I based my comments on what I'd heard years ago from my chemistry professor. After a little more research, I've found he and I were incorrect.
From the CDC report Mortality by Occupation, Industry, and Cause of Death: 24 Reporting States (1984-1988) (not the freshest data, I know): chemical engineers (age 20 & up) have a proportionate mortality ratio of 129; computer programmers have a PMR of 174. The big losers, if you're interested, are airplane pilots and navigators (8,795) and "insulation workers" (a staggering 21,188 -- although I doubt it would turn out to be statistically significant). Waiters and cosmetologists both clock in PMRs of over 1000, interestingly enough.
I suspect that once you control for education, race and socioeconomic status chemical engineers don't come out doing quite as well as, say, astrophysicists, but clearly they're not all spilling hydrofluoric acid on themselves on a daily basis.
Sorry for my incorrect statement. I'm rather glad to be proven wrong, as a good friend of mine is a biochemist.
Still, to drag myself back to topicality: I'm still convinced that I wouldn't ever want to work in a cleanroom.
Please spare me the capitalism 101. If you honestly believe american capitalist society is a functioning meritocracy, I doubt either of us will be able to do much to sway the other -- although I'll try anyway by referring you to the average teacher's salary vs. the average actor's salary.
Capitalism ensures that people will try as hard as they can to get as rich as they can. That competitive energy can be harnessed to create a thriving society. But left to its own devices, it tends to just produce an unassailable class of moneyed oligarchs. Market failures happen *all the time* precisely because of the ruthless competition at the heart of the system.
Just closing your eyes and calling this the best of all possible worlds will not convince me that regulation is a universal evil any more than one anecdote about a help wanted sign will convince me there isn't a job crunch in this country.
Business is not a god. It is here to serve people. Not the other way around.
Left to its own devices, industry will have 12 year olds working 18 hours days. Regulation makes the crap you buy at walmart a few pennies more expensive. It's well worth it.
Or do you just think you're one of the few, talented chosen ones, who could never need help from someone else -- that society's downtrodden are just getting what they deserve. Social Darwinism at work, right?
my guess: snarky paganism inspired by being a tech guy.
It's unfortunate, but it seems that most of us (myself included) deal with endless yelling at people who don't understand/value what we understand/value by deciding that everyone else is an idiot. Some of us become a fire-breathing libertarian. Some of us eschew all organized religion, or at least replace the one we were brought up in with one that we find amusingly unorthodox. Sometimes we just become an arrogant ass (that's the one I settled on).
Am I over-analyzing here? I'm honestly not trying to troll or flame, just navel-gaze.
I'll preface this by saying the GitS movie is beautiful, and I haven't read the manga...
...but the movie just didn't do much for me. It suffered from the usual problems of adapting a (presumably) sprawling manga into a film. There's no hope of adapting a plotline into the limited space, so they fall back on a shot at noirish, nihilistic plotlessness, hoping that they can get by on being evocative. Akira is another example of this problem. As is Blood: the Last Vampire. All have fascinating universes and mind-blowing art, but suffer from a serious lack of plot.
I'll take comparatively artless films (although still great) Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust over hyper-stylized and inscrutable films like GitS anyday.
Okay, it's a nice feature of the PS2. But you're overstating its usefulness. If it's a desirable feature, it's because you own the previous generation's games. If you own the previous generation's games, you own the system.
Is it nice to only have one box under your TV that can play 2 systems' worth of games -- and maybe provide a better framerate on your old games? Sure. But it's not a deal-breaker.
And -- and this is no small point -- the XBox is regularly derided as having the worst library of exclusive games. It's a great machine, but I don't know why everyone assumes XB2 will play XB1 games.
I don't know anyone who bothers with ripping soundtracks. Nobody bought the xbox for that.
Your "removed major hardware functionality" list also seems suspect to me -- what about removing zero-load times of carts when nintendo moved to optical discs? Or having to buy memory cards when consoles dropped carts? Or getting scanlines when video games went to raster displays? And I still miss the Atari paddle controllers...
My point it, it seems like a matter of perspective. MS will just make you use a network share for content. In three years you'll be listing that as a "feature" and wondering why they ever threw money away on a hard drive for XB1.
how expensive would it be for them to put together a ramdisk of a few hundred megs using obsolete technology? Keep in mind that memory is cheap and better-suited to caching than a hard drive. I suspect MS is ditching the hard drive as an anti-piracy measure and upping the RAM significantly from its current 64MB.
Sorry, but the GC was only recently hacked. And it's a laborious hack, involving a specific game, the broadband adapter, and a PC. And patience. The custom format/form-factor disc was a brilliant move on nintendo's part.
The PS2 is harder to mod than the XBox, but its real downfall was using DVD media. With DVD players going for $50, I think we're past the point where DVD playback is an important feature for a console to have. If MS was smart they'd axe the harddrive, use an exotic filesystem on their flash memory and implement a custom format optical disk.
The DC was almost laughably hackable -- it counted on the game contents not being extractable. As was proved by the DC and now the GC, that's not the case -- someone with a development box will rip them; they'll get out. But if you implement protection at both ends -- make the media as hard to rip as possible, then make it even harder to get into usable form w/ consumer gear -- like nintendo has done -- you can mostly defeat piracy.
no, believe me, I know the difference between skunked and over-hopped. I agree that Heineken frequently falls into skunk territory, but on the occasions where I've had a fresh bottle (relatively fresh -- never had it outside the states) I found the lager unpleasantly sour & bitter. Maybe I'm the wrong target audience -- I can enjoy a nice IPA but it's not my first choice. But Heineken seems to shoot for no flavor other than the hops, which, to me, is not appealing. Still, better than Amstel -- maybe it's just the DC area importer, but I have never had a bottle that wasn't spoiled. Of course, after the first few I haven't been trying very hard to find one...
Interesting stuff, though, about the chemical being the same as what skunks produce -- I never would've known.
yeah, I know. It's Dutch the way Foster's is Australian.
it's crappy by european standards, sure
on
BudNet Tracks Your Suds
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· Score: 3, Interesting
But at this point I think it's obvious that Americans don't drink the same kind of beer as Europeans. We seem to like light-bodied lagers a lot more. While bud uses rice (and corn), it uses it to produce a beer that's at least a solid example of, and perhaps the definition of, an American Lager. I've spoken to some folks who know a thing about brewing; they may not want to brew bud themselves, but they speak in respectful terms of the consistency between batches that Budweiser turns out. To do so on such a large scale is quite a trick.
I'm not personally a fan of Bud, but I think most of the people crapping on it in this thread are doing so out of simple elitism. Most likely prefer beers that have been marketed to them as "sophisticated" like the hopped-to-hell-and-back Heineken, or, god forbid, Amstel, which seems to trade entirely on a fake European heritage to excuse the fact that it tastes like licking a skunk.
I've read stories about variants that include their own screen. They collect the card, PIN, then display an error message. When you remove the need for the underlying ATM to appear to work, you can get away with a lot more -- although presumably the period where the device went unnoticed would be shorter.
but the consuls were a relatively late development. It's an oversimplification, but it'd be more accurate to say that over time power flowed from the senate to the tribunes and finally to the consuls -- there was more back and forth than this, and a dizzying array of legislative bodies that I'm grouping into "the senate", but the consuls really only became the focus of power when they started declaring themselves dictator on a regular basis during the prosecution of massive foreign campaigns.
Also, the consular elections weren't broken down by caste. You're thinking of the tribunes when you refer to representatives of the plebeians. In fact plebeian consuls were expressly forbidden until 367 BC.
Yeah, but that theory's been out of vogue for a while. It's theoretically tidy (and therefore attractive), but I believe the last few years' astronomical data has shown the universe's rate of expansion is accelerating. Something new woulkd have to turn up for the Big Crunch to come into vogue again.
to extend it: why don't we have multiple types of roads? If we had some with 3 foot wide lanes, some made of cobblestones, etc, the consumer will have so much more choice.
No; when it comes to infrastructure, standards are a good thing. You can complain about monocultures all you want, but for infrastructure -- a category I am using to describe things like the language you speak, the voltage coming to your house, the broadcast standard encoding your TV signal -- uniformity is good.
New wireless standards should be introduced because they provide added functionality and can be reasonably expected to eventually replace the old standard; not just for diversity of choice.
With all that said, I think bluetooth's drivers are so miserable and its range/speed/power consumption such a poor choice that I'm ready to send it to the scrap heap. A zigbee/wifi breakdown seems like a much better solution to me than a compromise wireless standard that's not only slow and short range, but uses too much power to be left on all the time on mobile devices.
just not established the relationship. There are plenty of unexplained health trends that could potentially be tied to increased EMF -- for example, increased incidence of various mental illnesses, asthma in children, some types of cancer, obesity, etc etc etc.
Of course there are probably better explanations for most/all of these things, but as it stands, there is no universally accepted explanation for any of these things. Could it be that our environment is now saturated with EM radiation? Maybe.
To that extent. Sure, they are very good at identifying potentially marketable technologies and implementing them before anyone else. But I just don't see how 5% marketshare can decide on a tech platform for the rest of us.
Bluetooth stinks. I've used it and enjoyed using it -- my ericsson t39 became a much better modem when I stopped bothering with IR and went to bluetooth. But the drivers are a nightmare and the speed is not sufficient to justify the power expenditure. That t39 was among the top 5 best engineered products I've ever owned -- great reception, battery life, call quality. Having bluetooth on cut the battery life by 2/3. I'm supposed to put up with that for 780kbps? No thanks.
There will be two wireless standards: something ponderously slow and low power, like zigbee, and something fast and power hungry, like the wireless 802.11 variants. I think bluetooth was a poor execution of an untenable middle ground.
it's something called long-term potentiation, and neuroscientists have known about it for a long time. if you get a neuron to fire enough, its synapses will strengthen. It's been a while, but I believe the mediating mechanism involves calcium-triggered protein synthesis.
FYI, LTP is one of the most promising mechanisms proposed for explaining how long term memory works.
25 seems like a plausible median age for preparing for marriage, first real estate purchase, first new car, etc. It's when you begin having enough buying power to buy expensive things, instead of just a lot of dispoable entertainment.
I'm 24. I've gone through periods where I wasn't interested in games -- most of college, in fact. I was vastly more excited about chipping my xbox than I was about actually playing any of the games that the modchip made available.
I think, though, that I will always play videogames to some extent. My circle of friends and I discuss this occasionally. Do I think I'll be up till 3AM playing an FPS when I'm 40? No. But when I have my old buddies over to watch the superbowl or a barbeque, could a descendant of Super Smash Bros. make an appearance? I suspect the answer will be yes.
I also have a feeling that, should I have a son, playing videogames will be a great way to interact with him. My generation (or slightly before) will be the first one with any hope of relating to their kids in this way. Maybe I'm being naive, but I suspect videogames are here to stay, and that the industry is going to be stuck for quite a while with the same 3 spatial dimensions and 2.1 vectors for sensory input (sight, sound, lame rumbling).
wtf are you talking about? You should spend less time on slashdot.
From Yahoo Financial: "For the six months ended 12/31/03, revenues rose 13% to $18.37 billion. Net income rose 7% to $4.16 billion. Results reflect increased demand for both desktop and server products, partially offset by a $1.48 billion stock option transfer charge."
You may dislike them. Pretending they're not successful is just ignorant. The source leak is a problem for them, but I doubt it'll have any serious repercussions much beyond this quarter.
As I said -- every staff writer contributes. I think writing more scripts is not a bad indicator of how much of a role in shaping the show someone has. The article also says that Meyer is relied on more for this post-script punch-up process than anyone else. It implies strongly that if not for that, he'd have even more script credits.
The script authorship issue aside, I think the article is pretty clearly in favor of my position. A quote cited in the story sums it up: "I'd rather make George Meyer laugh than win an emmy" -- quote from Ian Maxtone Graham, another staff writer. Meyer was/is *the* Simpsons writer. From the show's failure to return to form when he came back I have to assume he's lost a step, but during it's heyday he was the most influential writer on staff.
I just don't understand why so many people are so attached to the idea that Conan was the font of all hilarity on the Simpsons. It's like they think they've discovered a great secret no one else knows when they see his name in the credits, and are unwilling to give up their membership in that secret brotherhood by admitting that he played a part, but isn't the whole story (or even most of it). The fact is that Conan's humor, as embodied by the sketches on his show, is wild and surreal. It's very funny, but it's not really the type of humor that made the Simpsons as great as it was.
Slashdot Mirror
From the CDC report Mortality by Occupation, Industry, and Cause of Death: 24 Reporting States (1984-1988) (not the freshest data, I know): chemical engineers (age 20 & up) have a proportionate mortality ratio of 129; computer programmers have a PMR of 174. The big losers, if you're interested, are airplane pilots and navigators (8,795) and "insulation workers" (a staggering 21,188 -- although I doubt it would turn out to be statistically significant). Waiters and cosmetologists both clock in PMRs of over 1000, interestingly enough.
I suspect that once you control for education, race and socioeconomic status chemical engineers don't come out doing quite as well as, say, astrophysicists, but clearly they're not all spilling hydrofluoric acid on themselves on a daily basis.
Sorry for my incorrect statement. I'm rather glad to be proven wrong, as a good friend of mine is a biochemist.
Still, to drag myself back to topicality: I'm still convinced that I wouldn't ever want to work in a cleanroom.
Capitalism ensures that people will try as hard as they can to get as rich as they can. That competitive energy can be harnessed to create a thriving society. But left to its own devices, it tends to just produce an unassailable class of moneyed oligarchs. Market failures happen *all the time* precisely because of the ruthless competition at the heart of the system.
Just closing your eyes and calling this the best of all possible worlds will not convince me that regulation is a universal evil any more than one anecdote about a help wanted sign will convince me there isn't a job crunch in this country.
Left to its own devices, industry will have 12 year olds working 18 hours days. Regulation makes the crap you buy at walmart a few pennies more expensive. It's well worth it.
Or do you just think you're one of the few, talented chosen ones, who could never need help from someone else -- that society's downtrodden are just getting what they deserve. Social Darwinism at work, right?
there's just no getting around it. Chemists' average lifespans are several years shorter than the average.
seriously, is there anything we can do in this thread toward putting together an amicus brief? anything that might be useful to icann?
It's unfortunate, but it seems that most of us (myself included) deal with endless yelling at people who don't understand/value what we understand/value by deciding that everyone else is an idiot. Some of us become a fire-breathing libertarian. Some of us eschew all organized religion, or at least replace the one we were brought up in with one that we find amusingly unorthodox. Sometimes we just become an arrogant ass (that's the one I settled on).
Am I over-analyzing here? I'm honestly not trying to troll or flame, just navel-gaze.
...but the movie just didn't do much for me. It suffered from the usual problems of adapting a (presumably) sprawling manga into a film. There's no hope of adapting a plotline into the limited space, so they fall back on a shot at noirish, nihilistic plotlessness, hoping that they can get by on being evocative. Akira is another example of this problem. As is Blood: the Last Vampire. All have fascinating universes and mind-blowing art, but suffer from a serious lack of plot.
I'll take comparatively artless films (although still great) Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust over hyper-stylized and inscrutable films like GitS anyday.
Is it nice to only have one box under your TV that can play 2 systems' worth of games -- and maybe provide a better framerate on your old games? Sure. But it's not a deal-breaker.
And -- and this is no small point -- the XBox is regularly derided as having the worst library of exclusive games. It's a great machine, but I don't know why everyone assumes XB2 will play XB1 games.
Your "removed major hardware functionality" list also seems suspect to me -- what about removing zero-load times of carts when nintendo moved to optical discs? Or having to buy memory cards when consoles dropped carts? Or getting scanlines when video games went to raster displays? And I still miss the Atari paddle controllers...
My point it, it seems like a matter of perspective. MS will just make you use a network share for content. In three years you'll be listing that as a "feature" and wondering why they ever threw money away on a hard drive for XB1.
how expensive would it be for them to put together a ramdisk of a few hundred megs using obsolete technology? Keep in mind that memory is cheap and better-suited to caching than a hard drive. I suspect MS is ditching the hard drive as an anti-piracy measure and upping the RAM significantly from its current 64MB.
The PS2 is harder to mod than the XBox, but its real downfall was using DVD media. With DVD players going for $50, I think we're past the point where DVD playback is an important feature for a console to have. If MS was smart they'd axe the harddrive, use an exotic filesystem on their flash memory and implement a custom format optical disk.
The DC was almost laughably hackable -- it counted on the game contents not being extractable. As was proved by the DC and now the GC, that's not the case -- someone with a development box will rip them; they'll get out. But if you implement protection at both ends -- make the media as hard to rip as possible, then make it even harder to get into usable form w/ consumer gear -- like nintendo has done -- you can mostly defeat piracy.
Interesting stuff, though, about the chemical being the same as what skunks produce -- I never would've known.
yeah, I know. It's Dutch the way Foster's is Australian.
I'm not personally a fan of Bud, but I think most of the people crapping on it in this thread are doing so out of simple elitism. Most likely prefer beers that have been marketed to them as "sophisticated" like the hopped-to-hell-and-back Heineken, or, god forbid, Amstel, which seems to trade entirely on a fake European heritage to excuse the fact that it tastes like licking a skunk.
I've read stories about variants that include their own screen. They collect the card, PIN, then display an error message. When you remove the need for the underlying ATM to appear to work, you can get away with a lot more -- although presumably the period where the device went unnoticed would be shorter.
Also, the consular elections weren't broken down by caste. You're thinking of the tribunes when you refer to representatives of the plebeians. In fact plebeian consuls were expressly forbidden until 367 BC.
Yeah, but that theory's been out of vogue for a while. It's theoretically tidy (and therefore attractive), but I believe the last few years' astronomical data has shown the universe's rate of expansion is accelerating. Something new woulkd have to turn up for the Big Crunch to come into vogue again.
No; when it comes to infrastructure, standards are a good thing. You can complain about monocultures all you want, but for infrastructure -- a category I am using to describe things like the language you speak, the voltage coming to your house, the broadcast standard encoding your TV signal -- uniformity is good.
New wireless standards should be introduced because they provide added functionality and can be reasonably expected to eventually replace the old standard; not just for diversity of choice.
With all that said, I think bluetooth's drivers are so miserable and its range/speed/power consumption such a poor choice that I'm ready to send it to the scrap heap. A zigbee/wifi breakdown seems like a much better solution to me than a compromise wireless standard that's not only slow and short range, but uses too much power to be left on all the time on mobile devices.
Of course there are probably better explanations for most/all of these things, but as it stands, there is no universally accepted explanation for any of these things. Could it be that our environment is now saturated with EM radiation? Maybe.
Bluetooth stinks. I've used it and enjoyed using it -- my ericsson t39 became a much better modem when I stopped bothering with IR and went to bluetooth. But the drivers are a nightmare and the speed is not sufficient to justify the power expenditure. That t39 was among the top 5 best engineered products I've ever owned -- great reception, battery life, call quality. Having bluetooth on cut the battery life by 2/3. I'm supposed to put up with that for 780kbps? No thanks.
There will be two wireless standards: something ponderously slow and low power, like zigbee, and something fast and power hungry, like the wireless 802.11 variants. I think bluetooth was a poor execution of an untenable middle ground.
FYI, LTP is one of the most promising mechanisms proposed for explaining how long term memory works.
25 seems like a plausible median age for preparing for marriage, first real estate purchase, first new car, etc. It's when you begin having enough buying power to buy expensive things, instead of just a lot of dispoable entertainment.
I think, though, that I will always play videogames to some extent. My circle of friends and I discuss this occasionally. Do I think I'll be up till 3AM playing an FPS when I'm 40? No. But when I have my old buddies over to watch the superbowl or a barbeque, could a descendant of Super Smash Bros. make an appearance? I suspect the answer will be yes.
I also have a feeling that, should I have a son, playing videogames will be a great way to interact with him. My generation (or slightly before) will be the first one with any hope of relating to their kids in this way. Maybe I'm being naive, but I suspect videogames are here to stay, and that the industry is going to be stuck for quite a while with the same 3 spatial dimensions and 2.1 vectors for sensory input (sight, sound, lame rumbling).
From Yahoo Financial: "For the six months ended 12/31/03, revenues rose 13% to $18.37 billion. Net income rose 7% to $4.16 billion. Results reflect increased demand for both desktop and server products, partially offset by a $1.48 billion stock option transfer charge."
Here's their financial statement.
You may dislike them. Pretending they're not successful is just ignorant. The source leak is a problem for them, but I doubt it'll have any serious repercussions much beyond this quarter.
The script authorship issue aside, I think the article is pretty clearly in favor of my position. A quote cited in the story sums it up: "I'd rather make George Meyer laugh than win an emmy" -- quote from Ian Maxtone Graham, another staff writer. Meyer was/is *the* Simpsons writer. From the show's failure to return to form when he came back I have to assume he's lost a step, but during it's heyday he was the most influential writer on staff.
I just don't understand why so many people are so attached to the idea that Conan was the font of all hilarity on the Simpsons. It's like they think they've discovered a great secret no one else knows when they see his name in the credits, and are unwilling to give up their membership in that secret brotherhood by admitting that he played a part, but isn't the whole story (or even most of it). The fact is that Conan's humor, as embodied by the sketches on his show, is wild and surreal. It's very funny, but it's not really the type of humor that made the Simpsons as great as it was.