I like your post. I am curious, though, why you thought pulling the ad was over the top. To me it seems like common sense, given that a) children have poor judgement, and don't always do what they're told and b) parents can't watch them 24/7.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that some kid somewhere is going to wake up in the middle of the night, remember that cool commercial they saw earlier that day, sneak into his/her parent's bedroom and steal the car keys from atop the nightstand or inside a desk drawer, and then go downstairs, start the car, and, if they're lucky, drive into a ditch. I'm all for personal responsibility in most things, but children don't have the judgment to act responsibly in all cases, and it seems unwise to encourage them to do dangerous things.
Since it has become popular in this thread to mention religious affiliation, I will also disclose that I am a Christian, and (to preempt anyone from accusing me of being a lazy TV-addicted parent) add that I don't have kids and I don't watch TV.
Does anyone have any statistics on the number of car wrecks caused by underage drivers? I doubt it's a terribly uncommon occurrence.
If parents don't want their kids to watch stuff like this, they should stop their kids from watching stuff like this... There is a better option which is to throw the TV out the window and get it over with.
I agree that not watching TV is a wonderful idea in general, but as another poster said, TV ads don't have pre-announced schedules. If you want to avoid one ad, you have to avoid TV altogether. I think its unrealistic to expect parents to tell their kids "I'm sorry, you can't watch TV at all until you've reached legal driving age because you might see one ad that would give you bad ideas."
As the other reply said, a toddler need only release the parking brake - neither being able to see over the dashboard nor being seatbelted in are prerequisites to causing a car wreck. And it isn't just toddlers who might cause problems - children of any age could see this and think it's a good idea.
I remember a few years ago having seen a paper in ACM Transaction on Graphics about procedurally generating islamic tile patterns. Here's an accessible version:
Islamic star patterns in absolute geometry, Craig S. Kaplan and David H. Salesin.
I'm not surprised that there aren't any DMCA-like provisions, but the article also mentioned the problem of theatergoers videotaping movies, which is apparently legal there. I suspect sharing the resulting video is probably still illegal (according to both Canadian law and the Berne convention), but it's easier to stop people from videotaping movies in the theaters than it is to stop them from uploading files onto peer-to-peer networks from their homes (or elsewhere, if they're sufficiently paranoid), therefore copyright laws are not as effectively enforced, therefore content owners are angry at Canada. Is this what the real conflict is, or is my understanding of the situation wrong?
It would be interesting to know just what Canada's obligations are under the Berne convention or any other IP treaties they may have signed. Is this just a bunch of large corporations whining that the rights they think they ought to have aren't universally recognized, or is Canada actually breaking a treaty obligation? Or is the Berne convention sufficiently vague that both sides can plausibly believe they are right? What if a country doesn't want to participate in the Berne convention or trips anymore? (The US didn't sign on until 1989, now we're trying to force our IP laws on everyone else.)
I played the beta a bit about a month ago. Here are some of the high and low points for me. I'll try omit things that have already been said elsewhere (quests vs grind, graphics quality, similarity between mages and loremasters, etc...).
Good:
The shire looks very nice, and is laid out in a realistic manner, as a collection of small villages sprawled out over a wide area. Hobbits act like hobbits.
It appears that you can grow crops, though I didn't try it.
Bad (maybe I'm picking nits, but these things really do annoy me):
What's with using the One Ring as a quest indicator? I know it's a highly recognizable icon, but still, it's an evil thing. We shouldn't see it floating over the heads of, say, elvish questgivers.
Thorin's halls in the blue mountains are a bit more grandiose than Tolkien's descriptions would seem to warrant. (This was a controversial topic on the LOTRO forums.)
The Brandywine bridge is not structurally sound. Whoever designed it was apparently overly accustomed to modern steel bridges which can span wide distances without any arch. (I know this is a minor point, but it's immersion breaking for me when I see a bridge and think "that looks nice, but in the real world it would immediately fall into the river".)
Magic. They simply renamed it. Don't for a minute believe there are not mages and priests in this game. Loremasters are mages pure and simple. They throw fireballs.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who sees it this way. If it has the same mechanics as a fireball, it's a fireball. I don't care if the animation shows the loremaster pulling stuff out of his pocket with which to kindle a fire.
I am more concerned with being able to select the best CPU/GPU combo, and not being stuck with a great CPU and lousy video card or vice versa. And by "lousy video card", I don't really mean poor performance so much as a lack of decent drivers. This is something that can change after buying the hardware; under Linux, the quality of the Nvidia drivers (which I currently hold my nose and use; last time I tried to use an ATI driver, they hadn't yet ported it to the version of X.org that I wanted to use) varies from release to release. It would be nice to at least have the option of replacing the video card rather than having to replace the whole system if driver quality takes a turn for the worst.
Christianity says pretty much whatever any given sect wants it to say, by listening to them. One thing for one, something else for another.
The way it was explained to me (by an ethics prof a Christian college), there are two main schools of thought when it comes to Christianity and the environment:
According to dominion theology, God gave us the world to do whatever we want with. "Rule over the earth and subdue it, be fruitful and multiply, etc..." The earth exists only to serve our purposes. We might choose to avoid widespread environmental destruction, but only because we need a comfortable place to live, and not because the world has any intrinsic value of its own.
According to stewardship theology, God gave us the world so that we could take care of it, and it's something that he rather we didn't destroy. We have the authority to make decisions regarding its governance, but we should take care of it, like we might take care of a valuable painting that we couldn't paint ourselves, and who's artist might return some day and be upset if we drew mustaches on all the characters depicted therein.
There were other options that didn't mesh well with Christianity, as well, including the idea that the world is God, and that when we damage the environment we hurt God directly.
everyone I talk to says "no, that's not right. REALLY it is about." So, I never understand what it is about.
Here is Christianity explained as simply as I know how:
God created humanity, but we're quite fallible and often make life miserable for ourselves and each other through our own failings. The way the world happens to work, God can't have a decent relationship with us under such circumstances. The workaround to this problem is that the burden of sin can be removed if an innocent persons accepts the punishment for sin in our place (which is where Jesus comes in, and the reason why he died in such an unpleasant way). We then have the option to cast off our shame and guilt and restore our relationship with God by asking forgiveness for our sin (for which Jesus died), and then when we die we can live with Jesus forever in heaven.
I hope this was helpful in some fashion. I have skipped over quite a few things; creation, the role of satan, the end times, the return of Jesus, the holy spirit, etc... Most of these things are details that Christians may disagree over and yet remain Christians. For instance, it doesn't matter a bit (as far as I understand) to a person's salvation whether they believe the world is 6 thousand years old or 4 billion.
I find it hard to believe that Rumsfeld's earlier offers of resignation were an act, because there would have been nothing gained from it. It's a sort of admission of failure, an acknowledgement that things aren't going well. Politically, it would have been better for Rumsfeld to "stay the course" and pretend that everything is going fine.
Assuming a uniform probability distribution on parties, they will cancel each other out.
As others have stated, a uniform distribution is unlikely. I believe the real effect of uninformed votes is to bias the election results towards whichever candidate is most successful at marketing him/herself, which often means the candidate with the biggest campaign budget.
An easier, less controversial solution would be to require labelling for all electronic devices that would tell potential buyers how much energy the devices use. Something like "this devices uses a maximum of 200 watts when in use, 30 watts when idle, and 10 watts in standby mode". We have labels like these on water heaters and the like, why not smaller devices as well?
The real problem here is that if buyers can't distinguish a good product from a bad product, bad products will dominate the market. See A Market for Lemons for some insight into why this is so.
Here is an interesting article from Linux Weekly News: Who maintains RPM? Makes you wonder about the future of that package format. Unfortunately, it would not be an easy thing for Red Hat to switch to apt or anything else, we'll probably have multiple incompatible package formats for a long time to come.
I don't think it's fair to criticise the parent's understanding of orbital mechanics as there are in fact several valid ways of defending a patch of land from space that is not on the equator.
The most obvious, as you allude to, is a geosynchronous orbit, which can easily have line-of-sight to most of the United States (I'm not sure about Alaska). Whether we can, say, aim a laser accurately at that distance may be questionable, though.
Another possibility is to have a number of weaponised satellites which take turns passing over the U.S., much like GPS satellites do now.
A third option is to attach weapons to long space-elevator-like tethers which could perhaps be attached to the earth somewhere (not necessarily the equator, though that is the most obvious choice). This is not possible with current technology, however.
The disadvantage of the first two approaches is that our weaponized satellites would be above other countries as well as our own much or all of the time. This is likely to make any nation we don't get along well with very uncomfortable, and may inspire them to put their own weapons platforms in orbit with the stated purpose of defending themselves from the U.S., but also with the capability of attacking the U.S. directly.
Gleixner was the main author of Linux's hrtimer (high-resolution timer) subsystem, and has been a major contributor to Ingo Molnar's real-time preemption patch. The changelog for the 2.6.18 kernel reflects the addition of 136 patches authored by Gleixner, along with 143 from Molnar, who works for Red Hat.
The 2.6.18 release includes real-time technology that will save individual kernel developers from having to maintain separate real-time kernel trees, according to TimeSys. Additionally, embedded Linux developers or normal desktop users wishing to build kernels capable of achieving millisecond-level real-time responsiveness will no longer have to apply patches.
The article does not say what hrtimer and the real-time preemption patch actually do, nor does it say that those are the patches that were added to the kernel, merely that Gleixner worked on those as well as whatever those 136 patches are that made it into the kernel. So, what actually changed? Were internal APIs rearranged? Were long-held spinlocks replaced with shorter-duration spinlocks? Can the kernel preempt things it couldn't preempt before? Does the kernel export any new APIs to user space? What sort of improvements can we expect with these patches?
The article was quite vague in its technical details, so I was hoping someone could fill them in.
There has been a substantial ongoing effort to provide real-time support in Linux for quite a few years now; what do these particular patches do that hasn't been done before?
There doesn't seem to be an option anymore to do what most people are probably going to want to do, which is just set the homepage to whatever's in the current tab. One step forward, two steps back.
I think one of the main things that makes the slashdot system work is metamoderation - the moderators are subject to random, annonymous peer review. When moderators mod posts up or down because of their own biases rather than the merits of the posts, they'll loose their karma when their ratings get metamoderated by someone not in their on clique.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the entire userbase may develop a bias of its own, but I don't think anyone can reasonably characterize slashdot as a monoculture.
The cytherean atmospheric pressure is also about 90 times earth's, and it's almost entirely carbon dioxide (while here we have about 380 parts per million, iirc), so it's not really a fair comparison.
He could have engaged in spontaneous human combustion...
Isn't that sort of what happened to Feanor in the Silmarillion? (s/human/elvish)
Then he died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; and his likeness has never again appeared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos. Thus ended the mightiest of the Noldor, of whose deeds came both their greatest renown and their most grievous woe.
In the article, they state the energy density of this new fuel is 600 watt hours / litre, with the goal of eventually getting it up to 2200.
According to wikipedia, gasoline has an energy density of 32 megajoules per litre, which if I did the conversion right, comes out to about 8890 watt hours / litre. This sounds like a big difference until you consider that gas engines are typically somewhere around %20-30 efficient. It appears they may some day make a fuel that's roughly equivalent to gasoline.
Slashdot Mirror
I like your post. I am curious, though, why you thought pulling the ad was over the top. To me it seems like common sense, given that a) children have poor judgement, and don't always do what they're told and b) parents can't watch them 24/7.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that some kid somewhere is going to wake up in the middle of the night, remember that cool commercial they saw earlier that day, sneak into his/her parent's bedroom and steal the car keys from atop the nightstand or inside a desk drawer, and then go downstairs, start the car, and, if they're lucky, drive into a ditch. I'm all for personal responsibility in most things, but children don't have the judgment to act responsibly in all cases, and it seems unwise to encourage them to do dangerous things.
Since it has become popular in this thread to mention religious affiliation, I will also disclose that I am a Christian, and (to preempt anyone from accusing me of being a lazy TV-addicted parent) add that I don't have kids and I don't watch TV.
Does anyone have any statistics on the number of car wrecks caused by underage drivers? I doubt it's a terribly uncommon occurrence.
I agree that not watching TV is a wonderful idea in general, but as another poster said, TV ads don't have pre-announced schedules. If you want to avoid one ad, you have to avoid TV altogether. I think its unrealistic to expect parents to tell their kids "I'm sorry, you can't watch TV at all until you've reached legal driving age because you might see one ad that would give you bad ideas."
As the other reply said, a toddler need only release the parking brake - neither being able to see over the dashboard nor being seatbelted in are prerequisites to causing a car wreck. And it isn't just toddlers who might cause problems - children of any age could see this and think it's a good idea.
Figure 17 is particularly interesting.
I'm not surprised that there aren't any DMCA-like provisions, but the article also mentioned the problem of theatergoers videotaping movies, which is apparently legal there. I suspect sharing the resulting video is probably still illegal (according to both Canadian law and the Berne convention), but it's easier to stop people from videotaping movies in the theaters than it is to stop them from uploading files onto peer-to-peer networks from their homes (or elsewhere, if they're sufficiently paranoid), therefore copyright laws are not as effectively enforced, therefore content owners are angry at Canada. Is this what the real conflict is, or is my understanding of the situation wrong?
It would be interesting to know just what Canada's obligations are under the Berne convention or any other IP treaties they may have signed. Is this just a bunch of large corporations whining that the rights they think they ought to have aren't universally recognized, or is Canada actually breaking a treaty obligation? Or is the Berne convention sufficiently vague that both sides can plausibly believe they are right? What if a country doesn't want to participate in the Berne convention or trips anymore? (The US didn't sign on until 1989, now we're trying to force our IP laws on everyone else.)
Good:
Bad (maybe I'm picking nits, but these things really do annoy me):
I am more concerned with being able to select the best CPU/GPU combo, and not being stuck with a great CPU and lousy video card or vice versa. And by "lousy video card", I don't really mean poor performance so much as a lack of decent drivers. This is something that can change after buying the hardware; under Linux, the quality of the Nvidia drivers (which I currently hold my nose and use; last time I tried to use an ATI driver, they hadn't yet ported it to the version of X.org that I wanted to use) varies from release to release. It would be nice to at least have the option of replacing the video card rather than having to replace the whole system if driver quality takes a turn for the worst.
I agree with your assesment; I tried shadowbane once, but the client kept crashing and I gave up.
The way it was explained to me (by an ethics prof a Christian college), there are two main schools of thought when it comes to Christianity and the environment:
According to dominion theology, God gave us the world to do whatever we want with. "Rule over the earth and subdue it, be fruitful and multiply, etc..." The earth exists only to serve our purposes. We might choose to avoid widespread environmental destruction, but only because we need a comfortable place to live, and not because the world has any intrinsic value of its own.
According to stewardship theology, God gave us the world so that we could take care of it, and it's something that he rather we didn't destroy. We have the authority to make decisions regarding its governance, but we should take care of it, like we might take care of a valuable painting that we couldn't paint ourselves, and who's artist might return some day and be upset if we drew mustaches on all the characters depicted therein.
There were other options that didn't mesh well with Christianity, as well, including the idea that the world is God, and that when we damage the environment we hurt God directly.
Here is Christianity explained as simply as I know how:
God created humanity, but we're quite fallible and often make life miserable for ourselves and each other through our own failings. The way the world happens to work, God can't have a decent relationship with us under such circumstances. The workaround to this problem is that the burden of sin can be removed if an innocent persons accepts the punishment for sin in our place (which is where Jesus comes in, and the reason why he died in such an unpleasant way). We then have the option to cast off our shame and guilt and restore our relationship with God by asking forgiveness for our sin (for which Jesus died), and then when we die we can live with Jesus forever in heaven.
I hope this was helpful in some fashion. I have skipped over quite a few things; creation, the role of satan, the end times, the return of Jesus, the holy spirit, etc... Most of these things are details that Christians may disagree over and yet remain Christians. For instance, it doesn't matter a bit (as far as I understand) to a person's salvation whether they believe the world is 6 thousand years old or 4 billion.
I find it hard to believe that Rumsfeld's earlier offers of resignation were an act, because there would have been nothing gained from it. It's a sort of admission of failure, an acknowledgement that things aren't going well. Politically, it would have been better for Rumsfeld to "stay the course" and pretend that everything is going fine.
As others have stated, a uniform distribution is unlikely. I believe the real effect of uninformed votes is to bias the election results towards whichever candidate is most successful at marketing him/herself, which often means the candidate with the biggest campaign budget.
An easier, less controversial solution would be to require labelling for all electronic devices that would tell potential buyers how much energy the devices use. Something like "this devices uses a maximum of 200 watts when in use, 30 watts when idle, and 10 watts in standby mode". We have labels like these on water heaters and the like, why not smaller devices as well?
The real problem here is that if buyers can't distinguish a good product from a bad product, bad products will dominate the market. See A Market for Lemons for some insight into why this is so.
Here is an interesting article from Linux Weekly News: Who maintains RPM? Makes you wonder about the future of that package format. Unfortunately, it would not be an easy thing for Red Hat to switch to apt or anything else, we'll probably have multiple incompatible package formats for a long time to come.
I don't think it's fair to criticise the parent's understanding of orbital mechanics as there are in fact several valid ways of defending a patch of land from space that is not on the equator.
The most obvious, as you allude to, is a geosynchronous orbit, which can easily have line-of-sight to most of the United States (I'm not sure about Alaska). Whether we can, say, aim a laser accurately at that distance may be questionable, though.
Another possibility is to have a number of weaponised satellites which take turns passing over the U.S., much like GPS satellites do now.
A third option is to attach weapons to long space-elevator-like tethers which could perhaps be attached to the earth somewhere (not necessarily the equator, though that is the most obvious choice). This is not possible with current technology, however.
The disadvantage of the first two approaches is that our weaponized satellites would be above other countries as well as our own much or all of the time. This is likely to make any nation we don't get along well with very uncomfortable, and may inspire them to put their own weapons platforms in orbit with the stated purpose of defending themselves from the U.S., but also with the capability of attacking the U.S. directly.
The article does not say what hrtimer and the real-time preemption patch actually do, nor does it say that those are the patches that were added to the kernel, merely that Gleixner worked on those as well as whatever those 136 patches are that made it into the kernel. So, what actually changed? Were internal APIs rearranged? Were long-held spinlocks replaced with shorter-duration spinlocks? Can the kernel preempt things it couldn't preempt before? Does the kernel export any new APIs to user space? What sort of improvements can we expect with these patches?
The article was quite vague in its technical details, so I was hoping someone could fill them in.
There has been a substantial ongoing effort to provide real-time support in Linux for quite a few years now; what do these particular patches do that hasn't been done before?
There doesn't seem to be an option anymore to do what most people are probably going to want to do, which is just set the homepage to whatever's in the current tab. One step forward, two steps back.
I think one of the main things that makes the slashdot system work is metamoderation - the moderators are subject to random, annonymous peer review. When moderators mod posts up or down because of their own biases rather than the merits of the posts, they'll loose their karma when their ratings get metamoderated by someone not in their on clique.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the entire userbase may develop a bias of its own, but I don't think anyone can reasonably characterize slashdot as a monoculture.
Does anyone know what the numbers are? How much of our population growth is from immigration vs birth rate and increased longevity?
The cytherean atmospheric pressure is also about 90 times earth's, and it's almost entirely carbon dioxide (while here we have about 380 parts per million, iirc), so it's not really a fair comparison.
Isn't that sort of what happened to Feanor in the Silmarillion? (s/human/elvish)
In the article, they state the energy density of this new fuel is 600 watt hours / litre, with the goal of eventually getting it up to 2200.
According to wikipedia, gasoline has an energy density of 32 megajoules per litre, which if I did the conversion right, comes out to about 8890 watt hours / litre. This sounds like a big difference until you consider that gas engines are typically somewhere around %20-30 efficient. It appears they may some day make a fuel that's roughly equivalent to gasoline.