Very last line from the "warspying" article linked-to from within the Register article:
"The problem is, if the cops take an interest in you while you're doing something like this, the only way to get out of the situation is to admit that you're a dork," says MWD. "I'd almost rather be taken back to the station."
And nobody takes my "fall back" plan seriously...
on
New Calendar Proposal
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I've maintained for YEARS that, as long as we're going to go screwing around with the clock twice a year anyway, why not set the clock back one hour, twice every month? Let's say we set the clocks back one hour on the 1st of the month, and again on the 15th of the month, every month. In one year we'd be right back where we started (12 months X two hours each = 24 hours!), but we'd have gained a whole extra hour of sleep every two weeks (or so)...now who wouldn't like THAT? (and just to clarify: there'd be no restriction that you had to use the extra hour for sleep...) Sure, part of the year "first thing in the morning" would be just before sundown, and at a completely different part of the year (the opposite side of the year, in fact) you'd be sleeping all "day", but who cares? I mean, we all live by our clocks anyway, right? And you'd be getting that "fall back" boost twice every month!
Well, I'D vote for it...at least it's no crazier than thinking we're "gaining" or "losing" an hour by fiddling with the clocks.
an embedded heating element in the front windshield just like comes standard in all cars for the rear windshield!! For that matter, what's wrong with existing technology to provide that? Those lines don't impair my vision out the back of the car, so why think they would impair vision out the front of the car? Or is there another reason altogether (such as it might weaken the forward windshield enough that it was unsafe -- to which I'd reply "then make it thicker!" -- etc.?)
of the alien's "blasters" -- just thinking about that sound makes me shudder; just the PERFECT sound effect for the purpose (kind of like the Klingons' disrupter-fire sound in the Star Trek series always sounded so much more sinister than the phaser sound...)
...as the intro paragraph hints with "phrases likely to spread virally through the Net", all it really takes for something like that to cause big problems is for one of the mass-media outlets to get ahold of it (insidious little phrases like that have a way of making it onto the evening news or into the morning paper all too often) and, since judges and legislators seem to be more influenced by information they get from the (clueless) media than by actual professionals (or even actual hobbyists!) in whatever given field... well, you know the rest.
"I didn't know that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) were a treat. How did they taste?"
I hear they're somewhere between a MSHCT (Martha Stewart Holiday Cranberry Tart) and ABBOHP (Aunt Bea's Bad Old Homemade Pickles a.k.a. "Kerosene Cucumbers")
On the other hand, they're both low-fat and low-carb!
Ok, as soon as you mentioned storing the ongoing results in a bitmap I started wondering about what pretty patterns (if any; it sounds like the distribution of "1" bits would be so sparse that the picture would be mostly "0"'s; black...) might be derived from wrapping the string of Prime/NotPrime bits across a bitmap "window" of various "widths"...
Great. I wasn't having enough trouble forcing myself to set up those WinXPSP2 machines gathering dust in the lab...;-)
Well, what does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a toaster? What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a vacuum cleaner? What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a calculator?
There's no need to dispense with the maxim that the simplest answer that fits the evidence is most likely the correct one; I'd say a computer is a machine that computes. (of course, now we just have to define "compute"...)
Well, I don't know if I'd say that -- I mean, how "democratic" (or, maybe more to-the-point, "fair"...dang but I hate to invoke the f-word!) is it for you and me to expend the effort to look into the candidates' strengths and weaknesses (and those of their views/plans...or at least their promises) and, after careful and responsible evaluation make an informed choice, but some schmuck with less responsibility than a field mouse gets to cast an equally-effective vote? It seems almost like if you went to college for four to six years (and work extra hard to pay your way through a "good" one rather than a "bad" one), get good marks and take extra classes, etc. to make sure you're entitled to your degree and the job(s) the highschool "Career Day" counselor promised (heh heh), then the big interview with Acme Corp. comes up and the personnel manager says "Well, to be fair I have to let you know there are other applicants than you for this job -- one of whom has no training OR experience OR initiative OR ambition -- I'll be flipping my coin to decide who gets the position this afternoon and my secretary'll let you know on Monday. Have a nice weekend!"
At this point, I think I'd happily settle for knowing that my vote did "count" for an equal portion of the overall electoral "power" wielded by the entire populace - as it is right now my state (Tennessee) has 11 "electoral votes" and (for instance) California has 55. The way I see it, that makes my single vote worth about 1/5th of what a vote by a Californian's counts (partly because the electoral votes are divvied-out based on population rather than registration; all a state has to do to get a big hunk of electoral power is to have a lot of people living there, whether or not ANY of them actually vote. In other words, if each and every Tennessean voted, we'd all be fighting over those 11 electoral votes, but if only ONE Californian voted he'd be, single-handedly, exercising MILLIONS of times more influence over the election than any of us. That's certainly a far-fetched example but I frequently find it entertaining, if not always particularly enlightening, to exaggerate a problem to ridiculous proportions in order to illustrate it's weaknesses -- a sort of "philosophy by caricaturization".)
Any time a technical report is delivered by a lawyer, you pretty much know the tech is going to either be diluted or deleted and the report isn't going to be good news for anybody (except the lawyers, of course...)
But the overall message is clear (and laudable): if you don't exercise enough personal responsibility in your everyday life to make efforts to not be an idiot, don't think that you can make up for four years of lazy thinking/living by just going down to the courthouse and punching a button pretty-much at random.
I prefer the quote "If you aren't going to vote RIGHT, then don't bother to vote at all." (Unfortunately, many people take that statement to be an endorsement of a particular party/candidate rather than an endorsement of a particular way of living. They're usually the ones who wouldn't have voted "right" anyway...)
A big advantage of statistics-based interfaces is that they automatically enforce correctness, because correct strings are more probable than incorrect ones.
They obviously didn't include many PHBs' writings in their calculations... I'm frequently amazed at some of the grammatical... umm... experimentations undertaken by the upper two or three levels of management in their memos -- and the speeling, good grief, the SPEELING!! Is [F7] the last great secret of our civilization?!?!
Any kind of machinery requires differentiated structures, and anything involving electricity requires localised anisotropy - or how will you get your current flows separate in order to do anything useful?
You naysayers have been saying things like "That'll never work!" and "Don't you think if that could be done, somebody (somebody smarter than YOU, probably) would have already done it?!?!" for centuries, and will be for centuries to come:*
Thalassa: Have you prepared the megaton hydrocoils for the drawing Sargon supplied? Scotty: For all the good it'll do you. It's a fancy name, but how will something that looks like a drop of jelly make this thing work? You'll need microgears and a pulley that does what a muscle does.
*Star Trek "TOS", Season Two, "Return To Tomorrow"
For some strange reason, there's something | There called a "lameness filter" that repeatedly | are rejected all attempts to post this message | lots the way I wanted it to appear and saying I | of had too few characters per line and that I | technologies needed to reduce the count of "junk" chars | that per line in my post. Perhaps it's just me, | can but I think that making me do something so | be TOTALLY HOKEY as THIS, JUST so the post'll | used appear the way I intended for it to appear | to somehow seems MUCH more hokey, in the long | make run... But maybe I'm just being too ornery | weapons...
You just have to learn to think like this guy and turn yourself into a human one of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Very last line from the "warspying" article linked-to from within the Register article:
"The problem is, if the cops take an interest in you while you're doing something like this, the only way to get out of the situation is to admit that you're a dork," says MWD. "I'd almost rather be taken back to the station."
I've maintained for YEARS that, as long as we're going to go screwing around with the clock twice a year anyway, why not set the clock back one hour, twice every month ? Let's say we set the clocks back one hour on the 1st of the month, and again on the 15th of the month, every month. In one year we'd be right back where we started (12 months X two hours each = 24 hours!), but we'd have gained a whole extra hour of sleep every two weeks (or so)...now who wouldn't like THAT? (and just to clarify: there'd be no restriction that you had to use the extra hour for sleep...) Sure, part of the year "first thing in the morning" would be just before sundown, and at a completely different part of the year (the opposite side of the year, in fact) you'd be sleeping all "day", but who cares? I mean, we all live by our clocks anyway, right? And you'd be getting that "fall back" boost twice every month !
Well, I'D vote for it...at least it's no crazier than thinking we're "gaining" or "losing" an hour by fiddling with the clocks.
an embedded heating element in the front windshield just like comes standard in all cars for the rear windshield!! For that matter, what's wrong with existing technology to provide that? Those lines don't impair my vision out the back of the car, so why think they would impair vision out the front of the car? Or is there another reason altogether (such as it might weaken the forward windshield enough that it was unsafe -- to which I'd reply "then make it thicker!" -- etc.?)
of the alien's "blasters" -- just thinking about that sound makes me shudder; just the PERFECT sound effect for the purpose (kind of like the Klingons' disrupter-fire sound in the Star Trek series always sounded so much more sinister than the phaser sound...)
On a clear day, just look up. ;-)
...as the intro paragraph hints with "phrases likely to spread virally through the Net", all it really takes for something like that to cause big problems is for one of the mass-media outlets to get ahold of it (insidious little phrases like that have a way of making it onto the evening news or into the morning paper all too often) and, since judges and legislators seem to be more influenced by information they get from the (clueless) media than by actual professionals (or even actual hobbyists!) in whatever given field... well, you know the rest.
"I didn't know that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) were a treat. How did they taste?"
I hear they're somewhere between a MSHCT (Martha Stewart Holiday Cranberry Tart) and ABBOHP (Aunt Bea's Bad Old Homemade Pickles a.k.a. "Kerosene Cucumbers")
On the other hand, they're both low-fat and low-carb!
Uh, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but 1984 is even, not odd.
Well, that'd work ok with $100 bills too, assuming you only pass them to people who are color-blind...
["You can't be paranoid enough"]
Hey, it ain't paranoia if they really are out to get you!
["Could anyone tell me what anti-matter tastes like?"]
It's something like halfway between anti-chicken and anti-pork (with a little anti-Tabasco)
I was assured our communication was being carried out "in the most strict possible" and I was "exclusive partner" -- I smell a rat.
Ok, as soon as you mentioned storing the ongoing results in a bitmap I started wondering about what pretty patterns (if any; it sounds like the distribution of "1" bits would be so sparse that the picture would be mostly "0"'s; black...) might be derived from wrapping the string of Prime/NotPrime bits across a bitmap "window" of various "widths"...
;-)
Great. I wasn't having enough trouble forcing myself to set up those WinXPSP2 machines gathering dust in the lab...
Well, what does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a toaster?
What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a vacuum cleaner?
What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a calculator?
There's no need to dispense with the maxim that the simplest answer that fits the evidence is most likely the correct one; I'd say a computer is a machine that computes. (of course, now we just have to define "compute"...)
Prerequisite: You have to be willing to jump a certain distance to get to your conclusion.
Well, I don't know if I'd say that -- I mean, how "democratic" (or, maybe more to-the-point, "fair"...dang but I hate to invoke the f-word!) is it for you and me to expend the effort to look into the candidates' strengths and weaknesses (and those of their views/plans...or at least their promises) and, after careful and responsible evaluation make an informed choice, but some schmuck with less responsibility than a field mouse gets to cast an equally-effective vote? It seems almost like if you went to college for four to six years (and work extra hard to pay your way through a "good" one rather than a "bad" one), get good marks and take extra classes, etc. to make sure you're entitled to your degree and the job(s) the highschool "Career Day" counselor promised (heh heh), then the big interview with Acme Corp. comes up and the personnel manager says "Well, to be fair I have to let you know there are other applicants than you for this job -- one of whom has no training OR experience OR initiative OR ambition -- I'll be flipping my coin to decide who gets the position this afternoon and my secretary'll let you know on Monday. Have a nice weekend!"
At this point, I think I'd happily settle for knowing that my vote did "count" for an equal portion of the overall electoral "power" wielded by the entire populace - as it is right now my state (Tennessee) has 11 "electoral votes" and (for instance) California has 55. The way I see it, that makes my single vote worth about 1/5th of what a vote by a Californian's counts (partly because the electoral votes are divvied-out based on population rather than registration; all a state has to do to get a big hunk of electoral power is to have a lot of people living there, whether or not ANY of them actually vote. In other words, if each and every Tennessean voted, we'd all be fighting over those 11 electoral votes, but if only ONE Californian voted he'd be, single-handedly, exercising MILLIONS of times more influence over the election than any of us. That's certainly a far-fetched example but I frequently find it entertaining, if not always particularly enlightening, to exaggerate a problem to ridiculous proportions in order to illustrate it's weaknesses -- a sort of "philosophy by caricaturization".)
Any time a technical report is delivered by a lawyer, you pretty much know the tech is going to either be diluted or deleted and the report isn't going to be good news for anybody (except the lawyers, of course...)
But the overall message is clear (and laudable): if you don't exercise enough personal responsibility in your everyday life to make efforts to not be an idiot, don't think that you can make up for four years of lazy thinking/living by just going down to the courthouse and punching a button pretty-much at random.
I prefer the quote "If you aren't going to vote RIGHT, then don't bother to vote at all." (Unfortunately, many people take that statement to be an endorsement of a particular party/candidate rather than an endorsement of a particular way of living. They're usually the ones who wouldn't have voted "right" anyway...)
Yup. The most foolish thing I've done today was click on that link actually thinking that it would still work. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow...
I like how you (rightly) separate the NYT from "critical news information" (I mean, after all, the NYT does!)
They obviously didn't include many PHBs' writings in their calculations...
I'm frequently amazed at some of the grammatical... umm... experimentations undertaken by the upper two or three levels of management in their memos -- and the speeling, good grief, the SPEELING!! Is [F7] the last great secret of our civilization?!?!
You naysayers have been saying things like "That'll never work!" and "Don't you think if that could be done, somebody (somebody smarter than YOU, probably) would have already done it?!?!" for centuries, and will be for centuries to come:*
*Star Trek "TOS", Season Two, "Return To Tomorrow"
"Can this technology used for making weapons?"
For some strange reason, there's something | There
called a "lameness filter" that repeatedly | are
rejected all attempts to post this message | lots
the way I wanted it to appear and saying I | of
had too few characters per line and that I | technologies
needed to reduce the count of "junk" chars | that
per line in my post. Perhaps it's just me, | can
but I think that making me do something so | be
TOTALLY HOKEY as THIS, JUST so the post'll | used
appear the way I intended for it to appear | to
somehow seems MUCH more hokey, in the long | make
run... But maybe I'm just being too ornery | weapons...
You just have to learn to think like this guy
and turn yourself into a human one of these.
It'll drive the FBI crazy when Hannibal Lector starts sending his taunting messages through a re-mailing service on Mars.