No. I watch movies because I'm paid to. In my case, the people who pay my rent will stop paying my rent if I do not accompany them to theaters. Your parents will throw you out of the basement if you don't go to the movies with them?
I can't see much non-classroom legitimate use for laser pointers. You clearly don't have cats. It varies from cat to cat, but a red laser pointer (never tried the green ones) is the closest thing to a cat lasso that I've ever seen.
I've never liked the green ones-- just the back reflection in a small meeting room hurts my eyes.
I do feel sorry for a little sorry for those who cannot get one, but I also write it off as them not trying hard enough. With a little effort, it wasn't hard to get a Wii back in Oct. They would sit on the shelf for about 2 days before going sold out (according to GameStop and WalMart employees in my local area, YMMV). Yeah-- I decided a little before thanksgiving that I wanted one and found the Wiitracker online. I subscribed to that and looked in some ads and things. If I had been willing to get up really early in the morning thanksgiving day I could have had one at Kmart-- I'm too lazy for that, so I just went reasonably early (I had to be in that neighborhood anyway around that time to pick up someone at the airport) and ended up too far back in line. Then thanksgiving night, a little after midnight, the Wiitracker said Amazon had them unbundled for list (I checked just before bed-- I didn't spend a lot of effort) and a few minutes later one had my name stamped on it.
Another friend has managed to buy three of them by accident-- the first one while walking through blockbuster last January or so, and got it for a gift. The next two more recently in a rural Walmart while visiting family-- at least one of those is getting scalped, but one is probably going to get kept. She's made no special effort to find them-- she just runs into them.
I have a hard enough time deluding myself into thinking I'm a professional sitting in a cubicle. Now you want me to do it while carrying all my personal belongings in a bucket??? I work in a really large (a few hundred acres) facility that has offices, labs, and meeting rooms scattered over about a hundred buildings. It's very project-oriented, so it's easy to find yourself working in a different lab every few months or years, or even on the same day if you work on multiple projects that aren't closely related. It's common for everyone to have meetings that are a pretty good hike from their base. I've got things pretty much whittled down to a laptop and cellphone-- paper stuff gets scanned and kept on the laptop. I still have a desk and desk phone but rarely visit them (to visit my books occasionally). I still do lab work pretty regularly.
As I was getting to this point I started to realize that instead of having offices, everyone should just have a cellphone, a laptop, and a shopping cart. The offices and meeting rooms would all be replaced by Starbucks, and there might be large living-room like spaces for people to sit and work on non lab-type work. Workers approaching the end of a project, or whose projects are suddenly cancelled could hang out in front of the coffee shops and beg.
Chocolate is mainly sugar, a carb. Fries are mainly starch, a carb. Doughnuts, bread, crisps, sweets, beer, rice, poppadoms, all carbs.
Fries are mainly grease (calorically), as are doughnuts and most crisps. Plain rice is all carb, but fried rice is half grease. Poppadoms are probably about as greasy as crisps (they're not readily available here in LA as snacks). A lot of sweets are probably about as much fat as carbs, too-- e.g. most candy bars.
high calories "carb" snacks? WTF? Find me *one* that is a snack not a drink. Potato chips. Snickers bars (any candy bar, really). Fritos.
Oh, wait, you said one. My bad. I'm a carb monster (I worship at the alter of the FSM regularly), and I look at all of those and think "High fat". Look on the back of most any bag of chips or candy bar that's not labeled "low fat" or "baked" and you'll see that most things (except for the pretzels identified by another poster) are about half fat.
Potato Chips (Lays, lightly salted): 1 oz. Calories: 150, Calories from fat: 90, (10 grams fat, 15 g carb 2 g protein)
Snickers: 2 oz. bar: Calories: 275, Calories from fat: 122, (14 g fat, 35 of carbs, 4 of protein)
Fritos: 1 oz: Calories: 160, Calories from fat: 90,(10 g fat, 15 g carb, 2 g protein)
In general I go for the baked or reduced fat versions of chips-- I'm happy to eat carbs, but avoid the high fat versions of foods.
I thought I already took care of this by creating mailboxes for people or subjects that matter and filters to put messages in them. It's worked pretty well for quite a while now, and I can check the boxes in the order of how interested I think I'll be in what they have to say. With some filters I can even prioritize things, so that if person A sends me a message about topic B, the topic B filter is higher priority and stops further filtering.
I even have a social networking tool from it, because if my friends send something to several people it's usually a small number (sometimes with one or two new people) and they use regular cc instead of bcc.
IIRC, email has worked this way at least all the way back to Pine.
Every time I see the system I think I could write a website that could easily do the same thing for less than a dollar a ticket. The trick is of course that I wouldn't have the vast sums of money to buy out venues across the country to insure the monopoly. brownpapertickets
I've only used them once (or maybe twice), but it worked fine. It was when a band had *very* early advance ticket sales to supporters (essentially low level patrons).
Ticketweb also handles a lot of small clubs in the LA area and isn't usually too expensive. It's gotten so that things are likely enough to sell out at small clubs that advance tickets are a good idea, even for a lot of local bands.
As for being at the JPL instead of the Cape or Johnson? Suck it up. This is for every federal position. Expect your postal carrier to be grouching about the form to. Postal service isn't doing it.
There's no authority anywhere in NASA to oppose this. Griffin COULD just say "sorry, that's what the president wants and I can't do much about that" but that would be honest. Which is not what you expect from a political appointee Department of Energy operates 16 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (JPL is the only NASA FFRDC) and is applying the directive only to people who already have secret or higher clearances. Everyone else gets a site-local badge for whichever center they work at.
National Science Foundation is only applying it at their federally controlled headquarters-- they operate 5 FFRDCs, and none of the contractor employees at those centers are being put through the background checks.
I don't ignore traffic controls, but they cause the same delays or longer for a car than a bike. Bikes can generally lane-share to the front of a line at a control, and I can also take a different route where there are fewer controls with fixed delay (lights) and narrower streets that would affect car speed but not bike speed.
And there are places where I can time the lights just fine on a bike...
Furthermore none of those (TN, H1-B) allow your spouse to work while you're in the US, which makes it very awkward for married people. Yes, actually, there are geeks who are married. But Canada will even let your unmarried domestic partner (of either gender) work as long as you can show a relationship of more than year or so. Way more civilized.
By the way, a couple of reasons that there are so few American grad students in engineering and the sciences are (a) the ballooning costs of student loans, often with interest accruing while in school; and (b) the image (often perpetuated by Slashdot) that engineering and science are dead end roads that get no respect. a) Nobody pays for a PhD in science or engineering with student loans. If you get in and they don't find a way to cover your costs and living expenses with assistantships and fellowships and tuition waivers, you didn't really get in.
b) I have a PhD in physics and get no shortage of respect from people who don't. I spend most of my time around other people with PhDs, so it's weird when people act like it's a big deal. If I had to do it again, I'd do neuroscience though.
Face it, Canada is a mini-US, but with a more reasonable immigration policy. Because it's *really cold* and if their immigration policy was bad nobody would bother.
Privacy should disappear. It's the darkness that allows evil to grow and spread. What the techies should do is set up a system that eliminates the illusion of privacy that the masses currently enjoy and finally starts to spread a light into the lives of the powerful. says the guy who doesn't even show an email address in his slashdot profile...
It is important to have transparency in government though, and limit the amount of data that governments collect about their citizens and how they can use it.
Because it's fun to play. But that doesn't mean it can't be disappointing in many aspects. I finally got to play one about a week ago, and I'm far more disappointed that it doesn't have additional controllers to attach to your feet (for 4 input devices/person) than by the graphics.
This could be a little disturbing, if it works. How long before the technology trickles down to the identity thief around the corner? We are now told to shred everything. What happens when shredding is not enough? I crosscut shred everything, then I put it into the worm composter for the worms to eat. I then feed the worms to pet ducks, and twice a year feed the ducks to guests. I send the guests on camping trips to grizzly country with slabs of bacon for pillows. By the time the bears are done there are only homeopathic traces of the original information from the documents.
I should mention that it had to be avaliable in Canada. And since a lot of my friends are moving and don't have phones yet, if I can talk them into getting Vonage I can free months. yeah- the nice thing is that I can be in LA and have both a local LA number and a virtual number that's a local call in Canada, so it takes care of long distance in both directions pretty cheap.
That's kind of funny that you note that cops ticket jaywalking in LA-- when I moved to Pasadena 10 years ago I was surprised to see how consistently traffic will stop if you stand anywhere at the side of the road looking like you want to cross. In fact, I've seen cops be the first to stop, and have all traffic in both directions stop as well (without flashing any lights or anything) so someone could cross.
In my general experience here in SoCal, crossing at a corner crosswalk is much more dangerous than crossing between, because right-turning drivers are much less likely to notice peds crossing than straight-driving drivers are.
If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.
You can't start from a box of blocks and program up a person yet, but you can certainly customize some E. coli, or order up a modified virus (or build a simple one up from scratch), and that starts out with sitting down and scribbling out a bunch of genetic code. IGEM (linked above) is about developing a kit full of more or less plug replaceable tools and documenting the hooks that they have, much like a software library.
Slashdot Mirror
That's harsh.
I've never liked the green ones-- just the back reflection in a small meeting room hurts my eyes.
Another friend has managed to buy three of them by accident-- the first one while walking through blockbuster last January or so, and got it for a gift. The next two more recently in a rural Walmart while visiting family-- at least one of those is getting scalped, but one is probably going to get kept. She's made no special effort to find them-- she just runs into them.
As I was getting to this point I started to realize that instead of having offices, everyone should just have a cellphone, a laptop, and a shopping cart. The offices and meeting rooms would all be replaced by Starbucks, and there might be large living-room like spaces for people to sit and work on non lab-type work. Workers approaching the end of a project, or whose projects are suddenly cancelled could hang out in front of the coffee shops and beg.
Chocolate is mainly sugar, a carb. Fries are mainly starch, a carb. Doughnuts, bread, crisps, sweets, beer, rice, poppadoms, all carbs.
Fries are mainly grease (calorically), as are doughnuts and most crisps. Plain rice is all carb, but fried rice is half grease. Poppadoms are probably about as greasy as crisps (they're not readily available here in LA as snacks). A lot of sweets are probably about as much fat as carbs, too-- e.g. most candy bars.
Snickers bars (any candy bar, really).
Fritos.
Oh, wait, you said one. My bad. I'm a carb monster (I worship at the alter of the FSM regularly), and I look at all of those and think "High fat". Look on the back of most any bag of chips or candy bar that's not labeled "low fat" or "baked" and you'll see that most things (except for the pretzels identified by another poster) are about half fat.
Potato Chips (Lays, lightly salted): 1 oz. Calories: 150, Calories from fat: 90, (10 grams fat, 15 g carb 2 g protein)
Snickers: 2 oz. bar: Calories: 275, Calories from fat: 122, (14 g fat, 35 of carbs, 4 of protein)
Fritos: 1 oz: Calories: 160, Calories from fat: 90,(10 g fat, 15 g carb, 2 g protein)
In general I go for the baked or reduced fat versions of chips-- I'm happy to eat carbs, but avoid the high fat versions of foods.
I thought I already took care of this by creating mailboxes for people or subjects that matter and filters to put messages in them. It's worked pretty well for quite a while now, and I can check the boxes in the order of how interested I think I'll be in what they have to say. With some filters I can even prioritize things, so that if person A sends me a message about topic B, the topic B filter is higher priority and stops further filtering.
I even have a social networking tool from it, because if my friends send something to several people it's usually a small number (sometimes with one or two new people) and they use regular cc instead of bcc.
IIRC, email has worked this way at least all the way back to Pine.
I've only used them once (or maybe twice), but it worked fine. It was when a band had *very* early advance ticket sales to supporters (essentially low level patrons).
Ticketweb also handles a lot of small clubs in the LA area and isn't usually too expensive. It's gotten so that things are likely enough to sell out at small clubs that advance tickets are a good idea, even for a lot of local bands.
National Science Foundation is only applying it at their federally controlled headquarters-- they operate 5 FFRDCs, and none of the contractor employees at those centers are being put through the background checks.
I don't ignore traffic controls, but they cause the same delays or longer for a car than a bike. Bikes can generally lane-share to the front of a line at a control, and I can also take a different route where there are fewer controls with fixed delay (lights) and narrower streets that would affect car speed but not bike speed.
And there are places where I can time the lights just fine on a bike...
7.5 km is much faster for me to bike than to drive to work. For distances that short it ends up being dominated by traffic controls and parking.
In my case I can also park closer to my desk when I bike.
b) I have a PhD in physics and get no shortage of respect from people who don't. I spend most of my time around other people with PhDs, so it's weird when people act like it's a big deal. If I had to do it again, I'd do neuroscience though.
It is important to have transparency in government though, and limit the amount of data that governments collect about their citizens and how they can use it.
I wish I had mod points for you...
I've never understood why people get so hung up on having philosophical interpretations of it-- they aren't necessary or particularly useful.
That's kind of funny that you note that cops ticket jaywalking in LA-- when I moved to Pasadena 10 years ago I was surprised to see how consistently traffic will stop if you stand anywhere at the side of the road looking like you want to cross. In fact, I've seen cops be the first to stop, and have all traffic in both directions stop as well (without flashing any lights or anything) so someone could cross.
In my general experience here in SoCal, crossing at a corner crosswalk is much more dangerous than crossing between, because right-turning drivers are much less likely to notice peds crossing than straight-driving drivers are.
If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.
Kinda like this?
You can't start from a box of blocks and program up a person yet, but you can certainly customize some E. coli, or order up a modified virus (or build a simple one up from scratch), and that starts out with sitting down and scribbling out a bunch of genetic code. IGEM (linked above) is about developing a kit full of more or less plug replaceable tools and documenting the hooks that they have, much like a software library.
The perl that also comes with osx is buggy (try installing Net::LDAP and all its prereqs using perl -MCPAN -e shell
just did--here's the last thing it told me: "/usr/bin/make install -- OK"