And I, and probably most slashdot readers, am not very much a fan of people who can't distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. (Failure to distinguish between science fiction and real life is, sometimes, forgivable.) I thus offer the following quick guide:
If a story is set in some vague time period that can't figure out whether it's ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, and features wizards and lots of square-chinned guys with poor hygeine and names like Glorn Thundertrousers, it's probably fantasy.
If a story features spaceships, robots, time travel, lots of made-up technobabble, a high-school knowledge of physics, and lots of people in Spandex jumpsuits who are either green or have multiple heads, and have names that look like the result of a random banging on a keyboard, it's probably sci-fi.
If a story just has columns of abbreviations and numbers and words like "liquidity" and "divestiture," you're reading the financial reports by mistake.
Wow! You mean the eDonkey software is able to detect whether a given file infringes copyright, and automatically makes sure that those, and only those, files are incredibly slow downloads? That's better than anything the MPAA has!
so if someone out there who RTFA'd would like to tell me how this squares with Heisenberg
As I recall, Heisenberg states the impossibility of measuring both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. I don't think that affects changing its spin.
Coincidentally, $67 million Palmyra Atoll dollars is the estimated value of that Free Dell Desktop PC that's just waiting for those who click on your.sig.
What the article doesn't mention is that this "human-powered spam filtering" consists of Mentats who have been specially trained to use the latest Bayesian filters, and who bear the Imperial conditioning against deleting important messages.
I'm especially attracted to their "paradigm-shifting product line". I'd love to see them shift the boring present indicative "amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant" to the more self-actualizing future perfect "amavero, amaveris, amaverit," etc.
just what were the teachers doing during the months (or more?) where no one could talk to each other?
Trying (and failing) to teach the kids Spanish via lip-reading, common practice before sign languages became an official part of the curriculum in schools of the deaf.
no one has ever rigorously established that none of the kids had any prior exposure to sign language.
And how exactly would one rigorously establish this? Follow the kids around with a camera from birth to make sure no-one signs around them?
First of all, we need to make clear that there is no such thing as "sign language". Rather, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different sign languages, originating wherever there are deaf communities. Secondly, in Nicaragua at the time the schools for the deaf were prohibited from teaching any of the existing sign languages, since it was believed that the deaf should learn to read lips so that they could communicate "normally". This was of course a rousing failure, since so many different phonemes look the same when reading lips. I can imagine this problem is particularly prominent with Spanish, given its relatively small number of vowel sounds compared to English and its lack of the English tendency to close off vowel sounds with a telltale rounding of the lips.
Anyway, since they weren't able to communicate at all via lip-read Spanish, these children needed some means to communicate with each other and with their parents. It is true that sometimes these children would learn a few pantomimed gestures from their parents, but this is not the same thing as a signed language-- first, because none of the pantomime gestures necessarily resemble any of the accepted symbols in an existing sign language, and second, because these were only a few individual signs with no overriding structure. Claiming these children learned a "sign language" from their parents would be like claiming my dog knows English. Furthermore, prior to the reforms which led to the schools of the deaf being founded in Nicaragua, deafness was attached a social stigma. Deaf children were kept isolated from the rest of society and treated as if they were mentally incompetent, with no attempts being made to teach them.
At any rate, the most any one deaf child was likely to learn were a few made-up gestures, and these were unique to each deaf individual and his or her family, since before the opening of the schools for the deaf the deaf children had no opportunity to socialize with one another. When the deaf schools did open, the children forged their own pidgin out of the few gestures they knew, making up more symbols of their own. When this pidgin was passed to new students below the critical age for language learning, it became a fully grammatical language, a creole.
The symbols and structure of Nicaraguan Sign Language are different enough from those of other sign languages, and the opportunity for the children to be exposed to them is small enough, that it is extremely unlikely that other signed languages contributed any role to the formation of NSL.
You're wrong on two counts: First, this has nothing to do with "escaping Earth's pull." Radio transmissions already travel at many times escape velocity. It's not the gravitational pull of Earth which keeps them from getting out into space; it's the ionosphere.
Second, quoting from the novel Contact, page 94: "Those few minutes of television from Vega were originally broadcast in 1936, at the opening if the Olympic Games in Berlin. Even though it was only shown in Germany, it was the first television transmission on Earth with even moderate power. Unlike the ordinary radio transmission in the thirties, those TV signals got through our ionosphere and trickled out into space."
Every security system imaginable suffers from this fatal flaw: At least one person must be allowed access. If it is possible for one person to get in, it is possible for someone else to get in.
Slashdot Mirror
The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short.
Somebody mod this phrase -1 Redundant.
what if you want to listen to music at night?
Only if you're listening to Corey Hart.
Why don't they just sell a product instead of a lifestyle ?
If you hadn't already said you weren't American, this question would have given it away.
not very much a fan of fantasy
And I, and probably most slashdot readers, am not very much a fan of people who can't distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. (Failure to distinguish between science fiction and real life is, sometimes, forgivable.) I thus offer the following quick guide:
If a story is set in some vague time period that can't figure out whether it's ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, and features wizards and lots of square-chinned guys with poor hygeine and names like Glorn Thundertrousers, it's probably fantasy.
If a story features spaceships, robots, time travel, lots of made-up technobabble, a high-school knowledge of physics, and lots of people in Spandex jumpsuits who are either green or have multiple heads, and have names that look like the result of a random banging on a keyboard, it's probably sci-fi.
If a story just has columns of abbreviations and numbers and words like "liquidity" and "divestiture," you're reading the financial reports by mistake.
I think that joke's been done here before.
yeah maybe a dumb terminal would suffice, but how would the clerk play doom3 while ignoring the customers?!
Like this.
That's because the PS2 linux dev kit is warez.
Wow! You mean the eDonkey software is able to detect whether a given file infringes copyright, and automatically makes sure that those, and only those, files are incredibly slow downloads? That's better than anything the MPAA has!
Caucasian-American, Dude, please.
One atom says to another, "I think I lost an electron."
The second atom says, "Are you sure?"
The first atom says, "Yes, I'm positive."
so if someone out there who RTFA'd would like to tell me how this squares with Heisenberg
As I recall, Heisenberg states the impossibility of measuring both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. I don't think that affects changing its spin.
at eprovisia.coredump.cx.
.cx domain.
This site is a joke, and no more represents an actual business than that other famous site with a
Coincidentally, $67 million Palmyra Atoll dollars is the estimated value of that Free Dell Desktop PC that's just waiting for those who click on your .sig.
Even better the $67 million dollars in cash reserves are in Palmyra Atoll dollars; I wonder what the exchange rate is?
One Palmyra Atoll dollar = 17 pieces of mithril, or approximately twenty kilograms of fairy dust.
There's no such thing, people. This is a joke.
All the disclaimers and address in Palmyra Atoll is so dodgy.
Especially since Palmyra Atoll is "uninhabited" with "no economic activity," and "managed as a nature reserve."
What the article doesn't mention is that this "human-powered spam filtering" consists of Mentats who have been specially trained to use the latest Bayesian filters, and who bear the Imperial conditioning against deleting important messages.
I'm especially attracted to their "paradigm-shifting product line". I'd love to see them shift the boring present indicative "amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant" to the more self-actualizing future perfect "amavero, amaveris, amaverit," etc.
Im from Greece and Islam has been hell in the region for over a thousand years, it spreads like a virus.
And this distinguishes it from Christianity... how?
Europe, the Americas, Australia, and huge chunks of Asia and Africa didn't become Christian because they really liked the missionary tracts.
Many of the scenes in Star Wars were filmed in Tunisia.
Sure, but how do we know Tunisia isn't computer-generated?
just what were the teachers doing during the months (or more?) where no one could talk to each other?
Trying (and failing) to teach the kids Spanish via lip-reading, common practice before sign languages became an official part of the curriculum in schools of the deaf.
no one has ever rigorously established that none of the kids had any prior exposure to sign language.
And how exactly would one rigorously establish this? Follow the kids around with a camera from birth to make sure no-one signs around them?
First of all, we need to make clear that there is no such thing as "sign language". Rather, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different sign languages, originating wherever there are deaf communities. Secondly, in Nicaragua at the time the schools for the deaf were prohibited from teaching any of the existing sign languages, since it was believed that the deaf should learn to read lips so that they could communicate "normally". This was of course a rousing failure, since so many different phonemes look the same when reading lips. I can imagine this problem is particularly prominent with Spanish, given its relatively small number of vowel sounds compared to English and its lack of the English tendency to close off vowel sounds with a telltale rounding of the lips.
Anyway, since they weren't able to communicate at all via lip-read Spanish, these children needed some means to communicate with each other and with their parents. It is true that sometimes these children would learn a few pantomimed gestures from their parents, but this is not the same thing as a signed language-- first, because none of the pantomime gestures necessarily resemble any of the accepted symbols in an existing sign language, and second, because these were only a few individual signs with no overriding structure. Claiming these children learned a "sign language" from their parents would be like claiming my dog knows English. Furthermore, prior to the reforms which led to the schools of the deaf being founded in Nicaragua, deafness was attached a social stigma. Deaf children were kept isolated from the rest of society and treated as if they were mentally incompetent, with no attempts being made to teach them.
At any rate, the most any one deaf child was likely to learn were a few made-up gestures, and these were unique to each deaf individual and his or her family, since before the opening of the schools for the deaf the deaf children had no opportunity to socialize with one another. When the deaf schools did open, the children forged their own pidgin out of the few gestures they knew, making up more symbols of their own. When this pidgin was passed to new students below the critical age for language learning, it became a fully grammatical language, a creole.
The symbols and structure of Nicaraguan Sign Language are different enough from those of other sign languages, and the opportunity for the children to be exposed to them is small enough, that it is extremely unlikely that other signed languages contributed any role to the formation of NSL.
AnandTech has completed it's second review
It's official. I'm the last surviving human who knows how to use an apostrophe properly.
North American vinyl was produced with an emphasis on the highs to sound good on tiny car speakers.
Ah, I see, catering to the critical demographic of people who own in-dash phonographs.
I love it when /. submitters include their "expert opinion" on such matters. Who the hell are you?
He's certainly not the great and legendary Erwos, that's for sure.
You're wrong on two counts: First, this has nothing to do with "escaping Earth's pull." Radio transmissions already travel at many times escape velocity. It's not the gravitational pull of Earth which keeps them from getting out into space; it's the ionosphere.
Second, quoting from the novel Contact, page 94: "Those few minutes of television from Vega were originally broadcast in 1936, at the opening if the Olympic Games in Berlin. Even though it was only shown in Germany, it was the first television transmission on Earth with even moderate power. Unlike the ordinary radio transmission in the thirties, those TV signals got through our ionosphere and trickled out into space."
Every security system imaginable suffers from this fatal flaw: At least one person must be allowed access. If it is possible for one person to get in, it is possible for someone else to get in.