Will Smith was on Letterman a few days ago promoting the movie. I was amazed that he mentioned Asimov several times, actually seemed familiar with the stories, and could recite the Three Laws.
Why is that surprising? He is a smart guy and puts a lot of effort into his work.
Ah yes... since some people are not good at, or don't like, preparation / memorization they deem that it is cheating, not fun, and should be somehow removed from the game.
It's not about being good at it. The reason some of us enjoy chess so much is that we like to be in that state of intense concentration where you come up with ideas and make analytical decisions. When you just use the 'recall from memory' part of your brain, it is not as fun. And there have been studies using scans of brains to show that using the recall part of the brain more is precisely what happens the more advanced a player is.
"When offered a patent for the fireplace's design, Benjamin Franklin turned it down. He did not want to make a profit. He wanted all people to benefit from his invention."
"Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it... or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings--that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide." - Gautama Buddha
Ever notice the huge percentage of all the neat news stories you read about scientific progress in biology or physics are actually just summaries of the article that was published in nature?
Now if they would just stop selling my address to all those snail-mail spammers that seem to think every nature subscriber is a microbiologist.
Some people, like 14 year old cousins with a marijuana charge on their record, can't be trusted with cash.
Plus, giving cash makes it clear you don't really know enough about the person to give them an appropriate gift. At least, with a gift certificate, you can narrow it down a bit for their interests.
A gift certificate can also be a way of forcing the person to splurge a bit, but still letting them get exactly what they want. e.g. a gift certificate for some pricy store to a person that normally shops at less expensive places.
Aside from the naked women part, it sounds like a job in the Saudi Arabian government. I think you need to have a close genetic connection to get one of those jobs, though, 8^)
In case anyone is wondering, the goal is to hold the most territory. The parent poster's idealistic views are pretty and even a bit inspiring, but they aren't very realistic, 8^)
hrm, they don't all seem to be working properly now with mozilla 1.7 and java 1.4.2_04-b05 although they worked fine a couple years ago. I had the same sort of problems with smartmoney which is why I didn't buy a subscription.
Hoover's FBI is pretty famous for having had files on many predominant people at one point. Some of the more socialist countries( think scandinavia) also have extensive records on citizens. Records aren't evil in and of themselves. It is what you do with them that makes the difference; and gets you on these silly partial lists that the parent has made if you do bad things.
There are certainly reasons that this loophole seeking by the pentagon is not a good thing. But 'the gestapo and stasi did it too!' is not one of them.
I sincerely hope that the silly phrase 'jumped the shark' is not common enough for people to understand the abbreviation 'jumped'. 8^) Darn, I just realized I am helping it spread though. Someone needs to come up with an inverse-meme to cancel it out.;)
I am probably missing your subtlety, but it seems like you are pointing out parallels, not differences. (As many geeks do, I have a hard time with the 'say something completely different than what you mean' type of humour, I just see it as innacurate,;)
A top political problem in Europe up to that date was women wearing long pantalons in public
A big, recent political story in Europe is about women wearing veils in public.
irresponsible aviatics flying their fragile machines above the populated cities.
Remember 9/11? Heard of the no-fly zones that have been implemented now?
All socialist parties, which are currently at the peak of power in majority of european countries were totally outlawed, and some their members executed, because of throwing home made bombs on politicians. "War to terror" was that called.
Nonprofit charities that have had any of their money diverted to terrorists have been outlawed recently. And of course the extremists groups themselves.
Only things which seems to be almost identical to our time are media advertisings and patent issues. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy reading the old newspaper ads in the Wendy's decor,;)
If many (most?) geeks have some level of Asperger's, do they react differently to human representations (even those close to, or in, the "uncanny valley") than those who do not have Asperger's? Do they react more favorably to these images, less, or the same - as toward real-life humans?
I'd say more favorably. That would explain why so many geeks near the asperger's end of the spectrum enjoy anime and SF wherein non-realistic humans(and robots, dolphins, elves, et al.) are the protaganists,;)
From "The Last Thief 3 Preview You Will Ever Need to Read
From a hands-on experience with the game, by Dan, a.k.a. Digital Nightfall."
<Cain> Question: Is the game polished? did you run in bugs or glitches ? <Digital`Nightfall> The game is very polished. Release candidate #1 was accepted by eidos. That's virtually unheard of. If they do a patch, it will not be to fix bugs. I only saw one glitch, and that was a guard who's sword was haning from his armpit rather than his belt (usually they have to go to candidit 8 or 9).
Furthermore, it only runs on win2k/xp and nvidia or ati boards less than 2 years old which reduces their market quite a bit. I think it is obvious that they simply planned to cash in on the money that fans of the original would shell out, rather than make a quality game. Well, that is pretty much the definition of 'sequel' in the movie industry. I guess the video game industry is following their lead.
To give a bit of credit to America. I do believe I had been told that ENIAC was the first in my 7th grade computer class, but I was disabused of that notion by being taught of Zuse and shown the whole timeline and nuances in one of the introductory computer classes at a public university(Florida International University).
Similar to how most of us learned about Columbus in elementary(to justify the holiday) and then later learned about the "native" americans coming across the land bridge from the west, and the vikings coming from the east long before Columbus. Part of the cause simply seems to be that the truth is complicated, and teachers want to simplify things for young minds. Now if the teachers are simplifying too much due to laziness or their own ignorance or indoctrinations(read creationism), I can see where there is a problem.
But those problems seem to be less and less in our information age. If someone tells you something that sounds like an urban legend, you can look it up and most likely easily find a reputable source that it has been well debunked.
We still have a ways to go. It's not always easy. The other day, either in #world-relations or #politics on freenode, some guy was trying to tell me that the literacy rate of iraqi women was ~75% in 1987, and now it is around 24%.
He gave as his source a 'human rights watch' webpage which claimed UNESCO as their source. I was still incredulous so I found a source for actual UNESCO numbers, and it turns out UNESCO reported a 76% illiteracy rate of iraqi women in '87 which jibed more accurately with the factbook numbers.
It is awesome how easy it is to do research like that in this day and age and have it sparked by a debate between people across the world from each other.
I think that if we can teach our kids to be incredulous once in a while, research whatever they are interested in, keep as much information uncensored as possible, and give everyone the means to learn it, then the human race might actually have a chance. We won't have too worry much about the occasional nationalistic bending of facts told to children, either.
I don't know where that verbosity came from. I can't sleep,;)
I completely agree. I think they were thinking from the GUI file manager perspective rather than the commandline. At least they didn't also use spaces like MS Windows.;)
As for X11R6, I just do cd/usr/x<tab> and tcsh completes it case insensitively to/usr/X11R6/. This is one of the features of the enhanced completion mode.
From my ~/.tcshrc: set complete=enhance #completion ignores case and r.m-p expands to read.me-please
nvidia's binary driver breaks my tv capture card(ati wonder) for some strange reason(geforce4200ti, tv works using nv). I can't investigate and solve the problem because I don't have the specs or source. I was going to buy Matrox for my upgrade on the premise that nvidia and ati's binary-only behaviour was annoying, but now I see that Matrox is joining the binary-only club too.:(
Precisely. Using the human mind as a filter is the whole point. There is also a project called peep that does this with sound.
Peep - Allows real-time aural monitoring of network information
Peep aims to represent network information in real-time (and therefore eliminate searching through large logs of information to find problems) by using sound to represent the vast amount of available information about network status and to help identify network problems and irregularities.
The project looks a bit stalled, but it's still a really cool idea. You could probably find some stories about it in/. archives too,;) I thought it was neat that apparently nasa follows this philosophy with sounds for astronauts to filter/interpret on the space shuttle.
Set up a mailing list offsite so that all the folks looking for work can tell each other about jobs. When looking for jobs, folks often find ones that aren't quite suitable for themselves, but may be for an ex-coworker. That's why people often say that "networking" is the best way to find jobs.
So you should "abuse" your leet IT skills to setup that mailing list to facilitate the "networking" and set up proper filters or make sure it is not published anywhere, otherwise the headhunter/spammers will get a hold of it,:)
I see your point, although you could have worded it in a much more civil tone. I actually started a paragraph to say that being too picky that people don't know exactly what you think they should is an easy trap to fall into. I erased it since my post was getting long.
I was also over simplifying by saying 'write hello world'. Our real skills test doesn't even have that. It has 3 to 4 questions in each category. I would only consider you to have "overstated" knowledge of one of those categories if you answer most of them incorrectly. It's like the spamassassin philosophy of detecting spam. A single failed rule/question doesn't tell you much. But if you claim to know perl well and yet:
you can't do a simple regex match
and
you don't know what common vars like $_ and $! are
and
you can't solve a simple scoping problem
then it is quite likely that you don't really know perl.
p.s. Yes I typo'd the mailto at first, but I left it broken and with a defunct address on purpose so crawlers wouldn't spam me,;) Not that I have ever linked that page anywhere since I have nothing there but a small tool for my dad's employees. I wonder what makes an AC so curious about me.
You'd be amazed at how many people will claim they know a language but be unable to implement 'hello world' in it; or claim to use linux as a workstation yet can not say what their favorite window manager is. I don't even think it is necessary to know the language you will be working in since a good programmer can pick up a new language rather quickly if they are well educated and/or grounded in a few languages. But if you claim to know it, you'd better know it.
I guess I have an abnormal hatred of dishonesty, but I think the best use of these tests is too weed out the flat out liars or those that 'bend the truth' a bit too much regarding their skills.
So, my point is simply that, yes, these types of tests are quite useful for verifying resumes, but not a whole lot else.
That is precisely what you do when you have two different speed DIMMs or ISA RAM.
Back in the days when RAM was expensive, I had something like a 16MB DIMM with 70 ns access time, and a shiny new 32MB DIMM with 10 ns access time. I was thinking I would be 31337 if I hacked the kernel to let me form a ram disk from the slower RAM specifically and then I'd just make the slow ramdisk a higher priority swap than the disk swap partition.
I was excited since I found something that looked like it hadn't been done yet and seemed somewhat useful and doable. However, after a bit of experimenting and researching how to make the necessary changes I discovered that, indeed, a patch was already available to do it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that surprising? He is a smart guy and puts a lot of effort into his work.
It's not about being good at it. The reason some of us enjoy chess so much is that we like to be in that state of intense concentration where you come up with ideas and make analytical decisions. When you just use the 'recall from memory' part of your brain, it is not as fun. And there have been studies using scans of brains to show that using the recall part of the brain more is precisely what happens the more advanced a player is.
Quote from http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfra nklin_inventions.htm
Ah, and someone quoted Franklin on the issue in a slashdot article before:m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/18/1339201.sht
http://www.bartleby.com/73/105.html
Now if they would just stop selling my address to all those snail-mail spammers that seem to think every nature subscriber is a microbiologist.
Some people, like 14 year old cousins with a marijuana charge on their record, can't be trusted with cash.
Plus, giving cash makes it clear you don't really know enough about the person to give them an appropriate gift. At least, with a gift certificate, you can narrow it down a bit for their interests.
A gift certificate can also be a way of forcing the person to splurge a bit, but still letting them get exactly what they want. e.g. a gift certificate for some pricy store to a person that normally shops at less expensive places.
Aside from the naked women part, it sounds like a job in the Saudi Arabian government. I think you need to have a close genetic connection to get one of those jobs, though, 8^)
In case anyone is wondering, the goal is to hold the most territory. The parent poster's idealistic views are pretty and even a bit inspiring, but they aren't very realistic, 8^)
great interface for number visualization
I think the same guy who did the smartmoney maps did this one also:
visualize a musical piece's relation to parts of itself
make your own galaxies as part of search
hrm, they don't all seem to be working properly now with mozilla 1.7 and java 1.4.2_04-b05 although they worked fine a couple years ago. I had the same sort of problems with smartmoney which is why I didn't buy a subscription.
The View from Everest
There are certainly reasons that this loophole seeking by the pentagon is not a good thing. But 'the gestapo and stasi did it too!' is not one of them.
I sincerely hope that the silly phrase 'jumped the shark' is not common enough for people to understand the abbreviation 'jumped'. 8^) Darn, I just realized I am helping it spread though. Someone needs to come up with an inverse-meme to cancel it out. ;)
A top political problem in Europe up to that date was women wearing long pantalons in public
A big, recent political story in Europe is about women wearing veils in public.
irresponsible aviatics flying their fragile machines above the populated cities.
Remember 9/11? Heard of the no-fly zones that have been implemented now?
All socialist parties, which are currently at the peak of power in majority of european countries were totally outlawed, and some their members executed, because of throwing home made bombs on politicians. "War to terror" was that called.
Nonprofit charities that have had any of their money diverted to terrorists have been outlawed recently. And of course the extremists groups themselves.
Only things which seems to be almost identical to our time are media advertisings and patent issues. ;)
When I was a kid, I used to enjoy reading the old newspaper ads in the Wendy's decor,
I'd say more favorably. That would explain why so many geeks near the asperger's end of the spectrum enjoy anime and SF wherein non-realistic humans(and robots, dolphins, elves, et al.) are the protaganists, ;)
Wow; my first troll moderation since the moderation system was added(6 years?). ;)
Thanks. Variety is the spice of life.
Furthermore, it only runs on win2k/xp and nvidia or ati boards less than 2 years old which reduces their market quite a bit.
I think it is obvious that they simply planned to cash in on the money that fans of the original would shell out, rather than make a quality game. Well, that is pretty much the definition of 'sequel' in the movie industry. I guess the video game industry is following their lead.
Similar to how most of us learned about Columbus in elementary(to justify the holiday) and then later learned about the "native" americans coming across the land bridge from the west, and the vikings coming from the east long before Columbus. Part of the cause simply seems to be that the truth is complicated, and teachers want to simplify things for young minds. Now if the teachers are simplifying too much due to laziness or their own ignorance or indoctrinations(read creationism), I can see where there is a problem.
But those problems seem to be less and less in our information age. If someone tells you something that sounds like an urban legend, you can look it up and most likely easily find a reputable source that it has been well debunked.
We still have a ways to go. It's not always easy. The other day, either in #world-relations or #politics on freenode, some guy was trying to tell me that the literacy rate of iraqi women was ~75% in 1987, and now it is around 24%. He gave as his source a 'human rights watch' webpage which claimed UNESCO as their source. I was still incredulous so I found a source for actual UNESCO numbers, and it turns out UNESCO reported a 76% illiteracy rate of iraqi women in '87 which jibed more accurately with the factbook numbers.
It is awesome how easy it is to do research like that in this day and age and have it sparked by a debate between people across the world from each other.
I think that if we can teach our kids to be incredulous once in a while, research whatever they are interested in, keep as much information uncensored as possible, and give everyone the means to learn it, then the human race might actually have a chance. We won't have too worry much about the occasional nationalistic bending of facts told to children, either.
I don't know where that verbosity came from. I can't sleep, ;)
As for X11R6, I just do cd /usr/x<tab> and tcsh completes it case insensitively to /usr/X11R6/. This is one of the features of the enhanced completion mode.
From my ~/.tcshrc:
set complete=enhance #completion ignores case and r.m-p expands to read.me-please
nvidia's binary driver breaks my tv capture card(ati wonder) for some strange reason(geforce4200ti, tv works using nv). I can't investigate and solve the problem because I don't have the specs or source. :(
I was going to buy Matrox for my upgrade on the premise that nvidia and ati's binary-only behaviour was annoying, but now I see that Matrox is joining the binary-only club too.
So you should "abuse" your leet IT skills to setup that mailing list to facilitate the "networking" and set up proper filters or make sure it is not published anywhere, otherwise the headhunter/spammers will get a hold of it, :)
I was also over simplifying by saying 'write hello world'. Our real skills test doesn't even have that. It has 3 to 4 questions in each category. I would only consider you to have "overstated" knowledge of one of those categories if you answer most of them incorrectly.
It's like the spamassassin philosophy of detecting spam. A single failed rule/question doesn't tell you much. But if you claim to know perl well and yet:
- you can't do a simple regex match
- and
- you don't know what common vars like $_ and $! are
- and
- you can't solve a simple scoping problem
then it is quite likely that you don't really know perl.p.s. Yes I typo'd the mailto at first, but I left it broken and with a defunct address on purpose so crawlers wouldn't spam me, ;) Not that I have ever linked that page anywhere since I have nothing there but a small tool for my dad's employees. I wonder what makes an AC so curious about me.
I guess I have an abnormal hatred of dishonesty, but I think the best use of these tests is too weed out the flat out liars or those that 'bend the truth' a bit too much regarding their skills.
So, my point is simply that, yes, these types of tests are quite useful for verifying resumes, but not a whole lot else.
Back in the days when RAM was expensive, I had something like a 16MB DIMM with 70 ns access time, and a shiny new 32MB DIMM with 10 ns access time. I was thinking I would be 31337 if I hacked the kernel to let me form a ram disk from the slower RAM specifically and then I'd just make the slow ramdisk a higher priority swap than the disk swap partition.
I was excited since I found something that looked like it hadn't been done yet and seemed somewhat useful and doable. However, after a bit of experimenting and researching how to make the necessary changes I discovered that, indeed, a patch was already available to do it. ;)