Whatever you decide, don't just park your daughter in front of the TV and think: HUGE SUCCESS.
The better thing to do would be to explain a little about what 'everything' is - stars in the night sky are distant suns, except the planets which you can tell apart becasue they don't twinkle.
Everything in our solar system orbits the sun (except the sun) Smaller objects always orbit larger ones.
Everything is made from atoms.
The earth's continents are in motion
Clouds are water vapour
Parents pass on their traits to their children, and so on
Armed with this kind of knowledge, the answers will start to make sense to your daughter, and better yet, she'll understand how to determine whether a given answer is correct or not. Without some kind of knowledge background the answers won't really gel, and she'll remain vulnerable to the various mind predators out there.
You are inventing non-existent risks, supplying meaningless numbers to these non-existent risks, and then saying we shouldn't do important research work for fear of your made-up risks.
You'll forgive us for ignoring you, it's the only sane response.
I see that everything you know about the console market, you learned through reading the marketing tripe.
The Nintendo GameCube is not a market failure, unless you believe the X-Box also failed. GC outsold X-Box globally, though only slightly. So either both consoles failed, or neither did.
What Nintendo didn't bother to do was drop hundreds of millions on marketing, as Microsoft did. The result of Microsoft's money spent is that the clueless think the X-Box represents a far larger share of the global market than it really does.
GC and X-Box are essentially level. The difference was that X-Box has roughly double GCs share in the US market, and GC has a much better share of the Japanese market, where X-Box barely exists. In the Eurpean market, the two sold more or less the same.
In all markets, the PS2 is the leader, and not by a small margin.
In Anderson's Wired article, he illustrated his points using Amazon. With it's 1,000,000+ inventory, 52% of their sales were coming from outside their top 150,000 selling titles(IIRC).
This was a valid insight, as the largest bookstores typically carry 150,000 titles. Anderson revealed that the size of the book market is more than twice as large as what the largest bookstores can carry.
It was Bezos' decision to launch with 1,000,000 titles that drove this, plus Amazon's own set up, which makes it easy for browsers to find related titles, see what others who bought a book also bought etc.
This was another valid point: that the tong tail won't emerge without software to allow customers to easily find what they want to find, and see what else might be of interest to them.
Itunes is not like Amazon. Their range is actually quite limited. It consists of current and past bestsellers (billboard albums and tracks) and not much else. Apple have so far displayed little interest in having a richness of content equivalent to Amazon's coverage of print. Or maybe it's supplier problems.
I'm sure Amazon, just like any other bookseller, look at their 80/20 sales. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that 20% of 1,000,000 is a greater range than 20% of 150,000. In fact Amazon's top 20% represents more books than the entire range of titles stocked by a large bookstore! That's a long tail.
The Long Tail does not discount the importance of bestselling titles. Actually it reinforces it. To sell successfully (ie profitably) online, you need both. Bestselling titles bring customers to your website. What you need to have is a huge range of titles (whether books or music tracks it makes no difference) that those customers can easily and intuitively access, a range that the brick and mortar stores can never match.
Your ad hominem attack reveals much about you, but little about the person you are trying to criticize...
By your insanely stupid reasoning, the police shouldn't intervene if there is a bank robbery taking place or if some people have been taken hostage. They should wait until it's all over and then arrest the robbers / hostage-takers
Actually, this is exactly what modern police forces are trained to do... the intelligent ones anyway. Armed robbers enter banks for one reason only. To get money, then leave. The money isn't important - it's all insured. Many armed robbers are on drugs. Let them take their money with minimum fuss, and let them leave.
What would be stupid, is if the police showed up straight away, thus trapping several armed, drug-addled maniacs in an enclosed space with innocent people. That's not protecting anyone in the bank- that's putting them in more danger than they should be in. The police don't do this, as this would be "insanely stupid" to use your wording.
Dozens of armed police with their guns pointed at a bank door may look telegenic, but there are good reasons why you only see this in the movies, and not in real life.
As someone who has worn glasses for over 20 years, but not at all for the past six weeks, I would say you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
The article summary is misleading, in that PRK is performed on the general public as well as Lasik, it's not reserved for military only. It's basically used when a patient's cornea is too thin to be cut safely. It fires straight through the cornea to fix the eye. The downside of PRK is that it hurts, and takes a lot longer to heal than Lasik.
Speaking of cutting, Lasik no longer literally involves cutting. The Intralase technique uses a laser to take your cornea off. Trust me, you don't feel or notice a thing. The actual laser correction takes less time than the cornea stuff too.
It's a decision I spent two years working myself up towards, but I was just sick of headaches, having my glasses pushed back against my face, not being able to look down in case the stupid things fell off, messing around with clip-on sunglasses, and so on.
The surgery is not a piece of cake, but it's a one-off thing for long term gain.Now I have none of the hassles and all of the vision. Money well spent.
So a primitive simplistic game is not art? Well so what? If I write "lorelorn woz ere" on a random wall that's not art either. But neither the pen nor the wall lose their potential as a basis for artistic expression by my doing that.
Computer games are very much a potential basis for artistic expression, and are often used that way. Whether this be through music, sound, visuals, or their combinations, artistic expression unarguably exists there.
Mods and movies made using games, such as Red vs Blue also fall into the 'art' category. People have been expressing themselves artistically through this medium for so long now we barely consciously register it.
It takes moronic comments like Ebert's to remind us that games today are as foreign a country today as film was to theatre goers in 1908.
His comments are rather like saying film has no basis in art, using "Dumb and Dumber" as your sole basis for that argument.
Asteroids orbiting the sun are called centaurs, and there are millions of them. Some asteroids are in orbit of planets, such as the moons of Mars. Saturn's moon Phoebe is almost certainly a captured asteroid, as are Jupiter's outer moons, and inner ones such as Amalthea.
In general, the easiest difference between an asteroid and a 'small moon' is that a small moon has been pulled by its own gravity into a spherical shape.
That's not a hard and fast definition though. Saturn's moon Hyperion is in an irregular shape (one side is basically sheared off) but there are smaller moons that have the spherical shape.
Don't get too hung up on names. Our moon was called that long before the seventeenth century, which was the first time anything was found orbiting a body other than the sun.
Actually it was claimed the arrests had stopped an attack on Australian soil. The media duly repeated this claim without comment or question, so now it has become somehow relevant.
The fact is, a group of people from an increasingly vilified minority in Australia were arrested and are being held without formal charges being laid or evidence tendered.
They are being held under dubious new laws that extend the amount of time someone can be held without formal charges or evidence.
I expect they will be held for several months and then released without charge, trial, or comment in the media.
It's over 5 years old right now, so reasonably cheap to acquire a couple of copies, plus it has free internet play.
Play is your choice of co-op or competitive.
There is little difference between a new player and a new character, and many games are set up with a single high level character taking low level ones through the game, or getting them over strongpoints.
Games are easy to join or create. If you want you can simply create a private game for the two of you to play in.
Groups are easy to join or create, and don't require any negotiation. The game is easy to play (left click/ right click) and there is tons of room for experimentation.
I haven't been following this news too closely, so could someone please tell me if they've found any planets that are the size of earth?
Unfortunately, no. Microlensing is a technique that allows us to find smaller planets than was previously possible. As planets go, the Earth is big on the rocky scale, but small compared to, say, Jupiter. It's no accident that extrasolar planets so far discovered are measured in terms of their size compared to Jupiter.
To discover Earth-sized planets required a space-based telescope network. The good news on this is that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been scoped, planned, costed and is ready to go. The bad news is that this project has been cancelled (the bureau-speak is "indefinitely postponed") so that another man can go plant a flag on the moon.
We will all have a long wait now to find other Earths.
Slashdot Mirror
1. The police currently do a good job of catching bank robbers, and
2. Idiots will still suggest Orwellian overraction to their invented 'problems'.
I used to work in the banking industry so I can attest to 1, and 2 is self evident.
Yeah, that's better...
There is, but all those points go automatically to John Edwards.
I think Michael Crichton already did that one...
And like you, those other people are ignoring all scores except their own, which they look at and grin, knowing themselves to be awesome.
In Australia it is put thusly: "privatise the profit, socialise the cost"
The better thing to do would be to explain a little about what 'everything' is - stars in the night sky are distant suns, except the planets which you can tell apart becasue they don't twinkle.
Everything in our solar system orbits the sun (except the sun) Smaller objects always orbit larger ones.
Everything is made from atoms.
The earth's continents are in motion
Clouds are water vapour
Parents pass on their traits to their children, and so on
Armed with this kind of knowledge, the answers will start to make sense to your daughter, and better yet, she'll understand how to determine whether a given answer is correct or not. Without some kind of knowledge background the answers won't really gel, and she'll remain vulnerable to the various mind predators out there.
Un = 1 Bi = 2
Unbibi is simply Greek for one-two-two, or 122 if you prefer. With a 'um' suffix.
All elements are named this way until assigned an official name, which typically takes years.
Wow, what classes were present in your party? Can I guess? A mathematician, a different kind of mathematician and a statistician perhaps?
Freedom is not free. Quit complaining that the prison door has been wrenched from its hinges and start living.
You'll forgive us for ignoring you, it's the only sane response.
Monty on the Run: Platform perfection!
Wasteland: an RPG better than Fallout, I swear
Ranarama: Sort of hard to describe, plus the C-64 version is just a straight port from the Spectrum 48k, but still a great game.
Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge: The ultimate in fantasy strategy
Ultima V: My personal favourite, also the last Ultima to appear on the C-64
The Nintendo GameCube is not a market failure, unless you believe the X-Box also failed. GC outsold X-Box globally, though only slightly. So either both consoles failed, or neither did.
What Nintendo didn't bother to do was drop hundreds of millions on marketing, as Microsoft did. The result of Microsoft's money spent is that the clueless think the X-Box represents a far larger share of the global market than it really does.
GC and X-Box are essentially level. The difference was that X-Box has roughly double GCs share in the US market, and GC has a much better share of the Japanese market, where X-Box barely exists. In the Eurpean market, the two sold more or less the same.
In all markets, the PS2 is the leader, and not by a small margin.
This was a valid insight, as the largest bookstores typically carry 150,000 titles. Anderson revealed that the size of the book market is more than twice as large as what the largest bookstores can carry.
It was Bezos' decision to launch with 1,000,000 titles that drove this, plus Amazon's own set up, which makes it easy for browsers to find related titles, see what others who bought a book also bought etc.
This was another valid point: that the tong tail won't emerge without software to allow customers to easily find what they want to find, and see what else might be of interest to them.
Itunes is not like Amazon. Their range is actually quite limited. It consists of current and past bestsellers (billboard albums and tracks) and not much else. Apple have so far displayed little interest in having a richness of content equivalent to Amazon's coverage of print. Or maybe it's supplier problems.
I'm sure Amazon, just like any other bookseller, look at their 80/20 sales. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that 20% of 1,000,000 is a greater range than 20% of 150,000. In fact Amazon's top 20% represents more books than the entire range of titles stocked by a large bookstore! That's a long tail.
The Long Tail does not discount the importance of bestselling titles. Actually it reinforces it. To sell successfully (ie profitably) online, you need both. Bestselling titles bring customers to your website. What you need to have is a huge range of titles (whether books or music tracks it makes no difference) that those customers can easily and intuitively access, a range that the brick and mortar stores can never match.
By your insanely stupid reasoning, the police shouldn't intervene if there is a bank robbery taking place or if some people have been taken hostage. They should wait until it's all over and then arrest the robbers / hostage-takers
Actually, this is exactly what modern police forces are trained to do... the intelligent ones anyway. Armed robbers enter banks for one reason only. To get money, then leave. The money isn't important - it's all insured. Many armed robbers are on drugs. Let them take their money with minimum fuss, and let them leave.
What would be stupid, is if the police showed up straight away, thus trapping several armed, drug-addled maniacs in an enclosed space with innocent people. That's not protecting anyone in the bank- that's putting them in more danger than they should be in. The police don't do this, as this would be "insanely stupid" to use your wording.
Dozens of armed police with their guns pointed at a bank door may look telegenic, but there are good reasons why you only see this in the movies, and not in real life.
The article summary is misleading, in that PRK is performed on the general public as well as Lasik, it's not reserved for military only. It's basically used when a patient's cornea is too thin to be cut safely. It fires straight through the cornea to fix the eye. The downside of PRK is that it hurts, and takes a lot longer to heal than Lasik.
Speaking of cutting, Lasik no longer literally involves cutting. The Intralase technique uses a laser to take your cornea off. Trust me, you don't feel or notice a thing. The actual laser correction takes less time than the cornea stuff too.
It's a decision I spent two years working myself up towards, but I was just sick of headaches, having my glasses pushed back against my face, not being able to look down in case the stupid things fell off, messing around with clip-on sunglasses, and so on.
The surgery is not a piece of cake, but it's a one-off thing for long term gain.Now I have none of the hassles and all of the vision. Money well spent.
'It's a seller's market right now. We'd be fools not to join in' the capitalist was quoted as saying."
Well of course that's not what would happen. I mean, come on.
What actually happens is that armed NSA agents bust her door down, hand her over to the military, and ship that terrorist bitch to Guatanamo!
All they are doing is repeating the same level of sophistication in an argument that it took to convince them.
Computer games are very much a potential basis for artistic expression, and are often used that way. Whether this be through music, sound, visuals, or their combinations, artistic expression unarguably exists there.
Mods and movies made using games, such as Red vs Blue also fall into the 'art' category. People have been expressing themselves artistically through this medium for so long now we barely consciously register it.
It takes moronic comments like Ebert's to remind us that games today are as foreign a country today as film was to theatre goers in 1908.
His comments are rather like saying film has no basis in art, using "Dumb and Dumber" as your sole basis for that argument.
a)orbiting the sun, or
b)orbiting an object that is orbiting the sun.
Asteroids orbiting the sun are called centaurs, and there are millions of them. Some asteroids are in orbit of planets, such as the moons of Mars. Saturn's moon Phoebe is almost certainly a captured asteroid, as are Jupiter's outer moons, and inner ones such as Amalthea.
In general, the easiest difference between an asteroid and a 'small moon' is that a small moon has been pulled by its own gravity into a spherical shape.
That's not a hard and fast definition though. Saturn's moon Hyperion is in an irregular shape (one side is basically sheared off) but there are smaller moons that have the spherical shape.
Don't get too hung up on names. Our moon was called that long before the seventeenth century, which was the first time anything was found orbiting a body other than the sun.
The fact is, a group of people from an increasingly vilified minority in Australia were arrested and are being held without formal charges being laid or evidence tendered.
They are being held under dubious new laws that extend the amount of time someone can be held without formal charges or evidence.
I expect they will be held for several months and then released without charge, trial, or comment in the media.
What they will actually say to existing users is "pay up or we'll erase your hard drive."
Play is your choice of co-op or competitive.
There is little difference between a new player and a new character, and many games are set up with a single high level character taking low level ones through the game, or getting them over strongpoints.
Games are easy to join or create. If you want you can simply create a private game for the two of you to play in.
Groups are easy to join or create, and don't require any negotiation. The game is easy to play (left click/ right click) and there is tons of room for experimentation.
Unfortunately, no. Microlensing is a technique that allows us to find smaller planets than was previously possible. As planets go, the Earth is big on the rocky scale, but small compared to, say, Jupiter. It's no accident that extrasolar planets so far discovered are measured in terms of their size compared to Jupiter.
To discover Earth-sized planets required a space-based telescope network. The good news on this is that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been scoped, planned, costed and is ready to go. The bad news is that this project has been cancelled (the bureau-speak is "indefinitely postponed") so that another man can go plant a flag on the moon.
We will all have a long wait now to find other Earths.