How long til someone makes a Wii "game" that simulates a roll in the hay or other related "activities" ? The game can include a blow-up doll and using the Wii remote (with vibrate on), one could imagine some pretty cum-pelling interactions, complete with realistic motions, sound-responses and graphics... hmmm...
I wonder how solidly those Wii-remotes are built and whether they could handle the repetitive stresses of the ol' in and out...
You're criticizing his assumptions, but your statement is also complete conjecture. There's absolutely no evidence one way or the other to suggest how many alien civilizations there are (if any at all).
No, I'm not criticizing his assumptions, I let others do that. I was criticizing how he set up the problem/hypothesis. Of course all of this is conjecture. But the arguments as to how many alien civilizations are out there are very old and I didn't feel the need to rehash them. Any science museum has a display of the sort of: if only 1% of the stars had planets and only 1% of the planets were Earth like and only 1% of these planets had life and only 1% of these planets had intelligent life, there would be millions of civilizations out there. Read Carl Sagan among the countless others... look at the SETI project. No need to rehash that stuff here...
Whatever his assumptions are that leads him to 4%... it seems that he is considering only the probability that any ONE alien civilization is looking. But in all likelihood there are many, if not millions of alien civilizations out there than may be search, so the probability that any ONE of those million will find us seems quite a bit higher than 4%.
Btw, I still think this is insane. The body should just pass any water it doesn't need straight to the bladder. You'd think it would just stay in your stomach if your bladder was full and you were holding it but apparently it somehow goes somewhere else and kills you. I still think that's a little iffy because it just doesn't make sense.
Methinks you should learn just a Wii-bit more about how your own body physiology works...
Water *can't* stay in your stomach waiting for your bladder to be emptied. There is no such mechanism.
There *is* no direct path between your stomach and your bladder.
You *can't* pass pure water. Not through your bladder anyways, through your colon perhaps when it is malfunctioning...
You need sodium to *pump* water out of your system, into your bladder. Ergo, you drink too much water, your sodium stores get depleted as your kidneys try to get rid of all that water, and whole lot of bad things happen as your sodium concentration goes down (due to more water and flushing out sodium) (e.g. your entire nervous system depends on sodium to generate electrical responses, muscles need sodium too, indeed ALL cells need sodium, remember we evolved from the oceans filled with salt water)...
The Xbox 360 is pricey, but the other consoles are pricey for what your getting. The Wii is based on the Gamecube architecture and really should cost about $199 with a game.
Well, you're sorta right that the Wii should cost about $199... if you consider that both MS and SONY sell their consoles at a LOSS, while Nintendo sells the Wii at a PROFIT. So that extra $50 or more is PROFIT. Maybe if Nintendo were willing to shoulder the same losses that MS and SONY are, then the Wii would sell for only $100. But Nintendo doesn't have the same "business model", nor the same deep pockets (or you might say that Nintendo isn't that stupid). Frankly I think we all have an interest in Nintendo continuing to be a major player and surviving, so I'm glad that they incorporate a profit in the selling price (Let them have their extra $50 if it means that they continue to survive and innovate as they do...)
It might be in HP's best interest to sell PC's without an OS in order to appeal to potential customers who want them, but it should never be government forced, that is how monopolies are born.
Neither should consumers be forced to purchase bundles in which one of the components has a monopoly stranglehold on its segment of the market -- that is how monopolies become illegal and are perpetuated.
yup, I knew a girl, fresh out of college, who was planning a big party. She went to a local hi-fi store, "bought" a $2000 new stereo system, set it up for the party, and then returned it afterwards...
If a movie theater owner can get one to use, then basically ANYONE get can one. Which means that if I live in an apartment building, and I don't like my neighbor yacking on the phone at night, or may I'm just an a-hole, then I can jam everyone within a 100 foot radius or more. It would take a VERY carefully crafted law to make such usage illegal and that still wouldn't stop it from happening if jamming equipment were so readily available...
There are so many *other* ways of solving the movie theater problem that don't use jammers. There is no fundamental difference between a cell phone user in a theater and a noisy, disruptive person in the theater. So deal with both in the same way...
Seriously though, a lot of scams would be less effective if there was a reasonable supply of consoles.
mmm, and how does one create a "reasonable supply" ? Supposing you *knew* that you could sell 20 million PS3's within the first month of release... How you do create a supply of 20 millions PS3's ? Hmm... you either build a factory that can make 2mil/month and store them up for 10 months (but then why wouldn't you just start selling them right away), or you build a (very expensive) factory that can make 10mil/month and start making them a month or two before release. But then what exactly do you do with a factory that can make 10mil/month when the steady state demand levels out to 1mil/month ?
Aside from all the technical issues surrounding commercial skipping, I found the most scary aspect is that some of our elected officials have publicly stated that they believe that a TV viewer is REQUIRED to watch commercials, hence the legal basis for the prohibition of commercial skipping. I believe it was a senator who posited the legal theory that by watching broadcast TV, the viewer is entering into a LEGAL CONTRACT with the channel/station that content can be viewed SO LONG AS the commercials are also viewed. Needless to say, I was incredulous with this notion: How is it that we allow such boneheads to get elected and make our laws ? We are idiots for allowing this thinking to percolate within the Senate!
A hypothetical: Freshman year, English 1001: Student writes a 7 page paper and develops a good idea that they try to remember. Junior year, Political Science 3001: Student no longer has a copy of their Freshman year paper, but still remembers, almost word for word, a key sentence or paragraph that they wrote years ago. They include this in their Political Science paper, submit to turnitin.com and are flagged as a plagarist . Turnitin.com does not tell them what paper it is they have plagarized, who wrote the original work (even though it happened to be them), nor does turnitin.com explain to the professor that the "plagarized" paragraph was originally written by the same student.
Re-use even of one's own previous work, is also academic dishonesty and in the same category as plagarism. You cannot submit a paper written for one class as fulfillment for an assignment in another class.
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
Indeed, in addition to selling one's old papers, this re-use/re-submission issue is another reason for turnitin.com to keep papers "forever" so as to stop selling and resubmissions.
Re-use even of one's own previous work, is also academic dishonesty and in the same category as plagarism. You cannot submit a paper written for one class as fulfillment for an assignment in another class.
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
Well I'm glad you seem to be "back to normal"...
The notion that you can have brain surgery to remove a tumor, and it being "undamaging", is, well, "quaint". Neurosurgeons speak of "eloquent cortex" (cortex that is obviously doing something useful) and "non-eloquent cortex" (brain that you aren't obviously using and won't miss if removed), but it is of course just a euphemism, and a bedtime story told to unknowing patients. The fact is that you are using ALL of your brain -- it ALL has a function, some parts much more poorly understood and less obvious than other parts. So of course ANY brain surgery is going to cause brain damage, by definition. And in the case of tumor removal, you want to make as wide an excision as you guess the patient can tolerate to make sure you get it all (you didn't say what kind of tumor it was, but some tumor cells are extremely nasty and are exceedingly efficient at infiltrating normal brain tissue over many *centimeters*). So in your case, it just sounds like the surgeons misjudged, in an obvious way, the boundaries of "non-eloquent cortex", though it is really a fiction anyways.
I'm glad it seems like Boggle helped in the recovery process, and maybe it did. However, the brain also does have a natural time course of "recovery" that can take months or years. Since the brain cannot regenerate new brain tissue, the apparent recovery of function is largely due to rewiring, with normal, undamaged areas taking over and subsuming functions of the damaged regions. This process takes a lot of time. Whether Boggle actually helped is debatable, but the recovery process worked for you... sometimes it doesn't so well, and the deficits persist.
A pretty fantasy... (cf Fantastic Voyage)
on
Life Inside a Cell
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· Score: 3, Informative
Very pretty, and I suppose it might help you remember certain interactions and players, but it comes from the Fantasic Voyage school of portraying medical biology. Remember when the requisite hottie of the movie, Rachel Welch bumps into some tissue, injurying it... and these antibodies come streaming along and target her precisely ? For the most part, molecules and proteins such as shown in this animation do not move so purposefully, flying through the void in perfect formation, bumping into precise what they are intended to interact with, amidst the largely empty void (void of what?!? there is plasma/saline everywhere filled with molecules not that much smaller than some of these proteins and polypeptides). Interactions occur mostly by mass-action, PASSIVE diffusion and RANDOM encounters, which then *might* use specific affinities to start specific interactions.
So contrary to the very purposeful, specific and sparse view of interactions portrayed, the first and most predominant level of molecular "interaction" (bumping into each other) is random, driven by passive processes and mass action (many, many more molecules of all types around). Specificity only can kick in after chance encounters permit the right pairing.
Re:AAARRRG! (Its an FLV that plays with VLC...)
on
Life Inside a Cell
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· Score: 1
If what you're "aarrrg"ing about is the video not being playable under Linux... the file is downloadable and its a FLV file, playable using VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) among others...
"Business model" == barriers to a fully free market == artificial obstacles to competition == preventing a fully optimal economy
Bidders expect a "deal" - max bid != true max bid
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 2, Informative
Previous posts have discussed some of the reasons why sniping works and is the best strategy for the vigilant bidder. One of the additional factors that I haven't seen mention is the fact that in most cases, one's "maximum bid" is rarely a true maximum bid. This is in part because people go to ebay expecting a good deal. If you simply expected to pay retail prices, most people wouldn't bother with ebay (expect at Xmas time for newly released toy/products). If there is an item that you would say you'd be willing to bid "up to" $100 on, you do so generally thinking that even at $100, it would still be a "good deal". But what that means is that if you were asked to pay $100.01, you almost certainly think that was just about as good a deal. Probably even at $105.99 you would still go for it. But that is not the question that is asked of normal bidders who bid early with their "maximum bid". The current ebay rules don't allow you to answer that question with early bids. Only snipers can operate in the mode where they can adjust their "maximum bids" to their *true* maximum bids.
ebay needs to change their rules to get rid of sniping so as to get higher true bids and better final pricing for their sellers (unless ebay has already modeled the system and concluded that the total net income would go down due to less happy bidders/snipers).
OT: another thing that I am amazed that ebay puts up with are those ridiculous $0.01 auctions where the real value/cost of the product is shifted to the "shipping and handling" costs (and sometimes even the mandatory "insurance fees"), such that ebay itself is scammed out of its fair cut and the buyers are left vulnerable (and often misled). Vulnerable because "shipping and handling" and "insurance" are never refunded: "oh you never got the item, well ok, here is your money back: $0.01"...
I love the $10 mandatory insurance for the item that costs $0.01. (not!)
I snipe all the time because it is so obviously the best strategy to get the lowest price possible on any particular item, given the current ebay auction rules. It works about 50% of the time in my experience (i.e. it was clear that I won the auction with a lower price even when another bidder would have bid a higher price but couldn't because time ran out).
Given this, it is also obvious that to permit sniping means that many items are NOT sold for the highest price that someone was willing to bid (but couldn't because time ran out). That means that sniping favors *bidders*, not sellers, and therefore not ebay (which makes more money on if the final price is higher). So then why does ebay permit sniping ? Its current rules *encourage* sniping. It would be so easy to abolish sniping by simply (as other auctions do) making the ending time a "soft" deadline that gets extended (by say 10 minutes or more) every time a new bid comes in close to the end time. This solves the sniping problem. (It is only a problem for ebay and sellers. Bidders should be happy that it is possible to snipe).
"Redberry" is very good...
The Chinese could have just as well called it the Huckleberry... as in "I'm your Huckleberry..." (c.f Doc Holliday)
someones speculation:
On and off I hear discussions in which people speculate on the exact origin and meaning is of the quaint idiom used by Doc Holliday in the movie "Tombstone." I've heard some wild suggestions, including "huckleberry" meaning "pall-bearer" suggesting "I'll bury you."
Thing is.... the drones in Dark Angel were ARMED, so not only for surveillance, but "enforcement" (aka assassinations). I guess Bush won't be announcing that part of the program too soon...
EVDO is a good 5X faster than EDGE, i.e. they are not even in the same class. EVDO is real 3G, while EDGE is only 2.5G and competes with 1xRTT, not directly with EVDO. GSM is several years behind CDMA in data services. Tmo with EDGE is where Sprint and Verizon were with 1xRTT 3 years ago...
True for GSM, but False for CDMA (here and "cheap"
on
No 3G for HP Until 2007
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· Score: 2, Informative
HP's stance is not completely on the level. Yes, for the GSM world, including the US, 3G is not really here yet and pricing is also steep for data. But for CDMA, 3G is very much here (Verizon and Sprint) and pricing of 3G (EVDO) for handsets is very reasonable ($15/mo). And there are several decent multimedia and smartphones that support CDMA/EVDO (3G) already, with more on the way. So it is HP that is not keeping up with the market (at least for CDMA in the US).
So you cannot copyright an algorithm, but you can copyright the expression of that algorithm in computer source code?
Yes, but the added issue/twist with software that isn't present with traditional creative works is that algorithms often boil down to mathematics, and often there aren't many ways of expressing the underlying algorithm, so that two programmers might often arrive at the identical or near identical code independently for the same alogorithm. Then it becomes difficult to tell whether it was an independent effort or true copying followed by doctoring/obfuscation.
People tend to confuse copyrights and patents. But a similar problem with software patents apply: sometimes there is only one way to do things. There are those that would argue that mathematics should not be patentable, anymore than laws of physics... unfortunately software algorithms currently are indeed patentable...
'The question the court is facing is whether you can copyright an idea, a conjecture.'
What's the huge question ? The answer is NO. Copyright is clearly only protects the specific EXPRESSION of ideas, thoughts, etc, not the idea itself. Besides, which, as the book documents supposed facts of history, those certainly cannot be copyrighted, period.
Slashdot Mirror
How long til someone makes a Wii "game" that simulates a roll in the hay or other related "activities" ? The game can include a blow-up doll and using the Wii remote (with vibrate on), one could imagine some pretty cum-pelling interactions, complete with realistic motions, sound-responses and graphics... hmmm...
I wonder how solidly those Wii-remotes are built and whether they could handle the repetitive stresses of the ol' in and out...
Whatever his assumptions are that leads him to 4%... it seems that he is considering only the probability that any ONE alien civilization is looking. But in all likelihood there are many, if not millions of alien civilizations out there than may be search, so the probability that any ONE of those million will find us seems quite a bit higher than 4%.
Water *can't* stay in your stomach waiting for your bladder to be emptied. There is no such mechanism.
There *is* no direct path between your stomach and your bladder.
You *can't* pass pure water. Not through your bladder anyways, through your colon perhaps when it is malfunctioning...
You need sodium to *pump* water out of your system, into your bladder. Ergo, you drink too much water, your sodium stores get depleted as your kidneys try to get rid of all that water, and whole lot of bad things happen as your sodium concentration goes down (due to more water and flushing out sodium) (e.g. your entire nervous system depends on sodium to generate electrical responses, muscles need sodium too, indeed ALL cells need sodium, remember we evolved from the oceans filled with salt water)...
Cool hack, but better than just a regular RC joystick controller ???
yup, I knew a girl, fresh out of college, who was planning a big party. She went to a local hi-fi store, "bought" a $2000 new stereo system, set it up for the party, and then returned it afterwards...
no moral compass...
If a movie theater owner can get one to use, then basically ANYONE get can one. Which means that if I live in an apartment building, and I don't like my neighbor yacking on the phone at night, or may I'm just an a-hole, then I can jam everyone within a 100 foot radius or more. It would take a VERY carefully crafted law to make such usage illegal and that still wouldn't stop it from happening if jamming equipment were so readily available...
There are so many *other* ways of solving the movie theater problem that don't use jammers. There is no fundamental difference between a cell phone user in a theater and a noisy, disruptive person in the theater. So deal with both in the same way...
Aside from all the technical issues surrounding commercial skipping, I found the most scary aspect is that some of our elected officials have publicly stated that they believe that a TV viewer is REQUIRED to watch commercials, hence the legal basis for the prohibition of commercial skipping. I believe it was a senator who posited the legal theory that by watching broadcast TV, the viewer is entering into a LEGAL CONTRACT with the channel/station that content can be viewed SO LONG AS the commercials are also viewed. Needless to say, I was incredulous with this notion: How is it that we allow such boneheads to get elected and make our laws ? We are idiots for allowing this thinking to percolate within the Senate!
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
Indeed, in addition to selling one's old papers, this re-use/re-submission issue is another reason for turnitin.com to keep papers "forever" so as to stop selling and resubmissions.
Re-use even of one's own previous work, is also academic dishonesty and in the same category as plagarism. You cannot submit a paper written for one class as fulfillment for an assignment in another class.
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
Well I'm glad you seem to be "back to normal"... The notion that you can have brain surgery to remove a tumor, and it being "undamaging", is, well, "quaint". Neurosurgeons speak of "eloquent cortex" (cortex that is obviously doing something useful) and "non-eloquent cortex" (brain that you aren't obviously using and won't miss if removed), but it is of course just a euphemism, and a bedtime story told to unknowing patients. The fact is that you are using ALL of your brain -- it ALL has a function, some parts much more poorly understood and less obvious than other parts. So of course ANY brain surgery is going to cause brain damage, by definition. And in the case of tumor removal, you want to make as wide an excision as you guess the patient can tolerate to make sure you get it all (you didn't say what kind of tumor it was, but some tumor cells are extremely nasty and are exceedingly efficient at infiltrating normal brain tissue over many *centimeters*). So in your case, it just sounds like the surgeons misjudged, in an obvious way, the boundaries of "non-eloquent cortex", though it is really a fiction anyways. I'm glad it seems like Boggle helped in the recovery process, and maybe it did. However, the brain also does have a natural time course of "recovery" that can take months or years. Since the brain cannot regenerate new brain tissue, the apparent recovery of function is largely due to rewiring, with normal, undamaged areas taking over and subsuming functions of the damaged regions. This process takes a lot of time. Whether Boggle actually helped is debatable, but the recovery process worked for you... sometimes it doesn't so well, and the deficits persist.
Very pretty, and I suppose it might help you remember certain interactions and players, but it comes from the Fantasic Voyage school of portraying medical biology. Remember when the requisite hottie of the movie, Rachel Welch bumps into some tissue, injurying it ... and these antibodies come streaming along and target her precisely ? For the most part, molecules and proteins such as shown in this animation do not move so purposefully, flying through the void in perfect formation, bumping into precise what they are intended to interact with, amidst the largely empty void (void of what?!? there is plasma/saline everywhere filled with molecules not that much smaller than some of these proteins and polypeptides). Interactions occur mostly by mass-action, PASSIVE diffusion and RANDOM encounters, which then *might* use specific affinities to start specific interactions.
So contrary to the very purposeful, specific and sparse view of interactions portrayed, the first and most predominant level of molecular "interaction" (bumping into each other) is random, driven by passive processes and mass action (many, many more molecules of all types around). Specificity only can kick in after chance encounters permit the right pairing.
If what you're "aarrrg"ing about is the video not being playable under Linux... the file is downloadable and its a FLV file, playable using VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) among others...
"Business model" == barriers to a fully free market == artificial obstacles to competition == preventing a fully optimal economy
Previous posts have discussed some of the reasons why sniping works and is the best strategy for the vigilant bidder. One of the additional factors that I haven't seen mention is the fact that in most cases, one's "maximum bid" is rarely a true maximum bid. This is in part because people go to ebay expecting a good deal. If you simply expected to pay retail prices, most people wouldn't bother with ebay (expect at Xmas time for newly released toy/products). If there is an item that you would say you'd be willing to bid "up to" $100 on, you do so generally thinking that even at $100, it would still be a "good deal". But what that means is that if you were asked to pay $100.01, you almost certainly think that was just about as good a deal. Probably even at $105.99 you would still go for it. But that is not the question that is asked of normal bidders who bid early with their "maximum bid". The current ebay rules don't allow you to answer that question with early bids. Only snipers can operate in the mode where they can adjust their "maximum bids" to their *true* maximum bids.
ebay needs to change their rules to get rid of sniping so as to get higher true bids and better final pricing for their sellers (unless ebay has already modeled the system and concluded that the total net income would go down due to less happy bidders/snipers).
OT: another thing that I am amazed that ebay puts up with are those ridiculous $0.01 auctions where the real value/cost of the product is shifted to the "shipping and handling" costs (and sometimes even the mandatory "insurance fees"), such that ebay itself is scammed out of its fair cut and the buyers are left vulnerable (and often misled). Vulnerable because "shipping and handling" and "insurance" are never refunded: "oh you never got the item, well ok, here is your money back: $0.01"...
I love the $10 mandatory insurance for the item that costs $0.01. (not!)
I snipe all the time because it is so obviously the best strategy to get the lowest price possible on any particular item, given the current ebay auction rules. It works about 50% of the time in my experience (i.e. it was clear that I won the auction with a lower price even when another bidder would have bid a higher price but couldn't because time ran out).
Given this, it is also obvious that to permit sniping means that many items are NOT sold for the highest price that someone was willing to bid (but couldn't because time ran out). That means that sniping favors *bidders*, not sellers, and therefore not ebay (which makes more money on if the final price is higher). So then why does ebay permit sniping ? Its current rules *encourage* sniping. It would be so easy to abolish sniping by simply (as other auctions do) making the ending time a "soft" deadline that gets extended (by say 10 minutes or more) every time a new bid comes in close to the end time. This solves the sniping problem. (It is only a problem for ebay and sellers. Bidders should be happy that it is possible to snipe).
Why does ebay permit/encourage sniping ?
Thing is.... the drones in Dark Angel were ARMED, so not only for surveillance, but "enforcement" (aka assassinations). I guess Bush won't be announcing that part of the program too soon...
EVDO is a good 5X faster than EDGE, i.e. they are not even in the same class. EVDO is real 3G, while EDGE is only 2.5G and competes with 1xRTT, not directly with EVDO. GSM is several years behind CDMA in data services. Tmo with EDGE is where Sprint and Verizon were with 1xRTT 3 years ago...
HP's stance is not completely on the level. Yes, for the GSM world, including the US, 3G is not really here yet and pricing is also steep for data. But for CDMA, 3G is very much here (Verizon and Sprint) and pricing of 3G (EVDO) for handsets is very reasonable ($15/mo). And there are several decent multimedia and smartphones that support CDMA/EVDO (3G) already, with more on the way. So it is HP that is not keeping up with the market (at least for CDMA in the US).
Yes, but the added issue/twist with software that isn't present with traditional creative works is that algorithms often boil down to mathematics, and often there aren't many ways of expressing the underlying algorithm, so that two programmers might often arrive at the identical or near identical code independently for the same alogorithm. Then it becomes difficult to tell whether it was an independent effort or true copying followed by doctoring/obfuscation.
People tend to confuse copyrights and patents. But a similar problem with software patents apply: sometimes there is only one way to do things. There are those that would argue that mathematics should not be patentable, anymore than laws of physics... unfortunately software algorithms currently are indeed patentable...
'The question the court is facing is whether you can copyright an idea, a conjecture.' What's the huge question ? The answer is NO. Copyright is clearly only protects the specific EXPRESSION of ideas, thoughts, etc, not the idea itself. Besides, which, as the book documents supposed facts of history, those certainly cannot be copyrighted, period.