That's how you go about changing laws you dont agree with. This is nothing wrong - indeed this is exactly right. You work with the political system to have the law changed.
Well, as a tech industry veteran, he has the protocol all set:
"Calm down, sir, calm down. Now, a disaster you say? How so? Uh-uh.. Uh-uh... Uh-uh.. Hmm, yes, it sounds like your country is infected with a virus alright, and a nasty one too. Here's what you do: You shut down the country, reinstall the government and then you restart the whole thing from the beginning. That should take care of it. Have a nice day now!"
For recreational robotics - building simple stuff as a hobby - something like Lego Mindstorms is a very good way to get introduced to the field. Then you can start looking at experimental controller boards like a Basic stamp, self-contained single-board Linux machine or other small development system and go on building your own hardware from components.
Just realize that robotics encompasses several disparate fields - various software disciplines, electronics, electromechanics, wood- plastic- and metalworking and so on - each one of which is more than a full academic field in itself. Don't expect to develop real expertise in all areas; find the areas in robotics that especially fascinate you and focus on that.
For academic or industrial "real" robotics, expect to first take a Masters or equivalent in any of the disciplines you need (some areas could be mechanical engineering, control theory, computational neuroscience, even psychology), then widen your general knowledge and deepend your area of expertise through a good PhD program. After which, of course, you'll find few real research positions and a lot of very qualified applicants - but that's a different issue:)
The whole issue is this wimpy, do-gooder pinko commie vibe you get from "open" and "share" and "please don't kill innocent civilians" crap.
Just do a cut and paste and replace "open" with "Dark Top Eagle Hammerfist YMCA Shiny Leather" and you'll see military types lining up around the block for the stuff.
People on wikipedia will erase the original and place their views - I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Wha..? You've never actually worked in academia, have you?
They are also doing the (somewhat understandable) mistake of counting the Canon "Rebel XT" and Canon "350D" as two separate models, though the only single difference is the name. Had flickr been popular here in Japan, you'd have found a "Kiss Digital N" on the list as well.
And it looks a little lazy not to factor in the number of pictures; they have all the data after all.
When you buy something so big you need a crowbar to get it out the door.
Actually it's when you don't have enough funds on hand to buy a company, so you borrow funds (money, stock) with the to-be-bought company as collateral, use it to buy the place, then, often, extract value from your newly bought company to pay back the loan. The name comes from using a loan as leverage to make a deal you couldn't have pulled off otherwise.
Really? On the occasions I commute to work by train (typically to London, but it depends where the client wants me) most people I see are actually working: they're reading reports, word processing stuff on laptops, talking to colleagues... perhaps its just a cultural difference?
Interesting. You do see people studying on the train (I use my time that way) but work is rare. I'm not sure why there's a difference, though I can hazard a couple of guesses.
One factor is that especially in the morning you're not likely to have a seat, and even if you do you'll be sitting very cramped. Bringing out a laptop or a file folder just isn't doable. A small book or a mobile phone is fine on the other hand. And you usually don't talk to other people - again because it's cramped and you'd end up speaking in the ear of someone you don't know. And you'd be pretty lucky to happen on a colleague on the same train anyway, since people live all over the place and the trains are very frequent.
At night, and especially if you aren't riding in the center of the city (like between Namba and Umeda), you'll have more room, and you do see people (especially students of course) studying or reviewing. People are also talking more to each other - you have groups of workers going to or from some waterhole and they can get quite noisy. If you're going out with your colleagues (and many do a couple of times a week at least), you're not going to do work.
But mostly I think it is because there is still very much a culture here of being _seen_ working at the office. If you're working on the train, you're not seen working; you won't be able to get home any earlier for that. So the train ride for many becomes a bit of "alone-time" where you sleep, read, surf the net, email friends and so on, and incidentally create a buffer between your work and your home life.
all of the new 'video on your celphone' pushes just make me laugh - who's seriously going to download video onto their celphone at the cost that it ends up being (few fixed data rate plans) plus the fact that people watch movies on their 40" TV's, not a 2 inch micro screen.
Everyone I have seen using their Ipod is using WHILE doing other things - it's not a 'lets sit around the house and listen to music' - so video doesn't fit into this model at all.
While I agree that a video iPod is dead in the water, the idea does fit the use-case of a long commute. I use the Osaka subway and local train system to get to work, and the single most common thing people are doing is to use their mobile phones to email, to play games, to listen to music or speech books and to surf the net (the second most common is read a book or comic, with portable games and mp3 players a distant third). Lately, TV-enabled mobile phones are becoming more and more common too.
They're effectively using their phones as a portable entertainment and communication center; nothing much bigger would be useable anyhow. And while the phone/TV screen may be 5-6cm only, it's pretty high resolution and high quality and look at it right up close so it's perfectly fine for viewing your typical morning news and talkshows. You already have book and comic serials downloadable for phone use; adding video is a no-brainer, probably.
But the key for this use is the convergence. For most people, a phone that does only 80-90% of a dedicated device is a lot preferable to actually having a second, dedicated device to carry around on the way to work. And when it comes to convergent devices, the war is over and the mobile phone won.
Re:Probably that you're running Ubuntu, like me.
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
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· Score: 0
I've been doing live updates on this machine since the first Ubuntu release, and it's worked fine.
I'll be doing a reinstall the next time, though - not because I suddenly have a problem with live updates or anything, but simply because I have a whole lot of cruft accumulated (bits and pieces from apps I compiled and tried but no longer use, that sort of thing) and doing a reinstall is a quick way to clean it all up.
One solution longer-term is to not allow any html links (or markup in general) in posts or profiles. With no Google-rank spamming possible and no direct way for prospective marks to get in touch it removes most of the incentive to post crap comments in the first place. And pure text-only posts can quite easily be filtered for objectionable content.
When you break up, you tell your friends, eventually. You might ring them and let them know, they might ring you and ask how things are and you tell them.
However, you don't get all your friends on a Telephone conference call and say "My girlfriend and I broke up, thanks!", or take out an ad in the local paper saying "Attn to all my friends: I broke up!"
Exactly. Email your friends, tell them you've broken up. Don't post it on a public site.
Putting it in your profile - or posting about it on your blog, or announcing it on an IRC network - is taking out an ad, or putting a nice big notice on the bulletin board in the lobby. It's public - don't be surprised that the public finds out about it.
There are courses where lecture attendance is very important. There are courses where most learning goes on outside the lecture hall (project-based or lab courses and the like), and lectures become little more than extra help clarifying the literature for those having trouble with it.
If attendance is important, make it a prerequisite for passing the course. If it isn't important, on the other hand, don't worry about attendance.
How to deal with recordings (or lecture handouts) is a red herring.
Put a group of alpha geeks in a room and start a discussion. Inevitably, they spend more time trying to prove to each other who is the smartest than they do actually pushing forward the discussion. Why is that?
It's not inevitable at all; in most projects that is not what happens. I don't know what Debian does wrong to have that constantly happen but they'd better fix it or it will cripple the project at some point.
I disagree with this developer's comments, and suggest that perhaps his way of thinking is perhaps not suited to a meritocracy. Perhaps he needs an authority to appeal to in situations of disagreement.
"Meritocracy" means having authority - selected with skill in the field as the criterion (as opposed to connecitons, external resources, charisma or what have you). It means some people have more say than others based on their skill, not that there is no authority.
I disagree with this. The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture. I do think there is a real reason to upgrade.
Regular TV to HD - yes, absolutely. The quality difference is fairly profound.
But DVD to HD formats? No. The difference, even on a good HDTV setup, just isn't large enough to be interesting for most people. And most people do _not_ have a good setups; they do not calibrate their stuff, adjust the room lighting or think about reflections. For the vast majority of users a progressive-scan DVD player and a HD player will make zero difference.
DVD -> HD is not at all like VHS -> DVD, but much more like getting a new, lower noise VHS format that is expensive and incompatible with your regular VHS player.
You would get them by the millions if you go by that definition.
Probably not; a body has to be fairly big to become spherical under gravity (the exact size would depend on the composition). We'd probably get dozens, and gradually perhaps up into a few hundred, in our system.
But why would that be a problem? After all, the point is not (or should not be) to magically make the 8 or 9 currently on the list stay there with no additions or deletions. We once thought we had five planets. By now they're nine - why would 12 - or 25 or 100 - be a problem?
"Clearing the neighbourhood" has the problem of being very imprecise and arguably a lot more arbitrary than the other definition - and as has been pointed out, would disqualify other current planets too, depending on how you chose to interpret it.
frequent Internet use is associated with a decline in local knowledge and interest in living in the local area.
Which of course is not really a negative at all. "The internets" doesn't cause disaffection, it just shows you all the alternatives out there for all those already not happy where they live. No one community is a great place to live in for everybody after all. If it helps you find a place you'll like better it's just good for everyone.
Also, the ability to have contact with diverse groups no matter where you're physically residing probably helps smooth the rough edges out of living anywhere. If you can cultivate your interests over the net, staying in your community may not chafe as much as it would have done in an earlier era.
What was wrong with the first suggestion?
on
Pluto Making a Comeback
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I really liked the original suggestion. It's a planet if:
* It is round under its own gravity
* it is not already classified as a star
* It is not a satellite to something else not classified as a star (ie. when the common point of rotation is located within the body of the other object)
A possible fourth criteria could be:
* It orbits something classified as a star
though I'd be happy without that criteria, making solitary, wandering bodies be called planets as well.
Sure, that will probably get us planets by the dozen as we get a clearer idea of what't out in the edges of our system - but why is that a problem? It's not like having nine planets has some mysterious significance, and it hasn't been nine - or eight for that matter - for very long either.
I don't have one on my Panasonic, and I've never seen a compact laptop (not a "multimedia machine"-type luggable) that does.
Also, is that really an electromechanical control you have, or is it just another software-controlled "multimedia button" in another mechanical package?
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same Charles Hannum that was directly responsible for kicking fellow NetBSD founder, Theo de Raadt, out of the core group, removed his CVS priviledges, and made Theo twist in the wind for 7 months until he was forced to leave to found OpenBSD.
Theo "voice of reason" de Raadt? Imagine that, someone not getting along with him. What are the odds, really?
Exactly. I could have used DAT as another example. I didn't say they'd go away completely but that they, just like DAT or laserdiscs, remain a niche technology for a small minority for whom the benefits are so substantial and so important they're willing to overlook all the negatives.
The likes of Sony, Toshiba, Universal and so on are not content with a niche technology; for them - and for most of us - something that doesn't supplant the DVD and become truly mass-market is a failure. If that is the destination for these formats they are a failure and will get a replacement whether a fringe market continues to exist or not.
Slashdot Mirror
And if anyone mods me funny, well...
Funny? Had there been a "-1 You're making me cry" moderation I would not have needed to write this.
A political party for illegal actions? come on!
That's how you go about changing laws you dont agree with. This is nothing wrong - indeed this is exactly right. You work with the political system to have the law changed.
Well, as a tech industry veteran, he has the protocol all set:
"Calm down, sir, calm down. Now, a disaster you say? How so? Uh-uh.. Uh-uh... Uh-uh.. Hmm, yes, it sounds like your country is infected with a virus alright, and a nasty one too. Here's what you do: You shut down the country, reinstall the government and then you restart the whole thing from the beginning. That should take care of it. Have a nice day now!"
For recreational robotics - building simple stuff as a hobby - something like Lego Mindstorms is a very good way to get introduced to the field. Then you can start looking at experimental controller boards like a Basic stamp, self-contained single-board Linux machine or other small development system and go on building your own hardware from components.
:)
Just realize that robotics encompasses several disparate fields - various software disciplines, electronics, electromechanics, wood- plastic- and metalworking and so on - each one of which is more than a full academic field in itself. Don't expect to develop real expertise in all areas; find the areas in robotics that especially fascinate you and focus on that.
For academic or industrial "real" robotics, expect to first take a Masters or equivalent in any of the disciplines you need (some areas could be mechanical engineering, control theory, computational neuroscience, even psychology), then widen your general knowledge and deepend your area of expertise through a good PhD program. After which, of course, you'll find few real research positions and a lot of very qualified applicants - but that's a different issue
The whole issue is this wimpy, do-gooder pinko commie vibe you get from "open" and "share" and "please don't kill innocent civilians" crap.
Just do a cut and paste and replace "open" with "Dark Top Eagle Hammerfist YMCA Shiny Leather" and you'll see military types lining up around the block for the stuff.
People on wikipedia will erase the original and place their views - I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Wha..? You've never actually worked in academia, have you?
They are also doing the (somewhat understandable) mistake of counting the Canon "Rebel XT" and Canon "350D" as two separate models, though the only single difference is the name. Had flickr been popular here in Japan, you'd have found a "Kiss Digital N" on the list as well.
And it looks a little lazy not to factor in the number of pictures; they have all the data after all.
What is a leveraged buyout?
When you buy something so big you need a crowbar to get it out the door.
Actually it's when you don't have enough funds on hand to buy a company, so you borrow funds (money, stock) with the to-be-bought company as collateral, use it to buy the place, then, often, extract value from your newly bought company to pay back the loan. The name comes from using a loan as leverage to make a deal you couldn't have pulled off otherwise.
Really? On the occasions I commute to work by train (typically to London, but it depends where the client wants me) most people I see are actually working: they're reading reports, word processing stuff on laptops, talking to colleagues... perhaps its just a cultural difference?
Interesting. You do see people studying on the train (I use my time that way) but work is rare. I'm not sure why there's a difference, though I can hazard a couple of guesses.
One factor is that especially in the morning you're not likely to have a seat, and even if you do you'll be sitting very cramped. Bringing out a laptop or a file folder just isn't doable. A small book or a mobile phone is fine on the other hand. And you usually don't talk to other people - again because it's cramped and you'd end up speaking in the ear of someone you don't know. And you'd be pretty lucky to happen on a colleague on the same train anyway, since people live all over the place and the trains are very frequent.
At night, and especially if you aren't riding in the center of the city (like between Namba and Umeda), you'll have more room, and you do see people (especially students of course) studying or reviewing. People are also talking more to each other - you have groups of workers going to or from some waterhole and they can get quite noisy. If you're going out with your colleagues (and many do a couple of times a week at least), you're not going to do work.
But mostly I think it is because there is still very much a culture here of being _seen_ working at the office. If you're working on the train, you're not seen working; you won't be able to get home any earlier for that. So the train ride for many becomes a bit of "alone-time" where you sleep, read, surf the net, email friends and so on, and incidentally create a buffer between your work and your home life.
all of the new 'video on your celphone' pushes just make me laugh - who's seriously going to download video onto their celphone at the cost that it ends up being (few fixed data rate plans) plus the fact that people watch movies on their 40" TV's, not a 2 inch micro screen.
Everyone I have seen using their Ipod is using WHILE doing other things - it's not a 'lets sit around the house and listen to music' - so video doesn't fit into this model at all.
While I agree that a video iPod is dead in the water, the idea does fit the use-case of a long commute. I use the Osaka subway and local train system to get to work, and the single most common thing people are doing is to use their mobile phones to email, to play games, to listen to music or speech books and to surf the net (the second most common is read a book or comic, with portable games and mp3 players a distant third). Lately, TV-enabled mobile phones are becoming more and more common too.
They're effectively using their phones as a portable entertainment and communication center; nothing much bigger would be useable anyhow. And while the phone/TV screen may be 5-6cm only, it's pretty high resolution and high quality and look at it right up close so it's perfectly fine for viewing your typical morning news and talkshows. You already have book and comic serials downloadable for phone use; adding video is a no-brainer, probably.
But the key for this use is the convergence. For most people, a phone that does only 80-90% of a dedicated device is a lot preferable to actually having a second, dedicated device to carry around on the way to work. And when it comes to convergent devices, the war is over and the mobile phone won.
I've been doing live updates on this machine since the first Ubuntu release, and it's worked fine.
I'll be doing a reinstall the next time, though - not because I suddenly have a problem with live updates or anything, but simply because I have a whole lot of cruft accumulated (bits and pieces from apps I compiled and tried but no longer use, that sort of thing) and doing a reinstall is a quick way to clean it all up.
You should be able to use Gtk# just fine.
One solution longer-term is to not allow any html links (or markup in general) in posts or profiles. With no Google-rank spamming possible and no direct way for prospective marks to get in touch it removes most of the incentive to post crap comments in the first place. And pure text-only posts can quite easily be filtered for objectionable content.
When you break up, you tell your friends, eventually. You might ring them and let them know, they might ring you and ask how things are and you tell them.
However, you don't get all your friends on a Telephone conference call and say "My girlfriend and I broke up, thanks!", or take out an ad in the local paper saying "Attn to all my friends: I broke up!"
Exactly. Email your friends, tell them you've broken up. Don't post it on a public site.
Putting it in your profile - or posting about it on your blog, or announcing it on an IRC network - is taking out an ad, or putting a nice big notice on the bulletin board in the lobby. It's public - don't be surprised that the public finds out about it.
There are courses where lecture attendance is very important. There are courses where most learning goes on outside the lecture hall (project-based or lab courses and the like), and lectures become little more than extra help clarifying the literature for those having trouble with it.
If attendance is important, make it a prerequisite for passing the course. If it isn't important, on the other hand, don't worry about attendance.
How to deal with recordings (or lecture handouts) is a red herring.
Poor old Steve - but at least went out was doing what he loved,...
What, sticking his thumb up things?
I have to agree with what some other posters here have stated: he made a stunt show thinly guised as a documentary.
Put a group of alpha geeks in a room and start a discussion. Inevitably, they spend more time trying to prove to each other who is the smartest than they do actually pushing forward the discussion. Why is that?
It's not inevitable at all; in most projects that is not what happens. I don't know what Debian does wrong to have that constantly happen but they'd better fix it or it will cripple the project at some point.
I disagree with this developer's comments, and suggest that perhaps his way of thinking is perhaps not suited to a meritocracy. Perhaps he needs an authority to appeal to in situations of disagreement.
"Meritocracy" means having authority - selected with skill in the field as the criterion (as opposed to connecitons, external resources, charisma or what have you). It means some people have more say than others based on their skill, not that there is no authority.
I disagree with this. The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture. I do think there is a real reason to upgrade.
Regular TV to HD - yes, absolutely. The quality difference is fairly profound.
But DVD to HD formats? No. The difference, even on a good HDTV setup, just isn't large enough to be interesting for most people. And most people do _not_ have a good setups; they do not calibrate their stuff, adjust the room lighting or think about reflections. For the vast majority of users a progressive-scan DVD player and a HD player will make zero difference.
DVD -> HD is not at all like VHS -> DVD, but much more like getting a new, lower noise VHS format that is expensive and incompatible with your regular VHS player.
You would get them by the millions if you go by that definition.
Probably not; a body has to be fairly big to become spherical under gravity (the exact size would depend on the composition). We'd probably get dozens, and gradually perhaps up into a few hundred, in our system.
But why would that be a problem? After all, the point is not (or should not be) to magically make the 8 or 9 currently on the list stay there with no additions or deletions. We once thought we had five planets. By now they're nine - why would 12 - or 25 or 100 - be a problem?
"Clearing the neighbourhood" has the problem of being very imprecise and arguably a lot more arbitrary than the other definition - and as has been pointed out, would disqualify other current planets too, depending on how you chose to interpret it.
frequent Internet use is associated with a decline in local knowledge and interest in living in the local area.
Which of course is not really a negative at all. "The internets" doesn't cause disaffection, it just shows you all the alternatives out there for all those already not happy where they live. No one community is a great place to live in for everybody after all. If it helps you find a place you'll like better it's just good for everyone.
Also, the ability to have contact with diverse groups no matter where you're physically residing probably helps smooth the rough edges out of living anywhere. If you can cultivate your interests over the net, staying in your community may not chafe as much as it would have done in an earlier era.
I really liked the original suggestion. It's a planet if:
* It is round under its own gravity
* it is not already classified as a star
* It is not a satellite to something else not classified as a star (ie. when the common point of rotation is located within the body of the other object)
A possible fourth criteria could be:
* It orbits something classified as a star
though I'd be happy without that criteria, making solitary, wandering bodies be called planets as well.
Sure, that will probably get us planets by the dozen as we get a clearer idea of what't out in the edges of our system - but why is that a problem? It's not like having nine planets has some mysterious significance, and it hasn't been nine - or eight for that matter - for very long either.
I don't have one on my Panasonic, and I've never seen a compact laptop (not a "multimedia machine"-type luggable) that does.
Also, is that really an electromechanical control you have, or is it just another software-controlled "multimedia button" in another mechanical package?
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same Charles Hannum that was directly responsible for kicking fellow NetBSD founder, Theo de Raadt, out of the core group, removed his CVS priviledges, and made Theo twist in the wind for 7 months until he was forced to leave to found OpenBSD.
Theo "voice of reason" de Raadt? Imagine that, someone not getting along with him. What are the odds, really?
Exactly. I could have used DAT as another example. I didn't say they'd go away completely but that they, just like DAT or laserdiscs, remain a niche technology for a small minority for whom the benefits are so substantial and so important they're willing to overlook all the negatives.
The likes of Sony, Toshiba, Universal and so on are not content with a niche technology; for them - and for most of us - something that doesn't supplant the DVD and become truly mass-market is a failure. If that is the destination for these formats they are a failure and will get a replacement whether a fringe market continues to exist or not.