It's true that negative reinforcement will learn things like "Don't eat the wires" alot faster, because the end result is the same: If you eat the wires, you will get hurt.
However, using negative reinforcement for things that will only be annoying--running in the flowerbed for example--then you are only teaching it to be mean back. Not only that, you can go into the flowerbed--and if you can do it, but they can't, they sometimes associate that you can be mean when your in there. My friend did this (hit his dog to stay off the couch) so now every time you sit down, it will bite at your legs while your on the couch--because it thinks its a game to be played there, on the couch.
So, what you do is train them to not want to go into the flowers, by reinforcing the positive aspect of not going into the flowers in the first place. Then they won't have any desire to go into them--but still will if need be.
This is the problem with 'invisible fences'. If you train them to not go past a certian point, they never will. Not even if your being dragged out of the yard kicking and screaming. So it's good to teach it not to leave, but you don't need to teach it 'If I go past this spot, I will get hurt.' beacuse what if they need to go out past that point?
What? USB is USB. 1.1 and 2.0 use the same voltage and can source the same amount of amps. And the socket is the same, at least from the computer side--and there is only one device USB socket that supports charging and data... So I really have no idea what your talking about.
I also like that they trained them. For gun dogs this usually involves a shock collar and yelling things like "I said Whoa dammit".
I hope it went down like that with these kids too.
I understand your concern for dogs, but not all are treated like that. Most are either trained with clicker training (newer, not as widespread) or with the more traditional training which may use the shock collar--but I haven't seen it used in a very long time.
Most police dogs are trained to think of work as a 'game' and as such they only respond to the games commands. "Lets go to work" is the police-dog equivilant to telling your dog "Lets go play" and everything after that is a 'game' to them.
The suit states that they break when used "as instructed by the material that accompanied the Wii console." That's not being stupid, that's following instructions. If you're not going to RTFA, at least RTFS. I'd be willing to bet that the manual also says, "Don't let go of the wiimote during play." or "Do not move the wiimote in any dangerous manner around people/objects." or something along those lines as well.
So this suit is for people who are upset that they broke [insert expensive electronics] and they cannot get it fixed under warranty so they just want to bitch about something, to someone.
And yes, I know Nintendo is putting more robust straps onto the NEW consoles and extra wiimotes. This is NOT an admission of guilt on the part of Nintendo--they are simply making a product change. The new straps could be cheaper--we don't know.
I have played with the Wii, and the Wiimote and I have done 'extensive' testing on this subject (my cousin has one, and I bought Zelda. When I beat it, i'm giving it to him--so he wants me over every day to play.) so I can say with as much authority as anybody can:
There is NO benefit to swinging the wiimote like it's a real baseball bat, tennis raquet, sword, or whatever. None. So stop swinging them around like a moron.
And for the record... The straps were never meant to prevent the wiimote from flying out of your hands. They are there so you don't drop it on the floor.
The above is true, with the exception that the sensor bar tells the system what relation to the screen you are. It doesn't use the sensor bar all the time--such as when you swing the controller off the screen, for example.
But you DO need to point it at the screen so that the camera in the front of the wiimote can see the IR beams to know how to translate the sensor data received from the wiimote into movement in the screen.
Let me put it another way: The wiimote doesn't know which way is up if you don't point it at the sensor bar. If you don't know up, how are you going to translate changes in G forces (which is what the accelerometers measure) into movement of a pointer? You wouldn't be able to know what the data you were receiving meant, without a point of reference--and that is what the sensor bar provides.
I've been on JD many times, and I've never gotten out of it once. Not that I couldn't, but I didn't want to. I enjoy watching the system fail, and being on the inside is the best seat in the house.
The jury is an antiquated system, still in place to placate the people into thinking that the government isn't running the show.
It doesn't matter what the facts are, they will believe whatever the lawyers can twist the words they are saying into whatever it is he wants them to believe. On both sides.
People are sheep. Lawyers are sharks. And if there was such thing as a land-shark, I'm sure they'd eat sheep for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is dangerous stuff indeed. But first, to really understand how dangerous it is you have to understand how the body processes sugar. (information taken from the book 'Good Carb, Better Carb Cookbook' which you can find here http://tinyurl.com/ycuvmx)
Glucose, fructose and galactose can all be absorbed directly by the body--no breaking down at all. They are monosaccharides (one sugar) and they are 'simple sugar'. Glucose is also called 'blood sugar' and it is this that diabetics test for.
Lactose, sucrose and maltose on the other hand are disaccharides (two sugar) and they must be broken down into simple sugars before the body absorbs them.
Now, if Fructose can be absorbed by the body directly, why is it so bad? And what is with the 'High Fructose' stuff?
Well remember when I said that the body converts everything into Glucose? It can only do so much of that in a set amount of time. Normally this isn't much of a problem, as natural fruits and vegetables only have a tiny amount of it in them. So you don't have a issue with fructose getting into places where it's not supposed to be, floating around your bloodstream.
You could never eat enough fruits/vegetables to 'overdose' on Fructose in your life. Ever. It's simply not possible to do so, because you would get full before you were anywhere near it. The body was never designed to process that much, because it's not possible in nature.
The other bad thing about it is that the body never feels 'full' on this stuff. Your brain is tuned to stop eating after a certain amount of glucose is pumping through your veins. Fructose--while processed as into glucose--doesn't let this happen.
So you eat and eat and eat--but never get full. Kind of like Barbossa with his Apples. Yar.
THIS IS WHY WE ARE FAT.
The food is sweet (and sweet food is programmed into our brains as good food, because our brains need sugar to be as big as they are) and we never get full. Your body is bombarded with waaaaaay too much sugar, and then you eventually raise your tolerance for sugar so high that your body can never get that high with natural foods alone.
THIS IS WHY DIETS FAIL.
The solution? Limit how many carbs (and sugars) you intake is a start, but more importantly eat GOOD CARBS and minimize the bad ones. I really do recommend the book I linked above. It's less of a cookbook, and more of a instruction guide on what to eat.
Yes, HFCS is very addictive. And it's in so many things, even if you didn't want to eat it you would get some of it. It's in Ketchup. It's in orange juice. It's in soda.
Go ahead. Look at the back of the can of soda your drinking. HFCS is in all of 'em, and along with CS and sometimes even regular sugar sometimes. That's three kinds of sugar in one can. Add it to the fact that it's in everything and you can see how dangerous you can get with this stuff.
Re:Strange way to prosecute in the US
on
The Future of ReiserFS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes. It's called "A Trial by Public Jury" and you can bet your ass that the police in this stupid country leverage this to every benefit they can get from it.
In the US, you are tried by a jury of your 'peers'... Which is hardly the case. A nuclear scientist can be tried by janitors and bus drivers--but more likely, it's by anybody stupid enough not to be able to get out of jury duty.
It's actually easier than that. Don't use money. No, really! Just use 'tokens' or 'BonusBucks' or whatever the hell you like to represent money on your site.
One Currancy Unit = X BonusBuck(s) and then your around the whole issue entirely.
I think that you also have to offer at least one non-game thing to purchase with the BonusBucks... Like, hats or a T-Shirt or something.
IANAL, and I have NOT RTF bill/law/whatever... Just using logic to solve the issue.
Not only do I second your findings about Maxtor vs. Everybody Else, but I will do you one better:
I have a WD Caviar that's been spinning--continuously--since 1997. Its the Swap drive in a computer that is a demo inside a lab at my school. We took the HD cover off, and put a piece of lexan back over it so that everybody can see the working pieces inside it. The heads, the actuator arm, platters, etc.
That, along with another WD Caviar which is setup to do NOTHING but randomly write/read to/from memory, over and over again, until there is no more memory left and the computer reboots. It's been doing this since July of 1997 when I was a student there. I helped build it.
Since then, the computer lab has had at least 50 or so hard drives die in the workstations on the benches. Everybody is taking bets on it, which year it [the demo] will die. And not just the hard drive either. The power supply, the CPU, the memory--everything is just about coming to what we consider 'critical mass' inside the unit. You have to remember--we built it just to see if it would last the SEMESTER--it's done that and almost 10x more than we expected! We didn't even take the HD out in a clean room. Just flat out on the bench, with all the other dust and what have you.
Ever since then I've run nothing but WD in my computer exclusively. I've never had a drive go bad on me before I've replaced it with another drive that was bigger. I have 9HD's in my computer, just tipping over the 1TB mark (2x80, 2x120, 2x160, 2x250) all with partitions and LVM's all over the place. yea, I know... I should just make one big LVM and get it over with. So sue me.
Rechargeable batteries are cheap, and can be recycled for the heavy metals they contain. In my Logitech keyboard, they last on average a month of above-average-amounts of typing (with BOTH HANDS, you f**king animals.) and the mouse I have has a rechargeable Li-Ion battery inside it.
Basically I spent $250 for the keyboard, $30 for the recharger (8 spots for AA's) and 10 bucks for the batteries. Not only that, the other batteries are in remotes and other things around the house. When they go flat, I pop new ones in from the charger. Done.
Denial: "There is no way I'm buying something called Wii!"
Anger: "What in the hell were they thinking? The marketing for the Revolution was already in place!"
Bargaining: "Just let me have Super Smash Bros. Eleventy-billion, OK? Or maybe just a good Mario Kart?"
Depression: "Why did they let the marketing department come up with the name... Oh [deity] I can't let my friends know I'm buying one... They will make fun of me forever!"
Acceptance: "Fine... Whatever. Just so long as the games are fun I don't care what it's called."
If the dealers are selling the OEM version without any hardware, this would still be an illegal copy. The OEM pricing is set to be lower for computer makers, and is not to be sold without hardware.
Sort of... The reseller license says that it has to be sold with hardware--Microsoft Hardware.
So buy a $5 Microsoft mouse and the 'issue' is taken care of. Simple. We used to do it all the time at my last job. And we were told by the local Microsoft rep that this was perfectly acceptable.
When all you have is a hammer, all of your problems start to look like nails.
Microsoft has poured a lot... a LOT... Of money into it's OS. They want to re-use as much as possible on it, because they want to:
1. Keep costs down. 2. Keep the interface as similar as possible, to minimize learning curve 3. Introduce as few new bugs as possible, and to keep bug hunting down to a minimum when they do crop up.
So Microsoft's hammer is its OS. And it is a very big hammer. Its not even suited to hammer out the nails that it was designed for anymore. So now to justify the existance of it, they have to invent new ways to use it. They also have to force existing users to buy the hammer over and over again, which just makes it even more of a problem.
Tomatoes that are sold in the USA are not actually ripe at all. They are picked green, and the color is actually artificially induced by placing the fruit (which it is not--congress made a law saying that it is a fruit to get around taxes) in a place with lots of ethylene gas... which turns it red. The reason? Shipping. real-vine ripened tomatoes will bruise like heck if shipped. There is absolutely no way to ship true vine-ripened tomatoes.
Trust me. Grow your own tomatoes. A lot of people I know who hate tomatoes have tried mine and have since changed their dislike to "I don't like STORE BOUGHT tomatoes."
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that negative reinforcement will learn things like "Don't eat the wires" alot faster, because the end result is the same: If you eat the wires, you will get hurt.
However, using negative reinforcement for things that will only be annoying--running in the flowerbed for example--then you are only teaching it to be mean back. Not only that, you can go into the flowerbed--and if you can do it, but they can't, they sometimes associate that you can be mean when your in there. My friend did this (hit his dog to stay off the couch) so now every time you sit down, it will bite at your legs while your on the couch--because it thinks its a game to be played there, on the couch.
So, what you do is train them to not want to go into the flowers, by reinforcing the positive aspect of not going into the flowers in the first place. Then they won't have any desire to go into them--but still will if need be.
This is the problem with 'invisible fences'. If you train them to not go past a certian point, they never will. Not even if your being dragged out of the yard kicking and screaming. So it's good to teach it not to leave, but you don't need to teach it 'If I go past this spot, I will get hurt.' beacuse what if they need to go out past that point?
What? USB is USB. 1.1 and 2.0 use the same voltage and can source the same amount of amps. And the socket is the same, at least from the computer side--and there is only one device USB socket that supports charging and data... So I really have no idea what your talking about.
I understand your concern for dogs, but not all are treated like that. Most are either trained with clicker training (newer, not as widespread) or with the more traditional training which may use the shock collar--but I haven't seen it used in a very long time.I hope it went down like that with these kids too.
Most police dogs are trained to think of work as a 'game' and as such they only respond to the games commands. "Lets go to work" is the police-dog equivilant to telling your dog "Lets go play" and everything after that is a 'game' to them.
So this suit is for people who are upset that they broke [insert expensive electronics] and they cannot get it fixed under warranty so they just want to bitch about something, to someone.
And yes, I know Nintendo is putting more robust straps onto the NEW consoles and extra wiimotes. This is NOT an admission of guilt on the part of Nintendo--they are simply making a product change. The new straps could be cheaper--we don't know.
I have played with the Wii, and the Wiimote and I have done 'extensive' testing on this subject (my cousin has one, and I bought Zelda. When I beat it, i'm giving it to him--so he wants me over every day to play.) so I can say with as much authority as anybody can:
There is NO benefit to swinging the wiimote like it's a real baseball bat, tennis raquet, sword, or whatever. None. So stop swinging them around like a moron.
And for the record... The straps were never meant to prevent the wiimote from flying out of your hands. They are there so you don't drop it on the floor.
It's like your trying to speak english, but the internet is making you use math symbols and things to link words.
Yum is better anyway.
I bet he blames it on Aliens. Smeg-head.
Or was it the Quaagars? Or the Dispair Squid making Rimmer be so pathetic?
What I woulden't pay for some of that Sexual Magnetism Virus though.
The above is true, with the exception that the sensor bar tells the system what relation to the screen you are. It doesn't use the sensor bar all the time--such as when you swing the controller off the screen, for example.
But you DO need to point it at the screen so that the camera in the front of the wiimote can see the IR beams to know how to translate the sensor data received from the wiimote into movement in the screen.
Let me put it another way: The wiimote doesn't know which way is up if you don't point it at the sensor bar. If you don't know up, how are you going to translate changes in G forces (which is what the accelerometers measure) into movement of a pointer? You wouldn't be able to know what the data you were receiving meant, without a point of reference--and that is what the sensor bar provides.
A real gamer tweaks his stuff and isn't afraid of slapping on the ol' anti-static bracelet for some component & system shifting/tweaking/optimizing.
/home]# Yum install kvidia-kmod-$KVER
I have never put on one of those things, and i've never fried a component yet.
Then again, I don't go walking around on carpet and poke at my new videocard either...
And here is how I install the lastest videocard drivers:
spokehedz@spanky
Done.
Freaks 1
Morons 0
For words that I don't use that often, it's a lot easier than putting it into google and letting it tell me what I meant.
The article links to the BRITISH version... Which sucks for all us American types.
So, don't just download that one and install it. It DOES matter, with the inline spell-checker.
Or else you'll end up doing your neighbour a favour by changing his tyre.
I've been on JD many times, and I've never gotten out of it once. Not that I couldn't, but I didn't want to. I enjoy watching the system fail, and being on the inside is the best seat in the house.
The jury is an antiquated system, still in place to placate the people into thinking that the government isn't running the show.
It doesn't matter what the facts are, they will believe whatever the lawyers can twist the words they are saying into whatever it is he wants them to believe. On both sides.
People are sheep. Lawyers are sharks. And if there was such thing as a land-shark, I'm sure they'd eat sheep for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is dangerous stuff indeed. But first, to really understand how dangerous it is you have to understand how the body processes sugar. (information taken from the book 'Good Carb, Better Carb Cookbook' which you can find here http://tinyurl.com/ycuvmx)
Glucose, fructose and galactose can all be absorbed directly by the body--no breaking down at all. They are monosaccharides (one sugar) and they are 'simple sugar'. Glucose is also called 'blood sugar' and it is this that diabetics test for.
Lactose, sucrose and maltose on the other hand are disaccharides (two sugar) and they must be broken down into simple sugars before the body absorbs them.
Glucose + Fructose = Sucrose (Table Sugar)
Glucose + Galactose = Lactose (Milk Sugar)
Glucose + Glucose = Maltose (Malt sugar)
Now, if Fructose can be absorbed by the body directly, why is it so bad? And what is with the 'High Fructose' stuff?
Well remember when I said that the body converts everything into Glucose? It can only do so much of that in a set amount of time. Normally this isn't much of a problem, as natural fruits and vegetables only have a tiny amount of it in them. So you don't have a issue with fructose getting into places where it's not supposed to be, floating around your bloodstream.
You could never eat enough fruits/vegetables to 'overdose' on Fructose in your life. Ever. It's simply not possible to do so, because you would get full before you were anywhere near it. The body was never designed to process that much, because it's not possible in nature.
The other bad thing about it is that the body never feels 'full' on this stuff. Your brain is tuned to stop eating after a certain amount of glucose is pumping through your veins. Fructose--while processed as into glucose--doesn't let this happen.
So you eat and eat and eat--but never get full. Kind of like Barbossa with his Apples. Yar.
THIS IS WHY WE ARE FAT.
The food is sweet (and sweet food is programmed into our brains as good food, because our brains need sugar to be as big as they are) and we never get full. Your body is bombarded with waaaaaay too much sugar, and then you eventually raise your tolerance for sugar so high that your body can never get that high with natural foods alone.
THIS IS WHY DIETS FAIL.
The solution? Limit how many carbs (and sugars) you intake is a start, but more importantly eat GOOD CARBS and minimize the bad ones. I really do recommend the book I linked above. It's less of a cookbook, and more of a instruction guide on what to eat.
Yes, HFCS is very addictive. And it's in so many things, even if you didn't want to eat it you would get some of it. It's in Ketchup. It's in orange juice. It's in soda.
Go ahead. Look at the back of the can of soda your drinking. HFCS is in all of 'em, and along with CS and sometimes even regular sugar sometimes. That's three kinds of sugar in one can. Add it to the fact that it's in everything and you can see how dangerous you can get with this stuff.
Yes. It's called "A Trial by Public Jury" and you can bet your ass that the police in this stupid country leverage this to every benefit they can get from it.
In the US, you are tried by a jury of your 'peers'... Which is hardly the case. A nuclear scientist can be tried by janitors and bus drivers--but more likely, it's by anybody stupid enough not to be able to get out of jury duty.
It's actually easier than that. Don't use money. No, really! Just use 'tokens' or 'BonusBucks' or whatever the hell you like to represent money on your site.
One Currancy Unit = X BonusBuck(s) and then your around the whole issue entirely.
I think that you also have to offer at least one non-game thing to purchase with the BonusBucks... Like, hats or a T-Shirt or something.
IANAL, and I have NOT RTF bill/law/whatever... Just using logic to solve the issue.
Because the Internet is not a truck that you can just dump things into! It's a tube, and tubes get filled!
Like, DUH!
Not only do I second your findings about Maxtor vs. Everybody Else, but I will do you one better:
I have a WD Caviar that's been spinning--continuously--since 1997. Its the Swap drive in a computer that is a demo inside a lab at my school. We took the HD cover off, and put a piece of lexan back over it so that everybody can see the working pieces inside it. The heads, the actuator arm, platters, etc.
That, along with another WD Caviar which is setup to do NOTHING but randomly write/read to/from memory, over and over again, until there is no more memory left and the computer reboots. It's been doing this since July of 1997 when I was a student there. I helped build it.
Since then, the computer lab has had at least 50 or so hard drives die in the workstations on the benches. Everybody is taking bets on it, which year it [the demo] will die. And not just the hard drive either. The power supply, the CPU, the memory--everything is just about coming to what we consider 'critical mass' inside the unit. You have to remember--we built it just to see if it would last the SEMESTER--it's done that and almost 10x more than we expected! We didn't even take the HD out in a clean room. Just flat out on the bench, with all the other dust and what have you.
Ever since then I've run nothing but WD in my computer exclusively. I've never had a drive go bad on me before I've replaced it with another drive that was bigger. I have 9HD's in my computer, just tipping over the 1TB mark (2x80, 2x120, 2x160, 2x250) all with partitions and LVM's all over the place. yea, I know... I should just make one big LVM and get it over with. So sue me.
Marketing just got back with that one.
They are going to call it the 'Welly Wii-anger'.
Honeycomb big?
no, no, no!
Its very small?
Yea yea yea!
(BRING BACK FUTURAMA!!!)
Rechargeable batteries are cheap, and can be recycled for the heavy metals they contain. In my Logitech keyboard, they last on average a month of above-average-amounts of typing (with BOTH HANDS, you f**king animals.) and the mouse I have has a rechargeable Li-Ion battery inside it.
Basically I spent $250 for the keyboard, $30 for the recharger (8 spots for AA's) and 10 bucks for the batteries. Not only that, the other batteries are in remotes and other things around the house. When they go flat, I pop new ones in from the charger. Done.
They are not MIDI loops, they are MOD/C64 Music--as a nod to the demo programmers of decades past.
Sort of... The reseller license says that it has to be sold with hardware--Microsoft Hardware.
So buy a $5 Microsoft mouse and the 'issue' is taken care of. Simple. We used to do it all the time at my last job. And we were told by the local Microsoft rep that this was perfectly acceptable.
When all you have is a hammer, all of your problems start to look like nails.
Microsoft has poured a lot... a LOT... Of money into it's OS. They want to re-use as much as possible on it, because they want to:
1. Keep costs down.
2. Keep the interface as similar as possible, to minimize learning curve
3. Introduce as few new bugs as possible, and to keep bug hunting down to a minimum when they do crop up.
So Microsoft's hammer is its OS. And it is a very big hammer. Its not even suited to hammer out the nails that it was designed for anymore. So now to justify the existance of it, they have to invent new ways to use it. They also have to force existing users to buy the hammer over and over again, which just makes it even more of a problem.
Tomatoes that are sold in the USA are not actually ripe at all. They are picked green, and the color is actually artificially induced by placing the fruit (which it is not--congress made a law saying that it is a fruit to get around taxes) in a place with lots of ethylene gas... which turns it red. The reason? Shipping. real-vine ripened tomatoes will bruise like heck if shipped. There is absolutely no way to ship true vine-ripened tomatoes.
Trust me. Grow your own tomatoes. A lot of people I know who hate tomatoes have tried mine and have since changed their dislike to "I don't like STORE BOUGHT tomatoes."