>> IThe ability to use a computer is about as important to "jobs of the future!" as knowing how to husk coconuts is to a Pacific Islander. If you haven't learned those skills in your everyday life, then you're screwed anyway. >>
Damned right. That's why I'm currently taking night classes in coconut husking, so that with my cutting-edge husking skills I can rule over the rest of you computer-using losers.
the shuttle still is exponentially more expensive.
So Soyuz costs $25 million per launch, and the Shuttle currently costs $450 million per launch.
450,000,000 =~ 25,000,000 ^ 1.17. So the next Shuttle launch will cost 25,000,000 ^ 2.17 = $1,130,000,000,000,000? Or should that be 25,000,000 ^ 2.34 = $20,470,000,000,000,000?
Really? I'd bet that practically every scientist in the U.S., and anyone else who is seriously interested in science, knows who James Randi is. And if they don't, they ought to know.
Senior Aerospace Engineer at AFRL, Dr. Franklin Mead, "Dr. Bae's PLT demonstration and measurement of photon thrust (is) pretty incredible. I don't think anyone has done this before. It has generated a lot of interest."
Perhaps the demonstration would generate even more interest if it were credible.
Our society frowns heavily upon mixed marriages. Unless the person you have your eye on is locally accepted as being of the same "race" as you, you can basically forget about any kind of long term relationship. The weight of your society's disapproval will crush all but the most independent of couples.
Gee, if only my parents had followed your cautionary advice, they could have avoided the agony of 40+ years (and still going strong) of being happily married, along with more other friends than I could count.
Just which society is "yours"? The Taliban? The American rural south circa 1930? Nazi Germany? Mixed-race couples are absolutely no big deal in modern democracies these days.
And people wonder why there are so little "mixed marriages".
Far more likely the reason is because most people inherently prefer people of their own race/culture, and most societies are predominantly of one or two races/cultures, so for someone in the majority, a compatible partner (or co-worker, or random person on the street) will be most likely from the same, while for those in a minority group, someone from their own has more appeal because of the shared similarities.
>> Even a single observed miracle would shatter the world as we know it, including all of science. >>
Let's say a classic Biblical "miracle", like a burning talking bush, or a human walking on water, were observed and verified using scientific methods. Yes, that would shatter the world as we know it, but science would remain intact, and eventually come up with an explanation for it.
A miracle is by definition a blatant violation of the laws of nature, which is in turn by definition impossible. If the described phenomenon actually takes place, it's no longer a miracle.
A hundred years ago, the discovery of a living specimen of a fish that was extinct for 60 millions years would have been called a miraclulous act of divine intervention by the devout, and an impossibility by scientists. Well, that "miracle" actually happened, and today we call it a coelacanth.
>> Star Trek was guessing about computers a couple of hundred years in the future, but our current computers are already pretty close to their mark. >>
Naah. The flashing checkerboard lights and MO-NO-TONE COM-PYU-TER VOICE alone will require another fifty years at least.
Only check words greater than 6-7 letters long. Find all dictionary words that are the same length +/- 1 and start with the same letter (nobody gets that wrong). From those, find all words that have almost all the same letters in the same place. (Search from both ends, and if you've covered 80% of the word by the time both searches find a difference, it's a hit.)
Flag if the difference is: A single vowel replaced by another incorrect one - signiture, independant, definate, seperate Repeated consonants where there should be only one, or vice versa. - bussiness, occurence
I bet that would catch 95% of these sorts of misspellings with very few false positives.
The problem isn't typos -- words that the writer would know are misspelled if he saw them. It's words which the writer mistakenly believes to be spelled correctly. Then another coder comes along, skims over the API docs, tries to call functionSignature(), and finds that for some reason the function isn't defined.
Or maybe the code makes it into a release, and now the API reference has to list the function as functionSigniture(), which looks bad and probably causes headaches for the documentation writers and proofreaders.
>> Make 12 songs worth buying and you'd be surprised, people might actually buy them. But don't complain when people stop buying the filler. >>
They're called Greatest Hits compilations, and people do buy them in droves. Twelve to twenty songs by an artist, and only the GOOD ones, no filler "album tracks" - imagine that.
If, when you listen an album, all the really good songs also happen to be the hit single tracks, and the rest that you've never heard before all sound like filler dreck, I think that says a lot about what determines your taste and preferences.
WTF is "international studies"? Oh, it's the kind of trivial fluffy stuff that you need to study if you want to become a diplomat, head of state, or UN official. They teach it at podunk colleges like Harvard's JFK School of Government and Columbia's School of International Affairs.
And global commerce is a euphemism for "business classes for unmotivated kids who will end as CEOs of huge corporations".
>> The beauty of it is that it is online and always up-to-date (wrong, or less wrong).
Trying to capture it locally seems to me to be like trying to print The Internet. By the time it's done spooling, it's out of date. >>
Sure, what's the point of reading an old version of the history of the Battle of Hastings, or the technical specifications of the P-51 Mustang, or the characteristics of a dominant seventh chord? After six months, it's complete obsolete and worthless, right?
In Japan campaign ads on TV and radio (and any other electronic mass-media, I assume) are not allowed in any form. Having experienced both the Japanese campaign vans and the obnoxious election-season American TV ads, I'd say it's a toss-up -- well except for the fact that you can just turn off your damn TV.
And because tagging is such a time-consuming process, Flickr lets people batch tag all uploaded images at once -- which just makes things WORSE. If I search for "F-15", 75% percent of the pictures don't even have an F-15 in them because they were batch uploaded by someone who applied the tag of every item depicted in any of the photos, resulting in every photo having the same 20 tags, 18 of which are incorrect for that photo.
Slashdot Mirror
Enter key on your keyboard.
"Plain Old Text" formatting.
"Preview" button.
Makes it a lot easier to read.
Really.
Thanks.
>>
IThe ability to use a computer is about as important to "jobs of the future!" as knowing how to husk coconuts is to a Pacific Islander. If you haven't learned those skills in your everyday life, then you're screwed anyway.
>>
Damned right. That's why I'm currently taking night classes in coconut husking, so that with my cutting-edge husking skills I can rule over the rest of you computer-using losers.
the shuttle still is exponentially more expensive.
So Soyuz costs $25 million per launch, and the Shuttle currently costs $450 million per launch. 450,000,000 =~ 25,000,000 ^ 1.17. So the next Shuttle launch will cost 25,000,000 ^ 2.17 = $1,130,000,000,000,000? Or should that be 25,000,000 ^ 2.34 = $20,470,000,000,000,000?
Is that how it works?
Really? I'd bet that practically every scientist in the U.S., and anyone else who is seriously interested in science, knows who James Randi is. And if they don't, they ought to know.
If you sit on the glass and photocopy your ass, it just switches to "Enlarge by 50%" mode.
Senior Aerospace Engineer at AFRL, Dr. Franklin Mead, "Dr. Bae's PLT demonstration and measurement of photon thrust (is) pretty incredible. I don't think anyone has done this before. It has generated a lot of interest."
Perhaps the demonstration would generate even more interest if it were credible.
But for smaller-scale applications, positronium-protonium (PSP) is pretty popular.
Our society frowns heavily upon mixed marriages. Unless the person you have your eye on is locally accepted as being of the same "race" as you, you can basically forget about any kind of long term relationship. The weight of your society's disapproval will crush all but the most independent of couples.
Gee, if only my parents had followed your cautionary advice, they could have avoided the agony of 40+ years (and still going strong) of being happily married, along with more other friends than I could count.
Just which society is "yours"? The Taliban? The American rural south circa 1930? Nazi Germany? Mixed-race couples are absolutely no big deal in modern democracies these days.
And people wonder why there are so little "mixed marriages".
Far more likely the reason is because most people inherently prefer people of their own race/culture, and most societies are predominantly of one or two races/cultures, so for someone in the majority, a compatible partner (or co-worker, or random person on the street) will be most likely from the same, while for those in a minority group, someone from their own has more appeal because of the shared similarities.
>>
Even a single observed miracle would shatter the world as we know it, including all of science.
>>
Let's say a classic Biblical "miracle", like a burning talking bush, or a human walking on water, were observed and verified using scientific methods. Yes, that would shatter the world as we know it, but science would remain intact, and eventually come up with an explanation for it.
A miracle is by definition a blatant violation of the laws of nature, which is in turn by definition impossible. If the described phenomenon actually takes place, it's no longer a miracle.
A hundred years ago, the discovery of a living specimen of a fish that was extinct for 60 millions years would have been called a miraclulous act of divine intervention by the devout, and an impossibility by scientists. Well, that "miracle" actually happened, and today we call it a coelacanth.
As a "baby boomer" my life has basically spanned the "space/computer/indoor-toilet age"...
Hello Bennett Brauer!
>>
Star Trek was guessing about computers a couple of hundred years in the future, but our current computers are already pretty close to their mark.
>>
Naah. The flashing checkerboard lights and MO-NO-TONE COM-PYU-TER VOICE alone will require another fifty years at least.
You mean RTFS. There is no FA, only a summary!
Only check words greater than 6-7 letters long. Find all dictionary words that are the same length +/- 1 and start with the same letter (nobody gets that wrong). From those, find all words that have almost all the same letters in the same place. (Search from both ends, and if you've covered 80% of the word by the time both searches find a difference, it's a hit.)
Flag if the difference is:
A single vowel replaced by another incorrect one - signiture, independant, definate, seperate
Repeated consonants where there should be only one, or vice versa. - bussiness, occurence
I bet that would catch 95% of these sorts of misspellings with very few false positives.
The problem isn't typos -- words that the writer would know are misspelled if he saw them. It's words which the writer mistakenly believes to be spelled correctly. Then another coder comes along, skims over the API docs, tries to call functionSignature(), and finds that for some reason the function isn't defined.
Or maybe the code makes it into a release, and now the API reference has to list the function as functionSigniture(), which looks bad and probably causes headaches for the documentation writers and proofreaders.
Use of last comma is not universal, ubiquitous or absolutely necessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
>>
Make 12 songs worth buying and you'd be surprised, people might actually buy them. But don't complain when people stop buying the filler.
>>
They're called Greatest Hits compilations, and people do buy them in droves. Twelve to twenty songs by an artist, and only the GOOD ones, no filler "album tracks" - imagine that.
If, when you listen an album, all the really good songs also happen to be the hit single tracks, and the rest that you've never heard before all sound like filler dreck, I think that says a lot about what determines your taste and preferences.
The correct answer is either a. or b. Or rather, it's BOTH a. and b., until the test actually gets graded. Before that, it's impossible to know.
>>
you can teach your kid never to go looking for it and what to do if he accidentally finds it.
>>
I think most boys quickly figure out on their own what to do when they find porn...
Yes, so?
"Arab" is not equivalent to "oil baron" either, but the parent post didn't mention Muslims (or oil barons) at all.
The parent claimed that Israel's enemies are Arabs, and I think that's a reasonably fair characterization.
WTF is "international studies"? Oh, it's the kind of trivial fluffy stuff that you need to study if you want to become a diplomat, head of state, or UN official. They teach it at podunk colleges like Harvard's JFK School of Government and Columbia's School of International Affairs.
And global commerce is a euphemism for "business classes for unmotivated kids who will end as CEOs of huge corporations".
More confusion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ramone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramones
Interesting... but what does all of that have to do with anything? Neither the RIAA nor Phil Spector is mentioned anywhere in the article.
>>
The beauty of it is that it is online and always up-to-date (wrong, or less wrong).
Trying to capture it locally seems to me to be like trying to print The Internet. By the time it's done spooling, it's out of date.
>>
Sure, what's the point of reading an old version of the history of the Battle of Hastings, or the technical specifications of the P-51 Mustang, or the characteristics of a dominant seventh chord? After six months, it's complete obsolete and worthless, right?
In Japan campaign ads on TV and radio (and any other electronic mass-media, I assume) are not allowed in any form. Having experienced both the Japanese campaign vans and the obnoxious election-season American TV ads, I'd say it's a toss-up -- well except for the fact that you can just turn off your damn TV.
And because tagging is such a time-consuming process, Flickr lets people batch tag all uploaded images at once -- which just makes things WORSE. If I search for "F-15", 75% percent of the pictures don't even have an F-15 in them because they were batch uploaded by someone who applied the tag of every item depicted in any of the photos, resulting in every photo having the same 20 tags, 18 of which are incorrect for that photo.