I assume that anyone, barring physical handicap, can learn to type and will progressively get faster until they can express their thoughts somewhat directly. It's not a matter of the "think vs type" time ratio, it's not a matter of the logic acumen, it's not a matter of the raw speed. (Obviously the logic acumen is most important of all, but that's another skill that is usually developed over time.) I must say that without other information, I must assume a slow typist is an inexperienced computer user. Reminds me of the scene in Brazil where the co-worker claims he's "a bit of a whiz with these things" while hunting and pecking incompetently.
Learning ANY physical skill is easier if you are not paying 100% attention to the skill itself. Learn to roller skate by chasing a tennis ball around a parking lot. Focus on the ball, and your feet will "figure it out" on their own. Back in the ages of MUDs (that's MMORPGs in all text format, for you kids out there), I found the fastest way to learn to type quickly was to try to hold a conversation real-time. IRC is a sufficient alternative. If you don't want others to get bored with your slow responses, you will naturally speed up your typing.
However, it doesn't explain why you can feel strong empathy with the characters in Finding Nemo
Scott McCloud has a fairly good chapter on this in his book, Understanding Comics. He demonstrates drawing-space as a three-variabled continuum, a triangle. It's been a while, but I think the points were something like complexity, abstractness, realism. But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role, so it became more emotionally immersive. Dory and Nemo's dad were very simplified, abstractified, so we related better.
And I would say that it's even worse when you can't type your question. Too many people know my mother's maiden name, my first car, my high school -- and I assume much of this information can be had publicly as well.
While I expect there are many dunderheads out there who set up naively truthful answers to the canned security questions, there's no reason you should. If forced to set them up, I generally give untruthful answers. Don't go too far, as some sites give the challenges in "multiple choice" format. What's your hometown? (A) Peoria, (B) Detroit, (C) London, (D) The Fifth Inner Plane of Lord Zgothos' Realms.
Last week, NPR had a shout out to this essay (which I had read before) and also to a blogger named Vi Hart. Check out her YouTube videos and blog at vihart.com, especially the math class doodles. She talks very fast, cracks a lot of puns, and ridicules the established educational methods as she draws doodles that relate to math concepts. Explore your numeracy visually.
Sorry, I have never been so pissed off in my/. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".
You pick THIS moment to be pissed off?
That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.
Not sure what you mean by a limited number of fingers... we're not talking about Emacs and its quadruple bucky keystrokes. However, I fully agree that Apple's idea of useful key bindings is sometimes ridiculous. For example, they insist that Home and End keys jump all the way to the top and bottom of the whole document, rather than the carriage home (start) and the end of the current line. In most files I am editing, there are (say) a thousand lines, so there are a couple thousand handy locations I may want to jump to with a single logical keystroke. The number of times I want to jump to the end of the document is vanishingly small in comparison, and can be done by holding down a Page Down key for a moment or two instead.
Okay, I've done some Arduino stuff myself, and am familiar with the pricing on typical custom PCBs from Sparkfun. So I checked out the Saiko5 product page.
I mentally added up the custom wifi shield, the custom LED driver board, the LEDs, the Arduino itself, and thought damn, I bet they're gonna offer this for nearly a hundred bucks. Add on a rubber duck antenna, some wall wart or LIPO for power, and a basic case, and that's more like $150. Then I see the photos of heavy duty bomb-proof cases which appear to be machine-bent-then-anodized aluminum plate. Even 2mm plate is overkill and this looks a lot thicker. That's silly thick and heavy, even for stage pyrotechnics units, and it's gonna cost. There's no way I'd be interested in $200 for such a device, especially since they'd work best in grid/swarm configurations. The altogether price they offered was four times that, at $800. Even factoring for (1) niche market, (2) assembly disincentive [prefer DIY assembly], and (3) low count factory runs, this price is out of all sensibility.
When I first read the headlines elsewhere, I wondered how we could have advanced sensitivity by a few orders of magnitude to distinguish individual stars in another galaxy, nevermind planets. Slashdot's headline is nonsensical. I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic. I'll even trust that the astronomers' science is right on: they're able to detect if a star matches indicators for originating in this galaxy or that galaxy. Maybe it used to be a part of a different galaxy pre-collision, but I would say it's in this galaxy now, so it's not an extragalactic star system. This article itself occasionally uses the phrase "of extragalactic origin" and I'm okay with that, but simplifying it further actually makes it more confusing.
Of COURSE the images are being stored. Do you think for one moment that they would not be able to recall the images immediately after some airplane has an unforeseen tragic event? Within the hour, CIA Langley would be scrutinizing the scrotes of everybody who boarded, for the past six flights that each passenger took. Even if it turned out to be a maintenance issue or design defect like Qantas just endured. It boggles the mind how many people will just say "but... but... but they SAID they'd delete the images."
I overheard it put this way: "If the government is going to keep groping our wives and daughters, somebody's going to go Braveheart on them." Oppressive behavior just creates terrorists, it doesn't find or defeat them.
Students should just start downloading legal p2p software... at a massive scale.
Make sure that the university and the police department are getting overworked from false claims of illegal downloading.
It's a peaceful, harmless and non-violent way of teaching stupid people that p2p is not always illegal.
I agree with the strategy, but it's easier said than done. It's a significant investment to get into school, and an even bigger one to upset the applecart: daddy paid some tuition, you borrowed the rest of the tuition, and you do have those midterms and other academic projects to finish on time.
As pointed out, more games are using P2P updating mechanisms, and some gamers may not even be aware of it. Suddenly, the cops want to know why the kids are stealing music, and if they can't connect the dots as fast as their games are connecting to peer nodes, they may screw up their own legal defense.
Was it smart to call anything related to legitimate software a "bug" in the first place?
I get your point, but it seems a somewhat natural word associated with eavesdropping and listening devices. A near-invisible way to tap into the activity of the visitor of a web page. The phone is bugged. The website is bugged.
In practice, many non-technical users are STILL more likely to refer to computer flaws as "glitches" (and not even distinguishing hardware, software and human error) instead of "bugs."
Given the rapid orbital decay of objects below approximately 200 km, the commonly accepted definition for LEO is between 160 - 2,000 km (100 - 1,240 miles) above the Earth's surface. --Wikipedia
Yes, speed is the key, but I can see why someone could rationally simplify the statement to "100km is roughly half of a LEO altitude." He wasn't giving a definition, he was simply pointing out that 100km isn't orbital, and giving one way of looking at the difference.
I like this feature for a couple reasons. I'm a visual person, I like seeing if the site is the one I remember before I go visit, or if it's a spam-link-farm kind of page that's just wasting my time. I also like their "highlight" that shows WHERE in a page I'll find the sought phrase they snipped.
I also like the Google Flip feature at the bottom of their news page, but I don't like the two-click process to visit the site. Clicking on the preview gives a (useless) bigger preview, and then clicking on that takes you to the showcased page. Without the second preview, it would be a nice little stumbleupon-like way of finding interesting stories/news/ideas around the web.
I hesitate to reveal that the whole Slashdot site is a fake, designed to get insightful comments from you. Everyone else is an AI, including me.
What makes you feel like you must hesitate to reveal that the whole Slashdot site is a fake, designed to get insightful comments from me. Everyone else is an AI, including you?
If the movie looks like it'll be enhanced by 3D... that is, it's clear that it was designed with 3D in mind and will tell the story in a "3D way," I'll pay for the 3D experience. Coraline? Sure. Avatar? Sure. Johnny Depp Does Another Freaky Makeup Job? Not really. I'm sure other people decided Coraline wasn't worth it, or Alice would have been good if they didn't use crappy 3D post-conversion. I really don't care about seeing things on the first day, so I can usually hear from other people whether it overwhelmingly stank or totally rocked. I have no problem paying the ticket and supporting a theater or a director who makes a good movie. It's entertainment, not an investment.
Unmentioned is the other obvious and simple solution: don't join onto "social networks." I'm sure there'll be fifty replies explaining how they just have to be a member of the same useless cow-tipping, todays-sandwich-blogging, incessant-nagging network that their great Aunt Muriel is on, but you can in fact live a reasonably active and social life like they did in the olden days of 1995. No spoofing concerns either.
I'm sure many will correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic gist of devices like the Retina display is to match or slightly exceed the theoretical limit of an eye's ability to resolve details at a normal usage distance. This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity. The Compact Disc chose 44050 Hz sampling rate because our ears generally cannot hear anything over 22000 Hz.
What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution. In the visual realm, there's a good example. As you move an image across different photoreceptors, the brain will synthesize additional resolution. Our eyeballs do this all the time: tiny involuntary movements called Nystagmus help our neural edge-detectors gather more data to aid in perception. You can experiment with this using a video editor and one of those "pixelating" filters: move an object behind a coarse pixelating filter, and you can easily determine more about the original object shape than you could with a fixed image. Nystagmus beats Nyquist, if you will.
I think there's plenty of room for higher resolution sampling: music is often sampled at 48000 KHz nowadays, and I think handheld displays will benefit from 400+ or even 500+ DPI easily.
I guess I'm having a hard time to see where the boundary would lie, because of how easy it is to cross it. The Arduino, a general purpose microcontroller board, would seem to be about as open as they get: the whole firmware is open, the tools are open, they even give you files that would let you manipulate the hardware layout and have a factory produce your custom flavor. Does that get the Arduino a nod from the FSF? Okay, if so, what about Arduino-based devices which employ sensors and/or obfuscation on top of this great "free" platform? A locked-down spy device built upon open standards is possible on the web, on the desktop, and in your pocket. So the endorsement only goes for devices unmodified after inspection... which somewhat deflates any value in such an endorsement, in my mind.
The same is true with an infinite repeating decimal. It is an irrational number.
Far from true. A rational number is a number you could get by expressing as a ratio (real number divided by real number). Any infinite repeating decimal is easily shown as a ratio (and often of simple integers to boot), i.e., a rational number. 0.22222... is 2/9. 0.456456456456456... is 456/999. And so on.
"First dan" or shodan is roughly the level of "starting to get serious" or freshman-professional. This goes for karate, shogi, igo (go), language, and pretty much the grading scheme in all other Japanese arts and skills including ikebana and shodo calligraphy. Westerners often think the black belt in karate is the pinnacle, when indeed your first black belt is just the beginning of a lifelong journey. Most schools go to 9-dan (kyuudan) and have an honorary 10-dan or 11-dan ranking for the highest practitioner in the world. Everything below 1-dan is just weeding out the hobbyists and dilettantes.
A thousand other replies followed yours, with every variation of Wonder Woman, transparent cargo, wiring and bathrooms. Congrats on being fastest, or first to get an Insightful mod.
Personally, I think that temperature regulation and solar dazzle will be a lot harder problem. Already, flying north or south near sunset can have a noticeable impact on cabin temperatures, and everyone slides the blinds closed on the sunward side. What if you don't have those options? You're going to be the ant in the jar, left to sweat it out in the direct sunlight. Such a plane would be suitable only for short excursion use.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that anyone, barring physical handicap, can learn to type and will progressively get faster until they can express their thoughts somewhat directly. It's not a matter of the "think vs type" time ratio, it's not a matter of the logic acumen, it's not a matter of the raw speed. (Obviously the logic acumen is most important of all, but that's another skill that is usually developed over time.) I must say that without other information, I must assume a slow typist is an inexperienced computer user. Reminds me of the scene in Brazil where the co-worker claims he's "a bit of a whiz with these things" while hunting and pecking incompetently.
Learning ANY physical skill is easier if you are not paying 100% attention to the skill itself. Learn to roller skate by chasing a tennis ball around a parking lot. Focus on the ball, and your feet will "figure it out" on their own. Back in the ages of MUDs (that's MMORPGs in all text format, for you kids out there), I found the fastest way to learn to type quickly was to try to hold a conversation real-time. IRC is a sufficient alternative. If you don't want others to get bored with your slow responses, you will naturally speed up your typing.
Scott McCloud has a fairly good chapter on this in his book, Understanding Comics. He demonstrates drawing-space as a three-variabled continuum, a triangle. It's been a while, but I think the points were something like complexity, abstractness, realism. But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role, so it became more emotionally immersive. Dory and Nemo's dad were very simplified, abstractified, so we related better.
While I expect there are many dunderheads out there who set up naively truthful answers to the canned security questions, there's no reason you should. If forced to set them up, I generally give untruthful answers. Don't go too far, as some sites give the challenges in "multiple choice" format. What's your hometown? (A) Peoria, (B) Detroit, (C) London, (D) The Fifth Inner Plane of Lord Zgothos' Realms.
Last week, NPR had a shout out to this essay (which I had read before) and also to a blogger named Vi Hart. Check out her YouTube videos and blog at vihart.com, especially the math class doodles. She talks very fast, cracks a lot of puns, and ridicules the established educational methods as she draws doodles that relate to math concepts. Explore your numeracy visually.
You pick THIS moment to be pissed off?
That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.
Not sure what you mean by a limited number of fingers... we're not talking about Emacs and its quadruple bucky keystrokes. However, I fully agree that Apple's idea of useful key bindings is sometimes ridiculous. For example, they insist that Home and End keys jump all the way to the top and bottom of the whole document, rather than the carriage home (start) and the end of the current line. In most files I am editing, there are (say) a thousand lines, so there are a couple thousand handy locations I may want to jump to with a single logical keystroke. The number of times I want to jump to the end of the document is vanishingly small in comparison, and can be done by holding down a Page Down key for a moment or two instead.
Okay, I've done some Arduino stuff myself, and am familiar with the pricing on typical custom PCBs from Sparkfun. So I checked out the Saiko5 product page.
I mentally added up the custom wifi shield, the custom LED driver board, the LEDs, the Arduino itself, and thought damn, I bet they're gonna offer this for nearly a hundred bucks. Add on a rubber duck antenna, some wall wart or LIPO for power, and a basic case, and that's more like $150. Then I see the photos of heavy duty bomb-proof cases which appear to be machine-bent-then-anodized aluminum plate. Even 2mm plate is overkill and this looks a lot thicker. That's silly thick and heavy, even for stage pyrotechnics units, and it's gonna cost. There's no way I'd be interested in $200 for such a device, especially since they'd work best in grid/swarm configurations. The altogether price they offered was four times that, at $800. Even factoring for (1) niche market, (2) assembly disincentive [prefer DIY assembly], and (3) low count factory runs, this price is out of all sensibility.
When I first read the headlines elsewhere, I wondered how we could have advanced sensitivity by a few orders of magnitude to distinguish individual stars in another galaxy, nevermind planets. Slashdot's headline is nonsensical. I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic. I'll even trust that the astronomers' science is right on: they're able to detect if a star matches indicators for originating in this galaxy or that galaxy. Maybe it used to be a part of a different galaxy pre-collision, but I would say it's in this galaxy now, so it's not an extragalactic star system. This article itself occasionally uses the phrase "of extragalactic origin" and I'm okay with that, but simplifying it further actually makes it more confusing.
Of COURSE the images are being stored. Do you think for one moment that they would not be able to recall the images immediately after some airplane has an unforeseen tragic event? Within the hour, CIA Langley would be scrutinizing the scrotes of everybody who boarded, for the past six flights that each passenger took. Even if it turned out to be a maintenance issue or design defect like Qantas just endured. It boggles the mind how many people will just say "but... but... but they SAID they'd delete the images."
I overheard it put this way: "If the government is going to keep groping our wives and daughters, somebody's going to go Braveheart on them." Oppressive behavior just creates terrorists, it doesn't find or defeat them.
I agree with the strategy, but it's easier said than done. It's a significant investment to get into school, and an even bigger one to upset the applecart: daddy paid some tuition, you borrowed the rest of the tuition, and you do have those midterms and other academic projects to finish on time.
As pointed out, more games are using P2P updating mechanisms, and some gamers may not even be aware of it. Suddenly, the cops want to know why the kids are stealing music, and if they can't connect the dots as fast as their games are connecting to peer nodes, they may screw up their own legal defense.
I get your point, but it seems a somewhat natural word associated with eavesdropping and listening devices. A near-invisible way to tap into the activity of the visitor of a web page. The phone is bugged. The website is bugged.
In practice, many non-technical users are STILL more likely to refer to computer flaws as "glitches" (and not even distinguishing hardware, software and human error) instead of "bugs."
Yes, speed is the key, but I can see why someone could rationally simplify the statement to "100km is roughly half of a LEO altitude." He wasn't giving a definition, he was simply pointing out that 100km isn't orbital, and giving one way of looking at the difference.
I like this feature for a couple reasons. I'm a visual person, I like seeing if the site is the one I remember before I go visit, or if it's a spam-link-farm kind of page that's just wasting my time. I also like their "highlight" that shows WHERE in a page I'll find the sought phrase they snipped.
I also like the Google Flip feature at the bottom of their news page, but I don't like the two-click process to visit the site. Clicking on the preview gives a (useless) bigger preview, and then clicking on that takes you to the showcased page. Without the second preview, it would be a nice little stumbleupon-like way of finding interesting stories/news/ideas around the web.
What makes you feel like you must hesitate to reveal that the whole Slashdot site is a fake, designed to get insightful comments from me. Everyone else is an AI, including you?
If the movie looks like it'll be enhanced by 3D... that is, it's clear that it was designed with 3D in mind and will tell the story in a "3D way," I'll pay for the 3D experience. Coraline? Sure. Avatar? Sure. Johnny Depp Does Another Freaky Makeup Job? Not really. I'm sure other people decided Coraline wasn't worth it, or Alice would have been good if they didn't use crappy 3D post-conversion. I really don't care about seeing things on the first day, so I can usually hear from other people whether it overwhelmingly stank or totally rocked. I have no problem paying the ticket and supporting a theater or a director who makes a good movie. It's entertainment, not an investment.
Unmentioned is the other obvious and simple solution: don't join onto "social networks." I'm sure there'll be fifty replies explaining how they just have to be a member of the same useless cow-tipping, todays-sandwich-blogging, incessant-nagging network that their great Aunt Muriel is on, but you can in fact live a reasonably active and social life like they did in the olden days of 1995. No spoofing concerns either.
In Kyllo vs United States, the Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) search without warrant was deemed unconstitutional.
I'm sure many will correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic gist of devices like the Retina display is to match or slightly exceed the theoretical limit of an eye's ability to resolve details at a normal usage distance. This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity. The Compact Disc chose 44050 Hz sampling rate because our ears generally cannot hear anything over 22000 Hz.
What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution. In the visual realm, there's a good example. As you move an image across different photoreceptors, the brain will synthesize additional resolution. Our eyeballs do this all the time: tiny involuntary movements called Nystagmus help our neural edge-detectors gather more data to aid in perception. You can experiment with this using a video editor and one of those "pixelating" filters: move an object behind a coarse pixelating filter, and you can easily determine more about the original object shape than you could with a fixed image. Nystagmus beats Nyquist, if you will.
I think there's plenty of room for higher resolution sampling: music is often sampled at 48000 KHz nowadays, and I think handheld displays will benefit from 400+ or even 500+ DPI easily.
I guess I'm having a hard time to see where the boundary would lie, because of how easy it is to cross it. The Arduino, a general purpose microcontroller board, would seem to be about as open as they get: the whole firmware is open, the tools are open, they even give you files that would let you manipulate the hardware layout and have a factory produce your custom flavor. Does that get the Arduino a nod from the FSF? Okay, if so, what about Arduino-based devices which employ sensors and/or obfuscation on top of this great "free" platform? A locked-down spy device built upon open standards is possible on the web, on the desktop, and in your pocket. So the endorsement only goes for devices unmodified after inspection... which somewhat deflates any value in such an endorsement, in my mind.
Just like we took punitive action against Logan Airport and United Airlines for 9/11? Oh, right.
When "our adversary" uses the likes of Google or Akamai or British Telecom against us in a cyberattack, we're going to return fire on those platforms?
Hey, I'm putting a scheme together about the RIAA...
Far from true. A rational number is a number you could get by expressing as a ratio (real number divided by real number). Any infinite repeating decimal is easily shown as a ratio (and often of simple integers to boot), i.e., a rational number. 0.22222... is 2/9. 0.456456456456456... is 456/999. And so on.
"First dan" or shodan is roughly the level of "starting to get serious" or freshman-professional. This goes for karate, shogi, igo (go), language, and pretty much the grading scheme in all other Japanese arts and skills including ikebana and shodo calligraphy. Westerners often think the black belt in karate is the pinnacle, when indeed your first black belt is just the beginning of a lifelong journey. Most schools go to 9-dan (kyuudan) and have an honorary 10-dan or 11-dan ranking for the highest practitioner in the world. Everything below 1-dan is just weeding out the hobbyists and dilettantes.
Two words: Tank Man. Or more generally, "resist oppression." Take your pick.
A thousand other replies followed yours, with every variation of Wonder Woman, transparent cargo, wiring and bathrooms. Congrats on being fastest, or first to get an Insightful mod.
Personally, I think that temperature regulation and solar dazzle will be a lot harder problem. Already, flying north or south near sunset can have a noticeable impact on cabin temperatures, and everyone slides the blinds closed on the sunward side. What if you don't have those options? You're going to be the ant in the jar, left to sweat it out in the direct sunlight. Such a plane would be suitable only for short excursion use.