No, just direct user input to/dev/null. Or make it so that an artificial inhibitor is placed on your ping time depending on how much exercise you've done.
I remember a PC magazine a while back hacked up an exercise bike so that you could either walk faster or fire faster in Doom depending on how fast you pedalled.
Y'see, exercise can be fun when you put it in the context of "0MG, PORTMAN PORTMAN HOT GRITS IN MY PATNS!!1 I 0WN3D J00!" etc.
Why in the name of fuck would the Rapture Ready lot be concerned? Surely, if subdermal RFID and central government ID registries are predicted in the Book of Revelations, it signals the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Isn't that what the Rapture Ready people are all waiting for with baited breath and saying will happen just next week despite the fact that it's been promised every single couple of years for the last thousand or so years?
(Obligatory Simpsons reference: when Flanders gets a note purpotedly from Jesus saying "Dude, I'm in Montana!" and rushes off on the train to meet him)
Not Secular Humanist (though the ID folks do occasionally throw that card out there), but there is the National Centre for Science Education. There are also local groups in Georgia, Michigan, Alabama, Kansas and Colorado (and probably a few others, but nothing that a quick Google search can't turn up: try $state citizens for science or some derivation.
You can also use Talk Origins, Talk Reason, Talk Design, EvoWiki and Panda's Thumb to find lots of info on why these people are wrong. If you want to donate money, donate it to the NCSE or Talk.Origins, or perhaps buy some of the books of creationism refuters - I'd reccomend Robert Pennock's book 'Tower of Babel' as quite a good introduction.
Even my lowly blog has a few things on the ID/creationism debacle.
I did write up the current Pope's view of the evolution/creation situation in a blog entry recently. I found it, quite by accident, in a creationist book I picked up. Ratzinger is quite a bit more hardline than JP II on this issue, though not too explicit about it.
You are making the flaw of thinking that science only deals with what we do now. What about forensic science? Or archaeology? Forensics is a science: it uses scientific tests and principles to determine whether historical events happened, and to help piece together a story - the rubber matches up with the car tyre. The fact that there is a skid from a tyre doesn't "prove" that the guy robbed the store, but it can corroborate other evidence.
If you saw a man walk in to a store, pull a gun out and point it at a member of the staff, steal some money, got DNA evidence from some sweat that hit the floor during the robbery, matched the bullets in the gun to the type of gun he's got a licence for, and had a couple of eyewitnesses see him pulling away at high speed, you'd be able to say the guy committed robbery. You could then predict that if he did commit the robbery, he wouldn't have been home at a certain time, he wouldn't have answered a phone call that his friend made at that time, or wasn't there when his neighbour popped round to borrow a teaspoon. Each of these little things goes to support the theory that this guy did it. That theory could be wrong, but we build up all the pieces.
Similarly, with evolutionary theory, we can predict "based on what we know, if you go and look here, you'll probably find this type of fossil". You go there, start excavating, and, shortly after, you've found yourself the fossil you're looking for. As you fit more pieces of a puzzle together, you get a better and better idea of the picture and a better idea of where the different pieces go. This is the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
Science deals with historical facts. Evolution is one of those facts.
"intelligent design does not contradict evolution".
What of the work of Michael Behe? The very method used by Behe contradicts evolution and scientific practice. We start out with a problem - how do complex things form? - and we can either come up with a solution (ie. a series of progressive steps guided by natural selection towards a useful end prouct) based on the evidence and information or we simply say "that's too complicated for science, we must invoke the Intelligent Designer". The latter explanation does not answer the question in any useful or meaningful manner. It's not science.
Evolution is science, since it does provide us with useful and meaningful information that "gee, we don't know how this happened, therefore god did it" doesn't. It says: "this complex progression of steps happened, and we can look further in to it and find more and more steps, with multiple different organisms and little routes that evolution can take".
Argh. Not the Beowulf cluster of duped bash.org stories! We'll never survive! Thank Natalie Portman and her hot grits for getting us through these difficult times!
The five-across electrostars are horrible. On South Eastern we get them occasionally. I do like the four-across electrostars - they are really comfortable. Generally you only got the 5's during the rush hour (before 9:30am London arrival and after 4:30pm London departure) and you get the 4's during the day. Sometimes, though, when the train splits (on my line - the London-Hastings line, it splits at Tunbridge Wells), you can often find that the front half and back half are different - you'll get a mixture of 4's and 5's. I always try and walk up the train to find the 4's. I always get backache after an hour in a 5. Horrible.
The fours are also in first class, and if there's no ticket inspector, or it's so crowded that the ticket inspector can't get up the train, you can always sit in the First class section and jump up when they come along.
The problem with the Electrostars is that they've got way too much tech on them: CCTV, GPS (the doors are all GPS powered which is why they take some time to open, esp. if it's foggy) and all those fricking automatic announcers (I bought an MP3 player just to save myself from having to hear "This train is calling at..."). If they had just done a nice update to the old Slam Door trains, they could have saved a bucket. The new ones cost an absolute fortune. If they'd bought updated old style trains, they could have invested the money in improving service, improving punctuality, lowering prices and so on rather than having doors that take two minutes to open when you get to a station.
(Wow. Commuting to London every day has taught me some things...)
I've also done similarly. I've started a phpBB forum for London Meetups. Shout if anyone wants a forum on there for their meetup group. I've also set up RSS feeds for each of the forums so you can keep track of new group suggestions and any groups that are set up.
Do join up. I'd quite like to see meetup.com burn for charging these ridiculous sums.
PrefBar lets you change your settings. I use it to filter out most flash, animations, JS and Java - then tick them when I need them. Combine that with Flashblock and Adblock and you've got a useful browser.
Who knows? These Google folk are running it as a dark aside. Perhaps they are going to try and take all the Blogger staff and sell them as white slaves?
Seriously, they probably bought it to be hip. I'm an active blogger, but I can't see why everyone is busting a nut over the enormous buyouts and stuff.
It's a system that lets you post your content quickly and easily. A subculture has grown up around it (yuck: I used the word subculture...), but I still don't see the profit motive in it all. Perhaps that's why I'm not making millions and other people are.
furl.net does private bookmarking. I use it a lot and prefer it to del.icio.us - the mix of categories and tags, the fact it saves a cached copy when you bookmark (really useful for NYT articles etc.)
And you can create private categories and click 'private' when you bookmark stuff.
Okay, here's just a quick calculation I did based on the components I used to build a machine. I excluded the wifi card, since that isn't included in the default MiniMac. Of course, you just buy a PCI card and slot it in. I also didn't include a floppy drive. All the prices are from the computer components site OverclockersUK and include VAT (sales tax for you Americans) and shipping within the UK. You could reduce the price even further by seeing if anybody else sells the parts cheaper - I just used OverclockersUK because I've ordered lots of components from them.
CPU: AMD Sempron 2200+ 1.50GHz (Socket A) CPU OEM £32.31 Mainboard: Abit KV7 KT600 (Socket A) Motherboard £38.19 HDD: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40GB ATA-133 2Mb Cache - OEM £29.96 GFX: Asus A9250/TD ATI Radeon 9250 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Retail £32.31 RAM: Crucial 256MB DDR PC2700 CAS2.5 £27.61 CDRW: Sony CRX320E 52x32x52x16 CDRW/DVD Combi Drive £26.50 Modem: Creative Modem Blaster V.92 PCI - OEM £11.69 CPU HSF: Akasa AK-827 (Skt A) £7.16 Case: OcUK Value Rainbow Series Case w/350W PSU £22.27 OS: Get a friend to download a Linux distro of your choice or on their advice. Based on a 3 disc Linux distro (say, Mandrake 10.1), and discs costing 19p each, that's £0.57. Total £228.57 including VAT excl shipping
Mini Mac £339 including VAT excl shipping
Looked at like that, the Mac mini is obviously cheaper!;)
Seriously, though. I'm not a PC zealot, and I do have a Mac laptop. I wouldn't be drawn to comparing Linux and OS X, since they both serve different purposes for me. And the Mac mini is nice and small and is arguably nicer looking.
The flaws in my analysis? Erm, the fact that the ATX case is rather big in comparison to the Mac mini. And I didn't include case fans, which might be necessary. Also, there is something to be said for getting a computer, turning it on and it all working rather than having to plug it all in (or getting a geek friend to do it for you) and install the software. This analysis may fall on the lack of a geek friend or associate willing to put it together (if you are in a big city like London, head on down to your local LUG - there are lots of nerds willing to put your hardware together and install Linux). Plus the price difference would be absorbed by a copy of XP Home OEM if you wanted to run that (something I'd advise wholeheartedly against unless you were a gamer, in which case, neither the MiniMac nor my specification will suit you since you would probably want a better graphics card than a 9200/9250 - plus OS X sucks for games). I've also omitted the FireWire ports since the card doesn't, as far as I'm aware, support FireWire. It's possible to get a different motherboard which does support FireWire. My brother is using the Asus A7N8X-E which does support FireWire (and 5.1 audio etc.) - that is about twenty pounds more expensive. Even with that taken in to account, it's still cheaper than the MiniMac.
So, I've found a PC with comparable features. It doesn't use integrated graphics (Intel Extreme etc.), it uses a graphics card similar to the one in the MiniMac. I have factored in software (Linux). It's not a "Windows box", but it's usable. No problemo, right? The fact that you can get a cheaper PC box is no reason not to buy a MiniMac. In fact, I have an unhealthy lust for one, if only to replace my ageing iBook. If you prefer OS X, iLife and so on, go for it. It's a great little computer, and I'd certainly not say no if offered one.
As for that article, the bit about wifi and Bluetooth: "you're stuck using USB dongles and adapters". Bull. There are many PCI wifi cards (this post came via one), and with a little bit of hunting around you can find a PCI bluetooth card (though, it's probably cheaper to use the USB adapter). It would be very cool if they combined the wifi and bluetooth cards in to one PCI card. Plus, some of the motherboards I've seen come with
Perhaps, but in it's defence, the idea came out of interfaith dialogue. It may still cause offence that the calendars are based around the birth of Christ, but this seems to be a relatively simple way of adressing the balance somewhat. I mostly hate political correctness, but this is simply redressing the balance somewhat between the spiritual and the secular.
The use of BCE and CE is mostly used by people in interfaith dialogue. It's common usage among the various theologians at my college, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
Of course, if you are pissed off with the idea that it's taking Christ away from chronology you can simply mentally substitute Christian for Common. I'll be sticking to Common Era though.
Of course, I'd much rather measure from the Unix epoch. That, or perhaps the birth of Stallman (unlike the Christian story, whereby the saviour was born TO a virgin, in the GNU story, the saviour was born to STAY a virgin - see below)
Honest? You really think he will be. All the disenfranchised lefties are going to vote for Charles Kennedy? Or are we going to all swing to swing to Howard? As much as I would like to see Tony Blair booted, it just isn't going to happen. Blair will plod along in the same way that Bush got re-elected. The alternatives are so appalling - I mean, Kerry, honestly - how can you lose against one of the most hated presidents of all time?
No, I think we're stuck with Blair, or at least until Brown takes over.
The solution is obvious. You set up a web app and get your visitors to sign up for a Google API account and copy the details in to a profile. They log in, do their searches, it deducts from their own totals and the web app just plods merrily onward.
Yup. You're pretty much right on that. You ought to see the number of people I've tried to 'convert' to Firefox/Thunderbird who protested at first, but once I told them that they could uninstall it if they liked and revert to what they had (invariably IE), all the protests that they made before installing it disappeared after install. Why? Because they don't actually give a shit.
Can someone explain to me something...
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 1
WTF is the point of giving people who can kick a football a college scholarship? I talk out of naivety here, since I can't think of any good reason (beyond financial ones, perhaps) that sports and HE are tied together in the States.
I mean, here in London, a few of the colleges have teams - I think Imperial (the biggest sci/tech college) have a team that is relatively pro, but that's only because most people see it as a bit of fun rather than what it seems to be in the US.
How does it further the "community of scholars seeking truth" function of a university to have dimwitted douchebags running around a football field on a semi-professional basis? You can justify college sports only on the same basis that you can justify college UT squads and scholarships for EverQuest nerds.
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No, just direct user input to /dev/null. Or make it so that an artificial inhibitor is placed on your ping time depending on how much exercise you've done.
I remember a PC magazine a while back hacked up an exercise bike so that you could either walk faster or fire faster in Doom depending on how fast you pedalled.
Y'see, exercise can be fun when you put it in the context of "0MG, PORTMAN PORTMAN HOT GRITS IN MY PATNS!!1 I 0WN3D J00!" etc.
Why in the name of fuck would the Rapture Ready lot be concerned? Surely, if subdermal RFID and central government ID registries are predicted in the Book of Revelations, it signals the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Isn't that what the Rapture Ready people are all waiting for with baited breath and saying will happen just next week despite the fact that it's been promised every single couple of years for the last thousand or so years?
(Obligatory Simpsons reference: when Flanders gets a note purpotedly from Jesus saying "Dude, I'm in Montana!" and rushes off on the train to meet him)
You can also use Talk Origins, Talk Reason, Talk Design, EvoWiki and Panda's Thumb to find lots of info on why these people are wrong. If you want to donate money, donate it to the NCSE or Talk.Origins, or perhaps buy some of the books of creationism refuters - I'd reccomend Robert Pennock's book 'Tower of Babel' as quite a good introduction.
Even my lowly blog has a few things on the ID/creationism debacle.
I did write up the current Pope's view of the evolution/creation situation in a blog entry recently. I found it, quite by accident, in a creationist book I picked up. Ratzinger is quite a bit more hardline than JP II on this issue, though not too explicit about it.
I'm reckoning that Bush will use that as a justification for the War on Terror to get Silicon Valley supporting it:
"Hey nerds, those terrorists read the Quran. Guess what that's like? *SERVICE PACK 2*!!!"
You are making the flaw of thinking that science only deals with what we do now. What about forensic science? Or archaeology? Forensics is a science: it uses scientific tests and principles to determine whether historical events happened, and to help piece together a story - the rubber matches up with the car tyre. The fact that there is a skid from a tyre doesn't "prove" that the guy robbed the store, but it can corroborate other evidence.
If you saw a man walk in to a store, pull a gun out and point it at a member of the staff, steal some money, got DNA evidence from some sweat that hit the floor during the robbery, matched the bullets in the gun to the type of gun he's got a licence for, and had a couple of eyewitnesses see him pulling away at high speed, you'd be able to say the guy committed robbery. You could then predict that if he did commit the robbery, he wouldn't have been home at a certain time, he wouldn't have answered a phone call that his friend made at that time, or wasn't there when his neighbour popped round to borrow a teaspoon. Each of these little things goes to support the theory that this guy did it. That theory could be wrong, but we build up all the pieces.
Similarly, with evolutionary theory, we can predict "based on what we know, if you go and look here, you'll probably find this type of fossil". You go there, start excavating, and, shortly after, you've found yourself the fossil you're looking for. As you fit more pieces of a puzzle together, you get a better and better idea of the picture and a better idea of where the different pieces go. This is the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
Science deals with historical facts. Evolution is one of those facts.
"intelligent design does not contradict evolution".
What of the work of Michael Behe? The very method used by Behe contradicts evolution and scientific practice. We start out with a problem - how do complex things form? - and we can either come up with a solution (ie. a series of progressive steps guided by natural selection towards a useful end prouct) based on the evidence and information or we simply say "that's too complicated for science, we must invoke the Intelligent Designer". The latter explanation does not answer the question in any useful or meaningful manner. It's not science.
Evolution is science, since it does provide us with useful and meaningful information that "gee, we don't know how this happened, therefore god did it" doesn't. It says: "this complex progression of steps happened, and we can look further in to it and find more and more steps, with multiple different organisms and little routes that evolution can take".
Argh. Not the Beowulf cluster of duped bash.org stories! We'll never survive! Thank Natalie Portman and her hot grits for getting us through these difficult times!
Been there. Done that. Got the "Now click the little red button in the corner of the window" T-shirt.
The five-across electrostars are horrible. On South Eastern we get them occasionally. I do like the four-across electrostars - they are really comfortable. Generally you only got the 5's during the rush hour (before 9:30am London arrival and after 4:30pm London departure) and you get the 4's during the day. Sometimes, though, when the train splits (on my line - the London-Hastings line, it splits at Tunbridge Wells), you can often find that the front half and back half are different - you'll get a mixture of 4's and 5's. I always try and walk up the train to find the 4's. I always get backache after an hour in a 5. Horrible.
The fours are also in first class, and if there's no ticket inspector, or it's so crowded that the ticket inspector can't get up the train, you can always sit in the First class section and jump up when they come along.
The problem with the Electrostars is that they've got way too much tech on them: CCTV, GPS (the doors are all GPS powered which is why they take some time to open, esp. if it's foggy) and all those fricking automatic announcers (I bought an MP3 player just to save myself from having to hear "This train is calling at..."). If they had just done a nice update to the old Slam Door trains, they could have saved a bucket. The new ones cost an absolute fortune. If they'd bought updated old style trains, they could have invested the money in improving service, improving punctuality, lowering prices and so on rather than having doors that take two minutes to open when you get to a station.
(Wow. Commuting to London every day has taught me some things...)
Do join up. I'd quite like to see meetup.com burn for charging these ridiculous sums.
PrefBar lets you change your settings. I use it to filter out most flash, animations, JS and Java - then tick them when I need them. Combine that with Flashblock and Adblock and you've got a useful browser.
Who knows? These Google folk are running it as a dark aside. Perhaps they are going to try and take all the Blogger staff and sell them as white slaves?
Seriously, they probably bought it to be hip. I'm an active blogger, but I can't see why everyone is busting a nut over the enormous buyouts and stuff.
It's a system that lets you post your content quickly and easily. A subculture has grown up around it (yuck: I used the word subculture...), but I still don't see the profit motive in it all. Perhaps that's why I'm not making millions and other people are.
It is a bit silly, but it's an exceptionally useful tool. I much prefer it to del.icio.us.
furl.net does private bookmarking. I use it a lot and prefer it to del.icio.us - the mix of categories and tags, the fact it saves a cached copy when you bookmark (really useful for NYT articles etc.)
And you can create private categories and click 'private' when you bookmark stuff.
Okay, here's just a quick calculation I did based on the components I used to build a machine. I excluded the wifi card, since that isn't included in the default MiniMac. Of course, you just buy a PCI card and slot it in. I also didn't include a floppy drive. All the prices are from the computer components site OverclockersUK and include VAT (sales tax for you Americans) and shipping within the UK. You could reduce the price even further by seeing if anybody else sells the parts cheaper - I just used OverclockersUK because I've ordered lots of components from them.
;)
CPU: AMD Sempron 2200+ 1.50GHz (Socket A) CPU OEM £32.31
Mainboard: Abit KV7 KT600 (Socket A) Motherboard £38.19
HDD: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40GB ATA-133 2Mb Cache - OEM £29.96
GFX: Asus A9250/TD ATI Radeon 9250 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Retail £32.31
RAM: Crucial 256MB DDR PC2700 CAS2.5 £27.61
CDRW: Sony CRX320E 52x32x52x16 CDRW/DVD Combi Drive £26.50
Modem: Creative Modem Blaster V.92 PCI - OEM £11.69
CPU HSF: Akasa AK-827 (Skt A) £7.16
Case: OcUK Value Rainbow Series Case w/350W PSU £22.27
OS: Get a friend to download a Linux distro of your choice or on their advice. Based on a 3 disc Linux distro (say, Mandrake 10.1), and discs costing 19p each, that's £0.57.
Total £228.57 including VAT excl shipping
Mini Mac £339 including VAT excl shipping
Looked at like that, the Mac mini is obviously cheaper!
Seriously, though. I'm not a PC zealot, and I do have a Mac laptop. I wouldn't be drawn to comparing Linux and OS X, since they both serve different purposes for me. And the Mac mini is nice and small and is arguably nicer looking.
The flaws in my analysis? Erm, the fact that the ATX case is rather big in comparison to the Mac mini. And I didn't include case fans, which might be necessary. Also, there is something to be said for getting a computer, turning it on and it all working rather than having to plug it all in (or getting a geek friend to do it for you) and install the software. This analysis may fall on the lack of a geek friend or associate willing to put it together (if you are in a big city like London, head on down to your local LUG - there are lots of nerds willing to put your hardware together and install Linux). Plus the price difference would be absorbed by a copy of XP Home OEM if you wanted to run that (something I'd advise wholeheartedly against unless you were a gamer, in which case, neither the MiniMac nor my specification will suit you since you would probably want a better graphics card than a 9200/9250 - plus OS X sucks for games). I've also omitted the FireWire ports since the card doesn't, as far as I'm aware, support FireWire. It's possible to get a different motherboard which does support FireWire. My brother is using the Asus A7N8X-E which does support FireWire (and 5.1 audio etc.) - that is about twenty pounds more expensive. Even with that taken in to account, it's still cheaper than the MiniMac.
So, I've found a PC with comparable features. It doesn't use integrated graphics (Intel Extreme etc.), it uses a graphics card similar to the one in the MiniMac. I have factored in software (Linux). It's not a "Windows box", but it's usable. No problemo, right? The fact that you can get a cheaper PC box is no reason not to buy a MiniMac. In fact, I have an unhealthy lust for one, if only to replace my ageing iBook. If you prefer OS X, iLife and so on, go for it. It's a great little computer, and I'd certainly not say no if offered one.
As for that article, the bit about wifi and Bluetooth: "you're stuck using USB dongles and adapters". Bull. There are many PCI wifi cards (this post came via one), and with a little bit of hunting around you can find a PCI bluetooth card (though, it's probably cheaper to use the USB adapter). It would be very cool if they combined the wifi and bluetooth cards in to one PCI card. Plus, some of the motherboards I've seen come with
Perhaps, but in it's defence, the idea came out of interfaith dialogue. It may still cause offence that the calendars are based around the birth of Christ, but this seems to be a relatively simple way of adressing the balance somewhat. I mostly hate political correctness, but this is simply redressing the balance somewhat between the spiritual and the secular.
The use of BCE and CE is mostly used by people in interfaith dialogue. It's common usage among the various theologians at my college, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
Of course, if you are pissed off with the idea that it's taking Christ away from chronology you can simply mentally substitute Christian for Common. I'll be sticking to Common Era though.
Of course, I'd much rather measure from the Unix epoch. That, or perhaps the birth of Stallman (unlike the Christian story, whereby the saviour was born TO a virgin, in the GNU story, the saviour was born to STAY a virgin - see below)
http://www.stallman.org/saintignucius.jpg
Honest? You really think he will be. All the disenfranchised lefties are going to vote for Charles Kennedy? Or are we going to all swing to swing to Howard? As much as I would like to see Tony Blair booted, it just isn't going to happen. Blair will plod along in the same way that Bush got re-elected. The alternatives are so appalling - I mean, Kerry, honestly - how can you lose against one of the most hated presidents of all time?
No, I think we're stuck with Blair, or at least until Brown takes over.
The solution is obvious. You set up a web app and get your visitors to sign up for a Google API account and copy the details in to a profile. They log in, do their searches, it deducts from their own totals and the web app just plods merrily onward.
Why? I absolutely HATE the OS X system. urpmi was one of the most pleasant surprises I had when installing Mandrake.
Yup. You're pretty much right on that. You ought to see the number of people I've tried to 'convert' to Firefox/Thunderbird who protested at first, but once I told them that they could uninstall it if they liked and revert to what they had (invariably IE), all the protests that they made before installing it disappeared after install. Why? Because they don't actually give a shit.
WTF is the point of giving people who can kick a football a college scholarship? I talk out of naivety here, since I can't think of any good reason (beyond financial ones, perhaps) that sports and HE are tied together in the States.
I mean, here in London, a few of the colleges have teams - I think Imperial (the biggest sci/tech college) have a team that is relatively pro, but that's only because most people see it as a bit of fun rather than what it seems to be in the US.
How does it further the "community of scholars seeking truth" function of a university to have dimwitted douchebags running around a football field on a semi-professional basis? You can justify college sports only on the same basis that you can justify college UT squads and scholarships for EverQuest nerds.
Rich Wireless Application Service Provider kids?