And what's the point of building a fridge, a robot, a beer, or a couch if they aren't running linux, they aren't ethernet enabled, and they don't have a Web 2.0 interface?!?!
According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol -- up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women -- reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent...
Really? And here I was thinking that everyone died.
A lot of people have already mentioned that they can buy the DVD, which they can watch forever, for the price of two movie tickets, which they can use once. Owning (or renting at a fraction of the cost, or acquiring it by more... surreptitious means) has almost everything in its favour.
The biggest thing that cinemas still have going for them is that "opening day" buzz for people who want to see the movie as soon as they possibly can, preferably before anyone else they know has seen it. There is some logical sense in this, because it means you don't run the risk of hearing a spoiler; but it's mainly just psychological. It's fun to be one of the first people in the world to see a movie. It's annoying to know that lots of other people have seen it and you haven't.
But this doesn't apply anywhere near as much to Snakes on a Plane, because everyone who would concievably have been interested in it already knew everything about it. Also, the plot doesn't leave much room for suspense and twists - the title is a spoiler, for Cthulhu's sake. There was no reason to see it on opening night, so there was no reason to see it at the big screen at all.
If players tend to shy away from paper, shouldn't you play rock?
Alternatively, this bit probably applies best to lawyers:
On the other hand, Paper also connects with a player's perceptions about writing. There is a quiet power in the printed word... As such, some players perceive Paper as a subtle attack, the victory of modern culture over barbarism. Such players may use Paper to assert their superiority and dignity.
...in which case, the rational throw would be scissors.
But if the other side will rationally choose scissors, then the sensible course of action is to throw rock.
But if the other side reasons the same way, then obviously you'll have to play paper.
Either way, never get involved in a land war in Asia.
I'm getting sick of people reading a/. summary of a summary of someone's legitimate results and deciding then and there that the original research (whose message is now 2x re-interpreted by the successive authors) is crap.
The great-grandparent post took aim at the report of the research, not the research itself. I agree with everything you say except your application of it to that post.
You can't discount the psychological effect of being threatened by something you can't see.
Someone wandering around the street firing rounds into people randomly until he's taken down himself is not a fun event, but it has a kind of causality that the mind can come to grips with - the guy pulled out a gun, he shot someone, that person died. Tragic, but uncomplicated. It gives the brain a chance to identify the actual threat.
With a bioweapon on the other hand, you can take a lethal dose and not even know about it until hours later when you're across town. Not only does this make it much harder to track down the cause, it means that half the people who hear about it on the news will have psychosomatic problems, and will never quite feel safe even when there's no visible threat.
That's why it's called terrorism. It's not just about the efficiency of the effort-to-bodycount ratio - you can't induce terror in a dead person, but if you do it right you can scare a good chunk of the surviving population of the world.
(On a related topic, this is why the US government chooses to personify the threat. You can't fight an abstract concept - the War on Terror is instantiated as the War on bin Laden, because he's a visible, tangible threat. And if he's dead or at least in hiding, then everyone feels like the war has been won. Of course, any tangible threat will do; it doesn't matter whether Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, as long as we can fight them.)
Which is ironic because if we were created, we were created with logical, thinking minds which drive us to discover cause and effect rather than pursue blind faith.
Part of me wants to say something about proper modular design, object-orientedness, thoroughly designing interfaces then splitting up the work, blah blah blah.
However, the reality is that most programming assignments are too small for full-on thorough design to be anything but an obstacle, particularly for a one (and to a lesser extent, two) person team. So, realistically, here's how I'd do it. Note that this is not an ideal, this is what I think would actually happen if I was in your situation.
You start coding first. Write the whole thing top-down, and stay at as high a level as you can while keeping it logically coherent. When you get to a lower-level chunk that you don't want to think about right now, write a stub or a FIXME, and get the other guy (I'll assume male for now) to write a function to do that. Then just keep writing, on the assumption that you will be able to plug his function in eventually.
How big or small you should make the tasks depends on what you think he can do. Don't just say "here, do this" and then ignore him; give him an idea of how this task fits into the program (if it isn't obvious), let him ask you for ideas about how to do it, and be willing to claim bits back if they're too tough. On the other hand, be prepared to hand off bigger chunks if he's knocking over the stuff you gave him easily.
This is based on a few assumptions about the situation - that the project, or decent-sized chunks of it, can sensibly be written top-down; that your partner will be able to handle what you give him; and that he won't argue too much about the architecture. But with some minor tweaking it can probably work.
Oh, one more thing - use version control.
SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.
So the best thing they offer over the competition is the ease with which you can switch to the competition when they go out of business?
The thing that makes this truly bizarre, though, is that she quite readily blamed Mozilla for this. The fact that the copyright holder has every right to give it away for free doesn't even seem to register a blip here, even if that was a completely new piece of information for her.
All she seemed to be concerned about is the fact that Mozilla, by stepping out of line from what normal copyright holders do, has made their job more difficult. There's even the implication there that they should stop it and let her get on with her job. Although that may just be me misinterpreting the tone of 50% of emails.
Sure, she was in shock, and she hit out at the first available target. I get that. I just expect more from law enforcement.
I must say, just skimming over some of the top-level comments, that I've never seen such attention to writing quality in Slashdot posters. Apparently this community, at least, does have the "ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so."
Or maybe the moderators are being especially anal for this topic.:)
My interpretation (which could be totally wrong) was that the device is "scalable" in the sense that a chip is one qubit, but you can in theory put together, as it were, a Beowulf cluster of them to produce a multiple-qubit device.
There are so many things wrong with what I just said that it's hard to know where to start. I dunno.
I'd actually argue that it should be the other way around.
Songs are like processors, software and pharmaceuticals in that they have a very high development cost but almost zero production costs. In theory, the company that makes them could just sell a fixed number at a fixed price to recover costs plus some profit margin, then drop the price to virtually nothing. In practice the price starts high and drops off over the first few months/years/whatever.
iTunes should make songs cheaper as they become more popular.
From the buyer's perspective, however, Apple's 99-cents-for-everything model isn't perfect. Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?
No, it's too little; if you want to support that music (arguments about profits not reaching the artist aside for now) then you should be willing to pay more to encourage an as-yet unpopular artist and help them on the path to greater recognition. On the other hand, 99 cents or 25 cents or 1 cent (must not... make pun about... 50 Cent...) will make no difference to a band that has just sold its three billionth album.
I know economists out there will argue with me about supply and demand; and I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I'm not sure that it's the dominant force when supply is essentially infinite.
This could lead to new shimmering car finishes which can change with temperature or humidity, new cosmetics, but more importantly, to new applications in optical data processing.
From the title:
Science: Car Paint Changes With Temperature
Posted by Zonk on Monday December 05, @02:41PM
from the ooo-shiny dept.
Optical data processing shmoptical data processing.
Slashdot Mirror
</nitpick>
Clearly it's an Allen key socket. God must have bought Saturn from Ikea.
Blah blah Beowulf cluster blah blah blah?
Really? And here I was thinking that everyone died.
So the risk of a drinker dying is 82%?
Who's Abram?
A lot of people have already mentioned that they can buy the DVD, which they can watch forever, for the price of two movie tickets, which they can use once. Owning (or renting at a fraction of the cost, or acquiring it by more... surreptitious means) has almost everything in its favour.
The biggest thing that cinemas still have going for them is that "opening day" buzz for people who want to see the movie as soon as they possibly can, preferably before anyone else they know has seen it. There is some logical sense in this, because it means you don't run the risk of hearing a spoiler; but it's mainly just psychological. It's fun to be one of the first people in the world to see a movie. It's annoying to know that lots of other people have seen it and you haven't.
But this doesn't apply anywhere near as much to Snakes on a Plane, because everyone who would concievably have been interested in it already knew everything about it. Also, the plot doesn't leave much room for suspense and twists - the title is a spoiler, for Cthulhu's sake. There was no reason to see it on opening night, so there was no reason to see it at the big screen at all.
I predict they'll make a killing on DVDs.
Did anyone else read the "whoshotmrburns" tag as "Who's Hot Mr Burns"?
But if your opponent thinks the same way, then you should play paper!
Or you could introduce an "iocaine powder" throw...
Alternatively, this bit probably applies best to lawyers:
But if the other side will rationally choose scissors, then the sensible course of action is to throw rock.
But if the other side reasons the same way, then obviously you'll have to play paper.
Either way, never get involved in a land war in Asia.
The great-grandparent post took aim at the report of the research, not the research itself. I agree with everything you say except your application of it to that post.
Seconded. (Or fourthed, now that I look at it.)
You can't discount the psychological effect of being threatened by something you can't see.
Someone wandering around the street firing rounds into people randomly until he's taken down himself is not a fun event, but it has a kind of causality that the mind can come to grips with - the guy pulled out a gun, he shot someone, that person died. Tragic, but uncomplicated. It gives the brain a chance to identify the actual threat.
With a bioweapon on the other hand, you can take a lethal dose and not even know about it until hours later when you're across town. Not only does this make it much harder to track down the cause, it means that half the people who hear about it on the news will have psychosomatic problems, and will never quite feel safe even when there's no visible threat.
That's why it's called terrorism. It's not just about the efficiency of the effort-to-bodycount ratio - you can't induce terror in a dead person, but if you do it right you can scare a good chunk of the surviving population of the world.
(On a related topic, this is why the US government chooses to personify the threat. You can't fight an abstract concept - the War on Terror is instantiated as the War on bin Laden, because he's a visible, tangible threat. And if he's dead or at least in hiding, then everyone feels like the war has been won. Of course, any tangible threat will do; it doesn't matter whether Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, as long as we can fight them.)
+1 Offtopic, But On A More Interesting Topic Than The Article
Which is ironic because if we were created, we were created with logical, thinking minds which drive us to discover cause and effect rather than pursue blind faith.
Speak for yourself.
F' the other 1.7%
Yessir! Thank you sir!
Part of me wants to say something about proper modular design, object-orientedness, thoroughly designing interfaces then splitting up the work, blah blah blah. However, the reality is that most programming assignments are too small for full-on thorough design to be anything but an obstacle, particularly for a one (and to a lesser extent, two) person team. So, realistically, here's how I'd do it. Note that this is not an ideal, this is what I think would actually happen if I was in your situation. You start coding first. Write the whole thing top-down, and stay at as high a level as you can while keeping it logically coherent. When you get to a lower-level chunk that you don't want to think about right now, write a stub or a FIXME, and get the other guy (I'll assume male for now) to write a function to do that. Then just keep writing, on the assumption that you will be able to plug his function in eventually. How big or small you should make the tasks depends on what you think he can do. Don't just say "here, do this" and then ignore him; give him an idea of how this task fits into the program (if it isn't obvious), let him ask you for ideas about how to do it, and be willing to claim bits back if they're too tough. On the other hand, be prepared to hand off bigger chunks if he's knocking over the stuff you gave him easily. This is based on a few assumptions about the situation - that the project, or decent-sized chunks of it, can sensibly be written top-down; that your partner will be able to handle what you give him; and that he won't argue too much about the architecture. But with some minor tweaking it can probably work. Oh, one more thing - use version control.
So the best thing they offer over the competition is the ease with which you can switch to the competition when they go out of business?
Profit!
The thing that makes this truly bizarre, though, is that she quite readily blamed Mozilla for this. The fact that the copyright holder has every right to give it away for free doesn't even seem to register a blip here, even if that was a completely new piece of information for her.
All she seemed to be concerned about is the fact that Mozilla, by stepping out of line from what normal copyright holders do, has made their job more difficult. There's even the implication there that they should stop it and let her get on with her job. Although that may just be me misinterpreting the tone of 50% of emails.
Sure, she was in shock, and she hit out at the first available target. I get that. I just expect more from law enforcement.
I must say, just skimming over some of the top-level comments, that I've never seen such attention to writing quality in Slashdot posters. Apparently this community, at least, does have the "ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so." Or maybe the moderators are being especially anal for this topic. :)
Surely the title should be "Australians to Increases Surveillances Powers".
Not sure about "tos".
For Christmas in, I think, 1987, when I was 6, I had a choice between a Commodore 64 and a bike.
To this day I can't ride a bike.
My interpretation (which could be totally wrong) was that the device is "scalable" in the sense that a chip is one qubit, but you can in theory put together, as it were, a Beowulf cluster of them to produce a multiple-qubit device.
There are so many things wrong with what I just said that it's hard to know where to start. I dunno.
Songs are like processors, software and pharmaceuticals in that they have a very high development cost but almost zero production costs. In theory, the company that makes them could just sell a fixed number at a fixed price to recover costs plus some profit margin, then drop the price to virtually nothing. In practice the price starts high and drops off over the first few months/years/whatever.
iTunes should make songs cheaper as they become more popular.
No, it's too little; if you want to support that music (arguments about profits not reaching the artist aside for now) then you should be willing to pay more to encourage an as-yet unpopular artist and help them on the path to greater recognition. On the other hand, 99 cents or 25 cents or 1 cent (must not... make pun about... 50 Cent...) will make no difference to a band that has just sold its three billionth album.
I know economists out there will argue with me about supply and demand; and I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I'm not sure that it's the dominant force when supply is essentially infinite.
From the title:
Optical data processing shmoptical data processing.Yes, as in "I twarted I twaw a pwuddy twat."