Can anyone explain how the replicants are physiologically superior to regular humans, yet the only way to identify them is to ask them stupid questions while videotaping their irises?
In late to the discussion, but this is a point of the story that I've been somewhat facinated by. Other responders addressed the efficacy of a physically based test. The Voight-Komph (sp?) machine is interesting because it measures the lack of an emotional response to a stimulus. Interestingly, a scitophrenic (sp?) human should respond the same way. This was the main plot point used by K W Jeter (Dick's protege) in Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human. This actually makes sense in that one should expect that any person / replicant to go scitophrenic when imprinted with someone else's memories / past, which actually brings up questions in some of Dick's other work such as Total Recall.
BTW, junkbuster can be configured to use another proxy (like Squid) so you can use both together. I think privoxy will do that too.
It definitely will. Privoxy supports forwarding to http and socks proxies -- in fact that's why I started using it (bridge between a socks proxy and an http client with problematic socks support), and the ad blocking with all the associated bandwidth is just a bonus, even on a fast link.
-"Zow"
Re:My co-workers were quite pissed
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 1
Sure you aren't out of sync with them? What if they have the wrong Tuesday?
This is a common problem on supercomputers: you have lots of users that want to run lots of jobs that have conflicting requirements for resources, and typically some dependancies between jobs and the like. Take a look at some of the scheduling and resource management tools available for supercomputers and maybe one of those will scratch your itch.
A couple pointers to get you started:
SLURM, which while designed for Linux clusters is a good system and at least should seed a Google search (disclaimer: I work for LLNL and am on the user end of slurm, and I'm only speaking for myself here).
Condor is a lot more than scheduling, but it does that as well.
Those are the ones I think it would be useful to look at for now. Most of the other systems are vendor specific.
1. If you have call display, is it polite to answer the phone with the caller's name?
As others have observed, it might not actually be them. I only do so with people that I'm expecting to call, such as someone I was just talking with who said, "I'll get right back to you on that," or someone I just left a message for.
2. What about call answer?
It's all a matter of priorities: customer trumps coworker, coworker trumps personal call (which I really hate getting at work anyway).
3. Is call screening using an answering machine polite?
No, because I hate calling friends and having to start, "Joe? Joe? Are you there? If you're there pick up? We were just going out to dinner and wanted to see if you could come along, but if you're not there, it's too late."
4. I give telemarketers one chance to hang up before I slam the receiver down on them. Is this polite
I think it's being too nice. Tell them to take you off their list, bonus points if you bother to stay on long enough to verify they understood, then hang up. They're never going to initiate the disconnect because as long as they have you on the line, regardless of what you say, you're a potential sale.
5. What are cell phone rules? Is it acceptable to have a social call while in line at the supermarket?
The main problem I have with cell phones in public places is people shouting, presumably because of the bad quality of cell phone signals. If you can carry on without being loud enough to disturb others, AND it doesn't slow you down in line (like because you're ignoring the checker or hands are tied up so you can't get your wallet), then fine, the brain tumor is your problem, not mine.
What about a heated business call?
No, again because of the shouting and the fact you're distracted. Tell them it's a bad time and deal with it later.
I'm 27 and a computer scientist. All my professional experience has been in R&D environments with little customer interaction on the phone (more F2F), and it's usually easier to walk to talk to the other people on my team rather than look up their number.
I can think of some flip responses to that, but seriously, what does the military drill into your head about telephone courtisy that our mothers didn't try to?
A similar set that I didn't see anyone mention was the KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) Cup datasets. Every year for the ACM SIGKDD conference they make a dataset available and see who in the KDD community can do the best job of mining it (for instance, do the best classification on the test data). There isn't a central repository as different organizations host the challenge every year, but a quick Google search for "KDD Cup" will give you the list. The last four years had data sets such as:
"clickstream and purchase data from Gazelle.com, a legwear and legcare web retailer that closed their online store on 8/18/2000"
Bummer -- This might be a long shot, but if you bought it with a credit card, the credit card issuer (bank) may offer some sort of consumer protection. Give them a call, explain your situation and see if there's anything they can do for you. It sounds like you took it back to Best Buy to coordinate the repair -- if so, that's definitely in your favour as it seems to me that the CC company can call Best Buy and tell them, either get it fixed, replaced, or you can consider it returned and we're reversing the charge. If they reverse the charge, BB pays a penalty to the CC company, so BB is likely to do whatever they can to prevent that. Like I said, it's a long shot, but it sounds like you could use any leads at this point. Good luck!
We've come to a similar conclusion at the research institution I work for, however it requires more advanced planning. If we're doing something that we want to release as open source, we get the sponsors to write a letter saying that they want such and such software that we're working on released as open source because it will help advance research in that area, makes it easier for us to collaborate with our peers at other institutions, etc.
Repeat after me: The person holding the purse strings is always right. And the intelectual property office recognises this.
Also, while War Games obviously wasn't 100% accurate, it was definitely more realistic than the Net, Hackers and a lot of other movies featuring programmers.
I'll second that. How many other movies are that that devote that much time to researching the target system to figure out the password? Any other movie would have just run a fancy graphical version of crack. I mean, sure, some of the technology (like Joshua, and the graphics capabilities of an IMSAI) was made more Hollywood, but I think the character depictions were dead on.
Oh, and Lightman, good thing you didn't try to swim: skinny geeks like us sink like rocks.
I think they've been making good progress on the FX, so I bet you'll go to buy one of the first off the production line and find yourself in line right next to the DNF developers who are buying theirs because they're doing a complete rewrite to optimize for the FX. ..
Proving mental distress as cause for damages is really difficult though. It's much easier to prove quantifiable damages. So due them for doubling the price.
I agree, it does sound completely different from the eBay case. And while IANAL, I would think this would be actionable (at least here in the US), since there is presumably a quantifiable business loss. I don't think it's the credit card company that's at fault though -- they just have an expert system that rejects suspicious charges. I'd think that the restaurant is at fault for the manner in which they informed him of the rejected charge. At any restaurant swanky enough to take a potential client out to they should have pulled the guy aside ("You have a phone call," or something like that), and handled the situation away from the rest of the party. Of course, maybe the restaurant wasn't that swanky, in which case it's that guy's fault.
This page reminded me of a joke I read in Readers Digest many moons ago:
A man buys a nice sports car and peels out of the lot. Driving along he comes to a red light, where he's sitting next to another guy in a nice sports car. The first guy leans out his window and says, "Hey, I've got a GPS Map display in here."
The other guy is wholely unimpressed. "Yes, I have one of those."
"Well, I've also got a DVD player and satelight TV."
"I have those as well. But do you have a double bed in the back of yours?"
The man was dumbfounded. Just then the light turned green, and the two cars peeled off. The man went straight back to his dealer.
A couple weeks later he was driving along when he saw the other sports car pulled over along side the road. He pulled behind it and got out. As he approached the other car, he noticed steam rolling out and the windows all fogged up. He knocked on the window. No response. He knocked again and waited. Finally the other driver opened the door, clad only in a towel. The guy said, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I got a double bed installed in my car."
The other driver replied, "You got me out of the shower to tell me that?"
in all of US history I believe there has only been 1 successful company coming out of chapter 11 and I think that's Texaco Chevron.
I know Covad declared Chapter 11 -- I'm not sure they're through it yet, but I know they're doing better than ever, and if they haven't successfully finished it yet, they should in the near future. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples too -- Texaco-Chevron might just be the biggest.
I did say most games -- certainly there are some that rely on a high degree of realism -- particularly the Sim* games. Not just the Sims, but Simcity and some of the less popular titles from Maxis like SimLife, SimEarth, etc. But even with this high degree of realism, I don't think they're meant to be realistic: they're meant to be God-games. They allow you to explore ideas that you can't in real life. They allow you to actually put your money where your mouth is when you say, "Well, if I was in charge. .."
Anyway, I don't understand the huge popularity of The Simes -- I have it and it's not one of my favourite games. It really kind of tees me off that these people are so stupid that they can't figure out how to get around someone else if they really need to go. And I think the time-scaling is borked too, I mean, why can't any of these people get up, run through the bathroom, get dressed, and grab a quick breakfast in anything less than two hours?
Okay, way to make friends and influence people. So maybe I'm wrong -- that doesn't make me an idiot. And for the record, my video card doesn't support it: I didn't even bother to get a video card with DVI on it as I read that 1600x1200 over DVI was "unsupported", which I took to mean "it don't work". Since you say it does, I'll have to see if I can get this card upgraded.
I said it wouldn't work for any game that sold a monthly fee
I'm not sure about that. One of the reasons I haven't bothered to try Everquest (or introduce my wife to it -- she's the real gamer in the family) is that it doesn't sound fun for someone who just plays a few hours a week / month as you can't compete against these people who are on constantly. Maybe by making the game more attractive to casual gamers, Sony (or whoever) would make more from the additonal membership to make up for the loss from the hard-core types. It's like Microsoft products: they might not be the best and many hard core systems people prefer to work in Unix/Linux, hard core desktop publishing types prefer XPress, PageMaker, or the like, yet MS still pulls in billions from the masses who finds their stuff easier to use.
I think another solution would be to segregate the players by level/skills/age -- the problem with that is that approach is that it'll undoubtably wreak havoc with the social dynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
DC-3, probably.
-"Zow"
In late to the discussion, but this is a point of the story that I've been somewhat facinated by. Other responders addressed the efficacy of a physically based test. The Voight-Komph (sp?) machine is interesting because it measures the lack of an emotional response to a stimulus. Interestingly, a scitophrenic (sp?) human should respond the same way. This was the main plot point used by K W Jeter (Dick's protege) in Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human. This actually makes sense in that one should expect that any person / replicant to go scitophrenic when imprinted with someone else's memories / past, which actually brings up questions in some of Dick's other work such as Total Recall.
-"Zow"
Somehow, I get the feeling that Apple is going to use this for the next gen of PowerBooks.
(It's a joke -- all the materials scientists don't need to correct me.)
-"Zow"
How about The Last Starfighter ?
It definitely will. Privoxy supports forwarding to http and socks proxies -- in fact that's why I started using it (bridge between a socks proxy and an http client with problematic socks support), and the ad blocking with all the associated bandwidth is just a bonus, even on a fast link.
-"Zow"
Sure you aren't out of sync with them? What if they have the wrong Tuesday?
This is a common problem on supercomputers: you have lots of users that want to run lots of jobs that have conflicting requirements for resources, and typically some dependancies between jobs and the like. Take a look at some of the scheduling and resource management tools available for supercomputers and maybe one of those will scratch your itch.
A couple pointers to get you started:
Those are the ones I think it would be useful to look at for now. Most of the other systems are vendor specific.
-"Zow"
As others have observed, it might not actually be them. I only do so with people that I'm expecting to call, such as someone I was just talking with who said, "I'll get right back to you on that," or someone I just left a message for.
It's all a matter of priorities: customer trumps coworker, coworker trumps personal call (which I really hate getting at work anyway).
No, because I hate calling friends and having to start, "Joe? Joe? Are you there? If you're there pick up? We were just going out to dinner and wanted to see if you could come along, but if you're not there, it's too late."
I think it's being too nice. Tell them to take you off their list, bonus points if you bother to stay on long enough to verify they understood, then hang up. They're never going to initiate the disconnect because as long as they have you on the line, regardless of what you say, you're a potential sale.
The main problem I have with cell phones in public places is people shouting, presumably because of the bad quality of cell phone signals. If you can carry on without being loud enough to disturb others, AND it doesn't slow you down in line (like because you're ignoring the checker or hands are tied up so you can't get your wallet), then fine, the brain tumor is your problem, not mine.
No, again because of the shouting and the fact you're distracted. Tell them it's a bad time and deal with it later.
I'm 27 and a computer scientist. All my professional experience has been in R&D environments with little customer interaction on the phone (more F2F), and it's usually easier to walk to talk to the other people on my team rather than look up their number.
-"Zow"
I can think of some flip responses to that, but seriously, what does the military drill into your head about telephone courtisy that our mothers didn't try to?
-"Zow"
A similar set that I didn't see anyone mention was the KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) Cup datasets. Every year for the ACM SIGKDD conference they make a dataset available and see who in the KDD community can do the best job of mining it (for instance, do the best classification on the test data). There isn't a central repository as different organizations host the challenge every year, but a quick Google search for "KDD Cup" will give you the list. The last four years had data sets such as:
-"Zow"
It's part of the conspiracy!
That's the first thing I wondered too. I mean, I can just imagine driving along with one of my pals and going, "Dude, did that road cone just move?"
"Naw, you're just imagining things."
"No, there goes another!"
"Dude, I saw that! I think they're trying to get us! Step on it!
So, what you're saying is that things are better now?
Bummer -- This might be a long shot, but if you bought it with a credit card, the credit card issuer (bank) may offer some sort of consumer protection. Give them a call, explain your situation and see if there's anything they can do for you. It sounds like you took it back to Best Buy to coordinate the repair -- if so, that's definitely in your favour as it seems to me that the CC company can call Best Buy and tell them, either get it fixed, replaced, or you can consider it returned and we're reversing the charge. If they reverse the charge, BB pays a penalty to the CC company, so BB is likely to do whatever they can to prevent that. Like I said, it's a long shot, but it sounds like you could use any leads at this point. Good luck!
-"Zow"
We've come to a similar conclusion at the research institution I work for, however it requires more advanced planning. If we're doing something that we want to release as open source, we get the sponsors to write a letter saying that they want such and such software that we're working on released as open source because it will help advance research in that area, makes it easier for us to collaborate with our peers at other institutions, etc.
Repeat after me: The person holding the purse strings is always right. And the intelectual property office recognises this.
-"Zow"
I'll second that. How many other movies are that that devote that much time to researching the target system to figure out the password? Any other movie would have just run a fancy graphical version of crack. I mean, sure, some of the technology (like Joshua, and the graphics capabilities of an IMSAI) was made more Hollywood, but I think the character depictions were dead on.
Oh, and Lightman, good thing you didn't try to swim: skinny geeks like us sink like rocks.
-"Zow"
I think they've been making good progress on the FX, so I bet you'll go to buy one of the first off the production line and find yourself in line right next to the DNF developers who are buying theirs because they're doing a complete rewrite to optimize for the FX. . .
-"Zow"
Proving mental distress as cause for damages is really difficult though. It's much easier to prove quantifiable damages. So due them for doubling the price.
-"Zow"
I agree, it does sound completely different from the eBay case. And while IANAL, I would think this would be actionable (at least here in the US), since there is presumably a quantifiable business loss. I don't think it's the credit card company that's at fault though -- they just have an expert system that rejects suspicious charges. I'd think that the restaurant is at fault for the manner in which they informed him of the rejected charge. At any restaurant swanky enough to take a potential client out to they should have pulled the guy aside ("You have a phone call," or something like that), and handled the situation away from the rest of the party. Of course, maybe the restaurant wasn't that swanky, in which case it's that guy's fault.
Just thinking out loud. . .
-"Zow"
Okay, you find me a maid in the SF Bay area that will vacumn my floor every day for under $200/month (much less a one-time cost), and I'll hire them.
-"Zow"
This page reminded me of a joke I read in Readers Digest many moons ago:
A man buys a nice sports car and peels out of the lot. Driving along he comes to a red light, where he's sitting next to another guy in a nice sports car. The first guy leans out his window and says, "Hey, I've got a GPS Map display in here."
The other guy is wholely unimpressed. "Yes, I have one of those."
"Well, I've also got a DVD player and satelight TV."
"I have those as well. But do you have a double bed in the back of yours?"
The man was dumbfounded. Just then the light turned green, and the two cars peeled off. The man went straight back to his dealer.
A couple weeks later he was driving along when he saw the other sports car pulled over along side the road. He pulled behind it and got out. As he approached the other car, he noticed steam rolling out and the windows all fogged up. He knocked on the window. No response. He knocked again and waited. Finally the other driver opened the door, clad only in a towel. The guy said, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I got a double bed installed in my car."
The other driver replied, "You got me out of the shower to tell me that?"
I know Covad declared Chapter 11 -- I'm not sure they're through it yet, but I know they're doing better than ever, and if they haven't successfully finished it yet, they should in the near future. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples too -- Texaco-Chevron might just be the biggest.
-"Zow"
I did say most games -- certainly there are some that rely on a high degree of realism -- particularly the Sim* games. Not just the Sims, but Simcity and some of the less popular titles from Maxis like SimLife, SimEarth, etc. But even with this high degree of realism, I don't think they're meant to be realistic: they're meant to be God-games. They allow you to explore ideas that you can't in real life. They allow you to actually put your money where your mouth is when you say, "Well, if I was in charge. . ."
Anyway, I don't understand the huge popularity of The Simes -- I have it and it's not one of my favourite games. It really kind of tees me off that these people are so stupid that they can't figure out how to get around someone else if they really need to go. And I think the time-scaling is borked too, I mean, why can't any of these people get up, run through the bathroom, get dressed, and grab a quick breakfast in anything less than two hours?
-"Zow"
Okay, way to make friends and influence people. So maybe I'm wrong -- that doesn't make me an idiot. And for the record, my video card doesn't support it: I didn't even bother to get a video card with DVI on it as I read that 1600x1200 over DVI was "unsupported", which I took to mean "it don't work". Since you say it does, I'll have to see if I can get this card upgraded.
-"Zow"
I'm not sure about that. One of the reasons I haven't bothered to try Everquest (or introduce my wife to it -- she's the real gamer in the family) is that it doesn't sound fun for someone who just plays a few hours a week / month as you can't compete against these people who are on constantly. Maybe by making the game more attractive to casual gamers, Sony (or whoever) would make more from the additonal membership to make up for the loss from the hard-core types. It's like Microsoft products: they might not be the best and many hard core systems people prefer to work in Unix/Linux, hard core desktop publishing types prefer XPress, PageMaker, or the like, yet MS still pulls in billions from the masses who finds their stuff easier to use.
I think another solution would be to segregate the players by level/skills/age -- the problem with that is that approach is that it'll undoubtably wreak havoc with the social dynamics.
-"Zow"