Indeed it was the yellow Best Buy tag that pushed them over the edge (the dopey "yellow price tag logo" IS trademarked). But is a generic blue shirt and khaki-like pants really part of their trademark? No. I'm sure the clever people over at Improv Everywhere can come up with a sufficiently distinctive "Best Buy yellow splotch parody logo" that is protected under free speech.
Because of the red fluorescence protein in their skin cells, the three Turkish Angola kittens look reddish under ultraviolet light, the researchers said. Calling them "glow in the dark" may be overstating the case. More like black light cats. Nothing like having a 70s poster that can scratch back while listening to Dark Side of the Moon.
I tried to reply by just writing out '.' and '-' characters for the Morse code of the previous post, but that triggered one of SlashDot's filters Cool. I tried something similar and got the same message. I wonder what the longest Morse code message you can send on/. is without triggering the lameness filter?
Crowdsourcing can work if enough people participate. The laws of probability take over from there. What drives the success and stability of this counterintuitive approach is The Law of Large Numbers and some of the Central Limit Theorem. Basically, with enough random contributions, the counterproductive/arbitrary elements tend to cancel and the coherent parts add up over time. Ironically, this is probably why democracy tends to be a reasonably stable form of government. From a business's point of view, it is great because you essentially get free labor. However, the drawback is that if you don't have enough people participating, you essentially get white noise as your output subject to large fluctuations. You will also have to be patient before you hit the right critical threshold of users to get projects done on any meaningful time scale. Software projects have different needs but, using Wikipedia as a working example, this means you need roughly a hundreds of thousands of rabid, active users to achieve modest stability over several years. In other words, SourceForge. You may needs something on the scale of the open source movement itself for it to work in software.
Sure. But "SPAM (tm) brand spiced ham" (whatever you want to call it) is still trademarked, right? Unlike Coke (tm) to coke (i.e. coca/cocaine), email spam has no physical connection to SPAM (tm) brand spiced ham except via an obscure Monty Python in-joke.
I wonder if anti drug groups at some point had to fight the same trademark battle with Coke (and lost, since I don't think any anti drug groups today have the word 'Coke' in them)? Of course the Coke (tm) name is actually historically associated with the coca plant, unlike SPAM (tm) and its spam counterpart which have no obvious connection except cultural non sequiturism.
Well, yeah, welcome to society. This is not news. This is not technology related. Folks interact. Something you share with one person may in turn be shared by that person with others. It's called discretion, get some. All too true. But in a professional setting you almost never actively and publicly tag individuals as "friend" (like the facebook technology has you do). Real social networks and interactions are obviously more nuanced.
Now, in reality, the author posted it to a forum, probably with the intention of giving away the code. It would be entirely up to the author to sue and whether the author would sue or not -- well, I kinda doubt it. Good point, but intention is hard to gauge. For example, each poster on slashdot owns the copyright to their comments, but I doubt it is people's intention to let others use their posts on this forum for corporate or for-profit purposes without their permission. Many probably wouldn't care, but always best to check with the poster.
For those insisting someone track the rocks with GPS, check out this web page with a list of GPS paths for about 162 individual rocks (work done circa 1996). For those still interested, be sure and check out the associated Ph.D. dissertation and detailed California Geology article linked at that site. Still no web cams, but this animation is amusing (but probably staged).
I might argue that the ENTIRE triplet of prequels was itself one big shark jump rally (a trend started back in Jedi). The way GL approached the prequel projects, Henry Winkler himself may as well have played Anakin.
The best creativity and sharklessness frequently occurs within constraints (self imposed or otherwise). This "do a lot with a little" approach goes against common sense which might point to the "infinite resources, do whatever you want" school of maximized creativity (something GL has embraced). The latter almost always leads to shark jumping. Working within constraints forces a filmmaker to focus resources on the things that really matter (although obviously is not a recipe for success). Also, as soon as a work becomes too self conscious, knowing "what it is," the creative process becomes ultra-fragile and shark jumping becomes enevitable. Star Wars IV was a lean, beautiful piece of cinema largely because it was working within constraints: GL didn't get whatever he wanted, didn't have infinite resources, actually had a fear of failure, and Star Wars didn't know what it was yet. Everything GL has done with Star Wars since then has been an every-increasing exercise in self-indulgence diluting the creative effort. ESB is still high quality artistically, but it was creatively set in motion earlier and GL didn't direct it. Although GL didn't direct Jedi either, the genre was already too self conscious to be saved artistically and had degenerated to children's programming. Jedi was 70% shark jumping: second death star (creative!), Ewoks, excessive muppetization (Jabba's Fraggle Rock palace was what GL really wanted the cantina to be like in SW), soap opera romance consummated, another death star explosion in the finale. There were some fine moments in Jedi, but you had to hunt for them.
There was some village (Israel/Palestine/Middle-East 'ish') where the natural background radiation was something like two-hundred (200) times "normal" levels. The people there were perfectly normal, fine and healthy. In fact, researchers found the villagers were more healthy than normal/average for some diseases/conditions. That's right. For example, from the ionizing radiation article on wikipedia (units in mSv -- 1 mrem = 0.01 mSv):
260 Ramsar, Iran, annual natural background peak dose
175 Guarapari, Brazil annual natural radiation sources
50 USA NRC annual occupational limit
3 USA average dose (per year) from all natural sources
I don't want to sound like a troll, but radiation safety in the US is almost certainly far too conservative to the point that it has made the public (including many slashdotters, apparently) subject to the multi-decade bad PR. Radiation has a certain eerie mystery to it that just instinctively freaks people out. Obviously, like many things in life, it can be dangerous. But I think most here would agree that understanding exactly how objectively dangerous something is (especially something so naturally ubiquitous like radiation) should be a high public heath priority. We shouldn't let our emotions get too carried away here. The problem is the article (which actually has a few good ideas) picked a really, really terrible set of awful human tragedies to make their point. It would be like airplane safety people trying to make the case that hitting buildings with airplanes isn't "that deadly" and using the ratio of 9/11 survivors to deaths as an example. When making a valid point like this, especially when something like WWII A-bombs and Chernobyl are justifyably so tender in the public mind, you need to frame the problem very carefully and treat human tragedy with some respectful regard.
The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It's shaped like a sake cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere. Encase it in concrete, truck it to a site, bury it underground, hook it up to a steam turbine and, voila, one would generate enough electricity to power a 25,000-home community for at least five years A-Recent-Robert-Zemeckis-Film Cluster of those sounds ideally suited for a post apocalyptic bunker. You name it: Alpha Complex, Vault 13, Dr. Strangelove's wet dream:
Strangelove: I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy...heh, heh...(He rolls his wheelchair forward into the light) at the bottom of ah...some of our deeper mineshafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in drilling space could easily be provided. President: How long would you have to stay down there? Strangelove:...I would think that uh, possibly uh...one hundred years...It would not be difficult Mein Fuehrer! Nuclear reactors could, heh...I'm sorry, Mr. President. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. President: Well, I, I would hate to have to decide...who stays up and...who goes down.
Is it just me, or is the term "Black Friday" being used much more this year than in previous years? Maybe I'm the only clueless one, but I was seeing it so much I Wiki'd it for a little explanation: the root of the term (and if this is well known to all, my apologies... I'm slow that way) is that the balance sheets of retailers are typically "in the black" by the Friday following Thanksgiving.
I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".
Definitely puts Black Sabbath in a whole new light for me. So much for the "70s cool evil schtick", they were just making a financial statement.
Putting an online ID _that accurately reflects who you are_ on a resume is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Would you seriously really want to work at a place that WOULDN'T hire you just because you gave them an online ID (if it gives them a more accurate picture of your skills and who you are)? If you think you want to work at such a place, you are probably applying to the wrong jobs anyway (or posting things very orthogonal to your "true" self). Remember, the process works both ways and you can use what you put in your resume (when done reasonably) as a "who do I want to work with" filter. Accepting a job is supposed to be a two way street.
Universe doesn't care about conscious observers. For example, slight heating of the Earth atmosphere by the light from SN1988 _also_ counts as 'observation'.
In fact, if an event changes macroscopic state of ANY physical object - it already counts as observation. Indeed. I would go so far as to say that the event SN1988 and ensemble of sub-events within the event, for all practical purposes, "measured itself" while it was happening. The quantum coherence time/length of such a macroscopic situation would be very short (on the order of the scattering time/length) and would rapidly decohere to a macroscopic state. If that didn't do it, any coupling to the gravitational background at all would probably finish the job in the next microsecond.
As someone without a state-of-the-art addiction, I must admit that I do keep my eye on the items gadget fiends fixate one en masse. First, since any new technology has its problems no matter how cool, this first wave of users serves as a sacrifice to iron out all the bugs. Second, if the product has saying power, it survives that first wave and stays around proving its usefulness rather than just being a fad. With that success, the company releases improved versions that make the first version seem quaint but at lower prices. That process takes a year or two, but since I'm in no hurry it doesn't matter.
I supposed some games lend themselves to the level-less experience, some don't. Some of it is probably just organizational on the part of the creators. Nevertheless, it is probably true that levels in many modern games are a legacy effect from bygone eras and could be done away with. However, even back in The Day, games like Zork didn't have levels as such, you just played. Ironically, a level-based game may actually be somewhat more realistic. Although we think of life itself as a continuum of moments, our real circumstances actually do break naturally into something approximating "levels": that is, well defined cycles and milestones based on shifting local goals. These milestones are often separate by periods of routine. Perhaps levels in games (like chapters in books or acts in a play) are just a caricature of that real-life organizational effect with the routine periods removed to expedite the entertainment value.
Obviously, a huge amount of energy went into writing a typical MST3K show so that it recreated the feel of a bunch of sharp-witted pals staying up late at night over beers and pizza making fun of a bad movie. Nevertheless, it seems like as a group of talented comedian/actors, after watching so many campy movies with such vast bounties of ripe, low hanging fruit, it would be just too tempting to blurt out something amusing that deviated from the script. How many of the remarks made during a typical MST3K show (i.e. during the featured movies) would you say were improvised and how many were scripted?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it was the yellow Best Buy tag that pushed them over the edge (the dopey "yellow price tag logo" IS trademarked). But is a generic blue shirt and khaki-like pants really part of their trademark? No. I'm sure the clever people over at Improv Everywhere can come up with a sufficiently distinctive "Best Buy yellow splotch parody logo" that is protected under free speech.
Ouch. And those were the ones categorized as "resolved answers."
Crowdsourcing can work if enough people participate. The laws of probability take over from there. What drives the success and stability of this counterintuitive approach is The Law of Large Numbers and some of the Central Limit Theorem. Basically, with enough random contributions, the counterproductive/arbitrary elements tend to cancel and the coherent parts add up over time. Ironically, this is probably why democracy tends to be a reasonably stable form of government. From a business's point of view, it is great because you essentially get free labor. However, the drawback is that if you don't have enough people participating, you essentially get white noise as your output subject to large fluctuations. You will also have to be patient before you hit the right critical threshold of users to get projects done on any meaningful time scale. Software projects have different needs but, using Wikipedia as a working example, this means you need roughly a hundreds of thousands of rabid, active users to achieve modest stability over several years. In other words, SourceForge. You may needs something on the scale of the open source movement itself for it to work in software.
i.e. good job
Oh, never fu^Hricking mind.
Sure. But "SPAM (tm) brand spiced ham" (whatever you want to call it) is still trademarked, right? Unlike Coke (tm) to coke (i.e. coca/cocaine), email spam has no physical connection to SPAM (tm) brand spiced ham except via an obscure Monty Python in-joke.
I wonder if anti drug groups at some point had to fight the same trademark battle with Coke (and lost, since I don't think any anti drug groups today have the word 'Coke' in them)? Of course the Coke (tm) name is actually historically associated with the coca plant, unlike SPAM (tm) and its spam counterpart which have no obvious connection except cultural non sequiturism.
For those insisting someone track the rocks with GPS, check out this web page with a list of GPS paths for about 162 individual rocks (work done circa 1996). For those still interested, be sure and check out the associated Ph.D. dissertation and detailed California Geology article linked at that site. Still no web cams, but this animation is amusing (but probably staged).
The best creativity and sharklessness frequently occurs within constraints (self imposed or otherwise). This "do a lot with a little" approach goes against common sense which might point to the "infinite resources, do whatever you want" school of maximized creativity (something GL has embraced). The latter almost always leads to shark jumping. Working within constraints forces a filmmaker to focus resources on the things that really matter (although obviously is not a recipe for success). Also, as soon as a work becomes too self conscious, knowing "what it is," the creative process becomes ultra-fragile and shark jumping becomes enevitable. Star Wars IV was a lean, beautiful piece of cinema largely because it was working within constraints: GL didn't get whatever he wanted, didn't have infinite resources, actually had a fear of failure, and Star Wars didn't know what it was yet. Everything GL has done with Star Wars since then has been an every-increasing exercise in self-indulgence diluting the creative effort. ESB is still high quality artistically, but it was creatively set in motion earlier and GL didn't direct it. Although GL didn't direct Jedi either, the genre was already too self conscious to be saved artistically and had degenerated to children's programming. Jedi was 70% shark jumping: second death star (creative!), Ewoks, excessive muppetization (Jabba's Fraggle Rock palace was what GL really wanted the cantina to be like in SW), soap opera romance consummated, another death star explosion in the finale. There were some fine moments in Jedi, but you had to hunt for them.
260 Ramsar, Iran, annual natural background peak dose
175 Guarapari, Brazil annual natural radiation sources
50 USA NRC annual occupational limit
3 USA average dose (per year) from all natural sources
I don't want to sound like a troll, but radiation safety in the US is almost certainly far too conservative to the point that it has made the public (including many slashdotters, apparently) subject to the multi-decade bad PR. Radiation has a certain eerie mystery to it that just instinctively freaks people out. Obviously, like many things in life, it can be dangerous. But I think most here would agree that understanding exactly how objectively dangerous something is (especially something so naturally ubiquitous like radiation) should be a high public heath priority. We shouldn't let our emotions get too carried away here. The problem is the article (which actually has a few good ideas) picked a really, really terrible set of awful human tragedies to make their point. It would be like airplane safety people trying to make the case that hitting buildings with airplanes isn't "that deadly" and using the ratio of 9/11 survivors to deaths as an example. When making a valid point like this, especially when something like WWII A-bombs and Chernobyl are justifyably so tender in the public mind, you need to frame the problem very carefully and treat human tragedy with some respectful regard.
Strangelove: I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy...heh, heh...(He rolls his wheelchair forward into the light) at the bottom of ah...some of our deeper mineshafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in drilling space could easily be provided.
President: How long would you have to stay down there?
Strangelove:
President: Well, I, I would hate to have to decide...who stays up and...who goes down.
I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".
Definitely puts Black Sabbath in a whole new light for me. So much for the "70s cool evil schtick", they were just making a financial statement.
The RIAA is understandably afraid the Harvard folks will just yell at them in latin. Abutebaris modo subjunctivo denuo!
Putting an online ID _that accurately reflects who you are_ on a resume is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Would you seriously really want to work at a place that WOULDN'T hire you just because you gave them an online ID (if it gives them a more accurate picture of your skills and who you are)? If you think you want to work at such a place, you are probably applying to the wrong jobs anyway (or posting things very orthogonal to your "true" self). Remember, the process works both ways and you can use what you put in your resume (when done reasonably) as a "who do I want to work with" filter. Accepting a job is supposed to be a two way street.
In fact, if an event changes macroscopic state of ANY physical object - it already counts as observation. Indeed. I would go so far as to say that the event SN1988 and ensemble of sub-events within the event, for all practical purposes, "measured itself" while it was happening. The quantum coherence time/length of such a macroscopic situation would be very short (on the order of the scattering time/length) and would rapidly decohere to a macroscopic state. If that didn't do it, any coupling to the gravitational background at all would probably finish the job in the next microsecond.
As someone without a state-of-the-art addiction, I must admit that I do keep my eye on the items gadget fiends fixate one en masse. First, since any new technology has its problems no matter how cool, this first wave of users serves as a sacrifice to iron out all the bugs. Second, if the product has saying power, it survives that first wave and stays around proving its usefulness rather than just being a fad. With that success, the company releases improved versions that make the first version seem quaint but at lower prices. That process takes a year or two, but since I'm in no hurry it doesn't matter.
I supposed some games lend themselves to the level-less experience, some don't. Some of it is probably just organizational on the part of the creators. Nevertheless, it is probably true that levels in many modern games are a legacy effect from bygone eras and could be done away with. However, even back in The Day, games like Zork didn't have levels as such, you just played. Ironically, a level-based game may actually be somewhat more realistic. Although we think of life itself as a continuum of moments, our real circumstances actually do break naturally into something approximating "levels": that is, well defined cycles and milestones based on shifting local goals. These milestones are often separate by periods of routine. Perhaps levels in games (like chapters in books or acts in a play) are just a caricature of that real-life organizational effect with the routine periods removed to expedite the entertainment value.
Obviously, a huge amount of energy went into writing a typical MST3K show so that it recreated the feel of a bunch of sharp-witted pals staying up late at night over beers and pizza making fun of a bad movie. Nevertheless, it seems like as a group of talented comedian/actors, after watching so many campy movies with such vast bounties of ripe, low hanging fruit, it would be just too tempting to blurt out something amusing that deviated from the script. How many of the remarks made during a typical MST3K show (i.e. during the featured movies) would you say were improvised and how many were scripted?
Really enjoyed that article. I used the Physics Diet for a number of years and it really does work.