I ask how you would solve Jumble puzzles from the newspaper, given a vocabulary text file. Exhaustive search is not the answer, but given that the glut of CPU power and storage has fostered brute-force approaches to everything, this is surprisingly a quite common proposal.
The solution is quite obviously a hash lookup, but you would be surprised how few "programmers" come up with that.
This idea of ion bridges has been around a long time. The application here is basically misrepresented. All it is doing is replacing a small amount of commercial electric power with solar-generated potentials. But the process isn't feasible when run on commercial power, even if the power is free, so replacing the commercial power with solar (the germ of the "idea" here) is just disguising the dead horse.
Reminds me of the algae gambit: the solar constant crossed by photosynthesis is dismal, so no biofuel (corn ethanol, biodiesel, etc) can possibly be effective, but if you photosynthesize with algae, the very irony of pond scum making something useful is enough to make you (briefly) forget physical limits. Notional fantasies vs genuine engineering.
Plain old kerosene and other hydrocarbons are very effective repellants, also being very toxic to the critters. One wonders if this "discovery" was compared for relative effectiveness of these cheap substances.
Uncle Al Schwartz has talked about this bug-death-smell-as-repellant for years.
Here's my theory on why cursive penmanship is dangerous to teach:
1. It is a myth that cursive is faster than printing. "Fluid" printing
(not the block letters taught in the first grades) uses far fewer strokes.
Jumping from letter to letter instead of dragging the pen between letters
also uses fewer strokes and is more direct, and is thus faster.
2. Cursive is harder to read than printed letters. Some proofs of this
fact: (1) the ubiquitous instruction "please print" on forms, (2) the rarity
of continuous-cursive forms in typefaces used in publishing, (3) the
difficulty one has in reading supposedly stellar examples of cursive
penmanship, such as the US Declaration of Independence.
3. Cursive is much harder to learn than printing. Of course, for this reason
it is inflicted upon schoolchildren after they have a chance to master
printing, since many never succeed at it.
4. The "Palmer Method" (for example) of cursive pedagogy stifles a child's
developing a personal and distinctive style of handwriting. Within reasonable
limits of legibility, printing leaves more freedom for this artistic outlet.
5. The techniques of cursive handwriting are filled with self-contradictions.
A "slant" is dictated as a matter of efficiency, when there is no apparent
anatomical justification for this practice. Left-handers (when tolerated)
are taught to mirror the slant by tipping the paper to the left instead of to
the right, but the inclination of the paper has everything to do with the
slant of the writing (to the right whether executed right- or left-handed)
and nothing to do with which hand is manipulating the stylus.
The mindless regimentation typically used to teach cursive is antithetical to
the development of studious, inquiring minds. Unlike the rote of, say,
multiplication tables, the diktat of cursive handwriting is not rooted in
a useful natural principle. It is most popular in cultures such as the old
German and Chinese, which value rote and regimentation to a degree usually
held to be extreme by, say, Americans.
In light of the above points, why does this hideous art exist at all?
6. The only justifiable reason for commonly using cursive is obsolete. People
traditionally wrote in cursive from ancient times because the quill
pen technology penalized you for lifting the pen from the paper. The capillary
action of the ink is lost when contact is interrupted, and restoring the ink
trail is not reliable, so gaps often result. This is not a factor with
modern pencils, fountain pens, ball-point pens, or fiber-tip pens.
7. Therefore it is a foolish pedagogy that continues to maintain the
archaic art of cursive penmanship. This subject should be eliminated from
the primary school curriculum, and filed away in the universities' classics
departments, where it belongs.
Please. You can do this with a rubber band. Stretch it and it becomes more "ordered" and hot. Release it and it gets cold. (Use your lips as a thermometer.) Not that *anything* like this makes a practical heat pump. For efficiency you need a *phase change*, and this principle just does not supply that.
This is just one more absurd result you get when you postulate abstract information as "property".
If reductio ad absurdum is probative, then the whole edifice of IP law has more holes and dead ends than an ant's nest.
> A condensation, especially one made along definite editorial lines that differ from the original creator's, is certainly a derivative work, by 17 U.S.C. 101:
But the kind of derivative copies at issue in the court case are pure accidents of the technology.
Suppose we had DVD players (or an add-on gadget) that could download an edit list from the Internet, consisting of timecodes and skip-the-whole-clip, or mute-the-audio instructions. Or perhaps bowdlerized audio clips and insertion timecodes to replace the four-letter words. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of the original work is in such an edit list. How is that any different than using a fast-forward or mute button by hand?
The whole doctrine of derivative works in copyright law is based on accidents of ancient technology. Computers and information theory show such dogmas to be silly medieval fantasies. If you cast a derivative as "diffs" instead of a modified full text, then you haven't copied anything. If you try to argue that diffs are somehow copying aspects of the original by reference, then every bit of human thinking about a work is a derivative, including just watching a flick or writing a review of it.
The whole legal theory of copyright is proved absurd by this kind of stuff. You can't possibly rationalize it. By this judge's crank logic, you're a copyright violator because your eyeballs copy an image of the movie to your retinas when you watch it. Two copies, actually.
By my calculations the fuel consumed equals gobbling a cylindrical thread of fuel 0.6 thousandths of an inch in diameter, about 1/5 that of a human hair.
No, entrapment is enticing you into doing something you wouldnt have done without being asked. This is a sting, which the police use frequently to catch drug pushers.
And if you ask the file if it's a Trojan, it has to say yes, or else it can't infect you, right?
I used to drive a Ford Fiesta in the 1970s-1980s, similar to their Festiva nowadays. Hey, it was the Carter era. It seemed to get 30-ish mpg, which was pleasant, and with a 1.5L toy engine it still was peppy with a manual transmission. Then I got rear-ended, and saw how the car was made of tinfoil; it literally crumpled in half in the middle from a modest bump. Now I drive a Jeep Wrangler, at 17 mpg tops, but rear end collisions tend to bounce off. Structural strength and mass are angels of physics when M1V1 meets M2V2.
A human being is worth $millions just economically speaking. Increased exposure to lethal risks is not worth fuel economy simply on cold economics. Armor your loved ones in SUVs. Fuel taxes literally kill. Europeans are foolishly impoverishing and killing themselves with their fuel prices, but what can you expect from societies that are so moribund as to sterilize themselves below replacement rates. I'm proud to be an American, in an American style (multinational Daimler-Chrysler manufactured) SUV, and a 15-passenger van for my family of 11.
10 years for the crime of changing the magnetization patterns on a tape, or for changing the quantum states in some electronic memory. 10 years for making some phosphor glow, and some speaker cones wiggle. These are crimes?
The big power saws in the lumber department at Home Depot, used by the employees to cut lumber for your convenience, have an electronic on-off control locked by a 4-digit number entered on a keypad. No doubt this is intended to keep customers from helping themselves and having amputated limbs flopping around on the floor in a gumbo of blood and sawdust.
Last time I had an item cut there, I snooped over the shoulder of the guy doing the cutting as he keyed the code. I though to myself, "I bet it's either 0000 or 1234." Indeed, it was.
In the interests of safety and security, knowing the mischieviousness of SlashDot readers, I shall not here reveal which of the two likely codes it was. I imagine they would have a hard time defending the personal injury lawsuits if word got out.
EBay is not the Sears catalog, eBay is the print shop that produces the catalog. Sellers are free to offer satisfaction guarantees. And generally they should, this is a key element of successful retailing. I almost always do, and my returns run less than 1 percent.
What's the big deal? Eight-inch mortars are common in professional pyrotechnic displays. The shells are as big as these bowling balls. And they actually do something in the air, instead of being inert.
Anyone looked at a slurry of pyrotechnic aluminum in ethyl chloride? Very small metal particles, the liquid could boil off as you settle the surfaces together.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is quite obviously a hash lookup, but you would be surprised how few "programmers" come up with that.
So a sports bar can use up to 4 screens up to 55 inches. Can't you then use the 4 to do a 2 x 2 tile to get to 110 inches? Yowza! 9 feet!
Like Polaroid vs 35mm film.
"Only a schmuck works for somebody else."
This idea of ion bridges has been around a long time. The application here is basically misrepresented. All it is doing is replacing a small amount of commercial electric power with solar-generated potentials. But the process isn't feasible when run on commercial power, even if the power is free, so replacing the commercial power with solar (the germ of the "idea" here) is just disguising the dead horse. Reminds me of the algae gambit: the solar constant crossed by photosynthesis is dismal, so no biofuel (corn ethanol, biodiesel, etc) can possibly be effective, but if you photosynthesize with algae, the very irony of pond scum making something useful is enough to make you (briefly) forget physical limits. Notional fantasies vs genuine engineering.
Plain old kerosene and other hydrocarbons are very effective repellants, also being very toxic to the critters. One wonders if this "discovery" was compared for relative effectiveness of these cheap substances. Uncle Al Schwartz has talked about this bug-death-smell-as-repellant for years.
If you can cite a case of a 60-year-old without presbyopia, then that would be the greatest medical miracle since parthenogenesis.
1. It is a myth that cursive is faster than printing. "Fluid" printing (not the block letters taught in the first grades) uses far fewer strokes. Jumping from letter to letter instead of dragging the pen between letters also uses fewer strokes and is more direct, and is thus faster.
2. Cursive is harder to read than printed letters. Some proofs of this fact: (1) the ubiquitous instruction "please print" on forms, (2) the rarity of continuous-cursive forms in typefaces used in publishing, (3) the difficulty one has in reading supposedly stellar examples of cursive penmanship, such as the US Declaration of Independence.
3. Cursive is much harder to learn than printing. Of course, for this reason it is inflicted upon schoolchildren after they have a chance to master printing, since many never succeed at it.
4. The "Palmer Method" (for example) of cursive pedagogy stifles a child's developing a personal and distinctive style of handwriting. Within reasonable limits of legibility, printing leaves more freedom for this artistic outlet.
5. The techniques of cursive handwriting are filled with self-contradictions. A "slant" is dictated as a matter of efficiency, when there is no apparent anatomical justification for this practice. Left-handers (when tolerated) are taught to mirror the slant by tipping the paper to the left instead of to the right, but the inclination of the paper has everything to do with the slant of the writing (to the right whether executed right- or left-handed) and nothing to do with which hand is manipulating the stylus.
The mindless regimentation typically used to teach cursive is antithetical to the development of studious, inquiring minds. Unlike the rote of, say, multiplication tables, the diktat of cursive handwriting is not rooted in a useful natural principle. It is most popular in cultures such as the old German and Chinese, which value rote and regimentation to a degree usually held to be extreme by, say, Americans.
In light of the above points, why does this hideous art exist at all?
6. The only justifiable reason for commonly using cursive is obsolete. People traditionally wrote in cursive from ancient times because the quill pen technology penalized you for lifting the pen from the paper. The capillary action of the ink is lost when contact is interrupted, and restoring the ink trail is not reliable, so gaps often result. This is not a factor with modern pencils, fountain pens, ball-point pens, or fiber-tip pens.
7. Therefore it is a foolish pedagogy that continues to maintain the archaic art of cursive penmanship. This subject should be eliminated from the primary school curriculum, and filed away in the universities' classics departments, where it belongs.
The ISS is awful. The missions there are terrible. And so short!
Perhaps for now, but prom season is coming up.
Please. You can do this with a rubber band. Stretch it and it becomes more "ordered" and hot. Release it and it gets cold. (Use your lips as a thermometer.) Not that *anything* like this makes a practical heat pump. For efficiency you need a *phase change*, and this principle just does not supply that.
The science fair committee didn't like me.
Does not AT&T host alt.binaries.movies.divx (etc) on their own NNTP servers?
This is just one more absurd result you get when you postulate abstract information as "property". If reductio ad absurdum is probative, then the whole edifice of IP law has more holes and dead ends than an ant's nest.
> A condensation, especially one made along definite editorial lines that differ from the original creator's, is certainly a derivative work, by 17 U.S.C. 101:
But the kind of derivative copies at issue in the court case are pure accidents of the technology.
Suppose we had DVD players (or an add-on gadget) that could download an edit list from the Internet, consisting of timecodes and skip-the-whole-clip, or mute-the-audio instructions. Or perhaps bowdlerized audio clips and insertion timecodes to replace the four-letter words. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of the original work is in such an edit list. How is that any different than using a fast-forward or mute button by hand?
The whole doctrine of derivative works in copyright law is based on accidents of ancient technology. Computers and information theory show such dogmas to be silly medieval fantasies. If you cast a derivative as "diffs" instead of a modified full text, then you haven't copied anything. If you try to argue that diffs are somehow copying aspects of the original by reference, then every bit of human thinking about a work is a derivative, including just watching a flick or writing a review of it.
The whole legal theory of copyright is proved absurd by this kind of stuff. You can't possibly rationalize it. By this judge's crank logic, you're a copyright violator because your eyeballs copy an image of the movie to your retinas when you watch it. Two copies, actually.
Bah.
By my calculations the fuel consumed equals gobbling a cylindrical thread of fuel 0.6 thousandths of an inch in diameter, about 1/5 that of a human hair.
And if you ask the file if it's a Trojan, it has to say yes, or else it can't infect you, right?
Gov Schwarzenegger managed to get his out (the implant, I mean) in _Total Recall_. But then he had that briefcase kit.
A human being is worth $millions just economically speaking. Increased exposure to lethal risks is not worth fuel economy simply on cold economics. Armor your loved ones in SUVs. Fuel taxes literally kill. Europeans are foolishly impoverishing and killing themselves with their fuel prices, but what can you expect from societies that are so moribund as to sterilize themselves below replacement rates. I'm proud to be an American, in an American style (multinational Daimler-Chrysler manufactured) SUV, and a 15-passenger van for my family of 11.
10 years for the crime of changing the magnetization patterns on a tape, or for changing the quantum states in some electronic memory. 10 years for making some phosphor glow, and some speaker cones wiggle. These are crimes?
Last time I had an item cut there, I snooped over the shoulder of the guy doing the cutting as he keyed the code. I though to myself, "I bet it's either 0000 or 1234." Indeed, it was.
In the interests of safety and security, knowing the mischieviousness of SlashDot readers, I shall not here reveal which of the two likely codes it was. I imagine they would have a hard time defending the personal injury lawsuits if word got out.
I haven't snooped on their burglar alarms.
EBay is not the Sears catalog, eBay is the print shop that produces the catalog. Sellers are free to offer satisfaction guarantees. And generally they should, this is a key element of successful retailing. I almost always do, and my returns run less than 1 percent.
All your mussels are belong to us.
What's the big deal? Eight-inch mortars are common in professional pyrotechnic displays. The shells are as big as these bowling balls. And they actually do something in the air, instead of being inert.
Anyone looked at a slurry of pyrotechnic aluminum in ethyl chloride? Very small metal particles, the liquid could boil off as you settle the surfaces together.