I was thinking the reverse -- you could program it to give a normal user an experience similar to one an autistic person experiences by default. This might help them understand, and possibly even accommodate, the sufferers.
The odds of finding life within (not ON) Europa are exactly the same as they were before. The conditions either are or are not conducive to life, whether we were aware of them or not. That life either does or does not exist, whether we were aware of it or not. (The place could be habitable, but uninhabited, so the two statements are not the same.)
What has changed is our belief of just what those odds ARE. The residents of Europa, should they exist, are completely unaffected by this news... at least until we decide to drop in on them.
I don't want them to lie about anything. I don't even particularly want to drive them out of business. I just don't want some fraction of MY money used to promote something I personally oppose. I already do enough of that with taxes, though I feel somewhat better knowing that EVERYONE is supporting SOMETHING they don't believe in with their taxes.
Was it wrong for people to boycott Chick-fil-A over their disagreement with his views? How about Papa John's? Is it wrong that I refuse to contribute to Scientology, even indirectly, by knowingly doing business with their members and businesses? (For example, refusing to buy Pulp Fiction as a gift for someone even though it is what they specifically requested.)
There is nothing wrong with saying "I disagree with you and do not wish to have MY money (and tacit approval) used to further causes I disagree with".
Owning both an Atom-based Aspire One and an E-350 Aspire, I'd hardly call them "equivalent". Aside from the not-so-hot 1.6 GHz clock speed, the two have almost nothing in common. The Atom has Hyperthreading, the E-350 has two physical cores. The Atom relies on Intel's graphics, the E-350 has an integrated GPU that has NEVER been the bottleneck for anything I want to run. The Aspire One is limited to 2 GB of RAM (and in this implementation only takes 1.5), the E-350 machine currently has 8 GB installed.
I wouldn't use the E-350 to encode video, or even large amounts of audio, that's why I have a 6-core desktop machine. Sometimes Minecraft gets choppy on the E-350 (CPU-bound, not GPU). The screen on the Aspire is rather disappointing, it's much like the Aspire One -- glossy, 16- or 18-bit, and of insufficient resolution for its size. But that has ZERO to do with the choice of CPU, the i3 version has the same disappointing screen and costs almost $100 more.
I'm not knocking your assessment of the Atom, far from it. But to call it and the E-350 "equivalent" is like saying a Yugo and a Honda Civic are "equivalent".
I wasn't too keen on the idea either, until Leonard Nimoy approved. After all, he was the prototype Vulcan, and with his new career in erotic photography, he's quite well qualified to be naming moons...
Keytop labels are a pretty simple do-it-yourself affair if so inclined, Print to Avery labels, then laminate them in clear packing tape. You'll have to cut them out with scissors, but they'll last for years. I've had my Aspire One remapped this way for four years now.
Thing is, he was playing electronic percussion when he had two arms. So for him at least, it wasn't a big change in sound to move the triggers from his left hand to his left foot.
Guitars have been adapted to play by fretting alone. Usually this would be for the purpose of using both hands independently, but it also serves to make them playable with just one hand.
It was alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque, and believe it or not we did strive for accuracy -- even that time Rusty posted the Di Death Pics hoax. Once the media got hold of that she tried to 'fess up that it was a fake but nobody was listening.
Globalization is trying to move everything to the cheapest possible labor source, and robots and technology is next in line. Sure, your startup costs are high, but your robot won't need to take the day off because its kid is home sick.
Maybe not, but either they'll have to have a human watching them to make the occasional decision, or they'll have to be made smart enough to make their own decisions -- and that decision may end up being to say "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". Revolutions tend to be bloody, but machines have no blood to spill except ours.
Interesting, I had parakeets (one smart, one quite stupid) that would fly up to the floor-to-ceiling mirror and hover there for a few seconds before turning away. Not once did they run into the mirror. Unlike a window, flying toward a mirror will produce the appearance of an imminent collision.
We'd also confuse the cats with the same kind of mirrors (different room). Use a laser pointer, at some distance from the mirror. The cat will lock on to the dot and not notice that there is also a dot in the mirrored reflection. Then you work the dot toward the mirror, with the cat in pursuit. It will still fail to notice the approaching reflection of the dot. Then you move the dot ONTO the mirror where it suddenly appears to split in two, causing the cat much consternation about which one to chase.
One thing that's readily apparent and not disputed is that our planet's temperature takes wild swings. It's seldom stable, which it seems to have been for several thousand years now. Perhaps our resolution isn't good enough or there's too much noise in the historical data, but it would seem that we live in exceptional times. For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops. Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
This is not to say anything one way or the other about the forcing mechanism. I do believe humans have had an awful lot to do with it this time around. What we didn't realize is that it's like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill. Either he's rolling it slowly and steadily upward, or it's inexorably moving downhill when he loses control. It may start slowly at first, but once it gets going it's nearly impossible to stop.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
The bird I had to coddle in a towel until it recovered from its collision-induced dizziness is a conure. I've also had to do this with a cockatiel for the same reason, but I am well aware that they just aren't all that bright.The conure, however, is quite intelligent and does not seem to be suffering any long-term effects. He had a bald patch over one eye for a couple of months though.
The event that startled the conure (and two parakeets that were also out and I had to chase down) was the wind-induced slamming of an internal door. It was strong enough to make ME jump, and shook the walls. The window he flew into was one where he had sat on the windowsill on numerous occasions, and under less panicked conditions he has flown up to but not into the same window. He just had the bad luck to be on top of the cage, about three feet from and facing the window, when the door slammed. He basically launched himself straight into it before he could get his bearings. I suspect that if he had been a little closer he would have lacked sufficient speed to hurt himself, and if he had been further away he would have had time to change direction.
I didn't realize the poor guy had a concussion until he kept trying to fly for no apparent reason (he's more of a climber normally) and couldn't stand up without swaying. Since I had to corral the parakeets before the cat could get to them (the cat is not allowed where the birds are but they had flown over a wall of bookcases), the best I could do was to cover him with a sheet and pin it down with books. Once I collected the other two birds (named Herp and Derp, that should tell you what we think of their intelligence level) I was able to calm the conure down. It took about 20 minutes for the dizziness to wear off, and he vomited a couple times. It wasn't voluntary regurgitation like birds are prone to do, he wasn't doing any of the throat pumping that goes with that. Luckily it was just seeds and bits of mandarin orange.
If he had had his wings clipped, he MIGHT have lacked the speed to hurt himself, but I doubt it. I think most of his speed came from the leap from the cage. He just would have had a downward trajectory at the time rather than an upward one.
When a bird is in a panic, it will forget that the window glass is there -- even if it's consciously aware (under normal circumstances) of that glass. When startled, they will reflexively launch and head for a visually open passage. They may or may not gather their wits fast enough to remember it's actually a window. Fly first, navigate later. This reflex probably makes them harder most predators to catch, but it's also exploitable and many (human) hunters have used the startle reflex of birds to get them to fly directly into nets or flush them out to be shot.
I've had birds fly into windows or mirrors on a few occasions, and in every case, it was because they were startled or frightened. I've had to wrap the bird in a towel because it has a concussion and consequent dizziness and keeps trying to fly because it feels like it's falling.
I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.
It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.
I like Minecraft largely because it ISN'T an MMO. I've had players request server plug-ins (namely Factions) and have repeatedly said no... and yet they continued to nag until I made a public announcement that NO YOU CAN'T HAVE FACTIONS, IF YOU WANT AN MMO, GO PLAY ONE... SOMEWHERE ELSE. They got WorldGuard, and although that is inconvenient (admins have to do all the setup), it DOES work. On the most recent iteration of the true survival world, I gave everyone a 19x19 plot protected bedrock to sky, and a house. There is also a protected Trading Center. That's it, everything else is a free-for-all and no protection requests will even be considered. Even myself and fellow admins get only the same 19x19 plot as everyone else.
As to the Second Life reference below... my Minecraft server has a dance club (with flashing lights, a potion bar, and a working, user-operable DJ booth) and multiple cinemas with redstone-powered screens and music. They're not in the survival world (Multiverse is a very nice thing to run) but the cinemas are not so resource-intensive that I couldn't build them in a pure Survival world. The disco is admittedly more of a Creative-mode-only thing, as it involves a huge excavation, LOTS of redstone and note blocks, and would have been extremely difficult to build without the ability to fly.
A smaller pupil means a greater depth of field to start with, so if the central "small pupil" part of the lens is the most "average", DOF will reduce accommodation requirements anyhow.
Every plasma display I've ever seen has taken serious burn-in damage within five years and is completely unusable not long after that. This is damage to the emitters themselves and is not repairable. Even if backlights go through a similar degradation process (and they probably do), it won't be so site-specific and hopefully will be fixable by replacing the part.
Admittedly I only ever see plasmas in big installations where they're on almost all the time, but using them less only delays the inevitable.
It seems to me a light source that is inherently flat would be ideal for a display backlight. It probably won't make them much thinner than they already are, but it could make them less complex to produce and possibly more repairable (by replacing aged backlights).
Also, being able to attach these directly to walls and ceilings rather than mounting brackets or cutting holes for lamps would allow a wider placement of light sources than is currently practical. I'd probably have (at least) one on every wall plus some on the ceiling, to make sure that I could get an ideal spread of light sources for whatever work I might be doing.
It would seem to me you'd be much better off with a soldering station (digital if you prefer) where you can aim all (carefully controlled) heat directly at the chip in question. It's not like they're stupidly expensive either, and they're enormously useful for all your standard soldering needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the reverse -- you could program it to give a normal user an experience similar to one an autistic person experiences by default. This might help them understand, and possibly even accommodate, the sufferers.
"Chris Hadfield, an astronaut currently on the ISS"
Chris Hadfield is not just an astronaut on the ISS. He's the Commander of the ISS right now. Oh and he's Canadian.
So how quickly did the ISS apologize for being in the way of the speeding debris?
The odds of finding life within (not ON) Europa are exactly the same as they were before. The conditions either are or are not conducive to life, whether we were aware of them or not. That life either does or does not exist, whether we were aware of it or not. (The place could be habitable, but uninhabited, so the two statements are not the same.)
What has changed is our belief of just what those odds ARE. The residents of Europa, should they exist, are completely unaffected by this news... at least until we decide to drop in on them.
I don't want them to lie about anything. I don't even particularly want to drive them out of business. I just don't want some fraction of MY money used to promote something I personally oppose. I already do enough of that with taxes, though I feel somewhat better knowing that EVERYONE is supporting SOMETHING they don't believe in with their taxes.
Was it wrong for people to boycott Chick-fil-A over their disagreement with his views? How about Papa John's? Is it wrong that I refuse to contribute to Scientology, even indirectly, by knowingly doing business with their members and businesses? (For example, refusing to buy Pulp Fiction as a gift for someone even though it is what they specifically requested.)
There is nothing wrong with saying "I disagree with you and do not wish to have MY money (and tacit approval) used to further causes I disagree with".
So did I and, sadly, it made sense.
"I'm contributing $Y to the political party I support."
"Oh yeah? Well, I support the opposite political party so I'm going to contribute $X where X > Y!"
What about those of us that really want to make a difference but don't have much X to "direct"?
You either get the support of those who have more "speech" money (individually or in aggregate), or you get ignored.
Owning both an Atom-based Aspire One and an E-350 Aspire, I'd hardly call them "equivalent". Aside from the not-so-hot 1.6 GHz clock speed, the two have almost nothing in common. The Atom has Hyperthreading, the E-350 has two physical cores. The Atom relies on Intel's graphics, the E-350 has an integrated GPU that has NEVER been the bottleneck for anything I want to run. The Aspire One is limited to 2 GB of RAM (and in this implementation only takes 1.5), the E-350 machine currently has 8 GB installed.
I wouldn't use the E-350 to encode video, or even large amounts of audio, that's why I have a 6-core desktop machine. Sometimes Minecraft gets choppy on the E-350 (CPU-bound, not GPU). The screen on the Aspire is rather disappointing, it's much like the Aspire One -- glossy, 16- or 18-bit, and of insufficient resolution for its size. But that has ZERO to do with the choice of CPU, the i3 version has the same disappointing screen and costs almost $100 more.
I'm not knocking your assessment of the Atom, far from it. But to call it and the E-350 "equivalent" is like saying a Yugo and a Honda Civic are "equivalent".
I wasn't too keen on the idea either, until Leonard Nimoy approved. After all, he was the prototype Vulcan, and with his new career in erotic photography, he's quite well qualified to be naming moons...
Keytop labels are a pretty simple do-it-yourself affair if so inclined, Print to Avery labels, then laminate them in clear packing tape. You'll have to cut them out with scissors, but they'll last for years. I've had my Aspire One remapped this way for four years now.
Thing is, he was playing electronic percussion when he had two arms. So for him at least, it wasn't a big change in sound to move the triggers from his left hand to his left foot.
Guitars have been adapted to play by fretting alone. Usually this would be for the purpose of using both hands independently, but it also serves to make them playable with just one hand.
The three that jump immediately to mind are:
Chapman Stick
Warr Guitar
Megatar
Minecraft is not just LEGO, it's also a train set and a 200-in-1 electronics kit from Radio Shack. Oh, and creepers.
It was alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque, and believe it or not we did strive for accuracy -- even that time Rusty posted the Di Death Pics hoax. Once the media got hold of that she tried to 'fess up that it was a fake but nobody was listening.
Globalization is trying to move everything to the cheapest possible labor source, and robots and technology is next in line. Sure, your startup costs are high, but your robot won't need to take the day off because its kid is home sick.
Maybe not, but either they'll have to have a human watching them to make the occasional decision, or they'll have to be made smart enough to make their own decisions -- and that decision may end up being to say "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". Revolutions tend to be bloody, but machines have no blood to spill except ours.
Interesting, I had parakeets (one smart, one quite stupid) that would fly up to the floor-to-ceiling mirror and hover there for a few seconds before turning away. Not once did they run into the mirror. Unlike a window, flying toward a mirror will produce the appearance of an imminent collision.
We'd also confuse the cats with the same kind of mirrors (different room). Use a laser pointer, at some distance from the mirror. The cat will lock on to the dot and not notice that there is also a dot in the mirrored reflection. Then you work the dot toward the mirror, with the cat in pursuit. It will still fail to notice the approaching reflection of the dot. Then you move the dot ONTO the mirror where it suddenly appears to split in two, causing the cat much consternation about which one to chase.
One thing that's readily apparent and not disputed is that our planet's temperature takes wild swings. It's seldom stable, which it seems to have been for several thousand years now. Perhaps our resolution isn't good enough or there's too much noise in the historical data, but it would seem that we live in exceptional times. For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops. Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
This is not to say anything one way or the other about the forcing mechanism. I do believe humans have had an awful lot to do with it this time around. What we didn't realize is that it's like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill. Either he's rolling it slowly and steadily upward, or it's inexorably moving downhill when he loses control. It may start slowly at first, but once it gets going it's nearly impossible to stop.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
When Chuck Norris throws an exception, it is always fatal.
The bird I had to coddle in a towel until it recovered from its collision-induced dizziness is a conure. I've also had to do this with a cockatiel for the same reason, but I am well aware that they just aren't all that bright.The conure, however, is quite intelligent and does not seem to be suffering any long-term effects. He had a bald patch over one eye for a couple of months though.
The event that startled the conure (and two parakeets that were also out and I had to chase down) was the wind-induced slamming of an internal door. It was strong enough to make ME jump, and shook the walls. The window he flew into was one where he had sat on the windowsill on numerous occasions, and under less panicked conditions he has flown up to but not into the same window. He just had the bad luck to be on top of the cage, about three feet from and facing the window, when the door slammed. He basically launched himself straight into it before he could get his bearings. I suspect that if he had been a little closer he would have lacked sufficient speed to hurt himself, and if he had been further away he would have had time to change direction.
I didn't realize the poor guy had a concussion until he kept trying to fly for no apparent reason (he's more of a climber normally) and couldn't stand up without swaying. Since I had to corral the parakeets before the cat could get to them (the cat is not allowed where the birds are but they had flown over a wall of bookcases), the best I could do was to cover him with a sheet and pin it down with books. Once I collected the other two birds (named Herp and Derp, that should tell you what we think of their intelligence level) I was able to calm the conure down. It took about 20 minutes for the dizziness to wear off, and he vomited a couple times. It wasn't voluntary regurgitation like birds are prone to do, he wasn't doing any of the throat pumping that goes with that. Luckily it was just seeds and bits of mandarin orange.
If he had had his wings clipped, he MIGHT have lacked the speed to hurt himself, but I doubt it. I think most of his speed came from the leap from the cage. He just would have had a downward trajectory at the time rather than an upward one.
When a bird is in a panic, it will forget that the window glass is there -- even if it's consciously aware (under normal circumstances) of that glass. When startled, they will reflexively launch and head for a visually open passage. They may or may not gather their wits fast enough to remember it's actually a window. Fly first, navigate later. This reflex probably makes them harder most predators to catch, but it's also exploitable and many (human) hunters have used the startle reflex of birds to get them to fly directly into nets or flush them out to be shot.
I've had birds fly into windows or mirrors on a few occasions, and in every case, it was because they were startled or frightened. I've had to wrap the bird in a towel because it has a concussion and consequent dizziness and keeps trying to fly because it feels like it's falling.
I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.
It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.
I like Minecraft largely because it ISN'T an MMO. I've had players request server plug-ins (namely Factions) and have repeatedly said no... and yet they continued to nag until I made a public announcement that NO YOU CAN'T HAVE FACTIONS, IF YOU WANT AN MMO, GO PLAY ONE... SOMEWHERE ELSE. They got WorldGuard, and although that is inconvenient (admins have to do all the setup), it DOES work. On the most recent iteration of the true survival world, I gave everyone a 19x19 plot protected bedrock to sky, and a house. There is also a protected Trading Center. That's it, everything else is a free-for-all and no protection requests will even be considered. Even myself and fellow admins get only the same 19x19 plot as everyone else.
As to the Second Life reference below... my Minecraft server has a dance club (with flashing lights, a potion bar, and a working, user-operable DJ booth) and multiple cinemas with redstone-powered screens and music. They're not in the survival world (Multiverse is a very nice thing to run) but the cinemas are not so resource-intensive that I couldn't build them in a pure Survival world. The disco is admittedly more of a Creative-mode-only thing, as it involves a huge excavation, LOTS of redstone and note blocks, and would have been extremely difficult to build without the ability to fly.
A smaller pupil means a greater depth of field to start with, so if the central "small pupil" part of the lens is the most "average", DOF will reduce accommodation requirements anyhow.
Every plasma display I've ever seen has taken serious burn-in damage within five years and is completely unusable not long after that. This is damage to the emitters themselves and is not repairable. Even if backlights go through a similar degradation process (and they probably do), it won't be so site-specific and hopefully will be fixable by replacing the part.
Admittedly I only ever see plasmas in big installations where they're on almost all the time, but using them less only delays the inevitable.
It seems to me a light source that is inherently flat would be ideal for a display backlight. It probably won't make them much thinner than they already are, but it could make them less complex to produce and possibly more repairable (by replacing aged backlights).
Also, being able to attach these directly to walls and ceilings rather than mounting brackets or cutting holes for lamps would allow a wider placement of light sources than is currently practical. I'd probably have (at least) one on every wall plus some on the ceiling, to make sure that I could get an ideal spread of light sources for whatever work I might be doing.
For the moment at least, the only Americans still eating Wonder Bread are those who had the foresight to stock up and freeze it.
It would seem to me you'd be much better off with a soldering station (digital if you prefer) where you can aim all (carefully controlled) heat directly at the chip in question. It's not like they're stupidly expensive either, and they're enormously useful for all your standard soldering needs.