How will it work culturally to have rip off bank fees on a "free" social networking site? If someone complains in a post about being ripped off, will they censor? Or will it be part of the criminally enforceable terms of service not to disparage FaceBank?
Headaches from viewing 3D videos are caused by flickering on the screen. Just like with computer monitors, upping the refresh rate results in less flicker. I don't know of any cases where headaches are caused by the image that pops out of the screen.
All these elaborate justifications for headaches... Just think about getting motion sickness and you've got the answer. Combine shakey-cam with things jumping out of a flat screen at the viewer, and its kinda like a bad trip on a cruise ship... I get dizzy and headaches from motion sickness, I know most people puke, I'm curious if "most people" notice nausea when watching 3D.
The exact symptoms may also depend on whats perceived as moving weirdly, your inner ear motion sensors or what you see, but the fundamental problem might be an inner ear / visual processing mismatch.
Someone who cares about 3D (not me) and gets sick watching 3D, should take a sea sickness pill and try watching again.
hinting that the software giant may also be planning to offer its app store for legacy versions of Windows.
Here's a dilemma for MS... given a guy with a warez version of windows, do you let them app store it or not... Justification for no, is you just wanna make life more difficult for unlicensed windows installs. Justification of yes, is here's a guy who wants to give you a fat stack of bills for a bunch of 1s and 0s, so take it while you can get it....
I've, uh, heard from friends, that apple accepts money in the itunes music store from OSX pirates. But MS has a cultural love of making users jump thru windoze activation foolishness.
Sadly, it costs money to preserve. And politicians don't like to give money to projects unless they can get some present-day political mileage out of them.
Hire 50 guys from 50 different states to each do a tiny little bit of the restoration work. Thats how business is done, at least in the senate. Getting it thru the house requires somewhat more contractors of course.
No Lovecraft plot could ever be called 'brilliant'.
I think he's claiming its the setting, the sometimes extensive back story, the plot of the "bad guys" that is the brilliant part.
The plot from the readers point of view is almost always "survive", sometimes succeed, sometimes fail.
From the point of view of the reader and the average character, "the strange case of charles dexter ward" is pretty dull, they just want to survive. Curwen, on the other hand, is the star of the show...
a separate subgenre, called "hard science fiction", exists.
Not in movies and not on TV
Asimov and Clarke
and Kim Stanley Robinson and David Louis Edelman
The problem with that is that it attracts autistic people like mad, and you end up with incredibly dry books (and movies) that read like calculus textbooks, with all the characterization of a telephone book, although the plot is brilliant
Why can't I just have a brilliant plot? If I want romantic comedy and middle school drama there's a million shows my wife likes. Theres no need to pollute my show just so a checkbox can be clicked off. Some people like chocolate milk, some strawberry, and some plain ole white, wouldn't it suck for everyone if they'd only sell a 1/3 1/3 1/3 ratio mix of all three.
Summarizes to "I'm not rich enough to shop at Walmart". Ever buy a set of drill bits from China, and have them literally unwind themselves? Been there, seen that. Suddenly, Enco and McMaster are the cheapest way to drill holes.
"And given that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most." What a silly comment.
I agree, for different reasons. I'm not wealthy, but I'm doing... pretty well. I didn't get to this level by signing high multi-year monthly payment contracts. Needless to say I have a pay as you go phone. I pay about $10 per month to virgin mobile on average. That's like 20 minutes of service, which is all I need, and its worth well over $10 to me so I'm very happy with it (shh, don't tell VM)
I have almost no use for mobile data, but I might sign up for one month during a vacation or something (google maps, etc). But they have to pay their bills every month for the infrastructure, designed around roping people into multi-year contracts for stuff they mostly won't use. And unlike the guy whom signs up, and in his 14th month is pretty tired of it and does not use it at all, I'm going to absolutely blast the thing while I'm on vacation, I'll actually use it! So I'm willing to defend their high pricing.
Their pricing assumes the subscriber will sign up for about one month, then never again, or at least not for a long time. They don't have the luxury of a contract tying them down for years of payment. Ask yourself how much the cableco would charge if you wanted them to install, watch TV for one hour, then disconnect immediately after that one show.
Find me a science fiction movie or science fiction TV show and I'll let you know...
No, not an action flick, just a bunch of explosions. No, not a drama all about living in th ebig city and dating and family life. No, not a fantasy complete with knights and swordfights. No, not yet another cop movie, bumbling mismatched partners, now with extra cool ray guns! No, not another vampire and werewolf with cool, yet irrelevant to the plot, cellphones.
Futuristic doesn't mean chrome, or shaky camera, or lack of lighting. Doesn't mean the really tired old cliche of "internet or network in general as a bad acid trip"
They could have done that before, but they had no idea whether or not I had any business relationship with XYZ so it would have been a wild guess.
I've gotten thousands of targeted spam over the years, mostly from companies I do not do business with. I think I've gotten about 10 Citibank phishing emails over the years, at least. I don't have an account there, but... Same thing with bank of america, etc.
How many are actually studying computer science and how many are actually in hopped up vocational programs?
Don't forget option 3, which is the "IT" department in the business department, as opposed to "CS" which is in the math department.
Amusingly the report is about "CS" enrollment, which is all about analysis of algorithms, Knuth, and Scheme/LISP, but all the comments on/. so far are about "IT" jobs, which are all about SQL, TPS reports, and the "COBOL of the New Millennium aka Java"
The problem is they designed the seawall to survive a 5.7 meter wave and they got a 14 meter wave. I'm not seeing your 10 meter wall as helping very much. Oh it'll help, a little, just not much.
It was only the 4th largest earthquake on record. So... put up a 20 meter wall, which would have helped this time, and sooner or later they'll be a 21 meter wave followed by your same argument reposted...
If the ads are not absurdly obnoxious then how many would really do it? Do you realise that there are people who watch broadcast TV with advertisments when they have the DVD of the same film sitting right next to the TV?
Can you buy a legal DVD of a film that doesn't have 15 minutes of commercials at the start? The "illegal" copies are much better than the original.
I'd be curious about whether a pebble bed reactor would have fared better.
Probably "about" as risky but completely different failure modes. The pebbles are brittle and are going to have issues with a severe earthquake, unlike literally "depth charge proof" light water reactors. If the pebbles don't crack and no coolant leaks, they are harmless. One or the other fails, still harmless. Both simultaneously fail, instant Chernobyl because its yet another graphite moderated design. Once you set one (or a couple) pebbles on fire, it gets hot enough to catch all the pebbles despite the coating, so you gotta spray it down, which means thermal stress will crack em all, making a bigger fire or at least a heck of a mess.
Most exciting failure mode for a pebble bed would probably be chilling the graphite moderator (tsunami? Pump in sea water?), which eliminates doppler broadening, which turns the power WAY up, at least momentarily. Pop those little tennis balls like popcorn. Then all that red hot graphite can boil off the water and/or make old fashioned town-gas (mostly carbon monoxide gas) which explodes the containment, then the burning graphite roasts all the fission products into the air. Yeah it would be pretty bad.
So the lesson learned from Chernobyl is don't use a flammable moderator. (except, apparently, for the pebble bed fans)
The lesson from Japan is going to be don't use flammable cladding, and who cares what the alternatives do to the neutron balance.
The good news, is once we utterly ban flammable cladding, there's not much in a core that's still flammable, so our problems are pretty much over.
I suppose we need one more good fire / meltdown of a uranium carbide fueled reactor so we can ban carbide fuel. Then we're all good...
Without the fire / explosion, the Japan thing would still be a complete economic loss, but there would be no contamination outside the containment structure.
There are dozens of websites where you submit your question, and you get the answer back. A few of them are free, others charge. Is that the technique you were being tested on with your take home tests?
Best math teacher I ever had, gave a 5 minute quiz at the start of every class, which was scaled to be 90% of our grade, thus enforcing attendance, and made all tests take home, thus enforcing we did at least 3 homework assignments. He claimed the administration prevented him from skipping midterms and finals and this was his work around. He had tenure so I don't know why he couldn't just do what he wanted and tell the admin to deal with it.
The internet means "homework" and "take home tests" are obsolete as evaluation tools. No big deal. Evolve or die.
I did the same. The "show your work part is easy to defeat too: have the program print out it's intermediate steps
I outdid you both... "Oh, I only have to get 93% to get an A, and I really don't wanna get busted, I'll have my program insert an intentional arithmetic mistake at a random intermediate step 5% of the time"
This problem dealt with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a buffer solution, and it should have been obvious that '1' was a completely ridiculous answer. (The real answer was around 10e-6.)
If you're trying to teach chemistry, the way to do it would involve the student being able to figure out the pH of that solution is about 6, which I did in my head without a calculator. Don't need to grind out 8 sig figs to learn that whole "log of H+ concentration" thingy.
If you're trying to tech how to use a calculator, then use something that motivates the student. For about 1 in 100 kids that might be chem, but "home finance" and "sports statistics" are probably more interesting to the majority.
I'm of the opinion that math/physics/chemistry tests should be open book.
Add engineering tests. Its not like I spent time on the job memorizing data sheets before I started designing.
I distinctly remember a test that was something like "here's a manufacturers data sheet for a 2N3904 transistor, here's your textbook, design a theoretically perfect 14.250 MHz (aka 20 meters) class A amplifier, evaluate its gain and power output, normalize the discrete values to typical off the shelf 10% values, and re-evaluate if your design is operated off frequency at 14.100 MHz." And guess what we built and tested in lab the next week?
I also wrote calculator programs to solve quadratic equations and practically everything else. My reasoning was (and still is) that if I understood the formula well enough to write iterative instructions in a crappy calculator to do it, then I understood it well enough for the class.
My experience matches yours. The problem, is one of you or me in each class, and twenty of "can I copy your program?" in each class. Its easy to say no to most other kids, but I got a date with a cute girl out of one program.
You know what I did that was really weird, a motorola 68hc11 simulator in RPN on a HP-48 using arrays as "memory". Assuming you know how to use your calculator, the concept is easy to implement. It may not have been a array, it may have been the equivalent of "substr" on a very long string that happens to contain hex digits. Gimme a break, this was back when a 68hc11 and HP-48 was "new" technology.
Slashdot Mirror
MySQL doesn't do foreign keys? You using version 4.0 from 2003?
How will it work culturally to have rip off bank fees on a "free" social networking site? If someone complains in a post about being ripped off, will they censor? Or will it be part of the criminally enforceable terms of service not to disparage FaceBank?
Headaches from viewing 3D videos are caused by flickering on the screen. Just like with computer monitors, upping the refresh rate results in less flicker. I don't know of any cases where headaches are caused by the image that pops out of the screen.
All these elaborate justifications for headaches ... Just think about getting motion sickness and you've got the answer. Combine shakey-cam with things jumping out of a flat screen at the viewer, and its kinda like a bad trip on a cruise ship... I get dizzy and headaches from motion sickness, I know most people puke, I'm curious if "most people" notice nausea when watching 3D.
The exact symptoms may also depend on whats perceived as moving weirdly, your inner ear motion sensors or what you see, but the fundamental problem might be an inner ear / visual processing mismatch.
Someone who cares about 3D (not me) and gets sick watching 3D, should take a sea sickness pill and try watching again.
Out into the big room, with the green carpet, and blue ceiling? Never!
Agreed -- I can't stand the WinXP desktop background either.
I thought he was talking about the "Barney" TV studio until you mentioned XP. They are kind of similar.
hinting that the software giant may also be planning to offer its app store for legacy versions of Windows.
Here's a dilemma for MS... given a guy with a warez version of windows, do you let them app store it or not... Justification for no, is you just wanna make life more difficult for unlicensed windows installs. Justification of yes, is here's a guy who wants to give you a fat stack of bills for a bunch of 1s and 0s, so take it while you can get it....
I've, uh, heard from friends, that apple accepts money in the itunes music store from OSX pirates. But MS has a cultural love of making users jump thru windoze activation foolishness.
They can't put one at both Houston and KSC... one hurricane could take both out. No one is complaining that New Orleans didn't get one.
Sadly, it costs money to preserve. And politicians don't like to give money to projects unless they can get some present-day political mileage out of them.
Hire 50 guys from 50 different states to each do a tiny little bit of the restoration work. Thats how business is done, at least in the senate. Getting it thru the house requires somewhat more contractors of course.
No Lovecraft plot could ever be called 'brilliant'.
I think he's claiming its the setting, the sometimes extensive back story, the plot of the "bad guys" that is the brilliant part.
The plot from the readers point of view is almost always "survive", sometimes succeed, sometimes fail.
From the point of view of the reader and the average character, "the strange case of charles dexter ward" is pretty dull, they just want to survive. Curwen, on the other hand, is the star of the show...
a separate subgenre, called "hard science fiction", exists.
Not in movies and not on TV
Asimov and Clarke
and Kim Stanley Robinson and David Louis Edelman
The problem with that is that it attracts autistic people like mad, and you end up with incredibly dry books (and movies) that read like calculus textbooks, with all the characterization of a telephone book, although the plot is brilliant
Why can't I just have a brilliant plot? If I want romantic comedy and middle school drama there's a million shows my wife likes. Theres no need to pollute my show just so a checkbox can be clicked off. Some people like chocolate milk, some strawberry, and some plain ole white, wouldn't it suck for everyone if they'd only sell a 1/3 1/3 1/3 ratio mix of all three.
Summarizes to "I'm not rich enough to shop at Walmart". Ever buy a set of drill bits from China, and have them literally unwind themselves? Been there, seen that. Suddenly, Enco and McMaster are the cheapest way to drill holes.
"And given that pay-as-you-go pricing is what the poor and people living paycheck to paycheck use, the result is those who can afford the least still pay by far the most."
What a silly comment.
I agree, for different reasons. I'm not wealthy, but I'm doing ... pretty well. I didn't get to this level by signing high multi-year monthly payment contracts. Needless to say I have a pay as you go phone. I pay about $10 per month to virgin mobile on average. That's like 20 minutes of service, which is all I need, and its worth well over $10 to me so I'm very happy with it (shh, don't tell VM)
I have almost no use for mobile data, but I might sign up for one month during a vacation or something (google maps, etc). But they have to pay their bills every month for the infrastructure, designed around roping people into multi-year contracts for stuff they mostly won't use. And unlike the guy whom signs up, and in his 14th month is pretty tired of it and does not use it at all, I'm going to absolutely blast the thing while I'm on vacation, I'll actually use it! So I'm willing to defend their high pricing.
Their pricing assumes the subscriber will sign up for about one month, then never again, or at least not for a long time. They don't have the luxury of a contract tying them down for years of payment. Ask yourself how much the cableco would charge if you wanted them to install, watch TV for one hour, then disconnect immediately after that one show.
Find me a science fiction movie or science fiction TV show and I'll let you know...
No, not an action flick, just a bunch of explosions. No, not a drama all about living in th ebig city and dating and family life. No, not a fantasy complete with knights and swordfights. No, not yet another cop movie, bumbling mismatched partners, now with extra cool ray guns! No, not another vampire and werewolf with cool, yet irrelevant to the plot, cellphones.
Futuristic doesn't mean chrome, or shaky camera, or lack of lighting. Doesn't mean the really tired old cliche of "internet or network in general as a bad acid trip"
They could have done that before, but they had no idea whether or not I had any business relationship with XYZ so it would have been a wild guess.
I've gotten thousands of targeted spam over the years, mostly from companies I do not do business with. I think I've gotten about 10 Citibank phishing emails over the years, at least. I don't have an account there, but... Same thing with bank of america, etc.
How many are actually studying computer science and how many are actually in hopped up vocational programs?
Don't forget option 3, which is the "IT" department in the business department, as opposed to "CS" which is in the math department.
Amusingly the report is about "CS" enrollment, which is all about analysis of algorithms, Knuth, and Scheme/LISP, but all the comments on /. so far are about "IT" jobs, which are all about SQL, TPS reports, and the "COBOL of the New Millennium aka Java"
The problem is they designed the seawall to survive a 5.7 meter wave and they got a 14 meter wave. I'm not seeing your 10 meter wall as helping very much. Oh it'll help, a little, just not much.
It was only the 4th largest earthquake on record. So... put up a 20 meter wall, which would have helped this time, and sooner or later they'll be a 21 meter wave followed by your same argument reposted...
Uranium will burn in open air quite nicely. I don't think you really thought this through Mr. Armchair Nuclear Engineer.
Extremely hard to ignite. Needs to be fired down the barrel of a tank gun first, etc.
Also uranium oxide comes pre-oxidized, doesn't burn.
Will the device refuse to run if it's not able to connect to the ad server?
Blocking an ad server over your own wifi would be trivial.
Blocking an ad server over someone elses wifi, tough, but theoretically possible if you trespass inside someone elses wifi-router.
Blocking the 3G data connection to the ad server... probably not easy at all.
they should have worked with periodicals to create a subsidy for a steeper discount.
A discount? I'd be happy (a happy subscriber) if "The Economist" cost less on Kindle than in print.
If the ads are not absurdly obnoxious then how many would really do it? Do you realise that there are people who watch broadcast TV with advertisments when they have the DVD of the same film sitting right next to the TV?
Can you buy a legal DVD of a film that doesn't have 15 minutes of commercials at the start? The "illegal" copies are much better than the original.
I'd be curious about whether a pebble bed reactor would have fared better.
Probably "about" as risky but completely different failure modes. The pebbles are brittle and are going to have issues with a severe earthquake, unlike literally "depth charge proof" light water reactors. If the pebbles don't crack and no coolant leaks, they are harmless. One or the other fails, still harmless. Both simultaneously fail, instant Chernobyl because its yet another graphite moderated design. Once you set one (or a couple) pebbles on fire, it gets hot enough to catch all the pebbles despite the coating, so you gotta spray it down, which means thermal stress will crack em all, making a bigger fire or at least a heck of a mess.
Most exciting failure mode for a pebble bed would probably be chilling the graphite moderator (tsunami? Pump in sea water?), which eliminates doppler broadening, which turns the power WAY up, at least momentarily. Pop those little tennis balls like popcorn. Then all that red hot graphite can boil off the water and/or make old fashioned town-gas (mostly carbon monoxide gas) which explodes the containment, then the burning graphite roasts all the fission products into the air. Yeah it would be pretty bad.
So the lesson learned from Chernobyl is don't use a flammable moderator. (except, apparently, for the pebble bed fans)
The lesson from Japan is going to be don't use flammable cladding, and who cares what the alternatives do to the neutron balance.
The good news, is once we utterly ban flammable cladding, there's not much in a core that's still flammable, so our problems are pretty much over.
I suppose we need one more good fire / meltdown of a uranium carbide fueled reactor so we can ban carbide fuel. Then we're all good...
Without the fire / explosion, the Japan thing would still be a complete economic loss, but there would be no contamination outside the containment structure.
There are dozens of websites where you submit your question, and you get the answer back. A few of them are free, others charge. Is that the technique you were being tested on with your take home tests?
Best math teacher I ever had, gave a 5 minute quiz at the start of every class, which was scaled to be 90% of our grade, thus enforcing attendance, and made all tests take home, thus enforcing we did at least 3 homework assignments. He claimed the administration prevented him from skipping midterms and finals and this was his work around. He had tenure so I don't know why he couldn't just do what he wanted and tell the admin to deal with it.
The internet means "homework" and "take home tests" are obsolete as evaluation tools. No big deal. Evolve or die.
I did the same. The "show your work part is easy to defeat too: have the program print out it's intermediate steps
I outdid you both... "Oh, I only have to get 93% to get an A, and I really don't wanna get busted, I'll have my program insert an intentional arithmetic mistake at a random intermediate step 5% of the time"
This problem dealt with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a buffer solution, and it should have been obvious that '1' was a completely ridiculous answer. (The real answer was around 10e-6.)
If you're trying to teach chemistry, the way to do it would involve the student being able to figure out the pH of that solution is about 6, which I did in my head without a calculator. Don't need to grind out 8 sig figs to learn that whole "log of H+ concentration" thingy.
If you're trying to tech how to use a calculator, then use something that motivates the student. For about 1 in 100 kids that might be chem, but "home finance" and "sports statistics" are probably more interesting to the majority.
I'm of the opinion that math/physics/chemistry tests should be open book.
Add engineering tests. Its not like I spent time on the job memorizing data sheets before I started designing.
I distinctly remember a test that was something like "here's a manufacturers data sheet for a 2N3904 transistor, here's your textbook, design a theoretically perfect 14.250 MHz (aka 20 meters) class A amplifier, evaluate its gain and power output, normalize the discrete values to typical off the shelf 10% values, and re-evaluate if your design is operated off frequency at 14.100 MHz." And guess what we built and tested in lab the next week?
I also wrote calculator programs to solve quadratic equations and practically everything else. My reasoning was (and still is) that if I understood the formula well enough to write iterative instructions in a crappy calculator to do it, then I understood it well enough for the class.
My experience matches yours. The problem, is one of you or me in each class, and twenty of "can I copy your program?" in each class. Its easy to say no to most other kids, but I got a date with a cute girl out of one program.
You know what I did that was really weird, a motorola 68hc11 simulator in RPN on a HP-48 using arrays as "memory". Assuming you know how to use your calculator, the concept is easy to implement. It may not have been a array, it may have been the equivalent of "substr" on a very long string that happens to contain hex digits. Gimme a break, this was back when a 68hc11 and HP-48 was "new" technology.