Actually, the word "meme" was coined in 1988 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. The study of memetics has only been around for about a decade and a half. A lot of smart people doubt the usefullness and the plausibility of the study, but since it is so new, it is vey hard to tell.
It's certainly true that the proponents of memetics have a hard time really sitting down and coming up with hard evidence of what they are talking about, but it's also true that doing that is extremely difficult, given the material (which is insubstantial and only really detectable second-hand) and the nature of the idea, which is probably close to sociology, but also straddles psychology and biology.
You have to admit, however, that, on its own, the idea of a "meme" -- an idea as a self-contained unit that makes its way around the culture -- is both fascinating and useful for description of some cultural phenomena.
tax incentives to the parents of children who perform in the top X percentile of their class would motivate parents to become better involved.
I recognize the good intentions behind your idea, but I shudder when I think about what that would mean.
Think about the children who would then feel that they were responsible, not just for getting good grades, but for whether or not the family could afford a vacation in the summer, or (at the extreme) to buy new clothes or food.
Consider the parents who would mercilessly instill that attitude in their kids. Not just pride or social standing anymore, but actual money rest on the child's ability to jump through the correct hoops.
It sounds like a recipe for childhood neurosis to me.
Oh, yeah -- I forgot to mention how to do the transfer.
I used essential oil of mint. I was in art school at the time, and my roommate was doing some transferring of his (ink-jet-printed) photos onto canvas. He was using the oil and I borrowed some. It works great. Probably any "essential oil" would work, since (I think) they're mostly alcohol.
You can print out the design on normal paper. You tape it to the board, and then pour some oil onto the paper and rub the ink lines with something fairly hard. If you screw it up, more mint oil should take the ink off and let you try again. Now that I think of it, rubbing alcohol might even work. I dunno.
What's difficult about doing circuit boards at home? I've made a couple.
You can buy "blank" boards, covered completely in copper on one side. I did the design in Illustrator, printed it out on a laser printer, and transferred the laser ink to the copper. The ink works as a good resist for the ferric chloride etching solution, which is also cheap and easy to buy.
Then you get a shallow dish that you're not planning on using again (some old tupperware, e.g.), and swish the board around until the extra copper's gone. A 100-watt lamp keeps the ferric warm and makes everything go a little faster.
The etching doesn't take more than half an hour, and the projects I've built have worked well.
There's a thing called the "loudness curve" which was drawn up based on the responses of thousands of listeners to sine waves all at the same level. Humans don't have a flat frequency response. Here's the first link from a quick google. The one-sentence summary is that a person will percieve certain frequencies (e.g., the freqency range of a human voice, 2.5kHz - 6kHz) as being louder than others with the same amplitude.
The other thing is that it's extremely unlikely that your speakers are able to output 20kHz at the same loudness as 10k and 16k. They will have a non-flat frequency response too, which generally goes from somewhere around 30-40Hz up to 18kHz. Reliably, anyways, which is to say without a lot of distortion. So that will affect what you hear. If you could hear the 20kHz sound at all, and the 16k, too, your hearing is probably fine. If there's a medical school around you somewhere, you could probably get it checked for free, which is interesting, and a good idea if you're going to be involved in music professionally.
Finally, yes, your hearing does get damaged only in the range of the things you hear. The little hairs (cilia) in your inner ear that respond to a particular frequency will wither if they get over-stimulated. They won't grow back on their own, but there are people working on it!
You do realize that "short next step" arguments are entirely, completely, totally fallacious, don't you?
Wrong. The SCOTUS makes rulings based on past rulings. All they ever do is take "short next steps." Likewise, lawmakers use the rulings as starting points for new laws, and revise old laws incrementally. In fact, I'd almost say that our entire legal system is founded on the slippery slope.
Furthermore, for an interesting discussion of how the slippery slope can play out in public opinion, see this paper, which I believe was featured on/. a while back.
Did anyone else get a chuckle out of the fact that of the four"biggest threats" to American employment mentioned by this guy, three and possibly four involved blaming the government?
First, education; he wants the government (which as we all know, means all the rest of us) to improve education. This is of course a good thing, but it also seems like a boogeyman these days, especially when it comes to shifting blame. I wouldn't mind adding this interview to the "hot air that has gone out on this issue".
Next, government-funded R&D. This is the one that especially got me. He wants everyone else to pay to come up with ideas for his company. Perhaps he should outsource the R&D, if everything is so much more competitive in other countries!
Then, communications infrastructure. In the past, this has been built mostly by the government. Not so much anymore, the cell-phone system being the major example. Of course, the "swiss-army knife" of communications infrastructure is the wire and the protocols for the internet, which AFAIK was started up and largely implemented by the gubmint.
And finally, awww, he wants the government to leave him alone so he can outsource jobs and avoid paying taxes and keep doing all those "competitive" things he does.
If everything but service jobs leave the country, not only will corporations be paying far less in taxes, but the individual citizens will too, and then there will be no government money for education and R&D.
It is by no means a straight course, nor is it anything close to being a "completely barren plain, with very few obstacles". I don't really know much about the Mojave Desert, but it is definitely not a field of sand. There was a very nice article in the last Scientific American, which is unfortunately not freely accessible online, which explained the course.
The vehicles had to navigate along a series of waypoints which were between 150 and 1000 feet apart. There was also a limitation on how far they could stray: the width of legal track between each set of waypoints was defined, and could be, apparently, as little as 10 feet.
My understanding is that DARPA deliberately made the course difficult, going under rock formations, around the occasional hairpin turn, and so forth, to make sure that the robots could really navigate.
I cede your point about the ad. I did not understand that you and the ad were talking about the total national debt, and not the yearly budget ('cause most people don't make the distinction).
Anyways, I was a little quick off the mark; sorry.
( Now, before everyone goes into shock at seeing the "s" word. . . )
However , the fact remains that the national debt increased far, far less during Clinton's terms (due to a (eventually) balanced budget) than it has for a very long time (you yourself noted that, according to your data, the debt increased in his second term by less than half of what it had in his first) , and than it is currently projected to for the next 10 years or so. This projected increase is due very directly to the projected budget deficits caused by Bush's tax cuts and his spending increases. And if we look at the information pointed to above(thanks, IVotedIn200!), we see that, starting from the end of FY2001 ( beginning the first full fiscal year Bush could conceivably have an effect ), to today, right at the top of the page, the debt has increased by 1.3 trillion dollars. But here, I'll even give you the 400 billion increase from 9/30/2001 to 2002, because, using another page from the same site (the Treasury Department's, for those who aren't paying attention, and up-to-date) we see that, in fact, the debt increased under Clinton ( 1993 - 2001 ) by about 1.2 trillion. So if we take the 400 billion from FY 2002 from Bush and tack it onto Clinton, we have: 1.6 trillion over 9 years vs. 8-900 billion over 2! And without being generous to Bush like that, Clinton and Bush have grown the national debt by about the same amout, except Bush did it 3 times faster!!
But what do facts matter, anyways? Ideology and ranting about Al Sharpton is so much more fun.
The national debt, by the way, has been around since the the United States assumed the debt amassed during the Revolutionary War by the Continental Congress. The 20th century made it go way, way up, what with the two World Wars, the Depression, and increased military spending in the second half of the century (FDR is your man if you want to complain about increasing the debt).
The "add a document to the dock" behavior has priority over the "throw a document in the trash" behavior.
True, and yes, I think Tog has complained about this general behavior. It doesn't seem like too big a deal to me, though -- you just keep moving on down. But it is stupid.
My second biggest gripe is when you're trying to drag a dozen documents to an application's icon in the dock, and you miss it by hitting the area between the icon and the edge of the screen. (see Fitts' Law) Suddenly you've got a dozen documents in the dock, and you have to remove them one by one. Now try it with 50 documents.
This you are mistaken about. In Panther, which is what we're talking about, and in Jaguar, and I'm pretty sure in 10.1 too, the dock is separated; documents go in one half, apps in the other, and never the twain shall meet. So if you miss, the documents go nowhere, they just don't open. Of course, if you let go of the mouse without seeing the application highlight to let you know it can open those docs anyways, well, buddy, you deserve what you get. Hee hee.
Some of your gripe I can get behind, however -- I just did a little experimenting, and there is a completely different hit mask for opening an application and dragging to an application in the Dock. When opening, the entire rectangle from the edge of the dock to the edge of the screen, and between the icons above and below, is valid to click on. When dragging to, however, you have to be over the icon itself. What's more, it seems (based on trying only one or two apps, mind you) that the hit mask here is subtly different than the draggable area in the Finder. If anyone's got any info about this, I'd be interested to hear it.
Wood is flammable, yes.
If I had built a cabinet before, probably I would know exactly how to make things perfectly square.
And pretty much the dust from anything can cause lung cancer.
But really, folks, the point is that I have a +5, Informative, and you all don't. So, hah!
What I meant to say was. ..really, folks, the point is that I just thought I'd relate what I did to make my cabinet, and thanks for pointing out the rough spots.
(This is probably going to get -1, Flamebait Overrated Troll, and negate all my good work up above.)
You don't really need to use metal, though. Most people don't have the tools.
I built myself a rack cabinet for my music gear about a year and a half ago. I built it out of 1/2" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), which is a pretty good, reasonably strong, all-purpose, cheap, and very consistent (because it's made out of sawdust glued together, basically ). My boss, who is a former contractor, uses it all the time to make shelves at work. You can get 3/4", and sometimes even 1", if you are concerned about strength.
Then all you need to build the cabinet are: a circluar saw (table mount is best if you can get to one), some wood screws, and a drill. Plus, I guess, a tape measure.
There are really only three crucial issues: securing the corners somehow so the whole cabinet doesn't wobble back and forth, making sure the screws don't crack the MDF (which can happen very easily), and making sure the two sides are as close to parallel as possible, so that your equipment will fit in correctly all the way up and down the cabinet.
I solved the first by simply screwing a big piece of scrap MDF to the back bottom half of the cabinet. There are much more elegant ways to do it, and I am sure you can figure them out.
The second simply means that you have to drill all your screw holes before you put the screws in.
The third is the most difficult; I dealt with it by using corner clamps, and got lucky. Using a square in each corner would help, or you might be able to work something out using a level, if you have one.
Rack rails are available at big music stores (Guitar Center, e.g.); small ones should be able to order them. I'm sure Fry's has them, and MicroCenter too, but I've never actually looked.
The best way (I think) to attach the rails is with carriage bolts, and I didn't find that I needed washers (since there are so many bolts all the way down the rail). Rack screws are #10-32 machine screws (at least, that's what I use), and it's best to get short brass ones -- they go in easier.
I hope you don't think that I was impugning your site in any way, Craig. I am really enthusiastic about it, and I recommend it to people as a resource (those who don't already know about it). It helped me a lot in my recent search for an apartment, and the middle of last year when I was looking for a job.
I was just shocked that someone would make a job offer like this at all, anywhere.
Yes, I saw one on craigslist, not quite as bad (and, I realize, not a tech job) last night that made me laugh out loud. A hundred fifty dollars for a job that will take at least three full work days, if not a week (12+ pages) is a joke and a half, especially for someone with all the skills that are "required".
Small financial services company in Cambridge is looking for an experienced graphic designer to work on a project basis. Must have experience in:
Layout/design with an emphasis in publishing (e.g., magazine, periodicals, etc.)
Computer design skills a must (QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and photoshop desired)
Skills in designing both online and offline marketing materials
Illustration and iconography experience a major plus
Knowledge of PDF file optimization
The first project is a 12+ page information kit that will be offered as a downloadable PDF. Raw copy and some images will be supplied. Compensation for this first project is a flat fee of $150. Application must be accompanied by portfolio of prior work.
I decided to do the same thing recently ( altho' I have no kids; it's just for me ), and I stumbled across "Calculus The Easy Way", which I really like. It is, as Yodason mentioned, told in a story, which makes it a little silly at times. It's sort of a Guilliver's Travels plot. But the good part is that the story revolves around the characters actually discovering calculus, which means that they explain what they do and why, and go through proofs when they "stumble" across a principle that they're not sure about. It has traditional exercises at the end of each chapter, so you've got your homework right there too.
I highly recommend this book.
I also understand that "Algebra The Easy Way" is written by the same person and in the same style ( there are lots of references in "Calculus" to "when we discovered algebra" and so forth ), but I haven't been able to find it. Finally, the other books in the series are not like this -- they are traditional textbooks, dry and nearly useless.
All the scenarios that you describe are completely possible; I will even say that they probably _will_ happen. I'd also like to say that I hope that eventually people will stop feeling the need to do that sort of thing. But that's not an argument; it's just a foolish dream -- I don't really think it'll happen. I think that human nature is to want to belong to a group and exclude and disapprove of persons outside the group. So, yes, all this stuff will happen.
However, as you say, it happens already. The fact that it will increase in magnitude is something we'll have to adjust to.
( Oh, also I'd like to say that I don't care two bits whether I can see into your real life. If you want to fuck loose women, men, dogs, or even just have a drink of whiskey down by the docks, more power to you. What I'm worried about is who's looking at _my_ life. In all honesty, I also find the idea of living a double life fascinating -- you know, being a secret agent and all that. I just don't think it's any way to run a society. And, like I said at the end of my post, if you want to do your double-life thing in the context that I describe, nothing would prevent you; the only difference is that _everyone_ would see what a super-amazing nice person you are, not just the Rent-a-cops manning the cameras for the Party )
I'd like to go to the basic argument here. We start with the assumption ( which I believe you and I share, and if we don't, then this discussion doesn't have much future ) that the cameras are coming. In ten, maybe twenty years, SOMEONE will be able to watch everything that I do in public, make notes/recordings of my actions, and use that information for whatever that person or group likes. There will be surveillance. This is unavoidable. The only choice that we have deals with who has access to the information; who controls the cameras.
The first choice that I see is that a single power group, i.e., our government, controls the cameras, and all access to the information provided by them. Those of us being watched don't know who's watching, why, what the information is being used for, and so on. One day there's a knock on your door, and you're arrested for violating fornication laws down on the waterfront last saturday. We have lost both our privacy and an enormous amount of freedom and control over our own lives.
The second choice is that anyone, anywhere ( within the country, o/c ) has access to the information. It's totally open and free. Anytime I want, I can look at whoever is looking at me. Of course, anyone else can find out what I did last Thursday. This is true, and potentially unpleasant, I admit, but it's true now, it just requires more work. ( It's also entirely a side effect. ) The difference between this option and the other is that we know who's watching us and why. We lose our privacy, but retain control and freedom.
We even gain some useful information; we can find out that our Senator, while claiming to be a strict fundamentalist, and getting that fornication law pushed through Congress, likes to go down to the docks on Saturday night and screw till sunrise.
The big difference is this: societal predjudice and government predjudice are in completely different categories: one is inevitable, and mitigatable, and the other is unallowable and very hard to stop once it gets going.
Groups of people have been snubbing other groups of people and denying them jobs since about the time that humans learned how to brew coffee and put the baby down for a nap. Maybe that'll change; probably not. Predjudices are a part of what human society does. But if someone denies you a job or throws you out of your apartment, it's not the end. You've got friends, right? You can crash on their couch for a few days, maybe get a bank loan, pack up, and move to Seattle. That's it; it sucks, and your life's gonna be messed up for a couple of months, but Alabama was too hot anyways. The point is, you have options and the freedom to act on them. Society can suck, but it has alwa
You're welcome to follow me around, on condition that I can do the same to you, and that I know where you are and when you are following me.
That is the idea. ..everyone watches everyone. Not just that the state knows all about my actions, but that I know about the actions of the state. The argument is: the cameras are coming -- who's going to control them? the citizens, or the Government®?
You should think about the issue, not from an "I'm outraged" point of view, but from a "There's a workaround, let's find it" POV.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I understand that you are doing the same, and I certainly appreciate your arguments, but I think that your method is, well, completely wrong.:)
you'll have the freedom to live whatever life you want behind closed doors, where it actually *matters*.
Well, the thing is, I believe that my freedom to buy reactionary literature and involve myself openly with groups that anyone from my mother to the Attorney General to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir disapproves of is very important. It matters as much as my freedom in private, and I think that it matters to a good number of other people, too.
The point is, to recognize and understand the parameters of the system, to understand fully how it is watching you
I agree with this completely, and I think we need to get these ideas in writing, i.e., on the books. I disagree when you start taking the approach that says "well, I'm free to think what I want, even if I can't talk about it, and that's good enough."
How can you ensure that your daily activities don't end up branding you with the electronic equivalent of a scarlet letter, without you ever even knowing about it?
By making absolutely sure that everyone knows everyone else's daily activities, or can at the touch of a button. No-one can possibly hold anything over your head if everyone can find out about it anyways. Also, you notice how most people don't pick their nose when they know someone is watching them? The same will happen, I believe, to actions like bribery. And on the flip side, anyone can prove their innocence very easily when it is known exactly where that person was last Saturday night at 8:13PM.
What I'm suggesting is that you actively USE the system to protect yourself from persecution.
What if the system is DESIGNED to prevent undue persecution, and to actually protect everyone just a little bit better? Have you read "Transparent Society"? I recommend it.
once businesses start taking peeks at Joe's profile (you KNOW that's going to happen, don't you?)
Of course it is, but what if you can look at a business's profile, too? And the profile of its HR drones? And know if that business was looking at your file? And know that they knew that you were looking at theirs? And on and on. ..
How can you ensure that you have at least *some* privacy to live as you choose?
I don't believe that I need much more privacy than I can get by shutting my bedroom door at night. What I do need is the freedom to speak, write, and read whatever I want, to associate with whomever I choose, and to know what my government is up to. Hiding what I do is not important to me, but being able to do it is.
If you prefer your approach, nothing will stop you from using it, and the rest of us will be free to be open.
What you have described gives me goosebumps. I have to be acting, or lying, every single time I go out of my house? I am not free to say or do something for fear it will make me "get pounded down"? I hope you were being sarcastic, but I am afraid that you weren't. Your method for dealing with surveillance is self-censorship. "If I don't do anything THEY might not like, THEY'LL leave me alone."
I'd think that's something that we'd try to avoid.
My suggestions for how to deal with this are as follows (which may be too pragmatic for some):
1: Recognize, as you said, that this is inevitable. The cameras are coming, whether we want them or not. As some other people have mentioned, there are already ways to gather lots of information about you. More sophisticated and intentional methods are only a matter of time.
2: Therefore, instead of whining about it and fighting a losing battle, make sure that everything to do with surveillance is above the table. Pass laws that open the source code of the software. Put the locations of every camera into a public registry. Make the cameras themselves accessable at any time by anyone, over the web. We have to demand that the watchers are watched.
( A little editorializing )Those of us in the U.S. are supposed to be self-governed, yet every refers to "us" and "the government" as separate entities. It seems to me like this could be a way to fix that. After all, this system will track _everyone_, from our CEO to the local notary public, and maybe even your dog, too.
We are slowly losing privacy, no matter what we do. If we do it with our eyes open, and thoughtfully, we could end up better-off than before. If we just moan among ourselves, or flee to Tahiti, the cameras will come, and we won't even know where they are.
( The suggestions I give are illustrated pretty well in the book "The Truth Machine" by James L. Halperin ( which is where I got the suggestions from ), and probably other books, too. )
I agree with you, cshark, and I think that the RIAA may have opened their eyes at last, and backed off on this.
Consider what they got out of the settlement:
1) bad press
2) $12,000 (now Ms. Rosen can buy that '00 Dodge Neon!)
3) the site is still operational
4) a little bit of bad press
5) the student denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement
6) everybody on/. hates them (hmm, wait. ..)
In other words, NOTHING.
It seems to me like they may have realized that they were not going to get anything useful out of this suit, and decided to settle quickly, to "cut their losses," so to speak. Maybe they have an inkling that people in general don't think that suing college freshman as music pirates is such a great thing.
The thing is, OLGA won (in court!) because they established that they were publishing _interpretations_ to be used only within fair use guidelines. Now every single tablature file they serve has a header that explicitly states that.
I think that, as long as the MPA goes after a big lyric site, and that site can get some financial backing, this won't be a problem for too long, since there seems to be a precendent. Lyric sites will have to explicitly state that their files are interpretations, not transcriptions or anything else, but they'll still be around.
I think there's a pretty big difference between looking at websites and working with files on your computer.
To continue to use the spatial metaphor (because I think it makes things clear), it seems to me that web browsing is like reading a magazine (you are jumping from content to content, whether it's pictures or words or movies), and navigating files is like going through your desk drawers. When you're browsing the web, you don't care too much about where the content is actually located relative to other content. But on your home computer, that's essentially all you care about. You're not so worried about the content until you're accessing it in an application. The TV/Radio channels you mention are the same -- content for which you're not totally concerned about the location relative to other content. Channel 31 appears in the same place as 65, but you don't need the two to interact at all. Picture-in-picture is about as far as simultaneity goes there.
(I have to disagree with you about the prominence of the current path. Who cares what http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674920015/ qid=1049329928/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-0639604-93959 17 means? The point is that it's the book I've been looking for. That's what is taking up all the space in the window. I think the path is there as a convenience to those of us who can remember them.)
If I want to move a piece of paper from one drawer of my desk to another, I open both drawers and move the paper (or open one, pull out the paper, and while holding it in my hand, open the other drawer and put the paper in). Is it simpler in navigational-style file manager/browser?
You're absolutely right about going straight to the paper in the box with telekinesis. (I almost missed that you added X-ray vision -- you're talking about something like column view!) I don't think that has to break the model, though -- as long as you distinguish the column view ("X-ray vision") from the regular ("real-world") method. This is as simple as column view having a brushed-metal look (or something similar), and gives us the advantages of both worlds. ..I can find and grab a pice of paper quickly from the cupboard with my special powers, and then drop it into one of my desk drawers.
There are a lot of things missing (windowshading, for god's sake!!!) and strange (what the hell is "Computer" window and why do all my drives show up there?) to me in OS X's Finder, having used Mac OS since I was about six, but there are new, navigational-style things that I _really_ like. The best example is Go To. . . with tab completion. I'm willing to go along with Apple for the ride on OS X (what am I gonna do. ..switch to Windows, or Linux that looks like Windows?), but I hope they read articles and discussions like this and give them some thought.
I think the most important point from the article is that Apple needs to have a clear and coherent vision for their file management. If they had totally rewritten the Finder and it totally smoked, I would be there in an instant. But there's just enough left from OS 9, mixed with just enough new (to Mac OS) stuff to make long-time users feel a little funny (and I think that stuff probably affects newbies too, though I won't swear to it).
Re:Basically, a GIVE ME BACK MY OS 9 article
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A Better Finder?
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Well, no, you don't label doorknobs as doorknobs, but that's not what labels do. Doorknobs are non-movable tools, more like a button than a folder, and "labels", in this case, means colorizing, not words.
Imagine you have a bookcase with 15 books, all with the same physical appearance: they're all 10 inches tall, 2 inches thick, and a soothing blue color. They have their names written on them, so that differentiates them, but what if you "labelled" one of them red? I bet you could pick that one out about a hundred times faster.
That's the connection to spatiality.
I think what they're trying to say is that things which are good for continued survival of your genes are pleasurable, as a built-in mechanism to encourage you, strictly as a carrier of genes, to do them. That doesn't mean that all pleasurable things are good for the continued survival of your genes.
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
Of course there are other nice things in life, but as far as your DNA is concerned, they don't matter nearly as much as food and sex.
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly true that the proponents of memetics have a hard time really sitting down and coming up with hard evidence of what they are talking about, but it's also true that doing that is extremely difficult, given the material (which is insubstantial and only really detectable second-hand) and the nature of the idea, which is probably close to sociology, but also straddles psychology and biology.
You have to admit, however, that, on its own, the idea of a "meme" -- an idea as a self-contained unit that makes its way around the culture -- is both fascinating and useful for description of some cultural phenomena.
I recognize the good intentions behind your idea, but I shudder when I think about what that would mean.
Think about the children who would then feel that they were responsible, not just for getting good grades, but for whether or not the family could afford a vacation in the summer, or (at the extreme) to buy new clothes or food.
Consider the parents who would mercilessly instill that attitude in their kids. Not just pride or social standing anymore, but actual money rest on the child's ability to jump through the correct hoops.
It sounds like a recipe for childhood neurosis to me.
I used essential oil of mint. I was in art school at the time, and my roommate was doing some transferring of his (ink-jet-printed) photos onto canvas. He was using the oil and I borrowed some. It works great. Probably any "essential oil" would work, since (I think) they're mostly alcohol.
You can print out the design on normal paper. You tape it to the board, and then pour some oil onto the paper and rub the ink lines with something fairly hard. If you screw it up, more mint oil should take the ink off and let you try again. Now that I think of it, rubbing alcohol might even work. I dunno.
You can buy "blank" boards, covered completely in copper on one side. I did the design in Illustrator, printed it out on a laser printer, and transferred the laser ink to the copper. The ink works as a good resist for the ferric chloride etching solution, which is also cheap and easy to buy.
Then you get a shallow dish that you're not planning on using again (some old tupperware, e.g.), and swish the board around until the extra copper's gone. A 100-watt lamp keeps the ferric warm and makes everything go a little faster.
The etching doesn't take more than half an hour, and the projects I've built have worked well.
The other thing is that it's extremely unlikely that your speakers are able to output 20kHz at the same loudness as 10k and 16k. They will have a non-flat frequency response too, which generally goes from somewhere around 30-40Hz up to 18kHz. Reliably, anyways, which is to say without a lot of distortion. So that will affect what you hear. If you could hear the 20kHz sound at all, and the 16k, too, your hearing is probably fine. If there's a medical school around you somewhere, you could probably get it checked for free, which is interesting, and a good idea if you're going to be involved in music professionally.
Finally, yes, your hearing does get damaged only in the range of the things you hear. The little hairs (cilia) in your inner ear that respond to a particular frequency will wither if they get over-stimulated. They won't grow back on their own, but there are people working on it!
Wrong. The SCOTUS makes rulings based on past rulings. All they ever do is take "short next steps." Likewise, lawmakers use the rulings as starting points for new laws, and revise old laws incrementally. In fact, I'd almost say that our entire legal system is founded on the slippery slope.
Furthermore, for an interesting discussion of how the slippery slope can play out in public opinion, see this paper, which I believe was featured on /. a while back.
First, education; he wants the government (which as we all know, means all the rest of us) to improve education. This is of course a good thing, but it also seems like a boogeyman these days, especially when it comes to shifting blame. I wouldn't mind adding this interview to the "hot air that has gone out on this issue".
Next, government-funded R&D. This is the one that especially got me. He wants everyone else to pay to come up with ideas for his company. Perhaps he should outsource the R&D, if everything is so much more competitive in other countries!
Then, communications infrastructure. In the past, this has been built mostly by the government. Not so much anymore, the cell-phone system being the major example. Of course, the "swiss-army knife" of communications infrastructure is the wire and the protocols for the internet, which AFAIK was started up and largely implemented by the gubmint.
And finally, awww, he wants the government to leave him alone so he can outsource jobs and avoid paying taxes and keep doing all those "competitive" things he does.
If everything but service jobs leave the country, not only will corporations be paying far less in taxes, but the individual citizens will too, and then there will be no government money for education and R&D.
Just my two cents.
The vehicles had to navigate along a series of waypoints which were between 150 and 1000 feet apart. There was also a limitation on how far they could stray: the width of legal track between each set of waypoints was defined, and could be, apparently, as little as 10 feet.
My understanding is that DARPA deliberately made the course difficult, going under rock formations, around the occasional hairpin turn, and so forth, to make sure that the robots could really navigate.
( Now, before everyone goes into shock at seeing the "s" word. . . )
However , the fact remains that the national debt increased far, far less during Clinton's terms (due to a (eventually) balanced budget) than it has for a very long time (you yourself noted that, according to your data, the debt increased in his second term by less than half of what it had in his first) , and than it is currently projected to for the next 10 years or so. This projected increase is due very directly to the projected budget deficits caused by Bush's tax cuts and his spending increases. And if we look at the information pointed to above(thanks, IVotedIn200!), we see that, starting from the end of FY2001 ( beginning the first full fiscal year Bush could conceivably have an effect ), to today, right at the top of the page, the debt has increased by 1.3 trillion dollars. But here, I'll even give you the 400 billion increase from 9/30/2001 to 2002, because, using another page from the same site (the Treasury Department's, for those who aren't paying attention, and up-to-date) we see that, in fact, the debt increased under Clinton ( 1993 - 2001 ) by about 1.2 trillion. So if we take the 400 billion from FY 2002 from Bush and tack it onto Clinton, we have: 1.6 trillion over 9 years vs. 8-900 billion over 2! And without being generous to Bush like that, Clinton and Bush have grown the national debt by about the same amout, except Bush did it 3 times faster!!
But what do facts matter, anyways? Ideology and ranting about Al Sharpton is so much more fun.
The national debt, by the way, has been around since the the United States assumed the debt amassed during the Revolutionary War by the Continental Congress. The 20th century made it go way, way up, what with the two World Wars, the Depression, and increased military spending in the second half of the century (FDR is your man if you want to complain about increasing the debt).
True, and yes, I think Tog has complained about this general behavior. It doesn't seem like too big a deal to me, though -- you just keep moving on down. But it is stupid.
My second biggest gripe is when you're trying to drag a dozen documents to an application's icon in the dock, and you miss it by hitting the area between the icon and the edge of the screen. (see Fitts' Law) Suddenly you've got a dozen documents in the dock, and you have to remove them one by one. Now try it with 50 documents.
This you are mistaken about. In Panther, which is what we're talking about, and in Jaguar, and I'm pretty sure in 10.1 too, the dock is separated; documents go in one half, apps in the other, and never the twain shall meet. So if you miss, the documents go nowhere, they just don't open. Of course, if you let go of the mouse without seeing the application highlight to let you know it can open those docs anyways, well, buddy, you deserve what you get. Hee hee.
Some of your gripe I can get behind, however -- I just did a little experimenting, and there is a completely different hit mask for opening an application and dragging to an application in the Dock. When opening, the entire rectangle from the edge of the dock to the edge of the screen, and between the icons above and below, is valid to click on. When dragging to, however, you have to be over the icon itself. What's more, it seems (based on trying only one or two apps, mind you) that the hit mask here is subtly different than the draggable area in the Finder. If anyone's got any info about this, I'd be interested to hear it.
Wood is flammable, yes.
If I had built a cabinet before, probably I would know exactly how to make things perfectly square.
And pretty much the dust from anything can cause lung cancer.
But really, folks, the point is that I have a +5, Informative, and you all don't. So, hah!
What I meant to say was. . .really, folks, the point is that I just thought I'd relate what I did to make my cabinet, and thanks for pointing out the rough spots.
(This is probably going to get -1, Flamebait Overrated Troll, and negate all my good work up above.)
I built myself a rack cabinet for my music gear about a year and a half ago. I built it out of 1/2" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), which is a pretty good, reasonably strong, all-purpose, cheap, and very consistent (because it's made out of sawdust glued together, basically ). My boss, who is a former contractor, uses it all the time to make shelves at work. You can get 3/4", and sometimes even 1", if you are concerned about strength.
Then all you need to build the cabinet are: a circluar saw (table mount is best if you can get to one), some wood screws, and a drill. Plus, I guess, a tape measure.
There are really only three crucial issues: securing the corners somehow so the whole cabinet doesn't wobble back and forth, making sure the screws don't crack the MDF (which can happen very easily), and making sure the two sides are as close to parallel as possible, so that your equipment will fit in correctly all the way up and down the cabinet.
I solved the first by simply screwing a big piece of scrap MDF to the back bottom half of the cabinet. There are much more elegant ways to do it, and I am sure you can figure them out.
The second simply means that you have to drill all your screw holes before you put the screws in.
The third is the most difficult; I dealt with it by using corner clamps, and got lucky. Using a square in each corner would help, or you might be able to work something out using a level, if you have one.
Rack rails are available at big music stores (Guitar Center, e.g.); small ones should be able to order them. I'm sure Fry's has them, and MicroCenter too, but I've never actually looked.
The best way (I think) to attach the rails is with carriage bolts, and I didn't find that I needed washers (since there are so many bolts all the way down the rail). Rack screws are #10-32 machine screws (at least, that's what I use), and it's best to get short brass ones -- they go in easier.
Good luck!
I was just shocked that someone would make a job offer like this at all, anywhere.
Small financial services company in Cambridge is looking for an experienced graphic designer to work on a project basis. Must have experience in:
Layout/design with an emphasis in publishing (e.g., magazine, periodicals, etc.)
Computer design skills a must (QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and photoshop desired)
Skills in designing both online and offline marketing materials
Illustration and iconography experience a major plus
Knowledge of PDF file optimization
The first project is a 12+ page information kit that will be offered as a downloadable PDF. Raw copy and some images will be supplied. Compensation for this first project is a flat fee of $150. Application must be accompanied by portfolio of prior work.
Compensation: $150 flat fee
This is a contract job.
It has traditional exercises at the end of each chapter, so you've got your homework right there too.
I highly recommend this book.
I also understand that "Algebra The Easy Way" is written by the same person and in the same style ( there are lots of references in "Calculus" to "when we discovered algebra" and so forth ), but I haven't been able to find it. Finally, the other books in the series are not like this -- they are traditional textbooks, dry and nearly useless.
However, as you say, it happens already. The fact that it will increase in magnitude is something we'll have to adjust to.
( Oh, also I'd like to say that I don't care two bits whether I can see into your real life. If you want to fuck loose women, men, dogs, or even just have a drink of whiskey down by the docks, more power to you. What I'm worried about is who's looking at _my_ life. In all honesty, I also find the idea of living a double life fascinating -- you know, being a secret agent and all that. I just don't think it's any way to run a society. And, like I said at the end of my post, if you want to do your double-life thing in the context that I describe, nothing would prevent you; the only difference is that _everyone_ would see what a super-amazing nice person you are, not just the Rent-a-cops manning the cameras for the Party )
I'd like to go to the basic argument here. We start with the assumption ( which I believe you and I share, and if we don't, then this discussion doesn't have much future ) that the cameras are coming. In ten, maybe twenty years, SOMEONE will be able to watch everything that I do in public, make notes/recordings of my actions, and use that information for whatever that person or group likes. There will be surveillance. This is unavoidable. The only choice that we have deals with who has access to the information; who controls the cameras.
The first choice that I see is that a single power group, i.e., our government, controls the cameras, and all access to the information provided by them. Those of us being watched don't know who's watching, why, what the information is being used for, and so on. One day there's a knock on your door, and you're arrested for violating fornication laws down on the waterfront last saturday. We have lost both our privacy and an enormous amount of freedom and control over our own lives.
The second choice is that anyone, anywhere ( within the country, o/c ) has access to the information. It's totally open and free. Anytime I want, I can look at whoever is looking at me. Of course, anyone else can find out what I did last Thursday. This is true, and potentially unpleasant, I admit, but it's true now, it just requires more work. ( It's also entirely a side effect. ) The difference between this option and the other is that we know who's watching us and why. We lose our privacy, but retain control and freedom.
We even gain some useful information; we can find out that our Senator, while claiming to be a strict fundamentalist, and getting that fornication law pushed through Congress, likes to go down to the docks on Saturday night and screw till sunrise.
The big difference is this: societal predjudice and government predjudice are in completely different categories: one is inevitable, and mitigatable, and the other is unallowable and very hard to stop once it gets going.
Groups of people have been snubbing other groups of people and denying them jobs since about the time that humans learned how to brew coffee and put the baby down for a nap. Maybe that'll change; probably not. Predjudices are a part of what human society does. But if someone denies you a job or throws you out of your apartment, it's not the end. You've got friends, right? You can crash on their couch for a few days, maybe get a bank loan, pack up, and move to Seattle. That's it; it sucks, and your life's gonna be messed up for a couple of months, but Alabama was too hot anyways.
The point is, you have options and the freedom to act on them. Society can suck, but it has alwa
Psst. . .it's double-plus ungood.
That is the idea. . .everyone watches everyone. Not just that the state knows all about my actions, but that I know about the actions of the state. The argument is: the cameras are coming -- who's going to control them? the citizens, or the Government®?
That's exactly what I'm doing. I understand that you are doing the same, and I certainly appreciate your arguments, but I think that your method is, well, completely wrong.
you'll have the freedom to live whatever life you want behind closed doors, where it actually *matters*.
Well, the thing is, I believe that my freedom to buy reactionary literature and involve myself openly with groups that anyone from my mother to the Attorney General to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir disapproves of is very important. It matters as much as my freedom in private, and I think that it matters to a good number of other people, too.
The point is, to recognize and understand the parameters of the system, to understand fully how it is watching you
I agree with this completely, and I think we need to get these ideas in writing, i.e., on the books. I disagree when you start taking the approach that says "well, I'm free to think what I want, even if I can't talk about it, and that's good enough."
How can you ensure that your daily activities don't end up branding you with the electronic equivalent of a scarlet letter, without you ever even knowing about it?
By making absolutely sure that everyone knows everyone else's daily activities, or can at the touch of a button. No-one can possibly hold anything over your head if everyone can find out about it anyways. Also, you notice how most people don't pick their nose when they know someone is watching them? The same will happen, I believe, to actions like bribery. And on the flip side, anyone can prove their innocence very easily when it is known exactly where that person was last Saturday night at 8:13PM.
What I'm suggesting is that you actively USE the system to protect yourself from persecution.
What if the system is DESIGNED to prevent undue persecution, and to actually protect everyone just a little bit better? Have you read "Transparent Society"? I recommend it.
once businesses start taking peeks at Joe's profile (you KNOW that's going to happen, don't you?) .
Of course it is, but what if you can look at a business's profile, too? And the profile of its HR drones? And know if that business was looking at your file? And know that they knew that you were looking at theirs? And on and on. .
How can you ensure that you have at least *some* privacy to live as you choose?
I don't believe that I need much more privacy than I can get by shutting my bedroom door at night. What I do need is the freedom to speak, write, and read whatever I want, to associate with whomever I choose, and to know what my government is up to. Hiding what I do is not important to me, but being able to do it is.
If you prefer your approach, nothing will stop you from using it, and the rest of us will be free to be open.
Eager for your response. . .
I'd think that's something that we'd try to avoid.
My suggestions for how to deal with this are as follows (which may be too pragmatic for some):
1: Recognize, as you said, that this is inevitable. The cameras are coming, whether we want them or not. As some other people have mentioned, there are already ways to gather lots of information about you. More sophisticated and intentional methods are only a matter of time.
2: Therefore, instead of whining about it and fighting a losing battle, make sure that everything to do with surveillance is above the table. Pass laws that open the source code of the software. Put the locations of every camera into a public registry. Make the cameras themselves accessable at any time by anyone, over the web. We have to demand that the watchers are watched.
( A little editorializing )Those of us in the U.S. are supposed to be self-governed, yet every refers to "us" and "the government" as separate entities. It seems to me like this could be a way to fix that. After all, this system will track _everyone_, from our CEO to the local notary public, and maybe even your dog, too.
We are slowly losing privacy, no matter what we do. If we do it with our eyes open, and thoughtfully, we could end up better-off than before. If we just moan among ourselves, or flee to Tahiti, the cameras will come, and we won't even know where they are.
( The suggestions I give are illustrated pretty well in the book "The Truth Machine" by James L. Halperin ( which is where I got the suggestions from ), and probably other books, too. )
Consider what they got out of the settlement: /. hates them (hmm, wait. . .)
1) bad press
2) $12,000 (now Ms. Rosen can buy that '00 Dodge Neon!)
3) the site is still operational
4) a little bit of bad press
5) the student denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement
6) everybody on
In other words, NOTHING.
It seems to me like they may have realized that they were not going to get anything useful out of this suit, and decided to settle quickly, to "cut their losses," so to speak. Maybe they have an inkling that people in general don't think that suing college freshman as music pirates is such a great thing.
I think that, as long as the MPA goes after a big lyric site, and that site can get some financial backing, this won't be a problem for too long, since there seems to be a precendent. Lyric sites will have to explicitly state that their files are interpretations, not transcriptions or anything else, but they'll still be around.
Hopefully.
To continue to use the spatial metaphor (because I think it makes things clear), it seems to me that web browsing is like reading a magazine (you are jumping from content to content, whether it's pictures or words or movies), and navigating files is like going through your desk drawers. When you're browsing the web, you don't care too much about where the content is actually located relative to other content. But on your home computer, that's essentially all you care about. You're not so worried about the content until you're accessing it in an application. The TV/Radio channels you mention are the same -- content for which you're not totally concerned about the location relative to other content. Channel 31 appears in the same place as 65, but you don't need the two to interact at all. Picture-in-picture is about as far as simultaneity goes there.
(I have to disagree with you about the prominence of the current path. Who cares what http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674920015/ qid=1049329928/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-0639604-93959 17 means? The point is that it's the book I've been looking for. That's what is taking up all the space in the window. I think the path is there as a convenience to those of us who can remember them.)
If I want to move a piece of paper from one drawer of my desk to another, I open both drawers and move the paper (or open one, pull out the paper, and while holding it in my hand, open the other drawer and put the paper in). Is it simpler in navigational-style file manager/browser?
You're absolutely right about going straight to the paper in the box with telekinesis. (I almost missed that you added X-ray vision -- you're talking about something like column view!) I don't think that has to break the model, though -- as long as you distinguish the column view ("X-ray vision") from the regular ("real-world") method. This is as simple as column view having a brushed-metal look (or something similar), and gives us the advantages of both worlds. . .I can find and grab a pice of paper quickly from the cupboard with my special powers, and then drop it into one of my desk drawers.
There are a lot of things missing (windowshading, for god's sake!!!) and strange (what the hell is "Computer" window and why do all my drives show up there?) to me in OS X's Finder, having used Mac OS since I was about six, but there are new, navigational-style things that I _really_ like. The best example is Go To. . . with tab completion. I'm willing to go along with Apple for the ride on OS X (what am I gonna do. . .switch to Windows, or Linux that looks like Windows?), but I hope they read articles and discussions like this and give them some thought.
I think the most important point from the article is that Apple needs to have a clear and coherent vision for their file management. If they had totally rewritten the Finder and it totally smoked, I would be there in an instant. But there's just enough left from OS 9, mixed with just enough new (to Mac OS) stuff to make long-time users feel a little funny (and I think that stuff probably affects newbies too, though I won't swear to it).
Imagine you have a bookcase with 15 books, all with the same physical appearance: they're all 10 inches tall, 2 inches thick, and a soothing blue color. They have their names written on them, so that differentiates them, but what if you "labelled" one of them red? I bet you could pick that one out about a hundred times faster.
That's the connection to spatiality.
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
Of course there are other nice things in life, but as far as your DNA is concerned, they don't matter nearly as much as food and sex.