Fractals are complex images generated out of amazingly simple algorithms and math.
You can quite easily go from easy to sophisticated solution, you'll get exposure to different aspects of programming, and it's something you could spend as little or as much time as you'd like. They literally go on for infinity so in addition to the mandelbrot set and the julia set that you have probably seen a million times before, you can create many amazing different images from them.
Plus you'll get a "cool man" feeling when you print up a giant psychedelic sized poster and people visiting comment on how awesome it looks.
All of those items are "luxury" items in terms of survival.
If literally, you have to conserve water to live, while you may find it uncomfortable, you'll find yourself taking a lot less baths, and learning to brush your teeth with only 1/4 L of water.
Additionally, you might rethink using water to flush the toilet (disgusting, I know, but it can be done).
But don't worry, the great thing about the capital market is if you must be a water hog, and you can afford the $80 / cubic yard, you can splurge (although maybe your neighbors will choose to save water and buy a BMW instead)
For one, you might get some people who couldn't get a job as a McDonald's fry cook under normal circumstances who would be willing to work illegally for $10 an hour.
Or McDonalds might now be able to justify the cost of an expensive robotic system, and no longer needs to employ fry cooks anymore (and the only guy working is an engineer who can fix them when they break, and he definitely should earn more than a trade school mechanic).
Or, bosses won't give a rats ass about the fact that a fry cook is making as much as you, because you're still overpaid because of this minimum wage rule. (like how you could go get a nice cushy union position if you could find one that would pay $80 / hour but you just don't have the connections, and your boss doesn't care what the delivery guy is making)
Seriously, economics is hard and because it follows non-linear behavior the results are non-linear (and difficult to predict)
Well if you have the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard, you'd probably pay the $80.
A cubic yard is A LOT of water. You could live for some time off of that.
And, probably at that cost it makes sense for people to bring in water by the tanker truck, pushing prices down.
The key is what you're using it for. If you just want something to drink, $80 per cubic yard is quite all right. If you want to take a desert and turn it lush and green, it's quite expensive.
Seems to me people should look at usage case more than anything else.
And you're not just talking boiling it, but boiling it away into steam. Get a big stock pot, fill it with water, put it on your stove, see how long it takes to boil away.
Even if we say it's just 10 minutes on the range to boil away 1L of water, how much water do you use in a day?
Even at $0.25 / L you're looking at a very expensive source for water when desalinization happens. Plus you have all sorts of nasty side effects from the increase in fossil fuels you burn. Not just greenhouse emissions (unless maybe you turn the desert into a giant desalinization plant), think of how fuel prices will rocket.
OK but this really becomes a question of the car "failing safely." If the car is able to judge when it is unable to drive safely (say, a blizzard) and can then stop and tell the human driver to take over, it'll be OK. If the car gets confused and just shuts down on a highway where everyone is going 80MPH, the car is going to create a dangerous situation when it's unable to continue. (Although, in all fairness, breakdowns in conventional cars do occur on the highway and it doesn't necessarily mean death to the driver)
The big problem, as I see it, is that the reason I want an autonomous car is because I want to go sit in the back seat, light up a cigar, pour myself a scotch, and read a good book on a long road trip. However, if you still need a driver capable of taking over and driving, it kind of kills it. And I would bet it will be much more annoying to be watching a car drive itself and think "OK do I have to take over now" then just driving myself.
Or the current situation creates a need for N tablets in a house of N people which is no doubt more profitable then the bump in sales of higher capacity models you might get.
If people were screaming for this we'd have it, but as it's a corner case and already solved (in a way that is most profitable to the tablet companies) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for when it comes out
The problem is this sort of "improvement" will help you but few other people. Sure a few other power users might start using it, but it's not something for the general public in the sense it's not worth the resources to create.
I'd agree that it would be nice if there was more intelligent discussion on slashdot.
Most of the times when I comment I find the responses are just snarky "you're such an idiot" posts
But on soylent, when I comment, an actual response is unusual. AND the 10-20 comments that actually get posted still tend to have a very low signal to noise ratio
Were that true, there should be other evidence of the starship. Unless they were just disposing of spent fuel? Cool idea, right, since uranium is found naturally in nature and we could just dispose of it by making it as diluted in rock as it is in nature?
Although that's an interesting idea for the disposal of nuclear (fission) waste for an advanced civilization, I tend to believe that the energy required to melt rock and integrate melted fuel rods to a dilute enough concentration not to harm natural life would be cost prohibitive. In addition, any civilization THAT advanced would undoubtedly be able to get better efficiency out of their reactors before zipping away.
Unless maybe it's technology from Atlantis. Given no doubt by the same aliens who built the pyramids. When do Milla Jovovich and Bruce Willis come out to save the world?
Klinger wasn't trying to be gay, he was trying to be crazy.
This is explored in one of the episodes where a visiting psychiatrist offers to discharge Klinger from the Army -- but under the heading of a homosexual or transvestite. He refuses the discharge.
The problem is that technology allows universities to take short cuts in education, and not in the students advantage. Add to that some of the current goings on in the university system, and the future of the education system is a little worrisome (then again the future has always been worrisome and somehow we've muddled through).
But, while before you might have a few bad apples not providing sufficient feedback to students (or not doing it in a useful way) you have, as matters of policy, short cuts.
Why pay any attention at all to your students work when:
a) You can outsource checking for plagiarism to Turnitin or another similar service b) A computer can do grading for you automatically. Never mind that it can't tell the difference between a right answer written a different way than in the answer key and a wrong answer. c) An adjunct professor paid less than minimum wage can handle the actual teaching duties so the university can keep more of the students tuition.
First you have to define programming. FTFA it appears most of the bootcamp is aimed at web development. While you can't learn to do "serious" development in a few weeks, you CAN learn how to create basic functionality to implement dynamic websites.
Additionally, the fact that the average is 10 weeks makes me wonder what's in the pool. Presumably some courses may be much longer (like 6 months) and in that time you CAN cram most of the comp sci related courses in an associate degree if you work hard enough.
This whole story is a sensationalist slashvertisement. Web development now (as ten years ago) is quite appealing for people because you can make a decent buck working from home doing something you can essentially teach yourself (if you can get the business).
The interesting thing is that these sorts of price points encourage more consumption.
Back when a VHS tape was $20 I had absolutely no desire to buy any movies (it was cheaper to go to the theatre!). I saw maybe 1 - 2 movies a month, and the studios had to split that with the theatre.
Now I buy quite a few movies a month. Depends on how much free time I have but I'd say maybe I average one a weekend. Studios split it with Apple, but their costs are much lower as well. And whereas before in months where there were no movies I wanted to see I just wouldn't go, I can always find something on the back catalog.
And, it's useful to have a catalog I can pull up at any time.
Go to the apple store. They already do this. Buy a standard def and buy a high def version of the same movie and see which one you prefer, even on a small screen. (Hint: I always buy HD)
OK but that seems like a choice per image quality not screen size. The iTunes store already supports the choice to buy in HD or SD, and even on a small screen I can tell the difference.
If you have 4k monitors conceivably you'd want a higher resolution then an old projector that can only do 1080p
I read that, not as in all devices are the same (since a chip and pin device has a completely different reader) but that there's no reason someone willing to buy a different reader shouldn't be able to use one
Slashdot Mirror
Fractals are complex images generated out of amazingly simple algorithms and math.
You can quite easily go from easy to sophisticated solution, you'll get exposure to different aspects of programming, and it's something you could spend as little or as much time as you'd like. They literally go on for infinity so in addition to the mandelbrot set and the julia set that you have probably seen a million times before, you can create many amazing different images from them.
Plus you'll get a "cool man" feeling when you print up a giant psychedelic sized poster and people visiting comment on how awesome it looks.
According to Wikipedia, you've got 500k subscribers, or an average of $36 in assets per subscriber.
For a game that sounds about right to me. What did you think people were making millions off this thing?
All of those items are "luxury" items in terms of survival.
If literally, you have to conserve water to live, while you may find it uncomfortable, you'll find yourself taking a lot less baths, and learning to brush your teeth with only 1/4 L of water.
Additionally, you might rethink using water to flush the toilet (disgusting, I know, but it can be done).
But don't worry, the great thing about the capital market is if you must be a water hog, and you can afford the $80 / cubic yard, you can splurge (although maybe your neighbors will choose to save water and buy a BMW instead)
As best I can tell, you didn't read my post and went on into a rant on a complete side issue.
Economics isn't that simple.
For one, you might get some people who couldn't get a job as a McDonald's fry cook under normal circumstances who would be willing to work illegally for $10 an hour.
Or McDonalds might now be able to justify the cost of an expensive robotic system, and no longer needs to employ fry cooks anymore (and the only guy working is an engineer who can fix them when they break, and he definitely should earn more than a trade school mechanic).
Or, bosses won't give a rats ass about the fact that a fry cook is making as much as you, because you're still overpaid because of this minimum wage rule. (like how you could go get a nice cushy union position if you could find one that would pay $80 / hour but you just don't have the connections, and your boss doesn't care what the delivery guy is making)
Seriously, economics is hard and because it follows non-linear behavior the results are non-linear (and difficult to predict)
Well if you have the choice between dying of thirst or paying $80 for a cubic yard, you'd probably pay the $80.
A cubic yard is A LOT of water. You could live for some time off of that.
And, probably at that cost it makes sense for people to bring in water by the tanker truck, pushing prices down.
The key is what you're using it for. If you just want something to drink, $80 per cubic yard is quite all right. If you want to take a desert and turn it lush and green, it's quite expensive.
Seems to me people should look at usage case more than anything else.
The problem is scale.
Yeah but how much does it cost to boil water?
And you're not just talking boiling it, but boiling it away into steam. Get a big stock pot, fill it with water, put it on your stove, see how long it takes to boil away.
Even if we say it's just 10 minutes on the range to boil away 1L of water, how much water do you use in a day?
Even at $0.25 / L you're looking at a very expensive source for water when desalinization happens. Plus you have all sorts of nasty side effects from the increase in fossil fuels you burn. Not just greenhouse emissions (unless maybe you turn the desert into a giant desalinization plant), think of how fuel prices will rocket.
OK but this really becomes a question of the car "failing safely." If the car is able to judge when it is unable to drive safely (say, a blizzard) and can then stop and tell the human driver to take over, it'll be OK. If the car gets confused and just shuts down on a highway where everyone is going 80MPH, the car is going to create a dangerous situation when it's unable to continue. (Although, in all fairness, breakdowns in conventional cars do occur on the highway and it doesn't necessarily mean death to the driver)
The big problem, as I see it, is that the reason I want an autonomous car is because I want to go sit in the back seat, light up a cigar, pour myself a scotch, and read a good book on a long road trip. However, if you still need a driver capable of taking over and driving, it kind of kills it. And I would bet it will be much more annoying to be watching a car drive itself and think "OK do I have to take over now" then just driving myself.
Or the current situation creates a need for N tablets in a house of N people which is no doubt more profitable then the bump in sales of higher capacity models you might get.
If people were screaming for this we'd have it, but as it's a corner case and already solved (in a way that is most profitable to the tablet companies) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for when it comes out
Except ipads are quite a bit smaller than laptops -- even the macbook air.
What really sucked is that his mom was kinda hot, but for some reason she stuck her kid between us.
Wow.
The problem is this sort of "improvement" will help you but few other people. Sure a few other power users might start using it, but it's not something for the general public in the sense it's not worth the resources to create.
I'd agree that it would be nice if there was more intelligent discussion on slashdot.
Most of the times when I comment I find the responses are just snarky "you're such an idiot" posts
But on soylent, when I comment, an actual response is unusual. AND the 10-20 comments that actually get posted still tend to have a very low signal to noise ratio
Were that true, there should be other evidence of the starship. Unless they were just disposing of spent fuel? Cool idea, right, since uranium is found naturally in nature and we could just dispose of it by making it as diluted in rock as it is in nature?
Although that's an interesting idea for the disposal of nuclear (fission) waste for an advanced civilization, I tend to believe that the energy required to melt rock and integrate melted fuel rods to a dilute enough concentration not to harm natural life would be cost prohibitive. In addition, any civilization THAT advanced would undoubtedly be able to get better efficiency out of their reactors before zipping away.
Unless maybe it's technology from Atlantis. Given no doubt by the same aliens who built the pyramids. When do Milla Jovovich and Bruce Willis come out to save the world?
*Cue conspiracy flame wars*
bollocks. The soylent site averages only 10-20 comments a story, and most are not insightful comments
Klinger wasn't trying to be gay, he was trying to be crazy.
This is explored in one of the episodes where a visiting psychiatrist offers to discharge Klinger from the Army -- but under the heading of a homosexual or transvestite. He refuses the discharge.
If I've been hired to build a Potemkin village, then it would be unethical of me to spend time constructing interiors for the buildings.
Not unethical, idiotic.
The problem is that technology allows universities to take short cuts in education, and not in the students advantage. Add to that some of the current goings on in the university system, and the future of the education system is a little worrisome (then again the future has always been worrisome and somehow we've muddled through).
But, while before you might have a few bad apples not providing sufficient feedback to students (or not doing it in a useful way) you have, as matters of policy, short cuts.
Why pay any attention at all to your students work when:
a) You can outsource checking for plagiarism to Turnitin or another similar service
b) A computer can do grading for you automatically. Never mind that it can't tell the difference between a right answer written a different way than in the answer key and a wrong answer.
c) An adjunct professor paid less than minimum wage can handle the actual teaching duties so the university can keep more of the students tuition.
1. Programming can't be learned in a few weeks.
First you have to define programming. FTFA it appears most of the bootcamp is aimed at web development. While you can't learn to do "serious" development in a few weeks, you CAN learn how to create basic functionality to implement dynamic websites.
Additionally, the fact that the average is 10 weeks makes me wonder what's in the pool. Presumably some courses may be much longer (like 6 months) and in that time you CAN cram most of the comp sci related courses in an associate degree if you work hard enough.
This whole story is a sensationalist slashvertisement. Web development now (as ten years ago) is quite appealing for people because you can make a decent buck working from home doing something you can essentially teach yourself (if you can get the business).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The interesting thing is that these sorts of price points encourage more consumption.
Back when a VHS tape was $20 I had absolutely no desire to buy any movies (it was cheaper to go to the theatre!). I saw maybe 1 - 2 movies a month, and the studios had to split that with the theatre.
Now I buy quite a few movies a month. Depends on how much free time I have but I'd say maybe I average one a weekend. Studios split it with Apple, but their costs are much lower as well. And whereas before in months where there were no movies I wanted to see I just wouldn't go, I can always find something on the back catalog.
And, it's useful to have a catalog I can pull up at any time.
Go to the apple store. They already do this. Buy a standard def and buy a high def version of the same movie and see which one you prefer, even on a small screen. (Hint: I always buy HD)
OK but that seems like a choice per image quality not screen size. The iTunes store already supports the choice to buy in HD or SD, and even on a small screen I can tell the difference.
If you have 4k monitors conceivably you'd want a higher resolution then an old projector that can only do 1080p
I read that, not as in all devices are the same (since a chip and pin device has a completely different reader) but that there's no reason someone willing to buy a different reader shouldn't be able to use one
Mod parent up.
That's incredibly informative! Thank you AC. For 99 goatse posts you always make one or two gems...