There was an old british show called Yes Minister. It was on the air from 79-81, and it was about a newly apointed minister in the british government (like a cabinet secretary in the US), and satired how politics ran, with pandering and incompetitant politicians and the civil service who really ran the show, but had to make the politicians feel like they were in charge and so on. It's quite funny. Anyways, back in 1980, they were discussing the creation of this national database and they had already run though how it was going to be a disaster and nobody would like it and such. It's interesting how when they could see the problems that would arise from this system 24 years ago and spoof it on TV, that it would take to long for the government to catch up to the BBC.
They weren't using nintendo characters in playboy, they were using chracters who were made by various third party companies. They didn't have Samus wearing nothing but a blaster, or Zelda posing with the triforce conveniently placed. Those characters will always be truly nintendo, and thus Nintendo will go out of their way to specifically protect them.
People ARE stupid, that's what this country works on. You can convince people to buy almost anything by showing some hot women holding your product on prime time TV, because that automatically makes it awesome. Politicians have known this for years. Is it any coincidence that one of Kerry's biggest problems is that Bush is considered more handsome and more likeable than Kerry (Even though you or I will never ever meet either of the two, and thus shouldn't matter in the election)? No, 90% of america will believe whatever they're told, and their emotions are easily swayed by the mass media. Also, if from this extortion, Best Buy lost as little as one quarter of one percent of their nationwide sales, I'd wager it'd still be considered a major hit on their bottom line.
Poker, the pet rock of sports entertainment. That's how the PTI guys described it when thier show got prempted from their regular time slot for some world series of poker show (Is it just me, or does poker have a world series every week?). But for what it's worth, poker does have about the same amount of excitement as any other sporting event. It's a whole lotta nothing followed by 20 seconds of excitement. Think about it, for every home run or 40 yard touchdown pass, you have about 50 foul balls and 2 yard rushing gains.
What is so popular about ILoveBees.com?? I had never heard of it before now, and when I went there I didn't see anything of particular interest there. Just some crazy pictures and no content. Can someone clue me in onto why why this is such a popular website?
I can only imagine the backlash that's going to come from this comment.
"Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?"
"Don't you see the need to support our troops in this time of crisis??"
Nobody's disputing that first fact, but it was accomplished the Max Power way. If you don't know what the Max Power way is, it's from the Simpsons, when Homer changes his way to Max Power.
Homer (Max Power) - "Kids, there are three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!!"
Bart - "Isn't that the wrong way??"
Homer (Max Power) - "Yeah, but faster."
Bush assumed that the US would be hailed as liberating heros when conquering Iraq, and didn't even comprehend the notion of an organized resistance, and now people are dying because of his lack of foresight. But that's not even the point I'm getting at. The point is that people can be against the war and still want the best for the troops overseas. To say that someone who is anti-war is not supporting the troops is like saying people who are anti-crime aren't supporting the work of prision guards. People do recognize the necessity of their work, but you also hope for a world where their services aren't needed, and when they are needed, you certainly don't send them out to die because of some preconceived notion that it's their job to die.
Honestly, RPI needs to be more aggressive in increasing their rankings. You may see this as sucking up to these rankings organizations, but honestly RPI doesn't have any kind of name recognizition outside of the northeast. Engineers know about it across the country, but the farther west you go, you'll find fewer people who know about the school. It may not seem like a big deal unless you're trying to get into a field that's not engineering. As an alumni of RPI who is now in medical school, let me relate an interview I had at Ohio State Medical School. This is how the interview started.
Interviewer- "So, you go to Reen-saa-leer Polytechnic Institute? Where is that?"
Me- "It's in Troy, NY. A few miles outside of Albany."
Interviewer- "I see. What's their main program there?"
Me- "Its biggest school is the school of engineering, which is what most of the students major in. I myself am majoring in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering."
Interviewer- "Uh huh. Is the program any good?"
This kind of conversation wouldn't have happened to anyone who went to MIT or Cal Tech, since they have truly national reputations of being strong engineering schools, and that's the kind of thing RPI needs to do. As much as the campus loves to hate Shirly Ann Jackson (the President of RPI), she has done a good job of getting RPI more national recognition, and moving the school rankings out of tier two obscurity into to the top 50, and it has been improving over the past few years. And it's things like that which bring more research funding and experienced faculty to a school.
It was because three years ago, your student ID number was your SS number. New York legislation was soon passed such that starting in fall of 2001, student ID numbers couldn't have any part of your SS number in it, so everyone got new student ID numbers. You can still probably find test grades matched up social security numbers though because often times professors would post the exam grades on their personal webspace and just leave it there for years and years, but all the official RPI pages are pretty good about keeping information private.
Case Study: California Institute of Technology (who recently broke networking speed records)
You really can't say that just because they made the one network line with super speed. It was for a specific application (something like transfering data from a particle accelerator or something like that). I don't recall if that technology is going to have any practical use in upgrading conventional networks. It's like saying that porsches aren't the most powerful car out there because some guys set the land speed record with a rocket car in the desert. I'm sure that Cal tech has a lot of impressive network capabilities, but don't confuse their research initiatives with their campus facilities.
It is a funny comment, but there is some truth in it. Hard science doesn't have to be hard and boring. Hard and boring is what drives people away. Shows like Mr. Wizard, Beekman's World, and Bill Nye the Science Guy have been reasonably successful in terms of presenting scientific content to the mass public. Granted, those were geared towards kids, but it could be applied to a more mature audience. The point is that you have to present "interesting" science. Nobody cares about fourier transforms and such. You have to present concepts without bogging down in details. For example, I would be interested in learning how a shuttle launch is planned and what are the general parameters that influence a flight plan, but I am not interested in knowing how to calculate the necessary roll variance needed to compensate for the axial plane deviation due to Frinkinson's drag in the lower stratosphere. (I made all of that up BTW). Give people the interesting bits, and they'll develop an interest to learn more on their own.
That reminds me of a joke. Three astronauts are going to spend 2 years on a space station, and are allowed to bring 120 pounds of personal cargo with them. The American astronaut brings his 115 pound wife, the Japaneese astronaught brings 119 pounds of math and physics textbooks, and the russian astronaut brings 120 pounds of fine cuban cigars. Two years later when they return, the american and his wife get out of the spaceship with their new baby daughter. The Japaneese astronaut gets off with a notebook full of new theoritical physics equations. The Russian comes off the ship and yells "DOES ANYONE HAVE A FREAKING MATCH???"
I think blogs are the public access channel of the internet. Everyone has their opinion on one thing or another, so people start a blog to rant and rave about stuff. People know that when you read someone's blog (or watch someone's public access show), you're getting their specific opinion. If it was truly objective and neutral, he'd be writing for a magazine or something. Peter Jennings has his own opinions on stuff, but we take him to represent things relatively neutrally because ABC is legitamizing his claims. There is no system in place to check what some guy states on his blog. The problem with infomercials was that people inherantly believed that ABC automatically endoreced everything on their channel because there's no reason to believe that they didn't unless you watched the first 10 seconds of the show where ABC denied all association with the show. People will realize that blogs like public access are just guys spouting their own agenda.
Global Warming doesn't mean that everything gets polarized to just one extreme (like everything should get hot OR everything should get cold). Global Warming means that normal weather patterns get fucked up by the changes in average temperature. So global warming can lead to both flooding and droughts, both hot summers and cold winters, and lead to seasons of both unusually strong and unusually weak hurricanes. Having no hurricanes in a summer (while good for florida) is not normal, and thus reason for concern because when one part of a system isn't normal, than other parts are going to be off as well.
Can cows eat wood? The trees I'm familiar with in the northeast are such that by the time they're a half a meter tall, their trunks are already wooden. I wasn't aware that a cow could eat wood. The other possibility is that they're eating the trees at such an early age that the plant tissue is still soft, which would mean that the trees are still very small, and would barely be disginguishable from tall grass, in which case it makes you wonder why go through this strange process of needing cows to deal with the problem rather than just hiring a guy with a lawnmower to just clear the area out in one day. Also, how big of a problem is rampant tree growth? They don't exactly grow like weeds that need to be trimmed every week.
This kind of purebreeding has been done for centuries. It's how we got dogs to begin with; wolf puppies who showed more docile tendencies were bred together so their offspring could be used inside human society. That's also how we got all the breeds of dogs and cats we have today. Those animals which had desirable tendencies were selectively breeded together. Fishermen in Canada needed a dog to help them take the nets from the ship to the shore, so they bred a dog that liked to swim and had a thick and water resistant coat so that they could move through the cold Canadian waters, and thus the Labrador Retreiver was created. We will always breed animals to have the traits that suit our wants and needs. In the past, we wanted intellegent, strong, and loyal working dogs. These days we want proofy dogs with pointy ears and curly tails. Well, maybe that's not that I want, but that's what makes a championship dog these days if you've ever seen a dog show, but the means to make these dogs haven't changed since the days of old.
Uh, what? You want less space an a harder interface? Intuitive would mean that the functionality is relatively understandable and easy to use because the layout makes sense and is easily deductible. Why would you want something half as intuitive? Wouldn't that be the same as twice as hard?
As the article said, at least they didn't replace Alec Guiness.
They wouldn't have to. I recall in some behind the scenes look at the making of Episode I that when they were casting for the part of young Obi-Wan, they took pictures of Alec Guinness when he was a young man, cut it in half, and photoshoped the left side of Guinness's face with the right side of the actor's face to see how well it matched. So the idea is that Obi-Wan should have a relatively consistant look through the movies with a reasonable age progression.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an old british show called Yes Minister. It was on the air from 79-81, and it was about a newly apointed minister in the british government (like a cabinet secretary in the US), and satired how politics ran, with pandering and incompetitant politicians and the civil service who really ran the show, but had to make the politicians feel like they were in charge and so on. It's quite funny. Anyways, back in 1980, they were discussing the creation of this national database and they had already run though how it was going to be a disaster and nobody would like it and such. It's interesting how when they could see the problems that would arise from this system 24 years ago and spoof it on TV, that it would take to long for the government to catch up to the BBC.
They weren't using nintendo characters in playboy, they were using chracters who were made by various third party companies. They didn't have Samus wearing nothing but a blaster, or Zelda posing with the triforce conveniently placed. Those characters will always be truly nintendo, and thus Nintendo will go out of their way to specifically protect them.
People ARE stupid, that's what this country works on. You can convince people to buy almost anything by showing some hot women holding your product on prime time TV, because that automatically makes it awesome. Politicians have known this for years. Is it any coincidence that one of Kerry's biggest problems is that Bush is considered more handsome and more likeable than Kerry (Even though you or I will never ever meet either of the two, and thus shouldn't matter in the election)? No, 90% of america will believe whatever they're told, and their emotions are easily swayed by the mass media. Also, if from this extortion, Best Buy lost as little as one quarter of one percent of their nationwide sales, I'd wager it'd still be considered a major hit on their bottom line.
Homer - "I know, I'll breed the pets together. Soon, I will have a miracle hybrid with the loyalty of a cat and the cleanliness of a dog."
Here's how they got results.
(**ZAP**)
"Owww. Sorry, I'll do better, I promise, stop zapping me"
(**ZAP**)
"Sorry, sorry, I'll go faster"
(**ZAP**)
Poker, the pet rock of sports entertainment. That's how the PTI guys described it when thier show got prempted from their regular time slot for some world series of poker show (Is it just me, or does poker have a world series every week?). But for what it's worth, poker does have about the same amount of excitement as any other sporting event. It's a whole lotta nothing followed by 20 seconds of excitement. Think about it, for every home run or 40 yard touchdown pass, you have about 50 foul balls and 2 yard rushing gains.
What is so popular about ILoveBees.com?? I had never heard of it before now, and when I went there I didn't see anything of particular interest there. Just some crazy pictures and no content. Can someone clue me in onto why why this is such a popular website?
I can only imagine the backlash that's going to come from this comment.
"Can you say that the world is better with Saddam in power?"
"Don't you see the need to support our troops in this time of crisis??"
Nobody's disputing that first fact, but it was accomplished the Max Power way. If you don't know what the Max Power way is, it's from the Simpsons, when Homer changes his way to Max Power.
Homer (Max Power) - "Kids, there are three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!!"
Bart - "Isn't that the wrong way??"
Homer (Max Power) - "Yeah, but faster."
Bush assumed that the US would be hailed as liberating heros when conquering Iraq, and didn't even comprehend the notion of an organized resistance, and now people are dying because of his lack of foresight. But that's not even the point I'm getting at. The point is that people can be against the war and still want the best for the troops overseas. To say that someone who is anti-war is not supporting the troops is like saying people who are anti-crime aren't supporting the work of prision guards. People do recognize the necessity of their work, but you also hope for a world where their services aren't needed, and when they are needed, you certainly don't send them out to die because of some preconceived notion that it's their job to die.
Honestly, RPI needs to be more aggressive in increasing their rankings. You may see this as sucking up to these rankings organizations, but honestly RPI doesn't have any kind of name recognizition outside of the northeast. Engineers know about it across the country, but the farther west you go, you'll find fewer people who know about the school. It may not seem like a big deal unless you're trying to get into a field that's not engineering. As an alumni of RPI who is now in medical school, let me relate an interview I had at Ohio State Medical School. This is how the interview started.
Interviewer- "So, you go to Reen-saa-leer Polytechnic Institute? Where is that?"
Me- "It's in Troy, NY. A few miles outside of Albany."
Interviewer- "I see. What's their main program there?"
Me- "Its biggest school is the school of engineering, which is what most of the students major in. I myself am majoring in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering."
Interviewer- "Uh huh. Is the program any good?"
This kind of conversation wouldn't have happened to anyone who went to MIT or Cal Tech, since they have truly national reputations of being strong engineering schools, and that's the kind of thing RPI needs to do. As much as the campus loves to hate Shirly Ann Jackson (the President of RPI), she has done a good job of getting RPI more national recognition, and moving the school rankings out of tier two obscurity into to the top 50, and it has been improving over the past few years. And it's things like that which bring more research funding and experienced faculty to a school.
It was because three years ago, your student ID number was your SS number. New York legislation was soon passed such that starting in fall of 2001, student ID numbers couldn't have any part of your SS number in it, so everyone got new student ID numbers. You can still probably find test grades matched up social security numbers though because often times professors would post the exam grades on their personal webspace and just leave it there for years and years, but all the official RPI pages are pretty good about keeping information private.
Case Study: California Institute of Technology (who recently broke networking speed records)
You really can't say that just because they made the one network line with super speed. It was for a specific application (something like transfering data from a particle accelerator or something like that). I don't recall if that technology is going to have any practical use in upgrading conventional networks. It's like saying that porsches aren't the most powerful car out there because some guys set the land speed record with a rocket car in the desert. I'm sure that Cal tech has a lot of impressive network capabilities, but don't confuse their research initiatives with their campus facilities.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out the phyiscal differences between sexes
Espically when it's the physical differences that are pointing out.
Is the volume control on your speakers broken?
It is a funny comment, but there is some truth in it. Hard science doesn't have to be hard and boring. Hard and boring is what drives people away. Shows like Mr. Wizard, Beekman's World, and Bill Nye the Science Guy have been reasonably successful in terms of presenting scientific content to the mass public. Granted, those were geared towards kids, but it could be applied to a more mature audience. The point is that you have to present "interesting" science. Nobody cares about fourier transforms and such. You have to present concepts without bogging down in details. For example, I would be interested in learning how a shuttle launch is planned and what are the general parameters that influence a flight plan, but I am not interested in knowing how to calculate the necessary roll variance needed to compensate for the axial plane deviation due to Frinkinson's drag in the lower stratosphere. (I made all of that up BTW). Give people the interesting bits, and they'll develop an interest to learn more on their own.
That reminds me of a joke. Three astronauts are going to spend 2 years on a space station, and are allowed to bring 120 pounds of personal cargo with them. The American astronaut brings his 115 pound wife, the Japaneese astronaught brings 119 pounds of math and physics textbooks, and the russian astronaut brings 120 pounds of fine cuban cigars. Two years later when they return, the american and his wife get out of the spaceship with their new baby daughter. The Japaneese astronaut gets off with a notebook full of new theoritical physics equations. The Russian comes off the ship and yells "DOES ANYONE HAVE A FREAKING MATCH???"
I think blogs are the public access channel of the internet. Everyone has their opinion on one thing or another, so people start a blog to rant and rave about stuff. People know that when you read someone's blog (or watch someone's public access show), you're getting their specific opinion. If it was truly objective and neutral, he'd be writing for a magazine or something. Peter Jennings has his own opinions on stuff, but we take him to represent things relatively neutrally because ABC is legitamizing his claims. There is no system in place to check what some guy states on his blog. The problem with infomercials was that people inherantly believed that ABC automatically endoreced everything on their channel because there's no reason to believe that they didn't unless you watched the first 10 seconds of the show where ABC denied all association with the show. People will realize that blogs like public access are just guys spouting their own agenda.
Global Warming doesn't mean that everything gets polarized to just one extreme (like everything should get hot OR everything should get cold). Global Warming means that normal weather patterns get fucked up by the changes in average temperature. So global warming can lead to both flooding and droughts, both hot summers and cold winters, and lead to seasons of both unusually strong and unusually weak hurricanes. Having no hurricanes in a summer (while good for florida) is not normal, and thus reason for concern because when one part of a system isn't normal, than other parts are going to be off as well.
Can cows eat wood? The trees I'm familiar with in the northeast are such that by the time they're a half a meter tall, their trunks are already wooden. I wasn't aware that a cow could eat wood. The other possibility is that they're eating the trees at such an early age that the plant tissue is still soft, which would mean that the trees are still very small, and would barely be disginguishable from tall grass, in which case it makes you wonder why go through this strange process of needing cows to deal with the problem rather than just hiring a guy with a lawnmower to just clear the area out in one day. Also, how big of a problem is rampant tree growth? They don't exactly grow like weeds that need to be trimmed every week.
I didn't know they were on Hoth.
In other news, the State of Florida has changed its name to State of Emergency.
After all, I hope they don't forget about Poland...
This kind of purebreeding has been done for centuries. It's how we got dogs to begin with; wolf puppies who showed more docile tendencies were bred together so their offspring could be used inside human society. That's also how we got all the breeds of dogs and cats we have today. Those animals which had desirable tendencies were selectively breeded together. Fishermen in Canada needed a dog to help them take the nets from the ship to the shore, so they bred a dog that liked to swim and had a thick and water resistant coat so that they could move through the cold Canadian waters, and thus the Labrador Retreiver was created. We will always breed animals to have the traits that suit our wants and needs. In the past, we wanted intellegent, strong, and loyal working dogs. These days we want proofy dogs with pointy ears and curly tails. Well, maybe that's not that I want, but that's what makes a championship dog these days if you've ever seen a dog show, but the means to make these dogs haven't changed since the days of old.
Theirs are just hairier than the usual kind
Yarrr. That will replace the whale in my nightmares.
Uh, what? You want less space an a harder interface? Intuitive would mean that the functionality is relatively understandable and easy to use because the layout makes sense and is easily deductible. Why would you want something half as intuitive? Wouldn't that be the same as twice as hard?
As the article said, at least they didn't replace Alec Guiness.
They wouldn't have to. I recall in some behind the scenes look at the making of Episode I that when they were casting for the part of young Obi-Wan, they took pictures of Alec Guinness when he was a young man, cut it in half, and photoshoped the left side of Guinness's face with the right side of the actor's face to see how well it matched. So the idea is that Obi-Wan should have a relatively consistant look through the movies with a reasonable age progression.