated and saturated fats is some kind of health food. Hell, even KFC was recently advertising their extra-super-deep-fried chicken as healthy until public outcry finally got too much.
One of my big pet peeves is when people think they are accomplishing something when in fact they are not. Some of the blame has to go to the marketers who try ever so desperately to claim any kind of benefit to using or consuming their products. But a lot of the blame has to go towards the buying public who are so desperate to alleviate their guilt for not doing "what they're supposed to be doing" that they are willing to eat up this blatantly bullshit advertising. Like Yoda says: do or do not do. Don't try to fool yourself by pretending that some joystick is going to solve your athletic or health goals.
GMD
Unless you mean the prequels made you realize how lame the series already was by episode 6. How hokey episode 4 was, and how the pinnacle of the series was directed and largely rewritten by people other than Lucas. That could understandably rob you of fond memories. Of course, just watching them again older and wiser would probably have done that.
I hate to tell you this but I *have* watched the original trilogy since I was a kid. In fact, I probably watch the original trilogy about 3 times every year. I still enjoy them. You may argue that my positive feelings about those films are because I'm remembering my childhood or something. But I think they were substancially different than the new stuff.
Why? The characters. The original trilogy had likeable characters who were really giving it their all to take back the galaxy. Solo was a great guy. You could feel for what Luke was going through. Leia was clearly struggling with how to give all the parts of herself equal time. The rebellion doesn't have much but, boy, do they have heart! The Jedi, on the other hand, strike me as really a bunch or arrogant elite who seem to not be doing a very good job of anything. Anakin is just a spoiled brat. Obi Wan seems to have some ability but he never gets awfully worked up about anything. Yoda and Mace just sit around looking pensive and occasionally whip out their lightsabres. I wouldn't want to sit down and have a beer with any of those guys. They're just do damn boring.
Now let's look at the villans. Sure, in the original series the stormtroopers could never shoot straight but you knew that Vader was running the show most of the times and so it seemed like the Empire had a real chance of crushing the freedom fighters. In Ep 6 we see that Vader is starting to weaken a bit but then we're introduced to the Emperor who is even more powerful than Vader. *This* guy really knows his shit and he seems to delight in tormenting Luke. To put it simply, the bad guys were fearsome and competant. Now look at the bad guys from Ep 1 and 2. Darth Maul was cool but never really given a chance to say much. The Viceroy and the other Trade Federation weenies seem utterly incompetant. And Palpatine and Dooku have yet to do anything really horribly dispicable. It's hard to get worked up about these bad guys.
So there you have my theory. Characters are what makes the difference between the old and the new trilogy. Basically the old one had characters you could love and hate. The new one just has a bunch of guys dancing around in a CGI videogame.
GMD
Oh man. So I was a grad student, right? I was always trying to portray myself as a very serious, dedicated student to my thesis advisor. And he had the fastest computer in the department (a Sparc10!) and he gave me permission to use it for batch runs. So I pretty much kept one of my xterms as a remote terminal to his machine.
Anyhow, one day I found this funny .au (sound) file and wanted to play it for my office mates. So I did a 'cat naked.au > /dev/audio'. Nothing happened. So I turned up the volume and tried it again. Still nothing. Then I screached in horror! I was typing this command in on the xterm I use for my advisor's machine! Sure enough, two seconds later an email comes trickling in from my advisor stating 'Please note that you are logged into my machine so your sound file is coming through my speakers.'
So what was this sound file that I had inadvertently played for my advisor?
Butthead: "Whoa! Naked chicks!"
Beavis (excitedly): "Yeah! Naked chicks! Naked chicks!"
GMD
OMG, you're right! Well, we might as well do nothing then, rather than take incremental steps to make things that much harder for people to slip through. After all, you wouldn't design a computer network with more than one level of security, why try to protect your borders that way?
If you re-read my post you'll see there are TWO parts to what I was saying. The first is that the system will not catch 100% of terrorists. In fact if some nerd like myself can see a flaw within 5 minutes, I'm sure that the actual effectiveness with be considerably less than 100%.
The second part of my post is prefaced with the words "On a related note" meaning that you are supposed to consider this in conjunction with the first point. The second point is that there WILL be false positives. Some innocents are going to get labeled as terrorists. And that's not too much fun for whoever gets the unlucky draw.
This pervasive "well, it's better than nothing!" mindset that I see so much of these days regarding our counter-terror efforts really spooks me. It sounds as though you're perfectly happy to disregard all those false positives as no big deal or, perhaps, an acceptable cost for some feeling of safety. In designing a system, an engineer will look carefully at the trade off of Pcc (probability of correct classification) versus Pfa (false alarms). Then it comes down to a judgement call, of course. What tradeoff are you willing to live with. The purpose of my original post was to ask if anyone has any feeling for what those numbers are! If we don't, then we're just doing a bunch of bullshit to make ourselves feel good.
And, personally, I won't be feeling too good about sending innocent people to Gitmo.
GMD
But you should be a citizen of one of those 28 to get excluded, if I've understood correctly. AFAIK, the Sept 11th terrorists weren't, although they'd lived in Europe.
You're missing the point. All the terrorists have to do is get a forged passport from one of those countries and they'll slip through. A security net with tons of holes doesn't do any good.
On a related topic, does anyone know what the Pfa (probability of false alarm) for fingerprint matches is? It would be interesting to take this number, multiply it by the number of people coming into the country every day (subtracing out those from the magic 28 countries) and figure out how many jet-lag weary travelers are going to be in for one hell of a rude shock when they get to America.
GMD
This AC makes a good point that you can't lump all carbs together. What really causes the problem in today's diets is that most food is processed very heavily. Grain products have the bran and germ (the most nutritious parts) stripped out of them. Fats have been extracted from their raw sources using heat and chemical solvents which fundamentally change the character of the fatty acids (typically breaking down any double bonds between carbon atoms and allowing more hydrogen to get attached leading to saturated fats). Grain products that retain most of the original nutrition such as barley, wild rice, whole wheat bread, etc. should not be lumped together in the class of 'evil' carbs. The heavily processed sugars and starches in our typical diet are bad because they are simply empty calories.
A balanced diet really is the way to go because your body needs so damn many things to work well and counteract the effects of other things you eat. I know some people don't bother eating fruits because they 'can get their vitamins from a pill'. Fruits provide much more than vitamins, however. Pectin, for example, helps your body deal with excess cholesterol. Atkins' dieters love to eat tons of fat and brag about how healthy they are. I know someone who eats fried eggs and bacon every morning for breakfast. Listen, that is not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. First of all, frying eggs hydrogenates them (if you love eggs, try soft-boiling them so that they yolk isn't exposed to the air). Bacon is cured and processed and filled with saturated fats. Good nutritional practices are not as simple as 'eat more fat and less carbs'.
Many of us have seen first hand how people follwing the Atkins and other fad diets lose weight. But the real key to being healthy (as opposed to just fat loss) is to eat a balanced diet filled with fresh, nutrient-dense foods. You can eat a fair meat of meat on such a diet but you had better (a) trim off excess visible fat, and (b) suppliment with essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6 acids found in flax oil, hemp oil, nuts, seeds) to provide your body with the ability to deal with all the cholesterol and saturated fats you'll be taking in. Don't shy away from all carbs but make sure that any carbs you DO decide to take in are from nutrient dense sources. Never eat any type of bread except for 100% whole wheat. Don't use jasmine, white, basmanti or other highly processed rice -- use brown rice, wild rice, or barley. Skip pasta. Don't go crazy on fruits but definitely include some of those every day. And vegetables are essential. That's probably the most nutritious stuff you can find.
Bottom line: good nutrition is quite complicated. Much more so than you will ever hear about in USA Today or CNN. The best thing you can do is eat a balanced diet and reduce your consumption of highly processed foods. I'm not saying you have to run out and starting buying organic produce (lord knows I sure don't) but do realize that our modern society has traded nutrient value of foods for ease of processing and consumption.
GMD
They're only selling a third of the company.
The current owners will have absolute control, and won't have to follow the whims of anyone else.
That only works if the current owners always vote together as one entity. I doubt there is company that has ever put up more than 49% of their stock in an IPO. They always figure that they have 'absolute control'. But things never stay that way indefinitely.
Going public basically takes power out of the hands of employees and private investors, who probably care about the long-term health of a company, and puts it in the hands of the public (including market timers and mutual fund managers) who may not care what the hell happens to the stock price two quarters into the future.
GMD
I can't see how an IPO is good for the company. Good for the employees, but not good for the company.
It's a one-time huge infusion of cash into the company. That money can be used to purchase equipment and hire new employees. So there can be plenty of good for the company.
The bad news is that you have to sell your soul to get the money. As I mentioned above, you are no longer in complete control of your destiny. I'm worried what will happen to google. Did they really need the money that badly?
GMD
Is there anyone else here who is thinking that having such an invaluable internet tool now subject to the whims of public investors is not such a great thing? I would have rathered that Google stay private forever. That way they can make decisions based on what they think is best, not what will increase their stock price the most next quarter.
GMD
And these days, Champagne is for people who want to look exclusive and upper class, when truth be told, actually they're tosspots ;) Red wine or real ale anyday...
I'm not sure if you're trolling or what but here goes. Champagne is somewhat unique in that it is a fantastic accompanyment to almost any type of food. It goes well with appetizers, the main course, or dessert. You can have it with dinner, at a party, or even for breakfast. There really isn't any other kind of wine that is as versitile as champagne. You mention red wine in your post. There are great reds, to be sure, but if you are going to be eating a delicate whitefish, you would probably not want to be serving a Cabernet Sauvignon with that since the wine will easily overpower the food. In fact just the other day I caught From Russia With Love and Bond realizes that the chap who is dining with him is not an agent but is an assassin instead because he's inexperienced enough to order a red Chianti with fish. That pairing just doesn't go very well. You want to select a beverage that will enhance and compliment the food, not overpower it.
Champagne is well suited for this purpose because of the bubbles. The 'fizz', if you want to call it that, help cleanse the palatte between mouthfuls so that you can get the full taste sensation from the 20th bite as you did with the 1st. You can also achieve this effect by using a toothbrush during a meal and cleansing your tongue that way (try it when you're alone some time!) but that looks rather silly. I'm not at all surprised that smaller bubbles are better (in fact, I thought that was common knowledge) because smaller bubbles means you can get more contact surface area (more bubbles) on the tongue and that should increase the cleansing effect.
Of course, there are different types of champagne (differing levels of sweetness) but for the most part you really can't go wrong with champagne. It goes with everything. Something that most certainly cannot be said of red wine or ale.
GMD
I was reading an article in a recent issue of DefenseNews recently where they were reporting that a lot of TIA isn't being scraped, it's being given over to private contractors to perform. The feds still think it's a wonderful idea to track everything we do, they just don't want to so directly involved for political reasons. Private companies are not subject to these sorts of pressures and have considerable leeway on how much tracking of customer information they perform. So DARPA is looking to them to do most of the work and simply provide the government with the processed information.
Remember folks, just because CNN says that TIA is over doesn't make it so, necessarily. The privacy vs. terrorist-defense war isn't over -- it's just beginning. And next time, the government won't be so bloody obvious about what it's trying to do.
GMD
I have written an adolescent novel and am having trouble getting it published.
Trafford looks legitimate and offers a discount for those who do the layout themselves (I would use LaTeX).
How many equations are you planning on putting in this 'adolescent novel' anyhow? And you're wondering why you're 'having trouble getting it published'?
"I'm not so sure we should be doing this. We'd better turn back!" Molly exclaimed.
Sarah curled her lip in her characteristic unconscious show of displeasure. "I can't believe our one weekend away from our parents and you want to stop now! If you want to chicken out then go right ahead! But I'm going to \partial \rho \over \partial t + \nabla \dot u = 0 and that's all there is to it!"GMD
don't welcome any new ads. The only good ad is the blocked/skipped ad.
Yeah, but I hate to break it to you: you're not the majority. How many non-football fans watch the SuperBowl each year because of the commericials? A lot. That's because it's the one time of the year that you can be guaranteed that advertisers are honestly trying to catch your attention. So much of the other advertisements are bland and uninteresting. They're just not trying.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to take off there is going to be more and more pressure placed on adverising companies to come up with innovative ads that people won't mind sitting through. The real pickle for these companies is constantly coming up with new ads that are entertaining and push the limits and still not offensive to the majority of the American public. When I was younger I often wondered why ads suck so much. Surely there are tons of witty people who could write clever ads! Why aren't they being given the chance? Well, as I grew older I started to realize that a lot of humor is actually borderline offensive to a lot of people. Or they're simply too slow to 'get' the joke. Humor is, of course, the cheapest way to construct an interesting commerical. Other ways include novel imagery but this takes more talent and, arguably, more money.
Anyhow, I'm thinking that in the next 5 years we're going to see an improvement in the quality of advertisements to the point that they start to become entertainment in their own right. If companies do not do this, their ads are simply going to get blocked/skipped by an increasingly dissatisfied viewing public.
GMD
Dear Slashdot,
I am looking for a way to secretly do something at work that I am not supposed to be doing. My job entails the operations of heavy machinery that has been entrusted to me. These people also tip me for taking such good care of their vehicles. Can you please help me?
Thanks!
P.S.: I would also like whatever is suggested to be comfortable as well. And not too expensive, either.
"Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media ...
Hmmm. Funny thing is that I've always considered those buzz-phrases that are so often bandied about by 'various media' as Information Pollution in their own right. The by-products of processing good information down into a more-assimilabable (but less rich) format for consumption by the masses.
GMD
It's unfortunate that this guy is racking up some Troll and Flamebait mods since he's making a good point, albeit a bit inelegantly. There's a now-infamous poll that was given to Americans in 1995 which asked "Name a Famous Japanese Person". The results? #1: (Chinese martial artist) Bruce Lee. #2: (American-born) Yoko Ono. #3: Godzilla. I'm not kidding! I wish a good link to give you but if you're interested a bit of goolging will help you find people referring to this study.
Okay, so that was back in 1995. Ancient history, right? Give me a break. I bet if you give this question to 'the man on the street' again you'd get pretty much the same result. Obviously Japanese has made some incredible contributions to world culture. But until the day you can show the average American a photo of some famous Japanese celebrity and they can instantly recognize them, we should probably use a word other than "empire" to describe their impact in America.
GMD
Right now CGI is still expensive enough that most independents and hobbyists don't include it in their films. Affordable, rapid CGI could be a possible killer-ap for high-performance hardware. Currently, professional moviemakers must agonize over the creation of any CGI effect. It's a tedious process that involves using wire-frame animation, rendering and so on. If this process could be speeded up and simplifed, it might encourage more widespread adoption of CGI effects among hobbyists, giving them the ability to make movies they never could have before with their limited budgets.
Imagine being able to 'direct' a VR character almost as easily as you would direct a real life actor. When the technology gets to that level, we could see an explosion of new movies by people outside the Hollywood cookie cutter. Filmmakers with radicially new ideas who are too young to have developed a 'rep' in Hollywood could be creating some very professional looking films. Think of it this way: right now there are lots of people who write fanfics of their favorite movies or TV shows. But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now. With improved technology, perhaps these creative individuals might very well be able to make their own episodes, largely using CGI. Imagine taking a sci-fi movie that you like for the most part but hated the ending of. You load your CGI software with images of the main characters and battleships from the DVD and create CGI models of them. Now you can create a new ending that's more to your liking. Better yet, you can burn the new version of the movie with your ending (forget the "Director's Cut", this is "Mike's Cut") onto DVD and trade with your friends.
Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like. Very soon, the balance of power will shift and creative individuals who have lots of ideas but budgets nowhere near those of studios will be able to create some very impressive looking films. And then Hollywood will have to get their ass in gear and show us something that we couldn't do ourselves in our own living room.
GMD
P.S.: Several people have mentioned that pornography has historically been a big driver of technology. Can you imagine that boom that the adult market will get when people can make their own adult films using CGI characters? Think plots of porn flicks are stupid? Wish for something better? Hell, just load your CGI software with images of Jenna Jameson and make your own film with her as the star.
Actually, i was hoping one of these websites would tell me how to spoof the OnStar system of all the hot chicks so that when they try to go to some hot dance club all dolled up they'd end up at my apartment instead.
"Hey, babes! You look like you're ready to part-ay! C'mon in! I've got rum-n-cokes, well actually they're rum and Diet Caffeine Free Dr. Pepper, some Blatz on tap and some CDs of ABBA going already! Now, who wants to do the Macarena with me?"
GMD
...I lived through the dot-com stock bubble.
You don't have to be old and retired to be seduced by people promising you 500% returns on $50,000 investments. Twenty-somethings will fall for it if you use enough marketspeak.
There were all sorts of people who lost tons of money in the dot-com bubble, old and young. But here's the thing: when you're young you can risk more in exchange for the potential of higher growth. This is very basic finanical planning: younger people have a much longer horizon and can afford a much more aggressive investing strategy. So it makes sense that twentysomethings would get excited by the possibility of a 500% return. Once you get older, however, any financial planner will advise you to limit your exposure to stocks and start shifting towards more conservative investments. When you're older, you can't be taking wild risks like when you did when you were much younger.
Comparing this idiot with younger people who lost money in the dot-com era is just not right. In this crazy world, none of us can be all too sure of a great many things. I invested in a mix of aggressive growth internet stocks and some nice, stable, reputable mutual funds. So although I lost some money, I didn't come out all that bad. But that's just because I'm a pretty cautious guy. I have some friends my age who lost considerably more because they didn't balance risk. So they didn't come out so well but that's okay because they've got decades in which they might end up blowing me away in terms of life savings. I don't think they're stupid at all, they just have a different outlook on investing than I do. However, those people in the 50s and 60s who lost a shitload of money in the dot-com era deserve my distain as much as this scam guy. When you are getting that close to retirement you just don't take crazy chances like that! That's just being greedy.
So please spare us this supposedly Insightful comment of yours that this scam victim is somehow just like the rest of us. He isn't. He's greedy and he's stupid. And now he's flat broke and I'm not gonna shed one single tear for him.
GMD
Ah yes, another blast from the past. This system consisted of a keyboard, a CPU/drive box, and a daisy-wheel printer. And guess where the power switch for the entire system was? On the printer. I shit you not. So, if your printer ever broke down and needed repair (a not-to-uncommon occurance for daisy-wheel printers), you were SOL for however long it took them to fix the problem and mail your printer back to you. You couldn't even play your Buck Rodgers game. Who the hell puts the system power switch on the PRINTER???
GMD
I know most slashdotters are too young to remember this marvel. First, it had a lovely membrane keyboard. Second, its memory was so low that every time you typed a character the entire screen had to noticably refresh which was really hard to look at. My friends and I were kids at the time and all getting our parents to buy us computers. Well, except for one of us. So, being kids, the rest of us made fun of him because he didn't have a VIC-20 or TI/99-4A like we did. He begged and begged his parents to get him a computer so he wouldn't be the odd man out. They finally relented and bought him ... a Timex Sinclair! Oh boy, if you thought we teased him badly before...
GMD