I don't want to hold anything - I want a couple of cameras and some software to track my hands and fingers. Gesture based input with multiple finger positions available would be way better than a mouse. This would even get me to learn sign language to compare it to voice recognition. It would be close to magic: waving at lights and pointing to appliances to turn them on or off, controlling the volume of TV, stereo, or whatever with a simple gesture. I want to lean back in my easy chair and point to my wall mounted flat panel so I can browse without sitting at a desk.
All these people seem to think that getting to Mars is the ultimate goal, that gathering scientific data is the point, and we've been to the moon already. This is starry eyed gee-whiz thinking. The quote at the end of TFA explains the REAL goal - we need a permanent colony somewhere other than here. Yes the Moon is a harsher environment, but the cost in time and money to put a colony on Mars is so much higher than putting one on the Moon that it just doesn't make sense. Sure, while we're there we should do some science, but getting people to live there will produce more sustained value than dozens of brief scientific visits to places with only scientific interest. Look at how they consider the Moon now - if a place is only worth visiting a couple of times at most, we're going to run out of places to go pretty quick. A colony would provide LOTS of incentive for private company participation. Building an Earth/Moon ferry service is feasible in 50 years - no private company is going to invest in one to Mars anytime soon. I want a Moonbase!
It's not the agents that are going out away from me, it's me who's going out away from my usual computer and data. When I think of agents, I think of MY programs and desktop following me around and running on whatever is closest to me. That means my agents will inevitably be hosted as a guest on all sorts of computers, from the places I work to where I shop. I'd want my agents to watch my credit cards and challenge any charge that doesn't come from whatever my current location is. They should get some cache space on the bus computer while I'm riding to work, and be able to display my personal desktop on any handy display I want it on. When I go to a friend's house my stuff should "follow" me (actually just setup communication to my home/work boxen transparently.) If there's enuf local resources, I'd want a local VM running my entire workstation setup, minus whatever sensitive data I want to keep in a vault. I don't want to "send out" agents on the net without me - I want a "cloud" of agents dragging my corner of the net along with ME as I go out in the real world.
Protein. Pick your fav. The trick is, NOTHING that will cause insulin release. Delay that until lunch, and you'll feel great and lose weight. Insulin is an anabolic steroid - you can build muscle and store fat while insulin is in your blood, but you can't burn fat. Insulin takes a few hours to wear off, so when you get up in the morning is when you're at the lowest level. If you just skip breakfast, your body will store anything it can when you finally eat to protect itself from possible starvation. Eat some protein and you'll have nutrition your brain will run just fine on, your muscles and tissues won't shrink or waste away, but your fat will be put to use for what glucose (via glycogen) you need. A bit o' coffee and a handfull of the right vitamins, and your morning will be bright while your belly stays flat.
This is NOT a low carb diet either; eat lots of fruit later in the day if you want. Just be aware of your timing and hormones. If you actually want to build muscle, then eat a big meal shortly after your workout. The insulin will help your muscles grow. (So does testosterone, so hang some pron around your home gym:-D )
If you close a parenthetical statment with a smiley face, is the closing paren optional?
Most nuclear power proponents are missing one important fact: We use concrete and lead to "shield" the plants. There actually is no such thing as a radiation shield. All we can do is slow it down a whole lot by surrounding it with mass. The problem with this is that the nuclear plant itself becomes radioactive. The whole building soaks up the radiation and holds it. Once it's been running for 30 years, the operators can only do one hour shifts or they get too much exposure. After 50 years of operation, a typical plant is so contaminated that you can either dismantle it and put the whole building and the ground it stands on into a nuclear waste repository, or you can close it and keep people away for 500 YEARS before it cools enough to even approach. The only way nuclear plants can be called "cheap" is with shortsighted budgets that don't take this into account. The long-term view shows a fast return followed by a LONG period of worse than useless liability.
The US is all of 200 years old. It's pretty arrogant to make stuff this dangerous and force our grandkids to deal with it. Take this dirty path now and you'll lower the incentive to develop the alternative sources that are less ethically (and economically) questionable.
I'm all for nuclear power. As long as it's 93,000,000 miles away, right where it belongs.
Since your target is ~450 miles away, do you know for a fact that every neutrino that you shoot is aimed well enough that it necessarily must pass through the second detector? Could it be that your aim is just ever so slightly off? The explanation may be well over my head, but it seems to me that we haven't got the technology to aim a neutrino, and the creation process itself must produce variations in the initial trajectories. Since the Earth is spinning, orbiting, and otherwise experiencing accellerations that the neutrinos are supposedly not, does the neutrino beam drift? Just wondering...
Had I been given this assignment I'd do the same thing I've done numerous times before: ask a friend to have a duel between our home computers. Every time I change my firewall I get him to bang on it just to check. When I get a new tool I often let it loose on his home machine (with permission). There is no reason at all to assume that this assignment requires the students to break the law. Any computer on the net can be considered "an internet server" if it responds to even one port or a single ICMP type. It MAY be a problem for the students on a campus network in their dorms because of the IT department's policy, but those who have their own 'net connection can do it without breaking the law. Give them a little credit: Any student who has made it to this class will already know how to act responsibly on the net. There's nothing to see here. Move along...
Everybody is looking in the wrong direction. The guy isn't immune - he's incredibly susceptible. He caught it, it killed off all the cells that it can enter easily (including the antibodies that are tested for), and found itself with nowhere to replicate. It dies, and the progenitor cells of his immune system replenished what was missing. He was probably immunocompromised for a little under 2 weeks, and then things are fine. He's more lucky to have not developed pneumonia or sarcoma or another opportunistic infection before his immune system recovered from the fast decimation of a subset of his t-cells.
There! I've run rings around you logically! rm -rf * --- how to intercourse the penguin
At any given point in history, in all cultures known and unknown, if you were to ask the current experts and intellectuals they would universally state that everyone who had come before them had at most a small clue, but that they themselves are finally beginning to understand the workings of the universe and creation. There is no reason to suppose that in 100 years or so they'll look back and say that we knew it all; they too will call us ignorant of the truth. Science is just today's most popular religion, one that denies (in the common interpretation) that mind/consciousness is somehow suspect and not a valid subject of study if one wants to truly understand the world. Next century the common understanding will include the observer of quantum physics as central, possibly paramount in creation. The next big question will then be the psychological equivalent of the copernican revolution: Is the self the center of the universe (pre-copernicus geocentric interpretation) or is God (post-copernicus equivalent)?
Right now on Earth you can find organisms that will survive and even reproduce under martian conditions. We also have numerous lifeforms that can survive quite handily in various layers of the venusian atmosphere (tho not on the ground). Admittedly most of these extremophiles are single-celled creatures, but they CAN survive. I for one feel that (wo)mankind should take every possible opportunity to spread life wherever we can. The question of whether there is already some form of life there, especially on Mars (just because we can more easily envision it) is indeed a bump on the road that must not be ignored. Nonetheless, I think one of the most noble projects we can undertake that isn't self-serving would be to give other planets and future lifeforms a head start over just plain chance. Life may not be able to start under venusian conditions, but once it gets a foothold life can be pretty tenacious. I'd like to call this an obligation or a moral/ethical imperative, but that would take a MUCH longer discussion than would fit in a comment on slashdot. We keep calling Venus a woman, we know she's hot, so lets give her some of our seed! (Now THAT was for the/. crowd).
Yes all the other well meaning advice is good, some of it essential to good code/comments. But it always pays to put some humor into your code, be it funny variable names (that don't sacrifice clarity!) or entertaining commentary. With proper variable assignment, I've written lines that said open("the_pod_bay_doors", HAL) else print ImSorryDaveICantDoThat; My favorite opportunity is when you want to say something to the user and have them hit the any key so you can continue. The input statement needs a variable, the enduser will never see it's name, and you'll never need to reference it anywhere. Perfect for one liners laid like a bomb waiting for some co-worker to find. "Ira_eats_pork", "Diane_wears_army_boots", and "Kamal_loves_the_Backstreet_Boys" have all brought great exclamations from other cubicles where I've been working.
This is really going to be a leap forward in the study of near death experiences. If they get this med-tech working safely enough it will probably spawn a few religions. I'd be willing to try a half-hour or so if they can get over 99% success at reanimation.
You need to make this system wide or the end user WILL change it on you. How depends on which distro you are running. Also, note that the default behavior is dependent on the shell you run it under.
Give them something useful to take home so they can delve deeper into whatever inspired them. A knoppix games CD is perfect - they'll be able to experiment and muck it up all they want without worrying about hurting their parent's computer. There's still plenty of programming tools on the cd for a kid to play with. Or check out the other education and k-12 oriented live cds on the live cd list http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php?showo nly=&sort=Purpose
If you want to see the next evolution of the computer mouse, try the iGesture http://www.fingerworks.com/igesture_tech.html. It rocks - I used one for a few months and loved it. It's basically a 6.25" x 5" chording touchpad. You can do anything a mouse can do with only 2 fingers, and a whole lot more with thumb and up to 3 finger combinations and gestures. The interface is really intuitive. You want to cut&paste something? Just use your fingers like a scissors closing, drag it somewhere, then open your fingers to paste. I thought it really helped my productivity, but using a regular mouse after a few hours of the touchpad was disconcerting.
Bless You! I LOVE pick - it's the most forgiving language on the planet. Who needs types? Why declare what kind of data you want to store in a given variable? Just make up a name on the fly and put what you want in it. If you add 2 strings, pick will figure out that they both contain just numbers and not complain about type mismatches - it just plain gets it right.
And you gotta love a language that lets you compile code that says:
open(ThePodBayDoors, PleaseHal) else print IcantDoThatDave
(with proper values in the variables so your customer never sees the joke.)
Make a geek laugh - tell a joke in your source code.
Spider Robinson has witten a book (okay, 2 or 3 books) with this idea in mind. They're pretty good. Read "Lifehouse" first, then "Deathkiller" if you want the details.
This obviates implications that go far beyond the simple control of gadgets. Helping to correct ADD with this approach illustrates the effect that the brain doesn't just adapt; it actually changes its physical structure as it learns this new behavior. Our brains have specialized uses for specific areas and groups of cells. What happens to someone who uses one of these frequently, with one or more of the electrodes placed over a spot that is involved in some unrelated function? How will it change you when you grow connections from voluntary motor functions right into your pituitary gland? You may inadvertently throw 50 or more hormone and endocrine systems WAY out of whack. OTOH, IF the designers of the sensor cap pay attention to the impact long term use will have, high resolution biofeedback tied to the reward system of a game can be powerful. It may be possible to enhance neural growth in valuable ways. When an adult is learning a new language, there is a point when they switch from mentally translating to/from a language they know to actually thinking in the new language. This is a discernible change in which sections of the brain are involved before and after this point of fluency has been attained. This sensor cap could help facilitate that change. Personally, I'd like it to teach me to hold the same brain patterns as a meditating Zen master. The best ones always look so happy.
Atlantis is supposed to be a highly advanced civilization. Global warming is predicted to expose a good third of Antarctica. Nostradamus said we'll have a thousand years of peace before another huge war. Note that almost nobody had heard of Atlantis when Plato spoke of it, yet as we get closer to the epicenter of the destruction of a civilization (and perhaps a continent) more and more people have heard of it. Could it be that Atlantis hasn't been found yet because it's 1000 years in the future?
So many responses and not one mention of Underworld ?
The gist is that sealevel was much lower while ice was storing water in glaciers 18k-9k years ago. Civilizations/cities tend to grow along coastlines, so this guy went looking for man made structures along what would have been the coast back then.
He found some very interesting stuff, and has made a 3 part tv show on it (saw it on PBS), as well as a book.
Parties and the Electoral College were intended to be mechanisms for the election of government officials. They were never intended to run the country. Most americans don't know that senators and congress(wo)men sit in two seperate groups according to who they party with. What they SHOULD be doing is sitting with the other REPRESENTATIVES of their own state. They are suppossed to represent the intrests of their constituency, not a group run by greed for power.
Look at what a waste we've created. Despite the low opinion of politicians held by most people, those at the top actually have pretty good credentials and are well above average in intelligence. Yet they spend 90% of their considerable influence trying to tear down the other half of our government. This is idiocy. Political party affiliations should be banned from all government offices.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to hold anything - I want a couple of cameras and some software to track my hands and fingers. Gesture based input with multiple finger positions available would be way better than a mouse. This would even get me to learn sign language to compare it to voice recognition. It would be close to magic: waving at lights and pointing to appliances to turn them on or off, controlling the volume of TV, stereo, or whatever with a simple gesture.
I want to lean back in my easy chair and point to my wall mounted flat panel so I can browse without sitting at a desk.
All these people seem to think that getting to Mars is the ultimate goal, that gathering scientific data is the point, and we've been to the moon already. This is starry eyed gee-whiz thinking. The quote at the end of TFA explains the REAL goal - we need a permanent colony somewhere other than here. Yes the Moon is a harsher environment, but the cost in time and money to put a colony on Mars is so much higher than putting one on the Moon that it just doesn't make sense. Sure, while we're there we should do some science, but getting people to live there will produce more sustained value than dozens of brief scientific visits to places with only scientific interest. Look at how they consider the Moon now - if a place is only worth visiting a couple of times at most, we're going to run out of places to go pretty quick. A colony would provide LOTS of incentive for private company participation. Building an Earth/Moon ferry service is feasible in 50 years - no private company is going to invest in one to Mars anytime soon.
I want a Moonbase!
It's not the agents that are going out away from me, it's me who's going out away from my usual computer and data. When I think of agents, I think of MY programs and desktop following me around and running on whatever is closest to me. That means my agents will inevitably be hosted as a guest on all sorts of computers, from the places I work to where I shop. I'd want my agents to watch my credit cards and challenge any charge that doesn't come from whatever my current location is. They should get some cache space on the bus computer while I'm riding to work, and be able to display my personal desktop on any handy display I want it on. When I go to a friend's house my stuff should "follow" me (actually just setup communication to my home/work boxen transparently.) If there's enuf local resources, I'd want a local VM running my entire workstation setup, minus whatever sensitive data I want to keep in a vault.
I don't want to "send out" agents on the net without me - I want a "cloud" of agents dragging my corner of the net along with ME as I go out in the real world.
Protein. Pick your fav. The trick is, NOTHING that will cause insulin release. Delay that until lunch, and you'll feel great and lose weight. Insulin is an anabolic steroid - you can build muscle and store fat while insulin is in your blood, but you can't burn fat. Insulin takes a few hours to wear off, so when you get up in the morning is when you're at the lowest level. If you just skip breakfast, your body will store anything it can when you finally eat to protect itself from possible starvation. Eat some protein and you'll have nutrition your brain will run just fine on, your muscles and tissues won't shrink or waste away, but your fat will be put to use for what glucose (via glycogen) you need. A bit o' coffee and a handfull of the right vitamins, and your morning will be bright while your belly stays flat. :-D )
This is NOT a low carb diet either; eat lots of fruit later in the day if you want. Just be aware of your timing and hormones. If you actually want to build muscle, then eat a big meal shortly after your workout. The insulin will help your muscles grow. (So does testosterone, so hang some pron around your home gym
If you close a parenthetical statment with a smiley face, is the closing paren optional?
Most nuclear power proponents are missing one important fact: We use concrete and lead to "shield" the plants. There actually is no such thing as a radiation shield. All we can do is slow it down a whole lot by surrounding it with mass. The problem with this is that the nuclear plant itself becomes radioactive. The whole building soaks up the radiation and holds it. Once it's been running for 30 years, the operators can only do one hour shifts or they get too much exposure. After 50 years of operation, a typical plant is so contaminated that you can either dismantle it and put the whole building and the ground it stands on into a nuclear waste repository, or you can close it and keep people away for 500 YEARS before it cools enough to even approach. The only way nuclear plants can be called "cheap" is with shortsighted budgets that don't take this into account. The long-term view shows a fast return followed by a LONG period of worse than useless liability.
The US is all of 200 years old. It's pretty arrogant to make stuff this dangerous and force our grandkids to deal with it. Take this dirty path now and you'll lower the incentive to develop the alternative sources that are less ethically (and economically) questionable.
I'm all for nuclear power. As long as it's 93,000,000 miles away, right where it belongs.
Since your target is ~450 miles away, do you know for a fact that every neutrino that you shoot is aimed well enough that it necessarily must pass through the second detector? Could it be that your aim is just ever so slightly off? The explanation may be well over my head, but it seems to me that we haven't got the technology to aim a neutrino, and the creation process itself must produce variations in the initial trajectories. Since the Earth is spinning, orbiting, and otherwise experiencing accellerations that the neutrinos are supposedly not, does the neutrino beam drift?
Just wondering...
Had I been given this assignment I'd do the same thing I've done numerous times before: ask a friend to have a duel between our home computers. Every time I change my firewall I get him to bang on it just to check. When I get a new tool I often let it loose on his home machine (with permission). There is no reason at all to assume that this assignment requires the students to break the law. Any computer on the net can be considered "an internet server" if it responds to even one port or a single ICMP type.
It MAY be a problem for the students on a campus network in their dorms because of the IT department's policy, but those who have their own 'net connection can do it without breaking the law. Give them a little credit: Any student who has made it to this class will already know how to act responsibly on the net.
There's nothing to see here. Move along...
Everybody is looking in the wrong direction. The guy isn't immune - he's incredibly susceptible. He caught it, it killed off all the cells that it can enter easily (including the antibodies that are tested for), and found itself with nowhere to replicate. It dies, and the progenitor cells of his immune system replenished what was missing. He was probably immunocompromised for a little under 2 weeks, and then things are fine. He's more lucky to have not developed pneumonia or sarcoma or another opportunistic infection before his immune system recovered from the fast decimation of a subset of his t-cells.
There! I've run rings around you logically!
rm -rf * --- how to intercourse the penguin
At any given point in history, in all cultures known and unknown, if you were to ask the current experts and intellectuals they would universally state that everyone who had come before them had at most a small clue, but that they themselves are finally beginning to understand the workings of the universe and creation. There is no reason to suppose that in 100 years or so they'll look back and say that we knew it all; they too will call us ignorant of the truth.
Science is just today's most popular religion, one that denies (in the common interpretation) that mind/consciousness is somehow suspect and not a valid subject of study if one wants to truly understand the world.
Next century the common understanding will include the observer of quantum physics as central, possibly paramount in creation. The next big question will then be the psychological equivalent of the copernican revolution: Is the self the center of the universe (pre-copernicus geocentric interpretation) or is God (post-copernicus equivalent)?
Right now on Earth you can find organisms that will survive and even reproduce under martian conditions. We also have numerous lifeforms that can survive quite handily in various layers of the venusian atmosphere (tho not on the ground). Admittedly most of these extremophiles are single-celled creatures, but they CAN survive. I for one feel that (wo)mankind should take every possible opportunity to spread life wherever we can. The question of whether there is already some form of life there, especially on Mars (just because we can more easily envision it) is indeed a bump on the road that must not be ignored. Nonetheless, I think one of the most noble projects we can undertake that isn't self-serving would be to give other planets and future lifeforms a head start over just plain chance. Life may not be able to start under venusian conditions, but once it gets a foothold life can be pretty tenacious. I'd like to call this an obligation or a moral/ethical imperative, but that would take a MUCH longer discussion than would fit in a comment on slashdot. We keep calling Venus a woman, we know she's hot, so lets give her some of our seed! (Now THAT was for the /. crowd).
Yes all the other well meaning advice is good, some of it essential to good code/comments. But it always pays to put some humor into your code, be it funny variable names (that don't sacrifice clarity!) or entertaining commentary. With proper variable assignment, I've written lines that said open("the_pod_bay_doors", HAL) else print ImSorryDaveICantDoThat;
My favorite opportunity is when you want to say something to the user and have them hit the any key so you can continue. The input statement needs a variable, the enduser will never see it's name, and you'll never need to reference it anywhere. Perfect for one liners laid like a bomb waiting for some co-worker to find. "Ira_eats_pork", "Diane_wears_army_boots", and "Kamal_loves_the_Backstreet_Boys" have all brought great exclamations from other cubicles where I've been working.
This is really going to be a leap forward in the study of near death experiences. If they get this med-tech working safely enough it will probably spawn a few religions. I'd be willing to try a half-hour or so if they can get over 99% success at reanimation.
How much did they pay you to say that?
You need to make this system wide or the end user WILL change it on you. How depends on which distro you are running. Also, note that the default behavior is dependent on the shell you run it under.
We don't need no stinking sig
Once you try it the problem is going back to the old clunky mouse. I had no trouble with what you predict might be a problem.
If you want to see the next evolution of the computer mouse, try the iGesture http://www.fingerworks.com/igesture_tech.html. It rocks - I used one for a few months and loved it. It's basically a 6.25" x 5" chording touchpad. You can do anything a mouse can do with only 2 fingers, and a whole lot more with thumb and up to 3 finger combinations and gestures. The interface is really intuitive. You want to cut&paste something? Just use your fingers like a scissors closing, drag it somewhere, then open your fingers to paste. I thought it really helped my productivity, but using a regular mouse after a few hours of the touchpad was disconcerting.
open(ThePodBayDoors, PleaseHal) else print IcantDoThatDave (with proper values in the variables so your customer never sees the joke.)
Make a geek laugh - tell a joke in your source code.
I booted Dynebolic once. It scrogged my 120gig SATA drive. I smashed the cd. I still have the iso, but it ain't going near any decent hardware.
Spider Robinson has witten a book (okay, 2 or 3 books) with this idea in mind. They're pretty good. Read "Lifehouse" first, then "Deathkiller" if you want the details.
This obviates implications that go far beyond the simple control of gadgets. Helping to correct ADD with this approach illustrates the effect that the brain doesn't just adapt; it actually changes its physical structure as it learns this new behavior. Our brains have specialized uses for specific areas and groups of cells. What happens to someone who uses one of these frequently, with one or more of the electrodes placed over a spot that is involved in some unrelated function? How will it change you when you grow connections from voluntary motor functions right into your pituitary gland? You may inadvertently throw 50 or more hormone and endocrine systems WAY out of whack. OTOH, IF the designers of the sensor cap pay attention to the impact long term use will have, high resolution biofeedback tied to the reward system of a game can be powerful. It may be possible to enhance neural growth in valuable ways. When an adult is learning a new language, there is a point when they switch from mentally translating to/from a language they know to actually thinking in the new language. This is a discernible change in which sections of the brain are involved before and after this point of fluency has been attained. This sensor cap could help facilitate that change. Personally, I'd like it to teach me to hold the same brain patterns as a meditating Zen master. The best ones always look so happy.
Yep - ask and ye shall receive input http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/2 3/161256&tid=191
Atlantis is supposed to be a highly advanced civilization. Global warming is predicted to expose a good third of Antarctica. Nostradamus said we'll have a thousand years of peace before another huge war. Note that almost nobody had heard of Atlantis when Plato spoke of it, yet as we get closer to the epicenter of the destruction of a civilization (and perhaps a continent) more and more people have heard of it. Could it be that Atlantis hasn't been found yet because it's 1000 years in the future?
This is not a sig
Parties and the Electoral College were intended to be mechanisms for the election of government officials. They were never intended to run the country. Most americans don't know that senators and congress(wo)men sit in two seperate groups according to who they party with. What they SHOULD be doing is sitting with the other REPRESENTATIVES of their own state. They are suppossed to represent the intrests of their constituency, not a group run by greed for power. Look at what a waste we've created. Despite the low opinion of politicians held by most people, those at the top actually have pretty good credentials and are well above average in intelligence. Yet they spend 90% of their considerable influence trying to tear down the other half of our government. This is idiocy. Political party affiliations should be banned from all government offices.