Seems like common sense, biologically. More directed lights and more intense lights hitting an eyeball probably tricks the mind into wakefulness; less directed or less intense lights is more conducive to sleep behaviour. Not all that surprising. Also, this study can't be entirely conclusive with only 12 subjects being tested...
I'm just going to go "meh" for now.
Public skepticism about GMO's has been growing in China and the government there is extremely concerned with anything that can enrage popular discontent.
Just because it's no longer legal to grow genetically modified foods in China doesn't mean that Chinese corporations won't use them. Making GM seeds illegal cuts out a lot of red tape for both the government and the companies, gives China plausible deniability if things go badly in the future, and also gives the government a way to research China's own GMO crops that will somehow be different from the dangerous Western-created GMO products.
all that stands between us and censorship, corruption, secrecy or other Big Brother-esque ideology are people the public label "vigilantes". Would that not suggest that government, democracy, and even capitalism has failed?
I don't have mod points but I would agree with the previous post. Even implying that age is a consideration in any way would just invite a lawsuit. When you say the old timers are more capable of "getting working products delivered on time and on budget", how do you measure this? Ask questions that might flesh out whether your measure of deliverables is the same as your potential hiree's measure of deliverables.
What you want is not so much an employee that is necessarily older but an employee with predictable skills, attitude, and way of thinking (or at least tolerable) in your eyes. As a bonus, you end up with the most compatible person for the role, regardless of age.
Even if they did, tin snips still aren't very effective at getting open blister packs safely unless you're wearing heavy work gloves, in my experience. You'll still end up with a sharp edge whipping around, even if you're not ripping it open with your hands (which is undoubtably unsafe).
The fact that we have to have this discussion at all just goes to show the level of insanity that went into blister packs.
Assuming the creators of these packages never had the consumer in mind, what if we reverse the thinking and ignore their product... What's the most effective way to open these blister packs?
I was thinking creating a commercial acid-dropper (burn your skin acid, not burn your brain acid)! Something that looks like a coffeemaker that lets you put a package underneath, it'll drop a few drops of concentrated acid around the perimeter of the package and then after a second or two, drop a neutralizing base on the package. No fuss, no mess, no edges because they've essentially been melted into rounded edges... So what if the product might be turned into slag??
This is tantamount to a complete change of rules in the sales of these. The original target markets are the youth.
You must have been away from video games for a while... Have you priced out a full-out Rockband set? Rockband 2 sells for about $190 US. To play on a $300 console. That's out of the price range of most youth. If you want to move on to a "premium drum set", that's another $300. A "premium" guitar? $70. Then there are the customizable skins at $20 a pop... You can also buy a synchronized light and fog machine... A Rockband obsession can cost you more than $1000 easily.
Amazon's 6 screens of fake band game accessories would attest that Rockband and Guitar Hero have broadened their audience to include older, wealthier crowds.
Also, while not quite in the same era as the Beatles, how many of today's teens would care for "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith"? They created that anyway. I would argue the Beatles may be more universally accepted by different age groups.
Um, stipulating that people around the world are generally liberal, if true, means there would be no bias as it would actually be representative.
And your definition of liberal is crafted out of thion air, wrong, and ridiculous.
Nice try at a troll though.
Wasn't trolling. And I think you missed the Colbert joke entirely, which is probably why you're trolling the grand-parent poster and me. When Colbert was talking about a "liberal bias" the joke was on the "bias" part. Reality doesn't have a "bias" towards liberal-ness. It's a function of having a society comprised of "Joe Average".
Oh, and "liberal", according to Merriam Webster suggests, "the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties". Unless you believe the dictionaries are crafting opinion "out of thin air, wrong, and ridiculous", the dictionary definition of "liberal" should encompass most right-wing and left-wing thought, except the wing-nuts on the far side of either end who want us ALL to think/act in a certain way (which Colbert was poking at).
Again, mathematically, there probably is no "bias", because as you put it, "it would actually be representative"; enjoy the humor! Colbert's not as dumb as you might believe he is.
But thanks for the troll; until you criticized plasmacutter and Colbert, I had actually assumed Colbert was making a throw-away joke, not a wise observation. It took your post for me to realize the subtle truthiness of his statement.
It's funny that your response to his statement is to quote a farce news show (you did know your witty title is actually a farce didn't you?) then express your intolerance and make a hypocritical ass of yourself.
Think about how pathetic you are that you think a comedy show is worth quoting for political purposes.
Unless you were trying to demonstrate that your opinion is a joke, I suppose that could be why you did it.
Actually, wouldn't the title also be a mathematical fact? Most countries have fringe groups on the extreme right and the extreme left, ranging from fascist to communist... If we had a large enough population, wouldn't we see a regression towards the mean? Extreme religious groups fight amongst themselves, extreme economic views fight amongst themselves, the rest of the world votes for something in between; a "liberal bias", where liberal = !extreme.
Giving the parent post the benefit of the doubt, he might actually be looking at political opinion where the population=world and the reliability and validity of p>n (n=our own little sphere of influence). In which case, the parent poster and Colbert may both be right.
Like on a 3G iPhone? Their pseudo-GPS using wireless access points gets pretty darn close. It usually pinpoints me within a building or two.
I think it would be useful to at least have this option on my UMPC, even through Firefox. Business trips can often take me to places I have no interest in going; once there, at least I wouldn't be totally lost.
In fairness, I've seen colleagues freak out and it's because they sucked. I work in an educational environment and a lot of the IT people that come and go here join up over the summer or winter holidays and think things are just ducky and that they're da bomb for knowing how to hook a printer up to a Mac. Then September rolls around and all heck breaks loose. Our IT director has this "team" mentality where the existing, talented IT guys have to support the less talented ones and the one group freaks out at the doubled workload and the other group is just running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some of us have come to the conclusion that doubling our work but culling the weak would actually make our situation more manageable.
If you were the boss, you'd do well to fire the underperformers along with the malicious complainers. And then take the time to hire better people. Then you'd be a hero.
Nevermind that this view is akin to calling someone who picks a lock a "locksmith" or someone who breaks down a door a "carpenter".
I'd give you a +1 insightful for this if I could!
As an aside, I always thought of a "cracker" as a subset of hackers too, but the kind that figured out how to create a TSR or just photocopy a code-wheel to bypass game copy-protections. Then the 90s came and they started embracing "pirate". Damn kids these days and their modern cool-cat lingo, co-opting my language.
For once slashdot uses the term 'cracker' instead of 'hacker', and still people complain! I'm beginning to see how this works:p
I sometimes get uppity about how hacker is used to mean cracker since I learned the distinction a few years ago,
Back in the late 70s when I was messing with computers, black boxes, and such, a hacker was just generally someone who was skilled or creative enough to make/use technology do something new and unexpected. That included everything from using a cereal box toy to make free phone calls to building a robot. In this day and age where all software and sites claim to be secure, if someone can do something unintended on those systems, that would fit the 'making technology do something unexpected' description.
I would be very sad when the day comes that John Draper ("Captain Crunch") is referred to as a "cracker" instead of "phreaker" or "hacker". And face it, with the way some geeks now use "cracker", Draper's conviction on toll fraud charges (probably "terrorism" today) would certainly make him a "cracker"... And that's just wrong. I say we just keep the term "hacker" more generic - at least until us old-timers die.
Nope. You're right about the United States, as far as I know. We're in Canada. The land of music downloads.
We in Canada can get an iPhone with a 3 year voice plan only. What I was talking about was that I don't need a data plan or 3G because I can get public wi-fi anywhere I travel, i.e. North America. I wasn't saying that the iPhone was available without a data plan all over North America! For that to happen, Canada would need to take over the U.S. first.
The upshot is that the actual "minimum" requirement for an iPhone is a 3 year contract, regardless of the type of contract. You can get just a voice plan and request all data to your iPhone be blocked at their end. It requires not falling for the sales rep's pressure selling and FUD and calling customer service over and over until you get 2nd tier customer service or better (who know what they're talking about). You then turn off the 3G and Data Roaming options on your iPhone as well (or Jailbreak the thing).
I actually bought an iPhone without the data plan and just a 3-year $20 voice plan. Given a choice between buying an iPod Touch or a cheaper iPhone and getting rid of having to carry a separate cell phone as a bonus, I think I came out ahead.
Everyone asks "what about 3G and data access??" but I'm surrounded by wi-fi everywhere. Coupled with Starbucks on every street corner in North America, I'm also set without data roaming.
That just takes a spray of acid to the face or a dunk in a chemical vat. No training time whatsoever.
On another note, I get peeved by everyone ignoring Batman's "World's Greatest Detective" moniker and generally accepted reputation as one of DC Universe's smartest humans. Everyone focuses on Batman's physical skills where, in "reality", having keen observational skills and an intellect allowing superior strategems probably alleviates a lot of the need for ultimate physical skills.
Apple have no choice - if only IBM had retained such control over the IBM PC. And where are IBM now?
In a position where they don't have to overstock inventory and cater to the whims of fickle Joe Consumer, competing for decreasing revenue; where they can choose to work with their former PC competitors (or not), offering relatively platform agnostic solutions to their enterprise level clients (and thereby making money as everyone else's middle man).
Palm held on to their technology too tightly and were also overtaken.
Retaining intellectual property is only useful if you can leverage that advantage to be the only game in town. If other competitors start muscling into your game, it might be time to switch games.
What Google has done is represent the world, mathematically, as it existed a moment ago. This is a massively impressive feat which we slashdotters don't give enough credit. On the other hand, I still say, "meh".
Think of it this way, Google has created a "model" world. I'm not thinking "model" in the scientific terms but "model" as in the Gundam robots with snap-tite (tm) parts. Instead of plastic bits, this model Earth is built with data. It's pretty to look at and has a lot of great details. It's a darned good-looking likeness of our world. (And no, I don't mean Google Earth, either.)
But it can't predict things like a scientific model.
One still needs the scientific model and hypothesis testing to make predictions and see what our world will be like in the future. This, in turn, also helps explain how or why things came before. The Google model just shows what currently is.
I wouldn't say that the internet is making us stupider, but blogs are certainly making stupid people more visible. But Slashdot's been around long before blogs became popular and the visibility hasn't threatened this crowd.
The gist of my argument is that fact retention will be superseded by efficient fact retrieval and synthesis; and that wisdom (knowing when to and knowing why as opposed to knowing what) will probably gain more importance as a desired personality trait.
The same argument holds for Google, since what will follow will undoubtedly use Google as a baseline.
If I'm understanding correctly, you're berating him and accusing him of trolling because repeated, willful dishonesty isn't "useless" as it gets media attention for Greenpeace?
This is frequently used in government. Here, in Ontario, Canada, a former provincial minister of education was caught on tape telling people he wanted to "create a crisis" because when people are up in arms, it's easier to bring about change. So, I understand the idea that using misleading information is not "useless" even if it is unethical. To claim that misleading information is automatically of no value is short-sighted. I think the parent post is making a (strongly worded) distinction between "useless" applications of information and "unethical" applications of information.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like common sense, biologically. More directed lights and more intense lights hitting an eyeball probably tricks the mind into wakefulness; less directed or less intense lights is more conducive to sleep behaviour. Not all that surprising. Also, this study can't be entirely conclusive with only 12 subjects being tested... I'm just going to go "meh" for now.
Public skepticism about GMO's has been growing in China and the government there is extremely concerned with anything that can enrage popular discontent.
Just because it's no longer legal to grow genetically modified foods in China doesn't mean that Chinese corporations won't use them. Making GM seeds illegal cuts out a lot of red tape for both the government and the companies, gives China plausible deniability if things go badly in the future, and also gives the government a way to research China's own GMO crops that will somehow be different from the dangerous Western-created GMO products.
all that stands between us and censorship, corruption, secrecy or other Big Brother-esque ideology are people the public label "vigilantes". Would that not suggest that government, democracy, and even capitalism has failed?
What you want is not so much an employee that is necessarily older but an employee with predictable skills, attitude, and way of thinking (or at least tolerable) in your eyes. As a bonus, you end up with the most compatible person for the role, regardless of age.
Even if they did, tin snips still aren't very effective at getting open blister packs safely unless you're wearing heavy work gloves, in my experience. You'll still end up with a sharp edge whipping around, even if you're not ripping it open with your hands (which is undoubtably unsafe).
The fact that we have to have this discussion at all just goes to show the level of insanity that went into blister packs.
Assuming the creators of these packages never had the consumer in mind, what if we reverse the thinking and ignore their product... What's the most effective way to open these blister packs?
I was thinking creating a commercial acid-dropper (burn your skin acid, not burn your brain acid)! Something that looks like a coffeemaker that lets you put a package underneath, it'll drop a few drops of concentrated acid around the perimeter of the package and then after a second or two, drop a neutralizing base on the package. No fuss, no mess, no edges because they've essentially been melted into rounded edges... So what if the product might be turned into slag??
Yes, I'm bored at work.
This is tantamount to a complete change of rules in the sales of these. The original target markets are the youth.
You must have been away from video games for a while... Have you priced out a full-out Rockband set? Rockband 2 sells for about $190 US. To play on a $300 console. That's out of the price range of most youth. If you want to move on to a "premium drum set", that's another $300. A "premium" guitar? $70. Then there are the customizable skins at $20 a pop... You can also buy a synchronized light and fog machine... A Rockband obsession can cost you more than $1000 easily.
Amazon's 6 screens of fake band game accessories would attest that Rockband and Guitar Hero have broadened their audience to include older, wealthier crowds.
Also, while not quite in the same era as the Beatles, how many of today's teens would care for "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith"? They created that anyway. I would argue the Beatles may be more universally accepted by different age groups.
Another "positive" application?
Once this gets into pill or injectable form, I'd imagine governments and military organizations will have spotless human rights records.
Um, stipulating that people around the world are generally liberal, if true, means there would be no bias as it would actually be representative.
And your definition of liberal is crafted out of thion air, wrong, and ridiculous.
Nice try at a troll though.
Wasn't trolling. And I think you missed the Colbert joke entirely, which is probably why you're trolling the grand-parent poster and me. When Colbert was talking about a "liberal bias" the joke was on the "bias" part. Reality doesn't have a "bias" towards liberal-ness. It's a function of having a society comprised of "Joe Average".
Oh, and "liberal", according to Merriam Webster suggests, "the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties". Unless you believe the dictionaries are crafting opinion "out of thin air, wrong, and ridiculous", the dictionary definition of "liberal" should encompass most right-wing and left-wing thought, except the wing-nuts on the far side of either end who want us ALL to think/act in a certain way (which Colbert was poking at).
Again, mathematically, there probably is no "bias", because as you put it, "it would actually be representative"; enjoy the humor! Colbert's not as dumb as you might believe he is.
But thanks for the troll; until you criticized plasmacutter and Colbert, I had actually assumed Colbert was making a throw-away joke, not a wise observation. It took your post for me to realize the subtle truthiness of his statement.
It's funny that your response to his statement is to quote a farce news show (you did know your witty title is actually a farce didn't you?) then express your intolerance and make a hypocritical ass of yourself.
Think about how pathetic you are that you think a comedy show is worth quoting for political purposes.
Unless you were trying to demonstrate that your opinion is a joke, I suppose that could be why you did it.
Actually, wouldn't the title also be a mathematical fact? Most countries have fringe groups on the extreme right and the extreme left, ranging from fascist to communist... If we had a large enough population, wouldn't we see a regression towards the mean? Extreme religious groups fight amongst themselves, extreme economic views fight amongst themselves, the rest of the world votes for something in between; a "liberal bias", where liberal = !extreme.
Giving the parent post the benefit of the doubt, he might actually be looking at political opinion where the population=world and the reliability and validity of p>n (n=our own little sphere of influence). In which case, the parent poster and Colbert may both be right.
Like on a 3G iPhone? Their pseudo-GPS using wireless access points gets pretty darn close. It usually pinpoints me within a building or two.
I think it would be useful to at least have this option on my UMPC, even through Firefox. Business trips can often take me to places I have no interest in going; once there, at least I wouldn't be totally lost.
I don't know Wallyworld's terms of service, but are the customers within their rights to demand refunds?
I suspect it depends on whether they use the term "purchase" anywhere on the eula or site...
In fairness, I've seen colleagues freak out and it's because they sucked. I work in an educational environment and a lot of the IT people that come and go here join up over the summer or winter holidays and think things are just ducky and that they're da bomb for knowing how to hook a printer up to a Mac. Then September rolls around and all heck breaks loose. Our IT director has this "team" mentality where the existing, talented IT guys have to support the less talented ones and the one group freaks out at the doubled workload and the other group is just running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some of us have come to the conclusion that doubling our work but culling the weak would actually make our situation more manageable.
If you were the boss, you'd do well to fire the underperformers along with the malicious complainers. And then take the time to hire better people. Then you'd be a hero.
Nevermind that this view is akin to calling someone who picks a lock a "locksmith" or someone who breaks down a door a "carpenter".
I'd give you a +1 insightful for this if I could!
As an aside, I always thought of a "cracker" as a subset of hackers too, but the kind that figured out how to create a TSR or just photocopy a code-wheel to bypass game copy-protections. Then the 90s came and they started embracing "pirate". Damn kids these days and their modern cool-cat lingo, co-opting my language.
For once slashdot uses the term 'cracker' instead of 'hacker', and still people complain! I'm beginning to see how this works :p
I sometimes get uppity about how hacker is used to mean cracker since I learned the distinction a few years ago,
Back in the late 70s when I was messing with computers, black boxes, and such, a hacker was just generally someone who was skilled or creative enough to make/use technology do something new and unexpected. That included everything from using a cereal box toy to make free phone calls to building a robot. In this day and age where all software and sites claim to be secure, if someone can do something unintended on those systems, that would fit the 'making technology do something unexpected' description.
I would be very sad when the day comes that John Draper ("Captain Crunch") is referred to as a "cracker" instead of "phreaker" or "hacker". And face it, with the way some geeks now use "cracker", Draper's conviction on toll fraud charges (probably "terrorism" today) would certainly make him a "cracker"... And that's just wrong. I say we just keep the term "hacker" more generic - at least until us old-timers die.
Nope. You're right about the United States, as far as I know. We're in Canada. The land of music downloads.
We in Canada can get an iPhone with a 3 year voice plan only. What I was talking about was that I don't need a data plan or 3G because I can get public wi-fi anywhere I travel, i.e. North America. I wasn't saying that the iPhone was available without a data plan all over North America! For that to happen, Canada would need to take over the U.S. first.
Google "Rogers 'no data plan'" and you'll be surprised with everything that comes up. Here's a good one:
http://www.ehmac.ca/ipod-itunes-iphone-apple-tv/67337-no-data-plan-fido.html
The upshot is that the actual "minimum" requirement for an iPhone is a 3 year contract, regardless of the type of contract. You can get just a voice plan and request all data to your iPhone be blocked at their end. It requires not falling for the sales rep's pressure selling and FUD and calling customer service over and over until you get 2nd tier customer service or better (who know what they're talking about). You then turn off the 3G and Data Roaming options on your iPhone as well (or Jailbreak the thing).
I actually bought an iPhone without the data plan and just a 3-year $20 voice plan. Given a choice between buying an iPod Touch or a cheaper iPhone and getting rid of having to carry a separate cell phone as a bonus, I think I came out ahead.
Everyone asks "what about 3G and data access??" but I'm surrounded by wi-fi everywhere. Coupled with Starbucks on every street corner in North America, I'm also set without data roaming.
I'm kind of hoping for Man-bat myself. Batman striving to regain his humanity, Man-bat striving to be the perfect evolution - away from humanity.
Also good chance to see Gotham in the air, Ironman-like special effects, introduce a bunch of toys... And they get to avoid Mr. Freeze.
The Dread Pirate Batman?
I'd have modded you insightful or informative...
Batman WAS a pirate:
http://www.amazon.com/Legends-Batman-Pirate-Two-Face/dp/B000MI42AO
That just takes a spray of acid to the face or a dunk in a chemical vat. No training time whatsoever.
On another note, I get peeved by everyone ignoring Batman's "World's Greatest Detective" moniker and generally accepted reputation as one of DC Universe's smartest humans. Everyone focuses on Batman's physical skills where, in "reality", having keen observational skills and an intellect allowing superior strategems probably alleviates a lot of the need for ultimate physical skills.
Apple have no choice - if only IBM had retained such control over the IBM PC. And where are IBM now?
In a position where they don't have to overstock inventory and cater to the whims of fickle Joe Consumer, competing for decreasing revenue; where they can choose to work with their former PC competitors (or not), offering relatively platform agnostic solutions to their enterprise level clients (and thereby making money as everyone else's middle man).
Palm held on to their technology too tightly and were also overtaken.
Retaining intellectual property is only useful if you can leverage that advantage to be the only game in town. If other competitors start muscling into your game, it might be time to switch games.
What Google has done is represent the world, mathematically, as it existed a moment ago. This is a massively impressive feat which we slashdotters don't give enough credit. On the other hand, I still say, "meh".
Think of it this way, Google has created a "model" world. I'm not thinking "model" in the scientific terms but "model" as in the Gundam robots with snap-tite (tm) parts. Instead of plastic bits, this model Earth is built with data. It's pretty to look at and has a lot of great details. It's a darned good-looking likeness of our world. (And no, I don't mean Google Earth, either.)
But it can't predict things like a scientific model.
One still needs the scientific model and hypothesis testing to make predictions and see what our world will be like in the future. This, in turn, also helps explain how or why things came before. The Google model just shows what currently is.
I actually wrote a blog article about this, not necessarily relating to Google, but the upcoming "natural language search engines":
http://www.cybercognition.ca/?p=18
The gist of my argument is that fact retention will be superseded by efficient fact retrieval and synthesis; and that wisdom (knowing when to and knowing why as opposed to knowing what) will probably gain more importance as a desired personality trait.
The same argument holds for Google, since what will follow will undoubtedly use Google as a baseline.
If I'm understanding correctly, you're berating him and accusing him of trolling because repeated, willful dishonesty isn't "useless" as it gets media attention for Greenpeace?
This is frequently used in government. Here, in Ontario, Canada, a former provincial minister of education was caught on tape telling people he wanted to "create a crisis" because when people are up in arms, it's easier to bring about change. So, I understand the idea that using misleading information is not "useless" even if it is unethical. To claim that misleading information is automatically of no value is short-sighted. I think the parent post is making a (strongly worded) distinction between "useless" applications of information and "unethical" applications of information.