I just received a letter telling me I had a citation for illegal parking in San Francisco. I never go to San Francisco during the day - I neither live nor work there. So my first response was to go into my email to see if there is a 'paper' trail for what I was doing that day. I found that I was at a meeting in another city at the time. This won't provide proof in court, but at least now I know where I was and I can be 100% confident that unless we're dealing with a corrupt cop the handwritten citation won't have my license plate #.
What is wrong with the reasoning of the fire chiefs? We live in a society where there are many different groups with many different interests. The whole point of democracy is that everyone says their piece and gets to influence decisions that are made. Making (or not making) changes to DST just because of what the fire chiefs say would be stupid. But it's not stupid for the fire chiefs to say what they want.
More generally when I say "I want the government to do X" it doesn't mean "I want the government to do X just for me". It means "I want to do the government to do X. Maybe some other people will also say they want X. If enough of us say we want X then I think the government should do X". It's a distinction that many people seem to find too subtle when they make their knee jerk reactions to interest groups.
the only blurry one since it would be ridiculous if the models were too "detailed"
Models are often "too detailed". Some artists take pride in their work and don't like to leave a job unfinished. They are often situations when they can get away with adding detail even if it isn't strictly necessary, especially in something like a texture map where extra detail might cost nothing because storing black pixels might take the same disk or memeory space as storing painted ones.
In the philosophical sense. And it's great to see that Rockstar have explored it a bit. Basically we have a continuum something like:
Completely innocent game
Pornographic only if you make substantial changes (eg. a skinnable game where you can replace clothing textures with skin textures)
Pornographic if you make a relatively substantial hack (eg. the game renders humans with clothing layer by layer but if you remove the calls to the functions for the outer layers it renders humans in bare skin)
Pornographic only if you make a small hack to the executable (This case)
Pornographic only if you enter certain unpublished commands
Overtly pornographic
It's always interesting when you have a slope like this to see where different people will draw the line. I think (3) is the most interesting possibility but (4) is vaguely interesting too.
Sounds to me like something an anthropologist said up rather than an actual fact. Yes, temporal cycles play an important part in Mayan, Buddhist, Hindu and Jainist belief, for example, but they also play an important part in our own. In many of these cultures the cyclical aspect is very long ranging with different parts of cycles representing historical epochs of various types. But when it comes down to daily life I am yet to see any evidence that there are significant differences between cultures in how time is apprehended. Every culture I know of understands that at least in the medium term tomorrow is not the same as today but that there is still a similarity between tomorrow and today leading to the formation of cycles. Can you give some examples of a culture that is significantly different in this regard?
Windows ceased to be a GUI version of DOS with NT and its descendants. Still, it's more accurate than saying Windows is a GUI version of MacOS - a statement that is either a typo or evidence that this guy isn't qualified to make any kind of comments on this subject, even if he did invent ethernet.
What the hell do percentages have to do with anything? Most people are under 80, I'm not. Most people my age have kids. I don't. It's all irrelevant. Once you know the details about a particular person it's completely irrelevant what the statistics say. We know that James Doohan was well loved and made enough money to support his kids to a level that they are likely to be far less wanting than most people's kids. To think that somehow knowing some statistics about other people means that it invalidates these facts means that you almost certainly have some very basic misunderstandings about the nature of truth.
I have used Macs since I grew up, was a loyal 'Mac Evangelist'
What could 'loyalty' possibly mean in this context? I choose my computer by choosing the best machine for the job. 'Best' can mean many things: runs the apps I want, looks nice, works the way I want and so on. What does 'loyalty' mean? It can't mean anything other than an irrational attachment to a product despite its quality. It means you'll stick with a particular brand through thick and thin. In other words, loyalty means picking second best (or worse). I call that idiotic. And combined with evangelizing it's annoying as hell.
I just read some sad news on the BBC web site - Sci Fi actor James Doohan who played Scotty in Star Trek was found dead from pneumonia today. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
doesn't mean that the use for porn negates its benefit.
I never said it does. I'm just pointing out that some people find it hard to predict what uses technology will be put to. If the dpwnloading of porn is indirectly helping to fund science I think that's great.
Interesting. Iain Banks' Player of Games is interesting on this topic. To some extent it preempts the rise of the web.
He didn't mention pornography once
on
Sixty Years of Memex
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's amazing how little some humans appreciate the nature of humans. The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head. Even though he is a human, and probably shares the same desires as the rest of us, he was still completely way off. It's not like there weren't clues. The earliest use of technologies capable of production sexual stimuli are, in fact, the production of sexual stimuli. Whether it's humans carving female figurines 30,000 years ago, or lifelike Renaissance painting and sculpture, early photographic erotica, or pornographic movies from the turn of the century, humans are much the same everywhere.
On the other hand, the people who wrote the video editing software probably used lots of mathematics: bezier curves for interpolating time varying parameters, digital signal processing for both video and audio filtering , resampling and processing, matrices for applying 2D transforms to video streams, some basic stuff for mapping between color spaces, discrete wavelet/fourier/cosine transforms for image compression, lots of geometry if your editing package supports 3D...the list goes on.
I'm always amazed by the people who think math is unnecessary. It must seem that way if you're so poor at it that you can't even recognize its uses. And I'm not necessarily talking about you - I'm just picking up on your example to point out that mathematics is ubiquitous if you just open your eyes. And ironically, it's often the fun software (eg. games, video/movie visual effects) that uses it the most.
I once worked over a sumer vacation in medical records in the UK. We were doing some simple refiling job on every single file. Every so often one would come through with "Munchausen" written in big letters inside the folder. I guess when dealing with such people the first thing doctors had to know was whether or not the patient was for real. Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy is pretty nasty. Parents will do terrible stuff to their own kids for attention (or whatever it is they seek).
Why? Because reporting gives a biased view of what is going on in academia. When you carry out an experiment there are at least two ways it can turn out. Both of these outcomes provide useful information (unless it's a dumb experiment). Reporting the experiments that come out one way and not the other deprives us of some of that information and gives a very skewed view. This is particularly acute in statistical results: 5% of studies will show significance at the 95% confidence level just through chance. If only those are published then we are basically seeing published noise even though, to the casual observer, we are seeing only statistically significant results. The same reasoning holds valid for other types of experiment too.
It's amazing how some of those images are burnt into my brain. But that was a fine book. It's audience was young kids (all Ladybird books where) and yet it discusses binary and CPU architecture. Of course the people who wrote that book were probably old men who were unaware of the revolution taking place around them. In bookshops we had old serious looking books full of Fortran and pictures of magnetic core memory and yet we we were already using machines with solid state RAM at home. It was as if serious computer professionals were in denial that those 'toys' were ever going to amount to anything.
When someone creates a new project it gets press releases and news coverage. But when the project fizzles out because it was completely lame and didn't go anywhere in the least bit interesting nobody bother reporting it. It's like news stories are written in a dialect of C++ with constructors but no destructors.
Well I think it's time for the garbage collector of the news world. Someone who goes through year or three old science and technology magazines looking for projects where the leaders say things like "this technique will replace everything else" or "I expect my system to develop self-awareness over the next 18 months" and brings a bit of closure to them. If the project has failed then the project leaders need to be asked "what do you have to say about your extravagant claims?", "how do you feel about the grant money you frittered away?" and "how do you respond to the poeple who claimed you were a crackpot at the beginning?".
I'll have to put this story in my queue for re-examination in 2006.
...4 paragraphs long and actually interesting and relevant. Something fishy is going on here. 10,000 people could have posted "first post" in the time it took to write that comment. Let's see, maybe I missed something...no, I'm browsing at -1 so I see everything. I declare you are a cheat! You must have a time machine, or you've colluded with the person who posted the story.
I quit there long ago. I was working in a marketing group writing demos. Frankly, these people thought I was some kind of super whizzkid just because I could write a few lines of code. Bascially, doing 30 minutes of actual work a day was enough to convince them I was working ultra-hard.
I wonder how they manage in Japan. Tokyo isn't a small town and yet I saw (admittedly crude) renders of the buildings all round in many of the cars I peeked into,
Slashdot Mirror
I just received a letter telling me I had a citation for illegal parking in San Francisco. I never go to San Francisco during the day - I neither live nor work there. So my first response was to go into my email to see if there is a 'paper' trail for what I was doing that day. I found that I was at a meeting in another city at the time. This won't provide proof in court, but at least now I know where I was and I can be 100% confident that unless we're dealing with a corrupt cop the handwritten citation won't have my license plate #.
More generally when I say "I want the government to do X" it doesn't mean "I want the government to do X just for me". It means "I want to do the government to do X. Maybe some other people will also say they want X. If enough of us say we want X then I think the government should do X". It's a distinction that many people seem to find too subtle when they make their knee jerk reactions to interest groups.
- Completely innocent game
- Pornographic only if you make substantial changes (eg. a skinnable game where you can replace clothing textures with skin textures)
- Pornographic if you make a relatively substantial hack (eg. the game renders humans with clothing layer by layer but if you remove the calls to the functions for the outer layers it renders humans in bare skin)
- Pornographic only if you make a small hack to the executable (This case)
- Pornographic only if you enter certain unpublished commands
- Overtly pornographic
It's always interesting when you have a slope like this to see where different people will draw the line. I think (3) is the most interesting possibility but (4) is vaguely interesting too.WFT? Did I write that? I think I must be suffering from Alzheimer's before my time.
Windows ceased to be a GUI version of DOS with NT and its descendants. Still, it's more accurate than saying Windows is a GUI version of MacOS - a statement that is either a typo or evidence that this guy isn't qualified to make any kind of comments on this subject, even if he did invent ethernet.
What the hell do percentages have to do with anything? Most people are under 80, I'm not. Most people my age have kids. I don't. It's all irrelevant. Once you know the details about a particular person it's completely irrelevant what the statistics say. We know that James Doohan was well loved and made enough money to support his kids to a level that they are likely to be far less wanting than most people's kids. To think that somehow knowing some statistics about other people means that it invalidates these facts means that you almost certainly have some very basic misunderstandings about the nature of truth.
I just read some sad news on the BBC web site - Sci Fi actor James Doohan who played Scotty in Star Trek was found dead from pneumonia today. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Interesting. Iain Banks' Player of Games is interesting on this topic. To some extent it preempts the rise of the web.
It's amazing how little some humans appreciate the nature of humans. The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head. Even though he is a human, and probably shares the same desires as the rest of us, he was still completely way off. It's not like there weren't clues. The earliest use of technologies capable of production sexual stimuli are, in fact, the production of sexual stimuli. Whether it's humans carving female figurines 30,000 years ago, or lifelike Renaissance painting and sculpture, early photographic erotica, or pornographic movies from the turn of the century, humans are much the same everywhere.
I'm always amazed by the people who think math is unnecessary. It must seem that way if you're so poor at it that you can't even recognize its uses. And I'm not necessarily talking about you - I'm just picking up on your example to point out that mathematics is ubiquitous if you just open your eyes. And ironically, it's often the fun software (eg. games, video/movie visual effects) that uses it the most.
I once worked over a sumer vacation in medical records in the UK. We were doing some simple refiling job on every single file. Every so often one would come through with "Munchausen" written in big letters inside the folder. I guess when dealing with such people the first thing doctors had to know was whether or not the patient was for real. Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy is pretty nasty. Parents will do terrible stuff to their own kids for attention (or whatever it is they seek).
The significance is 17 digits which isn't quite enough.
Of course! But the asymmetry is annoying nonetheless.
...this book.
Why? Because reporting gives a biased view of what is going on in academia. When you carry out an experiment there are at least two ways it can turn out. Both of these outcomes provide useful information (unless it's a dumb experiment). Reporting the experiments that come out one way and not the other deprives us of some of that information and gives a very skewed view. This is particularly acute in statistical results: 5% of studies will show significance at the 95% confidence level just through chance. If only those are published then we are basically seeing published noise even though, to the casual observer, we are seeing only statistically significant results. The same reasoning holds valid for other types of experiment too.
It's amazing how some of those images are burnt into my brain. But that was a fine book. It's audience was young kids (all Ladybird books where) and yet it discusses binary and CPU architecture. Of course the people who wrote that book were probably old men who were unaware of the revolution taking place around them. In bookshops we had old serious looking books full of Fortran and pictures of magnetic core memory and yet we we were already using machines with solid state RAM at home. It was as if serious computer professionals were in denial that those 'toys' were ever going to amount to anything.
Well I think it's time for the garbage collector of the news world. Someone who goes through year or three old science and technology magazines looking for projects where the leaders say things like "this technique will replace everything else" or "I expect my system to develop self-awareness over the next 18 months" and brings a bit of closure to them. If the project has failed then the project leaders need to be asked "what do you have to say about your extravagant claims?", "how do you feel about the grant money you frittered away?" and "how do you respond to the poeple who claimed you were a crackpot at the beginning?".
I'll have to put this story in my queue for re-examination in 2006.
...4 paragraphs long and actually interesting and relevant. Something fishy is going on here. 10,000 people could have posted "first post" in the time it took to write that comment. Let's see, maybe I missed something...no, I'm browsing at -1 so I see everything. I declare you are a cheat! You must have a time machine, or you've colluded with the person who posted the story.
I quit there long ago. I was working in a marketing group writing demos. Frankly, these people thought I was some kind of super whizzkid just because I could write a few lines of code. Bascially, doing 30 minutes of actual work a day was enough to convince them I was working ultra-hard.
You missed an apostrophe.
I wonder how they manage in Japan. Tokyo isn't a small town and yet I saw (admittedly crude) renders of the buildings all round in many of the cars I peeked into,