Imagine being able to post a want-ad, or promote your clan
Like those storm troopers in SWG? That was pretty funny/whacky/intense/bordering on psychotic stuff. Anybody know if they're still at it? The last I heard was that Darth Vader himself came to inspect the troops.
I think you have some great suggestions. You shold send them to somebody (tech support? customer relations?) at MxO if you're a current subscriber.
Thank you for having the juevos to say that centrifugal force is bogus. For those who don't believe you, I will try to explain. There is no magical force pulling you inward just because you go in a circle. For instance, when you take a turn in a car, the force applied to the vehicle is the normal force of the road against the tires. When you whirl a rock over your head in a sling, it's just tension on the sling that you feel. It's just a convenient representation of the inward radial acceleration an object experiences while moving in a curved trajectory. There are other ways to represent it, especially using other coordinate systems, that are far superior in some cases.
My favorite expirement for people who only look at "centrifugal force" is the helium balloon in a car. As you turn left in a car the helium balloon will tend to go left, too. Of course, this is because the heavier air is going right with you and your sunglasses on the dashboard. But for people who think there are magical centrifugal fairies waving centrifgal wands, it leaves them groping for an explaination. mwahahaa
I've tried explaining it to many people. I find it odd that the people who adamantly refuse to believe me are the ones who have had mechanics at some point. But since they learned it using the two simplifications you mentioned, they don't even see them as simplifications but as fact. It always reminds me of the people who think F=ma means force *causes* acceleration. ugh!
From what I can tell, you're right. This vortex theory is just the relativistic version of these Newtonian simplifications. It will be interesing to see if the probe picks up some anomaly in the data that can't be explained by the current relativity theories.
That's got to be the best analogy ever. Did you come up with it yourself? Virtual mod points for you! I like it because you're not trying to convince anybody of a particular viewpoint. You're just using analogies to do what they're best at: bringing things into the abstract. The typical/. method is to try to use an anolgy to win an argument. That of course is futile. But in your maserful post you just want to open peoples minds to other ways of thinking. I would argue that it's so successful because you picked something utterly non-emotional. Of course some people may call you chicken-shit for not picking a side, but I wouldn't. Seeing things from another point of view is a sign of wisdom, not cowardice.
Think about it. These ads will show up in a virtual world (video game) about a virtual world (the Matrix). Consequently, it would make perfect sense that the virtual-virtual ads are indistinguishable from real world ads. (woah... too much coffee this morning) I'd go so far as to say they might enhance the gaming experience, rather than detract from it. And the fact that they're open to player ads might imply that they're willing to start a dialogue with their customers.
Of course, that's another point. Now they have two sets of customers: gamers and advertisers. Hopefully they will see that without a sizeable group of the former, the latter won't pay them much at all. So one would think they will try to please the gamers first and the advertisers second. Of course that may be a little harder to remember once the big bucks start flowing in.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea, Audacity is not a MIDI editor at all; it's just for sound files. Shawn is right right, you can only do simple things with it, but it is one of the best tools for those things that it does.
I've tried Rosegarden. It's not bad. It's not as good as GarageBand or Tracktion (both are Mac programs) for recording loops and using effects. Also you may have a hard time getting it to play well with Mandriva. I recommend using Redhat if you're going to use Rosegarden. Among the things that Rosegarden does better than GB1 are MIDI export, score view, mid-song key/meter changes. That's because GB1 doesn't do those things at all! GB2 does 2 of those things, but I haven't tried it out yet.
All in all, you probably need about 3 or 4 different programs if you wanted to do everything using free software. Psycle (Windows, sorry) for loops/effects (for electronica), Rosegarden for MIDI, Lilypond for engraving scores (for classical), Ardour for mixing and editing. Some of these apps will have overlapping features, of course, and they don't all run on the same platform.
Windows is fast becoming the toilet with a toaster, cordless drill, leaf blower, and pencil holder built in. It's the Chewbacca Defense of featureware.
*winces* Toilet with a built-in pencil holder? Drill?! Leaf blower?!?! You're one sick bastard.
People bring up the Mike Rowe thing a lot. I'm not quite sure where I stand on that. I do however have a problem with McDonald's and their ruthless trademark enforcement policies. There's not an awful lot of negative press surrounding it, like there always is with M$. I find that odd, considering that McDonald's threats are arguably more egregious.
I think the big difference with Mike Rowe is that he used the name after Microsoft had been around for a while. On the other hand, Ms. McCaughy was using the name McCoffee before McCafé was on the scene. Seems like they try to enforce their trademark on anything starting with Mc.
Just try naming your next company McRosoft and see what sort of trouble you get into then!
mengel, I would like to hear more of your ideas on war protests. How do you think the peace activists can implement some of these Ghandinian economic tacticts for their purposes? I think you are right that economic resistance would work better, but I just can't figure out how that would work in this situation. I'm not a peace protester, but I know that some of the Slashdotters are into that sort of thing and might appreciate some new ideas.
holy crap, what was that all about? I've read some wacky shit on the web, but that takes the cake! It sounds like somebody tried to explain time zones to this dude and he just blew a fuse. Like it's some earth-shattering existential mind job that there are, at any given time, a sunrise, sunset, midday and midnight, at different points on the planet. I hope that it was all just a hoax/joke.
I learned that on a Mr. Wizard show decades ago. I always thought it was pretty nifty, or should I say "wicked." Anybody know a good Mr. Wizard link? The ones that I've found so far were not very extensive.
It doesn't matter how much money you have already spent on something. That is sunk cost. That money has been spent and cannot be recovered (unless it's something like a fairly recent purchase that you can return for cash or store credit). Consequently, you should only take into account future costs. That is why they focus on TCO, ROI, and other forward-looking numbers.
Now, this could work to OSS's benefit, too. If more companies would stop thinking of sunk costs such as "we already have these.xlt and.dot templates" or "all our engineering tasks are already defined in an Access database with automatic monthly PowerPoint progress reports," perhaps they would open their eyes to the ongoing costs of upgrades, new licenses, crashes, incompatibility, etc.
The trick, perhaps, is to scrutinize the TCO that MS claims. Do they include the time needed to reboot your machine every time your USB to serial port causes a BSOD? Do they include the sheet of paper that your DeskJet spits out every time your machine is booted to Windows? Do they include the cost of having to find yet another IT manager after your last one suffers severe MS Burnout Syndrome? Similarly with OSS, do they include the cost of having to umm... look through all the really cool screen savers that came with the OS? Or the time you spent explaining to your customer why they couldn't open your OpenDocument in Word?
Just to set the record straight, I think that Sheehan is whiney and annoying, and I disagree with most of what she stands for. Nevertheless, I am outraged that she was arrested.
First of all, from the reports that I've read, she actually was arrested for protesting a.k.a. "demonstrating without a permit." But even if your argument were true, that she was arrested for blocking a sidewalk, I'd still have problems with it.
Have you been to DC? Hundreds of panhandlers, vendors, and other people block public walkways there all the time. Do they get arrested? No. So this supposed law would only be selectively enforced, which is a Bad Thing (tm). If there was such a law against blocking sidewalks, I assure you it would only serve one purpose: to give a "valid" reason to arrest protestors.
The charges pressed against Sheehan may or may not mention protesting, but make no mistake that that's the real reason she was arrested.
This is a continuing pattern of unchecked revocation of civil liberties. Both major parties were guilty of this sort of behavior around conventions and campaign stops. Check out the First Amendment. It says that the Congress shall make no law restricting our freedom to peaceably assemble. Last time I checked, sitting in a public walkway with 200 like-minded citizens counts as a peaceable assembly. And please don't give me any crap about needing a permit to protest. Such a requirement has too great of a chilling effect on free speech and assembly rights to be considered constitutional. Sure, they let the protesters have their permit to protest across the street this time, but who's to say they won't grant the permit next time?
DISCLAIMER: I am a raging libertarian, and I'd be surprised if any of my arguments would actually hold up in a courtroom.
PS: What ever happened to the Politics section? It seems like ever since the election, it's sort of fallen out of favor.
I'm not sure where you got your information, but the US does not have a "one person, one vote" policy. In presidential elections, the people in less populous states get more electoral votes (per capita) than those in more populous states. Further, due to the "winner take all" practice of most states, the votes of the electoral college rarely has the same ratio as the votes of the populace. There are many theories on how the US got to its current two-party system, but "one person, one vote" is not one of them. Some of the more viable arguments are: voter apathy, the nature of the electoral college, lack of viable alternatives, need for other voting methods (as you pointed out), middle-of-the-road candidates afraid to stand up for real issues, and many others.
To elaborate on your suggested starting place, it is a good idea to lobby your state legislators to support Condorcet voting (or your scheme of choice). It is up to them, not the federal government, to decide how your state's electoral votes are decided. Another way to go would be to directly lobby your state's electors. I don't know if this has ever been successful, but there's no reason to think that a concerted effort could not work.
heheh. oops. I just like to assume the best of people.:-) you should've played along, though. It would have been more fun! Well I don't mind that you're a patent lawyer. At least you're trying to change the system from the inside out, rather than bitching about it all day long. Good luck!
Sorry to reply to myself, but after reading the sample chapter, I see that the square root is still needed. Also, it appears that you don't always know which of the two quadratic solutions are correct. So this is definitely a trade-off. In this age of calculatordom, where approximate answers for sin and cos are just a couple of button presses away, such a trade-off may be unnecessary, but back when sines and cosines had to be looked up in tables, this approach would have been fantastic.
not really. While they are fractions (i.e. ratios of length), sines and cosines are based on the irrational number pi. This means that they cannot be written as ratios (fractions) of natural numbers. This was one of the major setbacks getting trig adopted in the first place. The ancients did not like the idea of irrational numbers. Ironically, it was Pythagoras' very theorem that required irrational numbers, but it was he who had Hippasus sentanced to death for insisting on their existance.
By replacing angles with spread, he gets rid of these non-rational operators. By replacing distance with quadrature, he gets rid of the other non-rational operator, the square root.
Pretty cool stuff, but there is one problem. They don't make measuring tape for quadrature. And they don't make miter saws that measure spread. So we're still going to have to convert eveything back to the old way to get anything built. IAAEngineer, so that's important to me. Of course, I'm one of those guys who does all the calcs in SI units and converts at the final step to imperial, so I'm used to last step conversions.
I don't think Dr. Stein is a management type at all, judging from his lab. Just because you disagree with him does not mean you should resort to name-calling.
Are you kidding? Of course there was an advance response. Bush signed declarations! That's practically the same thing as hiring a competant person to head FEMA, or not cutting funding to the Army Corp of Engineers.
Nit-pick: There's no such thing as an advance response. That phrase is nonsensical, or at best oxy-moronic. Politicians and reporters sure like to use it, though. A response is defined as something that happens after an event or stimulus. Advance means before something happens. One can have a "planned response" or "advance planning."
12. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. Microsoft and its suppliers provide the President and support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, either express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose, of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness of responses, of results, of workmanlike effort, of lack of viruses, and of lack of negligence, all with regard to the President, and the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, information, software, and related content through the President or otherwise arising out of the election of the President.
14. OBLITERATION OF THIRD PARTY CANDIDATES. You may obliterate third party candidates through the election of the President. The third party candidates are not under the control of Microsoft, yet. Microsoft is mentioning third party candidates to you only as a convenience, and does not imply an endorsement by Microsoft of the third party candidate.
19. The President is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and treaties. Microsoft or its suppliers own the title, copyright, and other intellectual property rights in the President. The President is bought, not sold.
well... i'm an engineer of the non-reversing variety, so I was really just talking out of my a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H hypothesizing. thanks for the correction!:)
The statistics in the Chinese article are questionable. According to the latest census, it appears that the mean income of whites is under $73,000 and of blacks just under $46k. That is far from a 15-fold difference as quoted in the article. I also noticed that it said there were 16.5 homocides in 2003. That is exactly what the FBI reported, and it's improtant to note that it's at its lowest value (per capita) in the last 20 years. So it's not like they're all bogus in that article, but just take it with a grain of salt.
Slashdot Mirror
Like those storm troopers in SWG? That was pretty funny/whacky/intense/bordering on psychotic stuff. Anybody know if they're still at it? The last I heard was that Darth Vader himself came to inspect the troops.
I think you have some great suggestions. You shold send them to somebody (tech support? customer relations?) at MxO if you're a current subscriber.
My favorite expirement for people who only look at "centrifugal force" is the helium balloon in a car. As you turn left in a car the helium balloon will tend to go left, too. Of course, this is because the heavier air is going right with you and your sunglasses on the dashboard. But for people who think there are magical centrifugal fairies waving centrifgal wands, it leaves them groping for an explaination. mwahahaa
I've tried explaining it to many people. I find it odd that the people who adamantly refuse to believe me are the ones who have had mechanics at some point. But since they learned it using the two simplifications you mentioned, they don't even see them as simplifications but as fact. It always reminds me of the people who think F=ma means force *causes* acceleration. ugh!
From what I can tell, you're right. This vortex theory is just the relativistic version of these Newtonian simplifications. It will be interesing to see if the probe picks up some anomaly in the data that can't be explained by the current relativity theories.
That's got to be the best analogy ever. Did you come up with it yourself? Virtual mod points for you! I like it because you're not trying to convince anybody of a particular viewpoint. You're just using analogies to do what they're best at: bringing things into the abstract. The typical /. method is to try to use an anolgy to win an argument. That of course is futile. But in your maserful post you just want to open peoples minds to other ways of thinking. I would argue that it's so successful because you picked something utterly non-emotional. Of course some people may call you chicken-shit for not picking a side, but I wouldn't. Seeing things from another point of view is a sign of wisdom, not cowardice.
Of course, that's another point. Now they have two sets of customers: gamers and advertisers. Hopefully they will see that without a sizeable group of the former, the latter won't pay them much at all. So one would think they will try to please the gamers first and the advertisers second. Of course that may be a little harder to remember once the big bucks start flowing in.
I've tried Rosegarden. It's not bad. It's not as good as GarageBand or Tracktion (both are Mac programs) for recording loops and using effects. Also you may have a hard time getting it to play well with Mandriva. I recommend using Redhat if you're going to use Rosegarden. Among the things that Rosegarden does better than GB1 are MIDI export, score view, mid-song key/meter changes. That's because GB1 doesn't do those things at all! GB2 does 2 of those things, but I haven't tried it out yet.
All in all, you probably need about 3 or 4 different programs if you wanted to do everything using free software. Psycle (Windows, sorry) for loops/effects (for electronica), Rosegarden for MIDI, Lilypond for engraving scores (for classical), Ardour for mixing and editing. Some of these apps will have overlapping features, of course, and they don't all run on the same platform.
Vergessen Sie nicht Aeolus für Orgelmusik!
*winces*
Toilet with a built-in pencil holder? Drill?! Leaf blower?!?! You're one sick bastard.
I think the big difference with Mike Rowe is that he used the name after Microsoft had been around for a while. On the other hand, Ms. McCaughy was using the name McCoffee before McCafé was on the scene. Seems like they try to enforce their trademark on anything starting with Mc.
Just try naming your next company McRosoft and see what sort of trouble you get into then!
I think you mean homophone. :)
mengel, I would like to hear more of your ideas on war protests. How do you think the peace activists can implement some of these Ghandinian economic tacticts for their purposes? I think you are right that economic resistance would work better, but I just can't figure out how that would work in this situation. I'm not a peace protester, but I know that some of the Slashdotters are into that sort of thing and might appreciate some new ideas.
holy crap, what was that all about? I've read some wacky shit on the web, but that takes the cake! It sounds like somebody tried to explain time zones to this dude and he just blew a fuse. Like it's some earth-shattering existential mind job that there are, at any given time, a sunrise, sunset, midday and midnight, at different points on the planet. I hope that it was all just a hoax/joke.
I think you misspelled "corruption."
I learned that on a Mr. Wizard show decades ago. I always thought it was pretty nifty, or should I say "wicked." Anybody know a good Mr. Wizard link? The ones that I've found so far were not very extensive.
Now, this could work to OSS's benefit, too. If more companies would stop thinking of sunk costs such as "we already have these .xlt and .dot templates" or "all our engineering tasks are already defined in an Access database with automatic monthly PowerPoint progress reports," perhaps they would open their eyes to the ongoing costs of upgrades, new licenses, crashes, incompatibility, etc.
The trick, perhaps, is to scrutinize the TCO that MS claims. Do they include the time needed to reboot your machine every time your USB to serial port causes a BSOD? Do they include the sheet of paper that your DeskJet spits out every time your machine is booted to Windows? Do they include the cost of having to find yet another IT manager after your last one suffers severe MS Burnout Syndrome? Similarly with OSS, do they include the cost of having to umm... look through all the really cool screen savers that came with the OS? Or the time you spent explaining to your customer why they couldn't open your OpenDocument in Word?
First of all, from the reports that I've read, she actually was arrested for protesting a.k.a. "demonstrating without a permit." But even if your argument were true, that she was arrested for blocking a sidewalk, I'd still have problems with it.
Have you been to DC? Hundreds of panhandlers, vendors, and other people block public walkways there all the time. Do they get arrested? No. So this supposed law would only be selectively enforced, which is a Bad Thing (tm). If there was such a law against blocking sidewalks, I assure you it would only serve one purpose: to give a "valid" reason to arrest protestors.
The charges pressed against Sheehan may or may not mention protesting, but make no mistake that that's the real reason she was arrested.
This is a continuing pattern of unchecked revocation of civil liberties. Both major parties were guilty of this sort of behavior around conventions and campaign stops. Check out the First Amendment. It says that the Congress shall make no law restricting our freedom to peaceably assemble. Last time I checked, sitting in a public walkway with 200 like-minded citizens counts as a peaceable assembly. And please don't give me any crap about needing a permit to protest. Such a requirement has too great of a chilling effect on free speech and assembly rights to be considered constitutional. Sure, they let the protesters have their permit to protest across the street this time, but who's to say they won't grant the permit next time?
DISCLAIMER: I am a raging libertarian, and I'd be surprised if any of my arguments would actually hold up in a courtroom.
PS: What ever happened to the Politics section? It seems like ever since the election, it's sort of fallen out of favor.
To elaborate on your suggested starting place, it is a good idea to lobby your state legislators to support Condorcet voting (or your scheme of choice). It is up to them, not the federal government, to decide how your state's electoral votes are decided. Another way to go would be to directly lobby your state's electors. I don't know if this has ever been successful, but there's no reason to think that a concerted effort could not work.
Haven't heard that in a while! You left out "gently."
heheh. oops. I just like to assume the best of people. :-) you should've played along, though. It would have been more fun! Well I don't mind that you're a patent lawyer. At least you're trying to change the system from the inside out, rather than bitching about it all day long. Good luck!
Sorry to reply to myself, but after reading the sample chapter, I see that the square root is still needed. Also, it appears that you don't always know which of the two quadratic solutions are correct. So this is definitely a trade-off. In this age of calculatordom, where approximate answers for sin and cos are just a couple of button presses away, such a trade-off may be unnecessary, but back when sines and cosines had to be looked up in tables, this approach would have been fantastic.
By replacing angles with spread, he gets rid of these non-rational operators. By replacing distance with quadrature, he gets rid of the other non-rational operator, the square root.
Pretty cool stuff, but there is one problem. They don't make measuring tape for quadrature. And they don't make miter saws that measure spread. So we're still going to have to convert eveything back to the old way to get anything built. IAAEngineer, so that's important to me. Of course, I'm one of those guys who does all the calcs in SI units and converts at the final step to imperial, so I'm used to last step conversions.
I don't think Dr. Stein is a management type at all, judging from his lab. Just because you disagree with him does not mean you should resort to name-calling.
Are you kidding? Of course there was an advance response. Bush signed declarations! That's practically the same thing as hiring a competant person to head FEMA, or not cutting funding to the Army Corp of Engineers.
Nit-pick: There's no such thing as an advance response. That phrase is nonsensical, or at best oxy-moronic. Politicians and reporters sure like to use it, though. A response is defined as something that happens after an event or stimulus. Advance means before something happens. One can have a "planned response" or "advance planning."
14. OBLITERATION OF THIRD PARTY CANDIDATES. You may obliterate third party candidates through the election of the President. The third party candidates are not under the control of Microsoft, yet. Microsoft is mentioning third party candidates to you only as a convenience, and does not imply an endorsement by Microsoft of the third party candidate.
19. The President is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and treaties. Microsoft or its suppliers own the title, copyright, and other intellectual property rights in the President. The President is bought, not sold.
16.5k homicides
well... i'm an engineer of the non-reversing variety, so I was really just talking out of my a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H hypothesizing. thanks for the correction! :)
The statistics in the Chinese article are questionable. According to the latest census, it appears that the mean income of whites is under $73,000 and of blacks just under $46k. That is far from a 15-fold difference as quoted in the article. I also noticed that it said there were 16.5 homocides in 2003. That is exactly what the FBI reported, and it's improtant to note that it's at its lowest value (per capita) in the last 20 years. So it's not like they're all bogus in that article, but just take it with a grain of salt.