Reminds me of the VisuaLABS scandal. This guy fooled investors and squandered millions of dollars on his revolutionary 3D television which was nothing but an off-the-shelf large screen TV with a couple of lines etched into it and some camera tricks to give the illusion of depth. The founder (Sheldon Zelitt) was a bit of a wacko - spent his time in his inventor's studio playing with "optics" - which usually meant doing bizarre and childish things like gluing magnifying glasses to pennies with superglue (I made up that example, but you get the idea). I think he also once wooed investors with a parabolic mirror magic trick which I guess none of them had ever seen.
More info here.
Some crops have a "suicide gene" that renders seeds sterile. To some critics this seems like a bad idea (fears that this gene could contaminate a natural plant and cause an extinction), although I suspect that's not very likely given it doesn't have much of a chance to propagate.
Still, if everybody switched and we became reliant upon a crop that could not produce viable seeds... Well, that's a frightening idea. Imagine if we lived through the coming water wars only to find all our seeds are sterilized monsanto seeds, and of course there's no such thing as roundup in the post-apocalyptic dystopia:)
I've been completely dedicated to Firewhatever & Thunderbird since I first became aware of them; the first thing I do on a new machine is delete every little blue "e" shortcut I can find (or replace the standard mozilla in the case of linux). There are probably 3 reasons I use firewhatever, in order of importance:
1. Adblock & Flash "click-to-play" extensions (the only ones I use, actually)
2. Popup-blocking and a sensible refusal to remap keys to stupid things (e.g., I can still right click to view source or download images even if a web site designer has included an annoying-yet-useless bit of javascript)
3. Bookmark shortcuts in the location bar (e.g. "dict inane" or "google al qaeda training manual")
4. Tabbed browsing
The wonder of adblock and flash click to play has almost redefined the web from my vantage point; banners and annoying animations are virtually non-existant on sites I frequent.
Okay, this risks being called a bit off topic, but it's so cool (and reasonably relevant) that it has to be mentioned.
Dot matrix printer music by this group The User has been around for awhile. It's not algorithmic music, but by printing strings of characters simultaneously to different dot matrix printers they make some pretty interesting sounding stuff.
DNA music sounded horrible but it was an interesting novelty. With the right kind of encoding scheme you could probably make something that sounded nice. A friend and I once experimented with fractal music (literally) by writing a script to generate the mandelbrot set in a format that was readable by an amiga-based tracker (OCTAMED). The number-of-iterations (color) value was mapped to pitch and instrument. It was neat because it not only sounded pretty interesting (he tweaked the way the numeric value was mapped to instrument and pitch), but you could also watch the mandelbrot pattern scrolling past in ASCII-form when you hit play. Fun diversion for an afternoon anyway.
I agree with that comment about third world conflict zones. One thing that blew my mind on recent visits to Chicago and Baltimore was the racial/economic tension... man. Canada has nothing close (except maybe Hastings in Vancouver, which is like Baltimore Lite).
But in keeping in line with the original topic, I don't think that there's any point in comparing work experiences on so broad a division as Canadian vs. American. There's a huge spectrum of employment opportunities and styles to be found in both countries ranging from the incredibly fun, motivated start-up environment where you work towards common goals with a small group of like-minded people, to the ultra-paranoid megalithic corporate dystopia of alarmed card-key turnstyles, locked elevators, office security cameras, invasive "productivity monitoring" practices, and a totally impersonal relationship with everybody who has any real power over your employment status.
You probably need acrobat 5, I whipped up some half-cocked counterpoints that are probably pretty self-evident and embedded them in this PDF as comments (double click the little yellow ballons, I haven't tried this in Acrobat 4 reader/linux - suffer..)
A big problem with science education is just that; teachers often are ill equiped to answer important and difficult questions. I've most often seen evidence of this in the evolution versus creationism debate. If a kid asks (probably in highschool) how evolution could be possible in light of the second law of thermodynamics, most high school teachers cannot give an adequate answer. That doesn't mean that adequate answers do not exist (they do).
Take for another example the intelligent design propaganda piece Ten questions to ask your biology teacher - excellent and compelling answers to all of those questions exist, but they are seriously tricky and would trap an average educator. You need to be very well trained in biology and other natural sciences to field those questions. Most teachers with an undergraduate degree in science and an education after degree simply don't have the knowledge.
Yes, the ease of setup is definitely a bonus. Case in point: I've just spend the last two days figuring out how to setup my video display (two CRTs with shutter-glasses stereo) to run at 1280x1024 @110Hz. The only hangup was getting the refresh rate on the monitors up to 110Hz (ie 55Hz in stereo mode) instead of the standard XFree86 maximum of 85Hz. A few google searches & video-timings howto's later, and some frighteningly underconfident testing of modelines and xvidtune fiddling and it works... but the task would have taken about 20 seconds in windows. Fortunately I don't setup a new workstation every week, and for everything else I can't live without linux. But setting up stuff can be a serious irritation, even if it is getting slowly better.
Minority Report (the Philip K. Dick short story) is an excellent story with some absolutely lame vision-of-the-future-tech bits. I think that's the hollywood formula though; s/story/action-FX/g. Read Philip K. Dick.
It's all just a horrible conspiracy to gradually shift hardware and software towards a centrally controlled, inaccessible quagmire of unbreakable digital rights management and spyware! run for your lives!
The conspiracy theorists have it all wrong. NASA isn't trying to hide their knowledge that life exists elsewhere, as George Filer asserts in that article. If you read up on some of NASA's astrobiology research, you'll see that if anything there are teams of motivated people desparately searching for evidence... Evidence being the key word. We need more than the insertion of patterns by our marvelous nervous systems onto boulders (seeing giraffes in the clouds) to show the existence of life elsewhere. Unfortunately the cranks and nutbags discredit the whole effort, much like they do for the environmentalist and conservation movements. Pesky nutbags.
The difference between linux and windows is that the former has tons of useful POSIX utilities like sed, grep, wc, tr, xargs... and I know how to use them, and do so almost every day. There's probably a way to do that sort of thing in windows, but I haven't a clue how.
Everything is advertised. Opting out isn't feasible, unless we collectively decide to go Kaczinski (Unabomber). No thanks. But it would be nice if we'd mostly agree to refuse to let people advertise on every available surface, or at least draw the line at the night sky!
Heh, how much did he get paid to say "Digital players in general and the iPod in particular are having a dramatic effect on the way people behave, he says." What's special about the iPod in this regard?
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the VisuaLABS scandal. This guy fooled investors and squandered millions of dollars on his revolutionary 3D television which was nothing but an off-the-shelf large screen TV with a couple of lines etched into it and some camera tricks to give the illusion of depth. The founder (Sheldon Zelitt) was a bit of a wacko - spent his time in his inventor's studio playing with "optics" - which usually meant doing bizarre and childish things like gluing magnifying glasses to pennies with superglue (I made up that example, but you get the idea). I think he also once wooed investors with a parabolic mirror magic trick which I guess none of them had ever seen. More info here.
I like that a lot. Nice and rusty. It'd be nice to see a rusty old enigma casemod ;)
Some crops have a "suicide gene" that renders seeds sterile. To some critics this seems like a bad idea (fears that this gene could contaminate a natural plant and cause an extinction), although I suspect that's not very likely given it doesn't have much of a chance to propagate.
:)
Still, if everybody switched and we became reliant upon a crop that could not produce viable seeds... Well, that's a frightening idea. Imagine if we lived through the coming water wars only to find all our seeds are sterilized monsanto seeds, and of course there's no such thing as roundup in the post-apocalyptic dystopia
You can hear the indian accent, but I can hear Dr. Sbaitso or Eliza. Clearly a keyword-based tech support automaton.
I've been completely dedicated to Firewhatever & Thunderbird since I first became aware of them; the first thing I do on a new machine is delete every little blue "e" shortcut I can find (or replace the standard mozilla in the case of linux). There are probably 3 reasons I use firewhatever, in order of importance:
1. Adblock & Flash "click-to-play" extensions (the only ones I use, actually) 2. Popup-blocking and a sensible refusal to remap keys to stupid things (e.g., I can still right click to view source or download images even if a web site designer has included an annoying-yet-useless bit of javascript) 3. Bookmark shortcuts in the location bar (e.g. "dict inane" or "google al qaeda training manual") 4. Tabbed browsing
The wonder of adblock and flash click to play has almost redefined the web from my vantage point; banners and annoying animations are virtually non-existant on sites I frequent.
Okay, this risks being called a bit off topic, but it's so cool (and reasonably relevant) that it has to be mentioned. Dot matrix printer music by this group The User has been around for awhile. It's not algorithmic music, but by printing strings of characters simultaneously to different dot matrix printers they make some pretty interesting sounding stuff.
DNA music sounded horrible but it was an interesting novelty. With the right kind of encoding scheme you could probably make something that sounded nice. A friend and I once experimented with fractal music (literally) by writing a script to generate the mandelbrot set in a format that was readable by an amiga-based tracker (OCTAMED). The number-of-iterations (color) value was mapped to pitch and instrument. It was neat because it not only sounded pretty interesting (he tweaked the way the numeric value was mapped to instrument and pitch), but you could also watch the mandelbrot pattern scrolling past in ASCII-form when you hit play. Fun diversion for an afternoon anyway.
Yeah, go Utah! ;)
Actually it's 100,000*100,000 = 10,000,000,000 combinations if you use a more reasonable increment of 1 cent :)
Yeah, she's hot. I can see why you're obsessed.
I agree with that comment about third world conflict zones. One thing that blew my mind on recent visits to Chicago and Baltimore was the racial/economic tension... man. Canada has nothing close (except maybe Hastings in Vancouver, which is like Baltimore Lite). But in keeping in line with the original topic, I don't think that there's any point in comparing work experiences on so broad a division as Canadian vs. American. There's a huge spectrum of employment opportunities and styles to be found in both countries ranging from the incredibly fun, motivated start-up environment where you work towards common goals with a small group of like-minded people, to the ultra-paranoid megalithic corporate dystopia of alarmed card-key turnstyles, locked elevators, office security cameras, invasive "productivity monitoring" practices, and a totally impersonal relationship with everybody who has any real power over your employment status.
You probably need acrobat 5, I whipped up some half-cocked counterpoints that are probably pretty self-evident and embedded them in this PDF as comments (double click the little yellow ballons, I haven't tried this in Acrobat 4 reader/linux - suffer..)
Responses
A big problem with science education is just that; teachers often are ill equiped to answer important and difficult questions. I've most often seen evidence of this in the evolution versus creationism debate. If a kid asks (probably in highschool) how evolution could be possible in light of the second law of thermodynamics, most high school teachers cannot give an adequate answer. That doesn't mean that adequate answers do not exist (they do).
Take for another example the intelligent design propaganda piece Ten questions to ask your biology teacher - excellent and compelling answers to all of those questions exist, but they are seriously tricky and would trap an average educator. You need to be very well trained in biology and other natural sciences to field those questions. Most teachers with an undergraduate degree in science and an education after degree simply don't have the knowledge.
If I have to suffer through one more haughty post about The Bleating Masses... I'll... I'll... I'll... stage an Ayn Rand book-burning.
Hopefully they can also spit out all of their quarters according to (wireless) demand.
Yes, the ease of setup is definitely a bonus. Case in point: I've just spend the last two days figuring out how to setup my video display (two CRTs with shutter-glasses stereo) to run at 1280x1024 @110Hz. The only hangup was getting the refresh rate on the monitors up to 110Hz (ie 55Hz in stereo mode) instead of the standard XFree86 maximum of 85Hz. A few google searches & video-timings howto's later, and some frighteningly underconfident testing of modelines and xvidtune fiddling and it works... but the task would have taken about 20 seconds in windows. Fortunately I don't setup a new workstation every week, and for everything else I can't live without linux. But setting up stuff can be a serious irritation, even if it is getting slowly better.
Minority Report (the Philip K. Dick short story) is an excellent story with some absolutely lame vision-of-the-future-tech bits. I think that's the hollywood formula though; s/story/action-FX/g. Read Philip K. Dick.
Actually not flamebait, was meant mostly as a joke (with a tinge of relatively legitimate paranoia- bytecode and VMs.. bah).
It's all just a horrible conspiracy to gradually shift hardware and software towards a centrally controlled, inaccessible quagmire of unbreakable digital rights management and spyware! run for your lives!
The conspiracy theorists have it all wrong. NASA isn't trying to hide their knowledge that life exists elsewhere, as George Filer asserts in that article. If you read up on some of NASA's astrobiology research, you'll see that if anything there are teams of motivated people desparately searching for evidence... Evidence being the key word. We need more than the insertion of patterns by our marvelous nervous systems onto boulders (seeing giraffes in the clouds) to show the existence of life elsewhere. Unfortunately the cranks and nutbags discredit the whole effort, much like they do for the environmentalist and conservation movements. Pesky nutbags.
The difference between linux and windows is that the former has tons of useful POSIX utilities like sed, grep, wc, tr, xargs... and I know how to use them, and do so almost every day. There's probably a way to do that sort of thing in windows, but I haven't a clue how.
Everything is advertised. Opting out isn't feasible, unless we collectively decide to go Kaczinski (Unabomber). No thanks. But it would be nice if we'd mostly agree to refuse to let people advertise on every available surface, or at least draw the line at the night sky!
Heh, how much did he get paid to say "Digital players in general and the iPod in particular are having a dramatic effect on the way people behave, he says." What's special about the iPod in this regard?
Xfree86: Webcams giving a nice GUI on the screen.
Uhh, even searching xfree86 + porn on google doesn't give anything remotely pornographic...