Are there really solid things out there that exist the way we think of them?
The way I think about solidity, yes, many everyday objects, such as the table I am typing this on, are solid.
The guy who can be considered the father of quantum theory disagrees with you. Here is a quote from Max Plank on just this topic:
-- As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
--
As a side note for hundreds of years we were trying to better understand the nature of Saturn's rings, why they were stable and didn't rip apart or fall to Saturn. At the time many speculated they were likely either big solid circular rings or liquid rings, but the math never could back that up. Along came James Maxwell who found that though the rings appear as as a solid continuous object it must be made of small particles that each orbit Saturn independently and ~130 years later we proved he was correct.
To answer Phantom of the Opera's question, my opinion is that no I do not think their are any really solid things in existence. What we conceive to be solid is just an illusion created much like the distance between Earth and Saturn makes the rings look solid. But then again, who knows what we'll find if we keep looking... the Universe has a way of surprising us.
What about a handcrank like they have on certain radios in Africa? ( http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/05/sonys_handcrank_1.php ) Sure it would take a day's worth of cranking to get enough charge for a mile of driving, but it still could be useful in an emergency.
Care to give an example, cause I'm struggling with this. What emergency would give you the leisure of 24 hours to hand crank up to a partly charged battery that will only take you a single mile. A single mile only takes ~20 minutes to walk at 3 mph. You could have gone and come back from your emergency site over 30 times at the speed of a leisurely stroll in that 24 hour period.
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment, which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set.
Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters.
It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily).
All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
This is very good insight on the problems that plague/. and reasonable suggestions on how to fix them. The idea to whitelist/blacklist specific strings of unicode is really the best idea I've heard in a while. Then, as/. editors come across further unicode exploits they could refine their lists. Again, great post. I agree with everything wrote. I hope this gets read and enlightens some editor/slashcoder to bring about a better/. for us all.
I can just see the legal defense team doing a GIS on lolcat keyboard as a means of gathering evidence that it was in fact the defendants cat that pressed the button to notify the police.
Do they really have to be that sharp? I faintly recall that the blades on my parents' old lawnmower were pretty dull, despite being good at cutting the grass. And grass trimmers, used to cut grass where a lawnmower can't reach, are usually just using a rotating steel wire, with a circular cross-section. So I'd guess that speed is much more important than sharpness when cutting grass.
I'd have to disagree on the dull blade comment. I used to cut lawns as a means of getting some spare cash when I was younger. Yes, a dull blade will cut a regularly kept yard rather easily, as there is only a few inches of grass to cut through. However, if you don't take care of your yard and it becomes overgrown, you won't succeed with a dull blade, but it isn't strictly because of the blade. If the grass is too thick it will build up additional friction and fight against the blade which in turn puts more of a load on the engine which will ultimately slow it down enough to cause a stall. If you have a sharper blade, the same engine will handle much thicker grass because it will cut much more effectively and not cause as much friction. That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine. Get a big enough engine and you could use baseball bats for the blades.
Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire. However I personally would replace the line it comes with and use steel ty wire. I believe it works so well because of how hard and thin it is, and it is that thinness that makes it sharp when it is moving at speed. I was always concerned that the steel line would snap and come for my legs... thankfully that day never occurred.
That misheard lyric is so common that there's a book about misheard lyrics with that as the title.
--
BMO
Their was a Tool song my friends and I argued over the lyrics of for quite some time. Think it was the prison sex song. I was sure it said, "...my lamb and martyr, this will be over soon...". My friends were sure the song was, "...my loving mother, this will be over soon...". Considering the topic of the song I suppose it could have had yet another level of depravity to it with the whole mom/incest angle, my perverted friends sure thought so, even though I didn't think it made much sense.
Since we are tossing around anecdotes, where I live (south Florida) 2 to 3 generations ago the word redneck was the term used for anyone who was an outdoor laborer. As being bent over all day under the sun generally gives you an nice dark neck, regardless of race. Now days most people who proscribe to being a redneck do so because they are part of that culture, and for whatever motivating reason, are proud to be rednecks (I come from a long line of self proclaimed rednecks, although I do not think of myself as one). The word is more of a reference to that culture and I don't see anyone in it getting bent out of shape when called one (unless they want to fight and then it wouldn't matter what was said). Then again, these same folks take no offense to being called a cracker, which at best evokes a, "Yeah, I'm white, so what?" response, and that term is somewhat more racially charged. So if the term is racially charged, I think it would only be so for those who do not know better. I've not seen anyone get offended over being called that name.
I was trying to remember that it was South Park, but my mind kept distracting me with...
Good evening, and welcome to The Money Programme. Tonight on The Money Programme, we're going to look at money. Lots of it. On film, and in the studio. Some of it in nice piles, others in lovely clanky bits of loose change. Some of it neatly counted into fat little hundreds, delicate fivers stuffed into bulging wallets, nice crisp clean checks, pert pieces of copper coinage thrust deep into trouser pockets, romantic foreign money rolling against the thigh with rough familiarity, beautiful wayward curlicued banknotes, filigreed copper plating cheek by jowl with tumbly rubbing gently against the terse leather of beautifully balanced bank books!!
A long time ago, in a NOC far far away... we hired someone who was color blind. Since it would be discrimination to fire him for it (as HR didn't learn about it after the fact, or I'm sure they would have found some reason not to hire him) we re-programed a lot of our monitoring pages. Instead of showing a red/yellow/green light, it would show a red R, a yellow Y, or a green G for the status lights. Perhaps it wasn't the perfect fix, but the color blind co-worker was able to function just fine following the change.
Sounds like a plan to me. I'd be pissed off if people kept bugging me as well. Just take the money he doesn't want and give it to a math oriented scholarship fund or something.
and yet maybe if you had a clue about where he was coming from you'd know it was the same math community that fucked him over that you suggest giving blindly too.... not that I dont disagree with teaching math on all levels to those that want it., but it is more immersive than that at a higher level (not just a give it to math scholarships and call it a day (yet I can see your point, but his as well). he was at the height of mathadamia (yay for made up words) and what he saw there was nothing short of cut throat... I'm four sheets to the wind, but please look up some of my earlier arguments.... ah fuck it, here is my earlier discussion on him: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1484928&cid=30508008
and really, dont take it from me, read the new yorker piece on him (I ref in my link). he is something special. not just some stuck up asshole looking for an albeit good for him negitive bit of PR.
I guess I'll have to get some cash from the ATM machine to pay for all this - especially if there's DLC content. I hope I can remember my PIN number.
While I'm out I should probably pick up some new DVI interface cables and RAM memory.
::head explodes::
I used to have a real problem when people would do this, but I've learned to not let small things like this get to me. It used to be so bad that I would yell at the screen when my computer would boot into Windows 2000, as it says at the bottom "Built on NT technology"... NT stands for New Technology, Built on New Technology technology indeed!
You are so cute. I know very little about UPS systems, but when I was working in a datacenter that housed 5000 servers we had a two story room that was twice the size of most houses (~2000 sq ft) with rows and rows of batteries. I was told that in the event of a power outage, we had 22 minutes of battery power before everything went out. The idea of having enough for 2 hours would have been one an interesting setup considering how monstrously large this one already was. Besides, I'm unsure why you'd ever need more than that 22min since that is plenty of time for our on site staff to gracefully power down any of our major servers if the backup generator failed to kick in.
Interesting overview of the/. moderation system and its short comings. Seems like we would be best served by posting new stories and then not allowing any comments to be made for 24 hours or some arbitrary allotment of time. Something tells me that we'd just end up with craftier trolls, but that is its own form of entertainment.
I think the issue is David Gelernter failed to predict how most of the Internet communities talk to each other. Not to mention it would require a massive restructuring of the Internet, but given the latest whispers of what ACTA will bring us, I guess it is more likely than not.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if they are doing this on purpose so they can track the users that pirated it...
Put your foil hat back on. Pirates would likely not be connecting to any Ubisoft servers, thus would not be trackable. But that is too simple. All we'd have to do is divine from what we know of other poison like DRM tactics: is Ubisoft the sort of company who would poison their own executable or their enemy's? Now, a clever company would put the poison in their own executable, because they would know that only a great fool would download a cracked executable. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the cracked exes from Reloaded or Skid-Row. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the executable from Ubisoft... Now, where was I?
Agreed, honestly I had no idea about the DRM in it as I've had the xbox 360 version for a few weeks as it came out prior to the PC release. I don't have my 360 connected to the internet so I would have never assumed a working internet connection would be needed on the PC had it not been for the/. article a ~week ago. And really, for a single player game to require an always on internet connection has to be an all time low.
I thought burned optical discs started to degrade after a few years. Have they solved this problem?
That's a problem with everything, not just burned discs. Until we invent some magically regenerative material I suspect we will always be plagued with decay mucking up pretty much everything. Damn entropy.
It means that no one had posted anything to the comments of the story yet. And if you are a/. regular it's really a secret troll code telling you to rush in to comment about frosty piss and checking the post anonymously button while praying to the FSM that you beat all the other cowards to it.;)
Doom. Everyone loved the first two games... then came in Doom 3, that looked stunning, but played more like a survival horror game. How can someone take such a wild, frantic, exhilarating series and make something so boring out of it?
That really is a sad statement on how far survival horror games have fallen when someone thinks Doom 3 fits that genre. Doom 3 was just a crappy FPS... walk into dark room, shoot the bad guy that is always positioned in an out of the way corner, rinse and repeat. It was never a survival horror... if I told my wife what you said she would be quaking with fiery, and her ranting would be epic. She and I both miss the glory days of survival horror...
That said, the rest of your point still stands and I agree with you. Enjoyable game play should always be the focal point that everything else branches off of. Instead what we get are games that are so graphically polished but play more like tech demos showing how pretty the latest and greatest video card can make everything.
Slashdot Mirror
this is a false comparison.
Unfortunately since their is no single accepted definition of what a supercomputer is, it is easy to lump the two together.
Are there really solid things out there that exist the way we think of them?
The way I think about solidity, yes, many everyday objects, such as the table I am typing this on, are solid.
The guy who can be considered the father of quantum theory disagrees with you. Here is a quote from Max Plank on just this topic:
--
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
--
As a side note for hundreds of years we were trying to better understand the nature of Saturn's rings, why they were stable and didn't rip apart or fall to Saturn. At the time many speculated they were likely either big solid circular rings or liquid rings, but the math never could back that up. Along came James Maxwell who found that though the rings appear as as a solid continuous object it must be made of small particles that each orbit Saturn independently and ~130 years later we proved he was correct.
To answer Phantom of the Opera's question, my opinion is that no I do not think their are any really solid things in existence. What we conceive to be solid is just an illusion created much like the distance between Earth and Saturn makes the rings look solid. But then again, who knows what we'll find if we keep looking... the Universe has a way of surprising us.
What about a handcrank like they have on certain radios in Africa? ( http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/05/sonys_handcrank_1.php ) Sure it would take a day's worth of cranking to get enough charge for a mile of driving, but it still could be useful in an emergency.
Care to give an example, cause I'm struggling with this. What emergency would give you the leisure of 24 hours to hand crank up to a partly charged battery that will only take you a single mile. A single mile only takes ~20 minutes to walk at 3 mph. You could have gone and come back from your emergency site over 30 times at the speed of a leisurely stroll in that 24 hour period.
That is when you go to the grocery store, buy all their AA batteries, wire them in parallel and hope it is enough to get you to the next volt station.
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment, which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set. Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters. It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily). All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
This is very good insight on the problems that plague /. and reasonable suggestions on how to fix them. The idea to whitelist/blacklist specific strings of unicode is really the best idea I've heard in a while. Then, as /. editors come across further unicode exploits they could refine their lists. Again, great post. I agree with everything wrote. I hope this gets read and enlightens some editor/slashcoder to bring about a better /. for us all.
I can just see the legal defense team doing a GIS on lolcat keyboard as a means of gathering evidence that it was in fact the defendants cat that pressed the button to notify the police.
Do they really have to be that sharp? I faintly recall that the blades on my parents' old lawnmower were pretty dull, despite being good at cutting the grass. And grass trimmers, used to cut grass where a lawnmower can't reach, are usually just using a rotating steel wire, with a circular cross-section. So I'd guess that speed is much more important than sharpness when cutting grass.
I'd have to disagree on the dull blade comment. I used to cut lawns as a means of getting some spare cash when I was younger. Yes, a dull blade will cut a regularly kept yard rather easily, as there is only a few inches of grass to cut through. However, if you don't take care of your yard and it becomes overgrown, you won't succeed with a dull blade, but it isn't strictly because of the blade. If the grass is too thick it will build up additional friction and fight against the blade which in turn puts more of a load on the engine which will ultimately slow it down enough to cause a stall. If you have a sharper blade, the same engine will handle much thicker grass because it will cut much more effectively and not cause as much friction. That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine. Get a big enough engine and you could use baseball bats for the blades.
Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire. However I personally would replace the line it comes with and use steel ty wire. I believe it works so well because of how hard and thin it is, and it is that thinness that makes it sharp when it is moving at speed. I was always concerned that the steel line would snap and come for my legs... thankfully that day never occurred.
Even humans mishear speech.
"'Scuse me while I kiss this guy"
That misheard lyric is so common that there's a book about misheard lyrics with that as the title.
-- BMO
Their was a Tool song my friends and I argued over the lyrics of for quite some time. Think it was the prison sex song. I was sure it said, "...my lamb and martyr, this will be over soon...". My friends were sure the song was, "...my loving mother, this will be over soon...". Considering the topic of the song I suppose it could have had yet another level of depravity to it with the whole mom/incest angle, my perverted friends sure thought so, even though I didn't think it made much sense.
Since we are tossing around anecdotes, where I live (south Florida) 2 to 3 generations ago the word redneck was the term used for anyone who was an outdoor laborer. As being bent over all day under the sun generally gives you an nice dark neck, regardless of race. Now days most people who proscribe to being a redneck do so because they are part of that culture, and for whatever motivating reason, are proud to be rednecks (I come from a long line of self proclaimed rednecks, although I do not think of myself as one). The word is more of a reference to that culture and I don't see anyone in it getting bent out of shape when called one (unless they want to fight and then it wouldn't matter what was said). Then again, these same folks take no offense to being called a cracker, which at best evokes a, "Yeah, I'm white, so what?" response, and that term is somewhat more racially charged. So if the term is racially charged, I think it would only be so for those who do not know better. I've not seen anyone get offended over being called that name.
I was trying to remember that it was South Park, but my mind kept distracting me with...
Good evening, and welcome to The Money Programme. Tonight on The Money Programme, we're going to look at money. Lots of it. On film, and in the studio. Some of it in nice piles, others in lovely clanky bits of loose change. Some of it neatly counted into fat little hundreds, delicate fivers stuffed into bulging wallets, nice crisp clean checks, pert pieces of copper coinage thrust deep into trouser pockets, romantic foreign money rolling against the thigh with rough familiarity, beautiful wayward curlicued banknotes, filigreed copper plating cheek by jowl with tumbly rubbing gently against the terse leather of beautifully balanced bank books!!
Exactly, April 1st for all intensive porpoises might as well be called Make the Internet Useless Day (at least for news).
A long time ago, in a NOC far far away... we hired someone who was color blind. Since it would be discrimination to fire him for it (as HR didn't learn about it after the fact, or I'm sure they would have found some reason not to hire him) we re-programed a lot of our monitoring pages. Instead of showing a red/yellow/green light, it would show a red R, a yellow Y, or a green G for the status lights. Perhaps it wasn't the perfect fix, but the color blind co-worker was able to function just fine following the change.
Sounds like a plan to me. I'd be pissed off if people kept bugging me as well. Just take the money he doesn't want and give it to a math oriented scholarship fund or something.
and yet maybe if you had a clue about where he was coming from you'd know it was the same math community that fucked him over that you suggest giving blindly too.... not that I dont disagree with teaching math on all levels to those that want it., but it is more immersive than that at a higher level (not just a give it to math scholarships and call it a day (yet I can see your point, but his as well). he was at the height of mathadamia (yay for made up words) and what he saw there was nothing short of cut throat... I'm four sheets to the wind, but please look up some of my earlier arguments.... ah fuck it, here is my earlier discussion on him: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1484928&cid=30508008
and really, dont take it from me, read the new yorker piece on him (I ref in my link). he is something special. not just some stuck up asshole looking for an albeit good for him negitive bit of PR.
I guess I'll have to get some cash from the ATM machine to pay for all this - especially if there's DLC content. I hope I can remember my PIN number.
While I'm out I should probably pick up some new DVI interface cables and RAM memory.
::head explodes::
I used to have a real problem when people would do this, but I've learned to not let small things like this get to me. It used to be so bad that I would yell at the screen when my computer would boot into Windows 2000, as it says at the bottom "Built on NT technology"... NT stands for New Technology, Built on New Technology technology indeed!
Bleh, somehow I posted that anon...
You are so cute. I know very little about UPS systems, but when I was working in a datacenter that housed 5000 servers we had a two story room that was twice the size of most houses (~2000 sq ft) with rows and rows of batteries. I was told that in the event of a power outage, we had 22 minutes of battery power before everything went out. The idea of having enough for 2 hours would have been one an interesting setup considering how monstrously large this one already was. Besides, I'm unsure why you'd ever need more than that 22min since that is plenty of time for our on site staff to gracefully power down any of our major servers if the backup generator failed to kick in.
Interesting overview of the /. moderation system and its short comings. Seems like we would be best served by posting new stories and then not allowing any comments to be made for 24 hours or some arbitrary allotment of time. Something tells me that we'd just end up with craftier trolls, but that is its own form of entertainment.
Something about getting involved in a land war in Asia not being a good idea wasn't it?
Inconceivable!
I think the issue is David Gelernter failed to predict how most of the Internet communities talk to each other. Not to mention it would require a massive restructuring of the Internet, but given the latest whispers of what ACTA will bring us, I guess it is more likely than not.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if they are doing this on purpose so they can track the users that pirated it...
Put your foil hat back on. Pirates would likely not be connecting to any Ubisoft servers, thus would not be trackable. But that is too simple. All we'd have to do is divine from what we know of other poison like DRM tactics: is Ubisoft the sort of company who would poison their own executable or their enemy's? Now, a clever company would put the poison in their own executable, because they would know that only a great fool would download a cracked executable. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the cracked exes from Reloaded or Skid-Row. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the executable from Ubisoft... Now, where was I?
Agreed, honestly I had no idea about the DRM in it as I've had the xbox 360 version for a few weeks as it came out prior to the PC release. I don't have my 360 connected to the internet so I would have never assumed a working internet connection would be needed on the PC had it not been for the /. article a ~week ago. And really, for a single player game to require an always on internet connection has to be an all time low.
I thought burned optical discs started to degrade after a few years. Have they solved this problem?
That's a problem with everything, not just burned discs. Until we invent some magically regenerative material I suspect we will always be plagued with decay mucking up pretty much everything. Damn entropy.
It means that no one had posted anything to the comments of the story yet. And if you are a /. regular it's really a secret troll code telling you to rush in to comment about frosty piss and checking the post anonymously button while praying to the FSM that you beat all the other cowards to it. ;)
Doom. Everyone loved the first two games... then came in Doom 3, that looked stunning, but played more like a survival horror game. How can someone take such a wild, frantic, exhilarating series and make something so boring out of it?
That really is a sad statement on how far survival horror games have fallen when someone thinks Doom 3 fits that genre. Doom 3 was just a crappy FPS... walk into dark room, shoot the bad guy that is always positioned in an out of the way corner, rinse and repeat. It was never a survival horror... if I told my wife what you said she would be quaking with fiery, and her ranting would be epic. She and I both miss the glory days of survival horror...
That said, the rest of your point still stands and I agree with you. Enjoyable game play should always be the focal point that everything else branches off of. Instead what we get are games that are so graphically polished but play more like tech demos showing how pretty the latest and greatest video card can make everything.
I'm unsure of what you are trying to get at, but San Jose is in the USA, so anyone buying a WD has a good chance of getting one.