England's first patent law, the 1623 Statute of Monopolies was actually a measure to restrict the king's power to grant monopolies arbitrarily over any industry he wanted. Before that law, the crown could sell "letters patent" to nobles or companies, creating artificial monopolies that enriched the government (salt monopoly, tea monopoly, etc). This statute repealed all past and future patents and monopolies, except those created in the future over completely novel inventions. It brought monopoly-granting power under the purview of Parliament and limited the maximum duration of patent monopolies.
Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that can certainly help. Just don't think it will be easy.
With Chinese it's kind of hard to dive into new reading material. You either know a character already, or have no clue what it means or even how to pronounce it. That, and every character being unique, means reading/writing will be the limiting factor in your kids' language study and the most time-consuming to remedy. Below are some tips to break down the task.
First thing is to learn the radicals. There's a limited number of them, and at least one in every character. Learn how to draw them because they're used over and over again. Learn their meanings too, because a character's meaning is usually at least loosely tied to its radical. Learning to identify the radicals also helps greatly in looking up unfamiliar words, as Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged first by radical, then by number of strokes.
When you buy them a dictionary, get a beginner's dictionary so that they can have a larger font, usage examples and Pinyin pronunciation, all of which are sometimes missing in comprehensive dictionaries. A good choice that provides many example sentences and phrases would be The Starter Oxford Chinese Dictionary (sorry, Simplified version only). Get them a second dictionary later on if they can't find every word they need. For several reasons, I like Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. You can try out the online version of it at Zhongwen.com to see how it's organized. This is also the only dictionary that you can use by looking up any part of a character, not just the radical (which can sometimes be hard to identify).
Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the non-radical part hints at the sound of the word. They'll notice many more of these related character components at the intermediate level. However, given the ~4,000-year development of the written language, these links can often be tenuous. Thinking up elaborate stories trying to tie all the pieces of the character together can be quite useful. For instance, with the character for wrong () I remember it by thinking, "It would be wrong to bet money that sun sets underground." A little convoluted, but it was enough to jog my memory ever since. Useful as this strategy can be, it's just not always possible and you'll have to learn many words by rote memorization.
For this I recommend writing. A lot! Have your kids say the words aloud and think of the meaning as they write. After enough repetitions, hopefully it will become part of their "motor memory" and once started they will be able to finish a character almost by reflex. They'll need this level of ingrained familiarity if they hope to retain the knowledge for long.
It's essential then to review regularly and for them to brush up on what they forgot. Flashcards can be used as others suggested, but I'd recommend using a "3-sided" flashcard that shows the English translation, the character and the pronunciation all separately. You can do this by writing along the top and bottom of one side of the card and holding them so you don't see both at once. This way they won't depend on the Romanized pinyin to pronounce characters. To optimize learning, reorganize the cards based on how well they're known. This way time won't be wasted needlessly reviewing stuff that's already learned.
To help with this optimization, some people use computer programs to model their memory decay, bringing up the character flashcard only when it's likely to be on the verge of being forg
With current launch prices at about $10,000 US per pound for manned missions, that's $625/oz, more than the price of gold until very recently. Carrying a few ounces of "change" up with you would cost you quite a bit more than the £6.25 per QUID.
That's only for a LEO launch. Make it "Intergalactic" and it would probably cost more than the entire Earth's economy. Quite an investment!
...Chuck Norris! In a surprise result, Norris swept with over 2,500,000 write-in votes, narrowly beating the next runner-up, Stephen Colbert. (Estonia's 2006 population was 1,324,333)
...don't come crying to Shigenori Maruyama when the oceans all soak into the Earth's cooling core. Seriously.
He and his Tokyo Institute of Technology colleagues say that in a billion years the Earth could be dry as Mars. Basically, we've been losing water since 750mya because the mantle cooled enough to trap water. First read about it in Discover Magazine, but the second link has the best summary I've found.
In my own musings, I'd figured sleep was just an energy-saving mode (yes, we are all computers). When we sleep, our body temperature lowers and we're not running around at a relatively unproductive time of the day. Especially when no food is available, a power-saving mode would be a great advantage in waiting out the bad circumstances (think hibernation, listlessness in famines, or siestas b/c it's too hot to work). If you look at reptiles as always being in low-power (cold-blooded) mode, the increased sleep trade-off for mammals and birds seems reasonable.
I think the inactivity and lack of cerebral stimulation during sleep was later used as a time to organize the day's experiences and long-term memories (like defragmentation), so now we're stuck with it even when we can work by artificial light.
It will work because cell phones are not like landline phones.
First of all, cell phones have screens. Often large color screens allowing many lines of text or graphics/videos. Wired phones could pretty much only push ads through audio recordings. Screens open up many more avenues for ad delivery without getting overly annoying.
Cell phones also know where you are and what stores are near you at any particular moment. Not only that, but we store a lot of information about ourselves on cells. Combined, they could produce highly relevant and profitable targeted ads. If everybody starts using their phones to access their debit cards like in Japan, the cell provider could even have evidence of effectiveness.
The calender app could place notices of sales in local stores. Have a reminder for your dad's birthday next week? May we suggest this drill bit set. Order online now through this link for guaranteed on-time delivery!
A phone could show a banner whenever an alarm is turned off (coffee ads in the morning, movie listings in the evening, whatever). Banners could also be slipped in unobtrusively when you silence your phone, turn it off, plug it in to its charger, etc.
People could also opt in for extras. Be subjected to a 15 second audio ad and get 5 extra anytime minutes! Fill out this fifteen minute survey and get this ringtone, free!
Bookfaced, at http://www.bookfaced.com/fb/, uses the API to map all your friend's hometowns in Google Maps. Handy if you're looking to plan a carpooled trip or something.
I just signed up and bought two optical mouses from uBid using the "early adopter" $10 off coupon. Worked great. One-page form and then only one click after going to checkout. A lot simpler than the multiple PayPal pages you have to go through after an eBay purchase.
Imagine where distributed computing would be today without the high-profile trailblazer, SETI@home. I remember reading several articles in 1999 about the project in the New York Times among other places. SETI@home's unique goal and approach attracted members, and with those, more attention for its size. Over 5.2 million have participated in the project, and in all likelihood 5 million of those were new to distributed computing.
While SETI@homes's managed to retain nearly a million members, the claim that it steals participants from other projects is absurd. Most of those other projects would face far greater obstacles to acceptance by having to woo new participants not already familiar with DC. Probably the originators of those other projects would not have even heard of DC themselves, or at least would have started several years later without a clear success story to look up to.
* The growing cost of development for games on next-gen platforms will increase demand from publishers to require new games to be deployed on many platforms.
* Increased cross-platform development will mean less money for optimizing a new game for any particular platform.
* As a result, with the exception of in-house titles developed by the console manufacturers themselves, none of the three major platforms (Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution) will end up with games that look significantly different from each other, nor will any platform show any real "edge" over the others. Many games will be written to a "lowest common denominator" platform, which would be two threads running on a single CPU core and utilizing only the GPU.
If that's the case, the Wii will see the greatest profit from this "lowest common denominator" development model, having not wasted money devoloping and subsidizing the sale of an HD-enabled machine.
My favorite fighter sim is definitely Biplanes, one of three games on the Triple Action cartidge for the Intellivision. Like a two-player 'Asteroids' on earth, this game's many short dogfights callused my thumbs more than any other game.
Like most people, I find animated, noisy or large ads obnoxious and distracting. That's why I use Firefox, Flashblock and Adblock. I've found though that I actually click on more ads after installing Firefox and Adblock.
The reason is that I removed "googlesyndication" from my filter list, so Google text ads come through. In addition to being more useful, I will also click on text ads whenever I've found an article that I support or found to be interesting. I often open three ads in backgrounded tabs and close them without ever laying eyes on them to throw them some support.
With 20,000 37-ft diameter dishes, each with areas of about 1,075.21 square feet ( × r), that comes to 21,504,200 square feet total for the array.
My question is, with 21.5m square feet (493.669 acres) of reflective surfaces, what happens when dust collects on the mirrors? Dust is bound to build up and cut significantly into their operating efficiency.
And with four-story high reflectors, the best solution is most likely hosing them down from the ground, probably several times per year. With L.A. right next door, and rivers like the Colorado not reaching the Pacific even now, where will the water come from to wash down 20,000 37-ft dishes in the middle of the desert?
E-books are great, but without a really readable display they won't be able to gain the acceptance of the curl-up-in-bed books. Can't wait to have one book and that's all--one that stores or downloads the content of thousands.
We've spent long nights in a tiny conference room here in Mountain View trying to figure out how to celebrate this momentous occasion. Should we lower Mitchell, our fearless president, into an erupting volcano? Send her backpacking through the Alps?
Diet and nutrition experts believe that focusing on mortality data obscures the true risk of being overweight, which is the toll it can take on a person's quality of life.
Considering that the leading causes of death such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes still have such intimate relationships with weight, I would still rather be thin than chronically sick.
Study after study has been confirming the links these diseases have with being overweight. When you consider quality of life arguments against controlling weight (i.e. - denying yourself those delicious delicacies), also consider the huge benefits in reduced medical expenses and better overall well-being you will enjoy.
Gmail in the new 8.0 version now works. That's my biggest stumbling block out of the way.
A very polished product
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I decided to try Opera out and I'm quite impressed with the care put into it. In addition to rendering blazingly fast on my old PII-266, the pages scale easily to my 800x600 monitor.
Other smaller things I also liked, like how link addresses pop up in a tooltip on mouseover. This allowed me to cut out the statusbar without travelling blind. It can still show during page loads, but doesn't take up space during viewing. A nice touch too was the way tab favicons shrink as more tabs open up, allowing more room on the row.
I've been a diehard Firefox fanboy because of the customizability (and full Gmail support), but I'd like to see some of these features in upcoming releases.
Octopuses may be mad smart and walkers, but they still only live a year or two. The only octopuses that could lord over us would be ones we genetically modified.
I've played a number of Cheapass games and Kill Doctor Lucky takes the cake for funniest and most fun to play. I bought this for my sister last year for Christmas and she loved it, even when I can't get her to touch any other sort of game, board or computer.
P.S. You'll love this game so much that you'll be tempted to buy the sequel, Save Doctor Lucky. Don't, but try some other Cheapass offerings instead. This isn't half as fun as the original.
I too would not mind, and sometimes appreciate the placement of Google AdSense adverts alongside Wikipedia content.
This has been proposed before, but why not make the text ads optional? They could be opt-out, or at the very least opt-in in the user Preferences page. I could see myself using them and would be more than glad to help out my favorite foundation and company.
Slashdot Mirror
England's first patent law, the 1623 Statute of Monopolies was actually a measure to restrict the king's power to grant monopolies arbitrarily over any industry he wanted. Before that law, the crown could sell "letters patent" to nobles or companies, creating artificial monopolies that enriched the government (salt monopoly, tea monopoly, etc). This statute repealed all past and future patents and monopolies, except those created in the future over completely novel inventions. It brought monopoly-granting power under the purview of Parliament and limited the maximum duration of patent monopolies.
Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that can certainly help. Just don't think it will be easy.
With Chinese it's kind of hard to dive into new reading material. You either know a character already, or have no clue what it means or even how to pronounce it. That, and every character being unique, means reading/writing will be the limiting factor in your kids' language study and the most time-consuming to remedy. Below are some tips to break down the task.
First thing is to learn the radicals. There's a limited number of them, and at least one in every character. Learn how to draw them because they're used over and over again. Learn their meanings too, because a character's meaning is usually at least loosely tied to its radical. Learning to identify the radicals also helps greatly in looking up unfamiliar words, as Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged first by radical, then by number of strokes.
When you buy them a dictionary, get a beginner's dictionary so that they can have a larger font, usage examples and Pinyin pronunciation, all of which are sometimes missing in comprehensive dictionaries. A good choice that provides many example sentences and phrases would be The Starter Oxford Chinese Dictionary (sorry, Simplified version only). Get them a second dictionary later on if they can't find every word they need. For several reasons, I like Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. You can try out the online version of it at Zhongwen.com to see how it's organized. This is also the only dictionary that you can use by looking up any part of a character, not just the radical (which can sometimes be hard to identify).
Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the non-radical part hints at the sound of the word. They'll notice many more of these related character components at the intermediate level. However, given the ~4,000-year development of the written language, these links can often be tenuous. Thinking up elaborate stories trying to tie all the pieces of the character together can be quite useful. For instance, with the character for wrong () I remember it by thinking, "It would be wrong to bet money that sun sets underground." A little convoluted, but it was enough to jog my memory ever since. Useful as this strategy can be, it's just not always possible and you'll have to learn many words by rote memorization.
For this I recommend writing. A lot! Have your kids say the words aloud and think of the meaning as they write. After enough repetitions, hopefully it will become part of their "motor memory" and once started they will be able to finish a character almost by reflex. They'll need this level of ingrained familiarity if they hope to retain the knowledge for long.
It's essential then to review regularly and for them to brush up on what they forgot. Flashcards can be used as others suggested, but I'd recommend using a "3-sided" flashcard that shows the English translation, the character and the pronunciation all separately. You can do this by writing along the top and bottom of one side of the card and holding them so you don't see both at once. This way they won't depend on the Romanized pinyin to pronounce characters. To optimize learning, reorganize the cards based on how well they're known. This way time won't be wasted needlessly reviewing stuff that's already learned.
To help with this optimization, some people use computer programs to model their memory decay, bringing up the character flashcard only when it's likely to be on the verge of being forg
With current launch prices at about $10,000 US per pound for manned missions, that's $625/oz, more than the price of gold until very recently. Carrying a few ounces of "change" up with you would cost you quite a bit more than the £6.25 per QUID. That's only for a LEO launch. Make it "Intergalactic" and it would probably cost more than the entire Earth's economy. Quite an investment!
...Chuck Norris! In a surprise result, Norris swept with over 2,500,000 write-in votes, narrowly beating the next runner-up, Stephen Colbert. (Estonia's 2006 population was 1,324,333)
He and his Tokyo Institute of Technology colleagues say that in a billion years the Earth could be dry as Mars. Basically, we've been losing water since 750mya because the mantle cooled enough to trap water. First read about it in Discover Magazine, but the second link has the best summary I've found.
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-99/rd/newsofsci encemed1735/ m l#note6
http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/dec99/newsnotes.ht
In my own musings, I'd figured sleep was just an energy-saving mode (yes, we are all computers). When we sleep, our body temperature lowers and we're not running around at a relatively unproductive time of the day. Especially when no food is available, a power-saving mode would be a great advantage in waiting out the bad circumstances (think hibernation, listlessness in famines, or siestas b/c it's too hot to work). If you look at reptiles as always being in low-power (cold-blooded) mode, the increased sleep trade-off for mammals and birds seems reasonable.
I think the inactivity and lack of cerebral stimulation during sleep was later used as a time to organize the day's experiences and long-term memories (like defragmentation), so now we're stuck with it even when we can work by artificial light.
It will work because cell phones are not like landline phones.
First of all, cell phones have screens. Often large color screens allowing many lines of text or graphics/videos. Wired phones could pretty much only push ads through audio recordings. Screens open up many more avenues for ad delivery without getting overly annoying.
Cell phones also know where you are and what stores are near you at any particular moment. Not only that, but we store a lot of information about ourselves on cells. Combined, they could produce highly relevant and profitable targeted ads. If everybody starts using their phones to access their debit cards like in Japan, the cell provider could even have evidence of effectiveness.
The calender app could place notices of sales in local stores. Have a reminder for your dad's birthday next week? May we suggest this drill bit set. Order online now through this link for guaranteed on-time delivery!
A phone could show a banner whenever an alarm is turned off (coffee ads in the morning, movie listings in the evening, whatever). Banners could also be slipped in unobtrusively when you silence your phone, turn it off, plug it in to its charger, etc.
People could also opt in for extras. Be subjected to a 15 second audio ad and get 5 extra anytime minutes! Fill out this fifteen minute survey and get this ringtone, free!
If you don't think there would be any takers, just ask this woman http://news.com.com/2061-10786_3-5770822.html.
Bookfaced, at http://www.bookfaced.com/fb/, uses the API to map all your friend's hometowns in Google Maps. Handy if you're looking to plan a carpooled trip or something.
I just signed up and bought two optical mouses from uBid using the "early adopter" $10 off coupon. Worked great. One-page form and then only one click after going to checkout. A lot simpler than the multiple PayPal pages you have to go through after an eBay purchase.
While SETI@homes's managed to retain nearly a million members, the claim that it steals participants from other projects is absurd. Most of those other projects would face far greater obstacles to acceptance by having to woo new participants not already familiar with DC. Probably the originators of those other projects would not have even heard of DC themselves, or at least would have started several years later without a clear success story to look up to.
My favorite fighter sim is definitely Biplanes, one of three games on the Triple Action cartidge for the Intellivision. Like a two-player 'Asteroids' on earth, this game's many short dogfights callused my thumbs more than any other game.
A WIRED article gave a 3-page writeup of the Swiss team developing the robots in November.
The reason is that I removed "googlesyndication" from my filter list, so Google text ads come through. In addition to being more useful, I will also click on text ads whenever I've found an article that I support or found to be interesting. I often open three ads in backgrounded tabs and close them without ever laying eyes on them to throw them some support.
My question is, with 21.5m square feet (493.669 acres) of reflective surfaces, what happens when dust collects on the mirrors? Dust is bound to build up and cut significantly into their operating efficiency.
And with four-story high reflectors, the best solution is most likely hosing them down from the ground, probably several times per year. With L.A. right next door, and rivers like the Colorado not reaching the Pacific even now, where will the water come from to wash down 20,000 37-ft dishes in the middle of the desert?
E-books are great, but without a really readable display they won't be able to gain the acceptance of the curl-up-in-bed books. Can't wait to have one book and that's all--one that stores or downloads the content of thousands.
Swimming?, that's soooo last week.
Considering that the leading causes of death such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes still have such intimate relationships with weight, I would still rather be thin than chronically sick.
Study after study has been confirming the links these diseases have with being overweight. When you consider quality of life arguments against controlling weight (i.e. - denying yourself those delicious delicacies), also consider the huge benefits in reduced medical expenses and better overall well-being you will enjoy.
Gmail in the new 8.0 version now works. That's my biggest stumbling block out of the way.
Other smaller things I also liked, like how link addresses pop up in a tooltip on mouseover. This allowed me to cut out the statusbar without travelling blind. It can still show during page loads, but doesn't take up space during viewing. A nice touch too was the way tab favicons shrink as more tabs open up, allowing more room on the row.
I've been a diehard Firefox fanboy because of the customizability (and full Gmail support), but I'd like to see some of these features in upcoming releases.
Yeah, but now you get to keep 682 more of them!
Octopuses may be mad smart and walkers, but they still only live a year or two. The only octopuses that could lord over us would be ones we genetically modified.
P.S. You'll love this game so much that you'll be tempted to buy the sequel, Save Doctor Lucky. Don't, but try some other Cheapass offerings instead. This isn't half as fun as the original.
I too would not mind, and sometimes appreciate the placement of Google AdSense adverts alongside Wikipedia content. This has been proposed before, but why not make the text ads optional? They could be opt-out, or at the very least opt-in in the user Preferences page. I could see myself using them and would be more than glad to help out my favorite foundation and company.