They love to throw MENSA-type logic puzzles at candidates to really separate the wheat from the chaff and get top-notch problem solvers on board.
"Bob sells lemonade on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Ed sells lemonade on Saturdays, Thursdays, and the same days Carol sells lemonade. Carol never sells lemonade when Bob sells lemonade. How do you crush them all to gain domination of the lemonade market?"
That's the way patent laywers think these days, they try to patent the whole world. I think its a flaw of the system, becuase these broad ones get passed with way too much. More than they deserve.
Actually, I did patent the entire world. Read US Patent Number 5,764,932: "Method for an inhabited world".
ABSTRACT
A method and system for an inhabited world. The "world" consists of a large (~12000km diameter) spheroid of rock. The method for production involves accretion from many small planetesimals.
The inhabited world has a molten interior, or core, and a hardened exterior, or crust. Approximately 75% of the crust is covered by highly saline water. A gaseous layer composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen,.9% argon and various trace gases is present. Bacteria, plants and animals inhabit the upper layers. The system for producing these organisms involves adding large amounts of organic compounds to water and allowing them to undergo evolution via "Natural Selection"(patent pending) for 4 billion years.
...naturally, I'm going to be expecting royalty checks from every individual who makes use of my novel "world" concept. If you don't like that, just go live in an orbital colony or a Dyson sphere. Plus, I'm going to sue this "God" character for patent infringment- I really have no choice but to defend my intellectual property. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go patent the neutron.
I recently read a book about "emergence": the idea that simple rules of interaction between unintelligent subcomponents of a system can lead to emergent behavior which is surprisingly complex and intelligent. In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; for instance, ant colonies, where the behavior of the colony is more intelligent than any given ant.
It then occurred to me that many groups and institutions exhibit the reverse of emergence: you have complex, smart people making up your system, but when you get them together you get stupid decisions. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, sometimes less intelligent than any one individual. The obvious name for this phenomenon is "demergence".
You'd think more people would recall that the founder of modern computer science was not only a homosexual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), but that prosecution and persecution for his sexuality eventually led him to take his own life.
American democracy has a long tradition of protecting the minority from the majority. I guess that no longer sits well with you? When can I expect the death camps to begin?
I read a phrase in the Times entertainment section that piqued my curiosity: "jump the shark". Curious, I did a Google search and found that the phrase refers to the "Happy Days" episode where Fonzie, on waterskis, literally jumps over a shark. The point was that the show was never quite credible, never really as good as it had been, after this moment. And it suddenly hit me that the re-election of George W. Bush marked something similar.
The U.S. decided it hated gays and feared Muslim extremists more than it valued freedom and liberty. That moment showed that all you had to do in this country to fuck the poor and hand over the country to the rich was talk like an honest Texas Good Ol' Boy and not a spoiled millionaire's son educated at Yale. We've embraced fear in the name of security, hate in the name of Christ, lies in the name of justice. The spectre of Al Qaeda is invoked whenever the people question the government, yet the government is curiously unconcerned with capturing Osama bin Laden. We preach freedom while locking up people without trial; we invoke Jesus while arrogantly abusing our power. In short, the country has jumped the shark.
We've got some good years in the country yet, and I still love it in many ways. But it will never be the same for me. I feel like America is a love who has betrayed me, and I still love her, still care about her, still want the best for her. But I'll never completely trust her, ever again.
A typical fundie told to boycott MS? Does this person even own a computer? If yes... do you see him switching to Apple?
Well, lets see... (1) Apple Computer had a rainbow striped logo for years, (2) they are based just outside of San Francisco, (3) they have suspiciously good taste, almost as if the OS and every piece of hardware was designed by interior decorators.
Something tells me that if the Christian fundamentalists get up in arms about Teletubbies and Spongebob being in cahoots with the homosexual conspiracy, they might have a little trouble accepting Apple. Plus, the company name is an allusion to Eve and the serpent, so they're obviously in league with Satan as well.
I might also add that by definition a democracy is majority rule and yes majorities impose laws on minorities. I can name numerous catagories of minorities whos activities are discriminated against: serial murderers, pediphiles, persons who rip tags off of unsold mattresses. Your whole post smacks of an uneducated self-rightous rant.
The difference between a homosexual couple and a serial killer (and therefore the flaw in the analogy) is obvious: (1) consent, (2) it doesn't harm anyone else.
Gay marriage is already law in many provinces now, but it is be voted federally soon.
And just look at what's happened to Canada! Total chaos! Two dollar coins, people speaking in French, and decriminalized marijuana! I hear there are even places where polar bears roam the streets at will- is THAT the kind of cesspool of degeneracy we want America to become? Tastefully decorated, perhaps, but at the cost of being overrun by polar bears and stoned French separatists?
What about the human right to employ whom I please?
Well, let's turn that argument around. You say, "it's OK to fire people just because they're gay". You do a great job and don't bother anyone at work, but I'm your employer, and I feel that this is insensitive, insufficiently liberal and politically incorrect. Plus, I hear that you have been doing things in your off time which are causing the moral breakdown of Western Civilization- like voting Republican. So I fire your heartless conservative ass. Or maybe I'm at Microsoft and I hear you express support for open source software and feel that this is a menace which must be purged at all costs.
Still want to argue that companies should be able to hire and fire for any reason whatsoever?
At the aquarium where I work we have a gay domestic couple of penguins. They live together, have hatched an egg given to them together. It's really cool.
PENGUIN LUST! Nothing but URGES FROM HELL! (as Bill the Cat would say...)
Also, Blade Runner. Maltese Falcon was pretty damn good- as much a movie classic as the book was a literary one. The ending isn't quite as cynical as in the novel, but then the movie has Bogey, Peter Lorre, and that classic "stuff that dreams are made of" line. And let's not forget The Princess Bride.
Maybe the moral is that just converting a great book to a movie isn't enough to have a great movie: you still have to have a good director, good casting, and a good screenwriter. (In the case of Princess Bride, Goldman was the screenwriter, and it was his idea to cast Andre the Giant). I also think the Princess Bride (which other than a few edits such as the Zoo of Death, is almost unchanged from the book) shows that it should have been possible to import entire scenes, unaltered, from the radio series and novels and get something which would be as funny- if not funnier- than the originals.
The radio series shows how goddamn funny the dialogue is when well acted. I thought "...all the diodes down my left side" was merely amusing on the page, but I was howling with laughter when I heard it read in that chronically depressed voice on the radio plays. Frankly you have to be one hack of a director to screw up the Hitchhiker's Guide: you've got a wealth of great material, both written and spoken. Your only problem is the painful decision of what not to put in.
I don't know if I'd say improvement, but Tom Stoppard did some different stuff ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead"). I mean, okay perhaps it's not quite as pithy and quotable as "to be, or not to be..."
Rosencrantz: Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
Guildenstern: No.
Rosencrantz: Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never *know* you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out."
[bangs on lid]
Rosencrantz: "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"
Guildenstern: [long pause] I think I'm going to kill you.
For that matter, wasn't the story of Hamlet itself borrowed by Shakespeare?
Will our eulogy be: "The humans became extinct because they couldn't concentrate hard enough on their space program."?
It's an idiotic comparison. Dinosaurs didn't have a space program, but neither did the turtles, crocodiles, and freshwater fish, and they mostly survived. Nor did birds, possums, or lizards, and a number of those survived. So obviously it's possible to survive an impact event without anything terribly high tech (unless the turtles had a space program and the paleontologists haven't figured it out yet). You'd probably do fine riding out an asteroid impact with an underground shelter with enough food and heating fuel to last a few years. Maybe there are good reasons for a manned space program, but asteroids aren't one of them.
Seriously. As a young scamp of 21, I find it hard to believe that anyone got anything done in any reasonable amount of time before the existence of the internet. What did people do to obtain obscure information?
Huddled around the fire in the cave as the mammoths thundered outside, chanted the sacred songs, and waited for the effects of the sacred mushrooms to take hold.
The civilization at easter island did not see this coming, nor will our global civilization do before it will be too late in fifty to a hundred years or so. Great, we are now bringing a few dormant eggs back to life, but that is nothing compared to the vast number of species we are forcing into extinction.
Yes, but at least when aliens land on earth ten thousand years from now and find nothing but barren earth, they'll be able to hatch sea monkey eggs and bring sea monkeys back to their kids.
Hey, here's an idea: encode all of human wisdom- Shakespeare, Plato, the Library of Congress, _Abbey Road_- into DNA and then inject that into sea monkey eggs!
From reading the article, it didn't seem like there was any evidence of this other than speculation. They talk about using computer models to show how it would have wiped life out, but what about the evidence that brought them to this model to begin with? They could at least start with evidence in rocks or something.
Yeah, that's the major difference between this and Alvarez arguing that an asteroid/comet impact killed off the dinosaurs: Alvarez had the iridium. Maybe not the smoking gun, but some smoke. As time went on, they found impact debris, shocked quartz (only produced in extremely energetic explosions such as asteroid impacts and A-bomb tests), and finally, a huge crater underground in Mexico. These guys seem to have nothing more than interesting speculation. I wouldn't rule it out, but I'd want to see that other explanations(asteroids, volcanos) don't fit the data and that something about the geological record is uniquely explained by this idea. You'd imagine that bombarding the earth with huge amounts of radiation would leave some sort of signal that the geologists could pick up.
Consults Homeland Defense Handbook...... it says here to "Duck and Cover".
While it's often mocked, "duck and cover" was actually pretty good advice for what to do in an H-bomb attack. Most of the high-energy radiation from an H-bomb is rapidly absorbed by the atmosphere- except for the infrared. That retains the ability to burn skin for miles, so for anyone outside the range of the fireball and shockwave of the blast, that would have been your primary concern. You'd still have to deal with fallout, nuclear winter and nuclear mutants, but hey cross those bridges when you come to them.
Establishing a viable space-community should be the primary goal of the human race
Frankly I think this is idiotic. Simply putting a couple people on Mars would cost a couple hundred billion dollars; establishing a viable, self-sustaining outpost would cost orders of magnitude more. Meanwhile, half the world lives in abject poverty and the environment and climate are going to hell. Hasn't it occurred to anyone that funding a multi-trillion dollar effort to colonize space, with its massive consumption of energy and resources, might push us over the edge and to the very extinction which space fanboys claim to be staving off?
Re:I, for one, welcome our new Exoskeleton Overlor
on
Commercial Exoskeletons
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
except you could carry much heavier (i.e. more powerful) weapons and a lot more (and bigger) ammo.
The most obvious weapon I can think of would be a.50 caliber heavy machine gun. Currently it takes several men to carry one(or else a vehicle like a Humvee), a suit might allow one man to carry and use a weapon capable of taking out light armored vehicles. You could also add some heavy body armor- in short, create a mobile machine gun nest.
It's going to have its limitations, but any technology- aircraft, trucks, tanks, ships, foot soldiers- have their limitations, the trick is recognizing the limitations and advantages of each and using them accordingly. I suspect we will see something along these lines eventually. If it can help us kill people more effectively, you can be sure the Pentagon will employ it.
Then there's the logistics end of things, where it might play an even larger role- loading bombs onto aircraft, loading munitions and supplies onto supply trucks and aircraft, that kind of thing. If you could use this kind of technology to make your supply train smaller, faster, and more flexible that might have a much bigger impact on warfare than allowing a guy to carry a bigger gun.
Mass drivers help you get into orbit, but they don't help you return from orbit at all. In a space elevator, though, you just press the "down" button. Simple as that.
It sounds really simple, but what if someone pushes ALL the buttons on the way down? If you're stopping every ten feet, it'll take forever.
your sig is funny. Just thought I'd point out though that while there may not be a "we" in "team," there is a "team" in "team."
I actually used to have someone that would tell me that stupid little saying. It was annoying crap like that which made me unable to work with him.;)
Just tell him there's also an "e-a-t" and a "m-e" in "team". It's saying like that which drive my office mates crazy...
Don't forget the HUGE inaccuracies in the technology and facts of WWII.
Oh come on, lighten up people, it's entertainment, not history. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate. You've got to admit that was a frickin' awesome scene when the Zeros are diving and firing, and Abraham Lincoln just picks up his light saber and uses it to reflect their laser beams back at them, blowing them all up and winning the war!
Slashdot Mirror
"Bob sells lemonade on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Ed sells lemonade on Saturdays, Thursdays, and the same days Carol sells lemonade. Carol never sells lemonade when Bob sells lemonade. How do you crush them all to gain domination of the lemonade market?"
Actually, I did patent the entire world. Read US Patent Number 5,764,932: "Method for an inhabited world".
ABSTRACT
A method and system for an inhabited world. The "world" consists of a large (~12000km diameter) spheroid of rock. The method for production involves accretion from many small planetesimals. The inhabited world has a molten interior, or core, and a hardened exterior, or crust. Approximately 75% of the crust is covered by highly saline water. A gaseous layer composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, .9% argon and various trace gases is present. Bacteria, plants and animals inhabit the upper layers. The system for producing these organisms involves adding large amounts of organic compounds to water and allowing them to undergo evolution via "Natural Selection"(patent pending) for 4 billion years.
It then occurred to me that many groups and institutions exhibit the reverse of emergence: you have complex, smart people making up your system, but when you get them together you get stupid decisions. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, sometimes less intelligent than any one individual. The obvious name for this phenomenon is "demergence".
You'd think more people would recall that the founder of modern computer science was not only a homosexual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), but that prosecution and persecution for his sexuality eventually led him to take his own life.
I read a phrase in the Times entertainment section that piqued my curiosity: "jump the shark". Curious, I did a Google search and found that the phrase refers to the "Happy Days" episode where Fonzie, on waterskis, literally jumps over a shark. The point was that the show was never quite credible, never really as good as it had been, after this moment. And it suddenly hit me that the re-election of George W. Bush marked something similar.
The U.S. decided it hated gays and feared Muslim extremists more than it valued freedom and liberty. That moment showed that all you had to do in this country to fuck the poor and hand over the country to the rich was talk like an honest Texas Good Ol' Boy and not a spoiled millionaire's son educated at Yale. We've embraced fear in the name of security, hate in the name of Christ, lies in the name of justice. The spectre of Al Qaeda is invoked whenever the people question the government, yet the government is curiously unconcerned with capturing Osama bin Laden. We preach freedom while locking up people without trial; we invoke Jesus while arrogantly abusing our power. In short, the country has jumped the shark.
We've got some good years in the country yet, and I still love it in many ways. But it will never be the same for me. I feel like America is a love who has betrayed me, and I still love her, still care about her, still want the best for her. But I'll never completely trust her, ever again.
Well, lets see... (1) Apple Computer had a rainbow striped logo for years, (2) they are based just outside of San Francisco, (3) they have suspiciously good taste, almost as if the OS and every piece of hardware was designed by interior decorators.
Something tells me that if the Christian fundamentalists get up in arms about Teletubbies and Spongebob being in cahoots with the homosexual conspiracy, they might have a little trouble accepting Apple. Plus, the company name is an allusion to Eve and the serpent, so they're obviously in league with Satan as well.
The difference between a homosexual couple and a serial killer (and therefore the flaw in the analogy) is obvious: (1) consent, (2) it doesn't harm anyone else.
And just look at what's happened to Canada! Total chaos! Two dollar coins, people speaking in French, and decriminalized marijuana! I hear there are even places where polar bears roam the streets at will- is THAT the kind of cesspool of degeneracy we want America to become? Tastefully decorated, perhaps, but at the cost of being overrun by polar bears and stoned French separatists?
Well, let's turn that argument around. You say, "it's OK to fire people just because they're gay". You do a great job and don't bother anyone at work, but I'm your employer, and I feel that this is insensitive, insufficiently liberal and politically incorrect. Plus, I hear that you have been doing things in your off time which are causing the moral breakdown of Western Civilization- like voting Republican. So I fire your heartless conservative ass. Or maybe I'm at Microsoft and I hear you express support for open source software and feel that this is a menace which must be purged at all costs.
Still want to argue that companies should be able to hire and fire for any reason whatsoever?
To make us more like Florida? That is pretty insidious...
PENGUIN LUST! Nothing but URGES FROM HELL! (as Bill the Cat would say...)
Maybe the moral is that just converting a great book to a movie isn't enough to have a great movie: you still have to have a good director, good casting, and a good screenwriter. (In the case of Princess Bride, Goldman was the screenwriter, and it was his idea to cast Andre the Giant). I also think the Princess Bride (which other than a few edits such as the Zoo of Death, is almost unchanged from the book) shows that it should have been possible to import entire scenes, unaltered, from the radio series and novels and get something which would be as funny- if not funnier- than the originals.
The radio series shows how goddamn funny the dialogue is when well acted. I thought "...all the diodes down my left side" was merely amusing on the page, but I was howling with laughter when I heard it read in that chronically depressed voice on the radio plays. Frankly you have to be one hack of a director to screw up the Hitchhiker's Guide: you've got a wealth of great material, both written and spoken. Your only problem is the painful decision of what not to put in.
Rosencrantz: Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
Guildenstern: No.
Rosencrantz: Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never *know* you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out." [bangs on lid]
Rosencrantz: "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"
Guildenstern: [long pause] I think I'm going to kill you.
For that matter, wasn't the story of Hamlet itself borrowed by Shakespeare?
It's an idiotic comparison. Dinosaurs didn't have a space program, but neither did the turtles, crocodiles, and freshwater fish, and they mostly survived. Nor did birds, possums, or lizards, and a number of those survived. So obviously it's possible to survive an impact event without anything terribly high tech (unless the turtles had a space program and the paleontologists haven't figured it out yet). You'd probably do fine riding out an asteroid impact with an underground shelter with enough food and heating fuel to last a few years. Maybe there are good reasons for a manned space program, but asteroids aren't one of them.
Huddled around the fire in the cave as the mammoths thundered outside, chanted the sacred songs, and waited for the effects of the sacred mushrooms to take hold.
Yes, but at least when aliens land on earth ten thousand years from now and find nothing but barren earth, they'll be able to hatch sea monkey eggs and bring sea monkeys back to their kids.
Hey, here's an idea: encode all of human wisdom- Shakespeare, Plato, the Library of Congress, _Abbey Road_- into DNA and then inject that into sea monkey eggs!
Yeah, that's the major difference between this and Alvarez arguing that an asteroid/comet impact killed off the dinosaurs: Alvarez had the iridium. Maybe not the smoking gun, but some smoke. As time went on, they found impact debris, shocked quartz (only produced in extremely energetic explosions such as asteroid impacts and A-bomb tests), and finally, a huge crater underground in Mexico. These guys seem to have nothing more than interesting speculation. I wouldn't rule it out, but I'd want to see that other explanations(asteroids, volcanos) don't fit the data and that something about the geological record is uniquely explained by this idea. You'd imagine that bombarding the earth with huge amounts of radiation would leave some sort of signal that the geologists could pick up.
While it's often mocked, "duck and cover" was actually pretty good advice for what to do in an H-bomb attack. Most of the high-energy radiation from an H-bomb is rapidly absorbed by the atmosphere- except for the infrared. That retains the ability to burn skin for miles, so for anyone outside the range of the fireball and shockwave of the blast, that would have been your primary concern. You'd still have to deal with fallout, nuclear winter and nuclear mutants, but hey cross those bridges when you come to them.
Frankly I think this is idiotic. Simply putting a couple people on Mars would cost a couple hundred billion dollars; establishing a viable, self-sustaining outpost would cost orders of magnitude more. Meanwhile, half the world lives in abject poverty and the environment and climate are going to hell. Hasn't it occurred to anyone that funding a multi-trillion dollar effort to colonize space, with its massive consumption of energy and resources, might push us over the edge and to the very extinction which space fanboys claim to be staving off?
The most obvious weapon I can think of would be a .50 caliber heavy machine gun. Currently it takes several men to carry one(or else a vehicle like a Humvee), a suit might allow one man to carry and use a weapon capable of taking out light armored vehicles. You could also add some heavy body armor- in short, create a mobile machine gun nest.
It's going to have its limitations, but any technology- aircraft, trucks, tanks, ships, foot soldiers- have their limitations, the trick is recognizing the limitations and advantages of each and using them accordingly. I suspect we will see something along these lines eventually. If it can help us kill people more effectively, you can be sure the Pentagon will employ it.
Then there's the logistics end of things, where it might play an even larger role- loading bombs onto aircraft, loading munitions and supplies onto supply trucks and aircraft, that kind of thing. If you could use this kind of technology to make your supply train smaller, faster, and more flexible that might have a much bigger impact on warfare than allowing a guy to carry a bigger gun.
Create an event which is half Battle Bots and half Ultimate Fighting Championship!
It sounds really simple, but what if someone pushes ALL the buttons on the way down? If you're stopping every ten feet, it'll take forever.
Wheels... and breasts!
Just tell him there's also an "e-a-t" and a "m-e" in "team". It's saying like that which drive my office mates crazy...
Oh come on, lighten up people, it's entertainment, not history. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate. You've got to admit that was a frickin' awesome scene when the Zeros are diving and firing, and Abraham Lincoln just picks up his light saber and uses it to reflect their laser beams back at them, blowing them all up and winning the war!