The problem being is that they have to account for the fact that if an alien species makes contact, they have to pay out ALL the bets, not just a single winning ticket.
Agreed - the tech development pace in IV compared to the movement pace was always to quick. You'd build up an army of unit X, and by the time you moved them to enemy territory, they were out of date. So far V seems to have alleviated some of that with slower tech, faster movement, and smaller armies (you don't need the stacks of death, since the enemy doesn't have them either)
For the most part, his facts are either verifiable, or close enough that it's not worth arguing over. It's his arguments forms. A has attribute P, B has attribute P, therefore A is just like B is not a cogent argument. It doesn't matter how much proof you have that A has attribute P or that B has attribute P. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. Yes, he uses diagrams, props and rhetorical devices to confuse the base form of the argument he's making, but that doesn't make it any more valid.
I still have a functional Epson dot-matrix printer from the mid-80s that works just fine with windows 7. Of course it helps that you can print to it just using type filename > lpt1:
Have you seen the Conservative party recently? Canada doesn't have a fiscally right-wing federal party. The Tories are only "right-wing" because of their social policies. Otherwise they're just as happy to send money to people for having kids, or sponsor professional sports teams, or pretty much any random group that will either get them votes, or support their social agenda.
It's a great exercise - I had a course where each paper we wrote had a different gimmick - not using the letter 'e', using only one and two syllable words, not using sentences longer than 5 words, etc...
The Green Party's fiscal policy is actually quite right-wing. They have their environmentalist hang-ups, which means that there's a lot of things they'd like to ban (or at least not subsidize), but they are probably less socialist in many ways than the Conservatives (especially Harper's Tories these last few years). They are strong on eliminating the deficit and reducing payroll and income taxes.
big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it
It's all about the audience - don't use "acetylsalicylic acid" or "non-steroidal anti-inflamatories" when "aspirin" or "pain-killer" will do. On the other hand, if the situation calls for it, the extra specificity and precision is critical. English has very few exact synonyms - we have the extra words because they add meaning. It's the reason Simon and Garfunkel can talk of "people talking without speaking" and "people hearing without listening", and just be contradicting themselves.
It's exactly the opposite. The only way you used to be able to be published was to be picked up by a publisher. This generally involved knowing someone, being related to someone, being in the middle of some scandal, or just being famous. Now, any schmo with a computer can type up a manuscript in some digital format, send it off to a printer, and have their very low-run hard-cover book published in the range of $10/book on a 2000 book run (with the next run being cheaper), and half that if you print soft-cover. Or, you can just sell PDFs. Of course, either way you have to do your own PR/Marketing, but you can pretty cheaply hire a PR firm to help with that. Also, most local book stores have a section just for local authors, so it's often easy enough to get your book out there.
I have a friend who has just self-published his third book, and now runs a business showing others how to publish their own books, and he can't keep up with the number of people who want to publish. It seems there are plenty of people who can't even get a publishing house to look at their stuff (no unsolicited manuscripts), who are willing to invest a decent amount of money to get their own book published.
Real Time? Oh, that's disappointing, all this time I thought it was ray-traced! I was hoping for 3d results with awesome lighting and reflection effects.
Pick up an old Motion Computing tablet off ebay. The things are available in the $200-$300 range off ebay and are nearly indestructable (as in 3 foot fall on concrete) and are mostly sealed against liquids. My 2 year old loves ours.
Since this stuff can be layered in three dimensions, HP is talking about petabyte/cm^3 storage densities at roughly a tenth the speed of current DRAM. If this takes off, we won't have other storage media.
This study doesn't say that. It says that heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers, but both groups die earlier than the moderate 1-3 drinks per day group.
At the same time, we do need to be careful to avoid giving people incentive to commit petty crimes with the hope of a free education if they lose a job.
I realize it's a crazy commie liberal hippie idea, but the easiest way to remove this incentive (and at the same time improve class mobility) is to let people have a free education without going to jail. As a certified bleeding heart liberal social-justice touting left-winger, I fully support making prisons less comfortable, to get the best amount of deterrence possible. Make them outright miserable places. (Although the deterrence of even the death penalty is apparently negligible since most crime is initially committed out of desperation - not out of an informed rational decision).
I think the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to avoid committing crime in the first place, enforce harsh, but time-limited punishments when laws are broken, and then give people the best opportunities to become productive once punishments are done. If these tracking things can be used to give people more effectively enforced transitions between prison and real life, then there may be value in them.
In retrospect, this worked on me last winter. I was looking at buying a new laptop and was looking around for after Christmas sales. After looking at a bunch and coming up with a short-list to research a bit more, an ad popped up on some unrelated site, offering and additional 30% off advertised sale prices... It seemed quite the coincidence at the time, but obviously it was less luck and more manipulation. I ended up buying it, since it was 30% a price that was already 40% reduced, but I can't help but feel a bit tricked.
If you have a good enough encryption algorithm, the encrypted data should come out indistinguishable from random. Then the next step is to find a readily available source of randomness and replace the encrypted data. If you replace what should be random data with non-encrypted, or insufficiently encrypted data, it will stand out. If you replace what shouldn't be random data with well encrypted data, it will also stand out. We can assume that the steganography examples being detected are poorly done. One easy way of doing this is to hide an AES encrypted message in the lowest significant bits in a jpeg. You just need to make sure that the amount of data you are trying to hide does not exceed the amount of random noise already in the image.
So get one of these. Touch screens for PCs have been around for years, it's just that a Minority-Report style interface is going to destroy your shoulders a whole lot faster than a mouse will hurt your elbow.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the last computer I assembled has a bit, thanks to an excessively sharp case edge.
There's an almost complete lack of hemoglobin in it.
The problem being is that they have to account for the fact that if an alien species makes contact, they have to pay out ALL the bets, not just a single winning ticket.
Agreed - the tech development pace in IV compared to the movement pace was always to quick. You'd build up an army of unit X, and by the time you moved them to enemy territory, they were out of date. So far V seems to have alleviated some of that with slower tech, faster movement, and smaller armies (you don't need the stacks of death, since the enemy doesn't have them either)
In XP, hold down either CTRL or SHIFT when you double click on a folder. In Windows 7, right-click on a folder and "Open in new window".
For the most part, his facts are either verifiable, or close enough that it's not worth arguing over. It's his arguments forms. A has attribute P, B has attribute P, therefore A is just like B is not a cogent argument. It doesn't matter how much proof you have that A has attribute P or that B has attribute P. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. Yes, he uses diagrams, props and rhetorical devices to confuse the base form of the argument he's making, but that doesn't make it any more valid.
Of course it can dance.
I still have a functional Epson dot-matrix printer from the mid-80s that works just fine with windows 7. Of course it helps that you can print to it just using type filename > lpt1:
If there's a need to go back to Windows, you can set up Windows XP mode, and older printer drivers should work.
Have you seen the Conservative party recently? Canada doesn't have a fiscally right-wing federal party. The Tories are only "right-wing" because of their social policies. Otherwise they're just as happy to send money to people for having kids, or sponsor professional sports teams, or pretty much any random group that will either get them votes, or support their social agenda.
It's a great exercise - I had a course where each paper we wrote had a different gimmick - not using the letter 'e', using only one and two syllable words, not using sentences longer than 5 words, etc...
The Green Party's fiscal policy is actually quite right-wing. They have their environmentalist hang-ups, which means that there's a lot of things they'd like to ban (or at least not subsidize), but they are probably less socialist in many ways than the Conservatives (especially Harper's Tories these last few years). They are strong on eliminating the deficit and reducing payroll and income taxes.
big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it
It's all about the audience - don't use "acetylsalicylic acid" or "non-steroidal anti-inflamatories" when "aspirin" or "pain-killer" will do. On the other hand, if the situation calls for it, the extra specificity and precision is critical. English has very few exact synonyms - we have the extra words because they add meaning. It's the reason Simon and Garfunkel can talk of "people talking without speaking" and "people hearing without listening", and just be contradicting themselves.
I have a friend who has just self-published his third book, and now runs a business showing others how to publish their own books, and he can't keep up with the number of people who want to publish. It seems there are plenty of people who can't even get a publishing house to look at their stuff (no unsolicited manuscripts), who are willing to invest a decent amount of money to get their own book published.
Real Time? Oh, that's disappointing, all this time I thought it was ray-traced! I was hoping for 3d results with awesome lighting and reflection effects.
Pick up an old Motion Computing tablet off ebay. The things are available in the $200-$300 range off ebay and are nearly indestructable (as in 3 foot fall on concrete) and are mostly sealed against liquids. My 2 year old loves ours.
Since this stuff can be layered in three dimensions, HP is talking about petabyte/cm^3 storage densities at roughly a tenth the speed of current DRAM. If this takes off, we won't have other storage media.
This study doesn't say that. It says that heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers, but both groups die earlier than the moderate 1-3 drinks per day group.
At the same time, we do need to be careful to avoid giving people incentive to commit petty crimes with the hope of a free education if they lose a job.
I realize it's a crazy commie liberal hippie idea, but the easiest way to remove this incentive (and at the same time improve class mobility) is to let people have a free education without going to jail. As a certified bleeding heart liberal social-justice touting left-winger, I fully support making prisons less comfortable, to get the best amount of deterrence possible. Make them outright miserable places. (Although the deterrence of even the death penalty is apparently negligible since most crime is initially committed out of desperation - not out of an informed rational decision).
I think the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to avoid committing crime in the first place, enforce harsh, but time-limited punishments when laws are broken, and then give people the best opportunities to become productive once punishments are done. If these tracking things can be used to give people more effectively enforced transitions between prison and real life, then there may be value in them.
In retrospect, this worked on me last winter. I was looking at buying a new laptop and was looking around for after Christmas sales. After looking at a bunch and coming up with a short-list to research a bit more, an ad popped up on some unrelated site, offering and additional 30% off advertised sale prices... It seemed quite the coincidence at the time, but obviously it was less luck and more manipulation. I ended up buying it, since it was 30% a price that was already 40% reduced, but I can't help but feel a bit tricked.
If you have a good enough encryption algorithm, the encrypted data should come out indistinguishable from random. Then the next step is to find a readily available source of randomness and replace the encrypted data. If you replace what should be random data with non-encrypted, or insufficiently encrypted data, it will stand out. If you replace what shouldn't be random data with well encrypted data, it will also stand out. We can assume that the steganography examples being detected are poorly done. One easy way of doing this is to hide an AES encrypted message in the lowest significant bits in a jpeg. You just need to make sure that the amount of data you are trying to hide does not exceed the amount of random noise already in the image.
Right, because publishing your public key is a great way to support plausible deniability.
Yeah, no kidding - everyone knows that the Nikon D3X is WAAAYYY better than any crappy Canon.
So get one of these. Touch screens for PCs have been around for years, it's just that a Minority-Report style interface is going to destroy your shoulders a whole lot faster than a mouse will hurt your elbow.
If you're going to divide by 0, you might as well arrange it so you prove 2 = fish