Since the CPUs electrons travel near the speed of light
I know that it has little to do with your point (about which I do agree in part), but the above is one of my pet peeves.
*ahem*
Electric fields propagate at the speed of light along a conductor, and cause corresponding motion of electrons and/or holes. The net motion of a bunch of carriers (electrons and holes), however, is a much slower speed, determined by all sorts of material properties--on the order of cm/s, generally. Now, there is random motion of carriers at the speed of km/s, but they are not carrying computationally useful information--and that's still orders of magnitude slower than c.
Some editor needs to learn the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash (unless Firefox isn't displaying them properly). The first sentence of paragraph three, as it stands, simultaneously suggests that a nanometer is thick and that the Metal Gear team somehow assisted the project.
In the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation due to class snobbery. Though I agree that public transportation is vastly underused in the USA, I do not agree with your assignment of cause.
I've been to cities with wonderful public transportation systems (New York, Washington D.C.). There, let me tell you, your 80%-impoverished figure is not at all accurate. Men in Italian suits sporting an all leather attaché case ride alongside tourists and children and errand-runners and anyone else going anywhere else in the city, because public transportation is well done. You can get to the vicinity of your destination in only a few stops, and the schedules are such that you don't need to wait a half hour or more for a pickup.
I, however, live in a city with a radially designed transportation network. It will take you downtown from uptown and vice versa, but if I want to get to the grocery store three miles away, I'd need to take three different busses. If I want to get to my place of employment--perhaps two miles away--I'd have to take a bus downtown to a "hub", then pick up another one and head right back to about where I started. (By the way, I just walk, rather than drive, due to parking costs.) The schedules aren't remotely reliable, either, and we've learned not to expect the 5:30 train to be here anywhere around that time.
As a result, the majority of the passengers around here match your description: "either impoverished Americans (from ghetto neighborhoods) or illegal aliens from Mexico"... because these "hubs" are generally in low-income neighborhoods, because the routes won't take you from one uptown (or downtown) destination to another, and because the only people who sacrifice such large chunks of day to these poorly designed systems are those who truly have no other choice.
Have you ever actually looked at DSM criterion for a diagnosis? Asperger's or otherwise? There is no prerequisite that the individual must be a babbling idiot before a diagnosis can be applied (heck, Homosexuality used to be a diagnosis in older DSM's).
I'd rather not go into how having this has affected my life, as that is fairly personal to me, but Asperger's Syndrome is vastly different from a diagnosis of "geek" or "smart" or whatever else. And yes, I can suffer from Asperger's and still have the capacity to wish to be seen with some sort of dignity.
There is a chance that, had my condition been diagnosed at the age of 12 rather than at 22, that I could have had a normal relationship with my family and my now-fiancee, rather than being thrown into occasional depressive episodes due to the stress of attempting to associate closely with a neruotypical individual.
You aren't special. You are a normal geek, you are smarter than most people out there, and you aren't "sick".
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but as long as we are discussing Asperger's and such, I though I'd add this note to the original issue of urine/blood based diagnosis:
Apparently, those suffering from "non-chelated pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified or Asperger's disorder" do not have "significantly increased median coproporphyrin levels", which is the method used in the article to diagnose the more severe forms of autism spectrum disorders. (Note: There is an increase in the median urinary porphyrins for those with Asperger's and PDD-NOS, but not sufficient to be statistically significant based upon the authors' criteria.)
Source: Nataf R, Skorupka C, Amet L, Lam A, et al. "Porphyrinuria in childhood autistic disorder: implications for environmental toxicity." Toxicol Appl Pharmacol 2006;214:99-108 ...and related Wikipedia Article.
And what about those of us who have been finally diagnosed through traditional means, but sadly a decade or two too late for therapy to actually make a difference in our lives, due to our being told over and over again through the years that we were just your "Internet whiners".
Don't be too quick with the label. As a society, we've started to overdiagnose many conditions, and that hampers proper medical care. But it is just as bad, if not worse, to underdiagnose those who are suffering.
Speed cameras aren't just put up as a revenue earner, or to piss you off. The pen pushers that make these choices do so do because, and you may find this surprising, they are thinking about preservation of not only your life, but the safety of millions of other people just like you.
That is, unless you live in Cleveland. The former (thank heavens) mayor stated frankly that the city's new speed/red light cameras are a means for the city to raise additional funds, as the budget has recently fallen on hard times. Additionally, the cameras weren't put up at the most dangerous intersections, nor the intersections with heavy pedestrian traffic, but, overall, the intersections with the greatest volume of cars per day.
There are two universities on a stretch of the highly traffic-ed Euclid Avenue. None of the red light cameras protect these intersections where students are injured every year by "over eager" drivers, though there are a decent number of such cameras at plain-and-simple, pedestrian-less intersections a half mile up and down the road.
I am not saying that speed/red light cameras are wrong--there is nothing wrong with the technology or the premise. We need, though, to be more careful of the implementation. Plenty of Clevelanders are not happy about this intrusion of Big Brother, as they see little to no benefit to anyone's safety, given this incredibly poor implementation.
Re:Sounds Familiar...
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And once you've read it, stay away from the sequels!
Gentry Lee hopped on and wrote the majority of the next three books in the series, turning Arthur C. Clarke's timeless novel of discovery into a trilogy of bickering, narcisistic characters and bungling political pundits.
Heh... Sorry, I guess I'm still bitter about that one.
Well, it's about time. Hafnium oxide dielectrics were the talk of the semiconductor research world in the early/mid 90's. Big-time chip manufacturers refused to adopt the technology, though, hoping that some technology that didn't require the re-vamping of an entire fabrication facility would come along and magically reduce gate oxide lekage current.
The technology is fairly mature by now (from a research standpoint), so the only "news" is that the major manufacturers have finally realized that it is the least of all evils from a commercial point of view.
Personally, I wonder how different the current market would be if one of the commercial fab plants would have embraced the technology 5-10 years ago.
The race will see as many as 90 teams 'drive' an unmanned robotic road vehicle
I know... I know... they did put 'drive' in semi-quotes, but it's still misleading to a reader who is unfamiliar with the Challenge.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The robots will be driving themselves.
This type of design is worlds different from a system to be 'driven' using a joystick or by some guy monitoring the robot's progress. Amazing leaps and bounds in artificial intelligence, software image recognition, spatial on-the-go mapping, etc. are coming out of DARPA Urban Challenge that would never be necessary if there was a human hand--even remotely--behind the controls.
My car came without tape player, CD player, external audio port, etc... heck, the radio looks like it thinks that FM is cutting edge. I don't like most of the same-old that comes over the radio waves, especially on the quiet gaps between cities where just a lost country station or two filters through however-many kilometers until the nearest radio station.
My solution? Build something.
With two linear power amplifiers (~$10), a big filter capacitor (~5$ from Radio Shack), speakers ($1 at a flea market), and plugs (~$10 for everything), I've built a decent and fairly powerful car stereo that runs off of my car's 12 V jack and takes input from my iPod or anything else with a headphone output.
There's a lot of junk on the market for iPod-n'such nowadays, but unless you're an audiophile with your mp3's (or ace's or whatever you like) encoded upwards of 300 kbps, cheap solutions are more than sufficient.
Sadly, he's gone now. Erosion and nature, rather than aliens, took the famous face in the rocks away from us in May of 2003.
Side note: I was there just months before it fell. Yeah, it bore a resemblanec to a face, but only from the right angle. Otherwise, it looks like rocks... Much like Mars's well-renowned face, but significantly more temporary.
Nintendo patented a special type of chip that had to be put in each video game before it would play on the NES
Don't get me wrong... the 10NES chip/code was a great idea at the time... but poor hardware implementation caused--for pretty much any system older than ~1 year--those endless blinking red or blue screens as the system refused to actually recognize the game. The slightest bit of dust or bent pin would throw off the precise timing that the 10NES chip used to verify the games, leading to the famous ritual of blowing on the cartridges.
Now that I think about it, Tengen's later reverse engineering of the lockout system would probably be forbidden by the DMCA... Ahh! How could we have lived without Gauntlet?!?
The current theory is that certain (blue-ish) frequencies of light create radical pairs--charged particles--that are affected by the Earth's magnetic field. Some (unkown, I believe) mechanism detects the effect on these particles (perhaps a Hall voltage?) and interprets that as magnetic field information.
it might show that joggers are just as happy as sunbathers.
Though I can't say I put much faith in the readings of the E-Meter-wannabe, I don't understand the logic behind the above statement. It seems to suggest that joggers are supposed to be less happy...... having done both of the above, I'd say that the former is much more enjoyable than the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
In other breaking news, the Department of Homeland Security reminds everyone that the terrorism thread advisory level has been raised to 'orange'.
Uh... Daedelus/Icarus/Helios, anyone?
According to the stickers, my old TI-83 is certified for Windows Vista... and Windows XP... and '98. And ME, just for the heck of it.
I like those stickers. They stay shiny long after the computers (and operating systems) have dulled.
I know that it has little to do with your point (about which I do agree in part), but the above is one of my pet peeves.
*ahem*
Electric fields propagate at the speed of light along a conductor, and cause corresponding motion of electrons and/or holes. The net motion of a bunch of carriers (electrons and holes), however, is a much slower speed, determined by all sorts of material properties--on the order of cm/s, generally. Now, there is random motion of carriers at the speed of km/s, but they are not carrying computationally useful information--and that's still orders of magnitude slower than c.
--And now you know...
And, fittingly, is today's featured article on the English Wikipedia.
Some editor needs to learn the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash (unless Firefox isn't displaying them properly). The first sentence of paragraph three, as it stands, simultaneously suggests that a nanometer is thick and that the Metal Gear team somehow assisted the project.
... c'mon... "solid-Snoke"?
I've been to cities with wonderful public transportation systems (New York, Washington D.C.). There, let me tell you, your 80%-impoverished figure is not at all accurate. Men in Italian suits sporting an all leather attaché case ride alongside tourists and children and errand-runners and anyone else going anywhere else in the city, because public transportation is well done. You can get to the vicinity of your destination in only a few stops, and the schedules are such that you don't need to wait a half hour or more for a pickup.
I, however, live in a city with a radially designed transportation network. It will take you downtown from uptown and vice versa, but if I want to get to the grocery store three miles away, I'd need to take three different busses. If I want to get to my place of employment--perhaps two miles away--I'd have to take a bus downtown to a "hub", then pick up another one and head right back to about where I started. (By the way, I just walk, rather than drive, due to parking costs.) The schedules aren't remotely reliable, either, and we've learned not to expect the 5:30 train to be here anywhere around that time.
As a result, the majority of the passengers around here match your description: "either impoverished Americans (from ghetto neighborhoods) or illegal aliens from Mexico"... because these "hubs" are generally in low-income neighborhoods, because the routes won't take you from one uptown (or downtown) destination to another, and because the only people who sacrifice such large chunks of day to these poorly designed systems are those who truly have no other choice.
These machines are made by Konami? And they're just across the border?
I'm gonna be rich!
...now, where'd they put that "B" button...
I'd rather not go into how having this has affected my life, as that is fairly personal to me, but Asperger's Syndrome is vastly different from a diagnosis of "geek" or "smart" or whatever else. And yes, I can suffer from Asperger's and still have the capacity to wish to be seen with some sort of dignity.
There is a chance that, had my condition been diagnosed at the age of 12 rather than at 22, that I could have had a normal relationship with my family and my now-fiancee, rather than being thrown into occasional depressive episodes due to the stress of attempting to associate closely with a neruotypical individual.
Give me a break. I wish.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but as long as we are discussing Asperger's and such, I though I'd add this note to the original issue of urine/blood based diagnosis:
...and related Wikipedia Article.
Apparently, those suffering from "non-chelated pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified or Asperger's disorder" do not have "significantly increased median coproporphyrin levels", which is the method used in the article to diagnose the more severe forms of autism spectrum disorders. (Note: There is an increase in the median urinary porphyrins for those with Asperger's and PDD-NOS, but not sufficient to be statistically significant based upon the authors' criteria.)
Source: Nataf R, Skorupka C, Amet L, Lam A, et al. "Porphyrinuria in childhood autistic disorder: implications for environmental toxicity." Toxicol Appl Pharmacol 2006;214:99-108
And what about those of us who have been finally diagnosed through traditional means, but sadly a decade or two too late for therapy to actually make a difference in our lives, due to our being told over and over again through the years that we were just your "Internet whiners".
Don't be too quick with the label. As a society, we've started to overdiagnose many conditions, and that hampers proper medical care. But it is just as bad, if not worse, to underdiagnose those who are suffering.
That is, unless you live in Cleveland. The former (thank heavens) mayor stated frankly that the city's new speed/red light cameras are a means for the city to raise additional funds, as the budget has recently fallen on hard times. Additionally, the cameras weren't put up at the most dangerous intersections, nor the intersections with heavy pedestrian traffic, but, overall, the intersections with the greatest volume of cars per day.
There are two universities on a stretch of the highly traffic-ed Euclid Avenue. None of the red light cameras protect these intersections where students are injured every year by "over eager" drivers, though there are a decent number of such cameras at plain-and-simple, pedestrian-less intersections a half mile up and down the road.
I am not saying that speed/red light cameras are wrong--there is nothing wrong with the technology or the premise. We need, though, to be more careful of the implementation. Plenty of Clevelanders are not happy about this intrusion of Big Brother, as they see little to no benefit to anyone's safety, given this incredibly poor implementation.
And once you've read it, stay away from the sequels!
Gentry Lee hopped on and wrote the majority of the next three books in the series, turning Arthur C. Clarke's timeless novel of discovery into a trilogy of bickering, narcisistic characters and bungling political pundits.
Heh... Sorry, I guess I'm still bitter about that one.
Well, it's about time. Hafnium oxide dielectrics were the talk of the semiconductor research world in the early/mid 90's. Big-time chip manufacturers refused to adopt the technology, though, hoping that some technology that didn't require the re-vamping of an entire fabrication facility would come along and magically reduce gate oxide lekage current.
The technology is fairly mature by now (from a research standpoint), so the only "news" is that the major manufacturers have finally realized that it is the least of all evils from a commercial point of view.
Personally, I wonder how different the current market would be if one of the commercial fab plants would have embraced the technology 5-10 years ago.
The race will see as many as 90 teams 'drive' an unmanned robotic road vehicle
I know... I know... they did put 'drive' in semi-quotes, but it's still misleading to a reader who is unfamiliar with the Challenge.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The robots will be driving themselves.
This type of design is worlds different from a system to be 'driven' using a joystick or by some guy monitoring the robot's progress. Amazing leaps and bounds in artificial intelligence, software image recognition, spatial on-the-go mapping, etc. are coming out of DARPA Urban Challenge that would never be necessary if there was a human hand--even remotely--behind the controls.
My car came without tape player, CD player, external audio port, etc... heck, the radio looks like it thinks that FM is cutting edge. I don't like most of the same-old that comes over the radio waves, especially on the quiet gaps between cities where just a lost country station or two filters through however-many kilometers until the nearest radio station.
My solution? Build something.
With two linear power amplifiers (~$10), a big filter capacitor (~5$ from Radio Shack), speakers ($1 at a flea market), and plugs (~$10 for everything), I've built a decent and fairly powerful car stereo that runs off of my car's 12 V jack and takes input from my iPod or anything else with a headphone output.
There's a lot of junk on the market for iPod-n'such nowadays, but unless you're an audiophile with your mp3's (or ace's or whatever you like) encoded upwards of 300 kbps, cheap solutions are more than sufficient.
Ahhh!
Somebody figured out the missing step!!!
Uh... wasn't the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampsire?
Sadly, he's gone now. Erosion and nature, rather than aliens, took the famous face in the rocks away from us in May of 2003.
Side note: I was there just months before it fell. Yeah, it bore a resemblanec to a face, but only from the right angle. Otherwise, it looks like rocks... Much like Mars's well-renowned face, but significantly more temporary.
Nintendo patented a special type of chip that had to be put in each video game before it would play on the NES
Don't get me wrong... the 10NES chip/code was a great idea at the time... but poor hardware implementation caused--for pretty much any system older than ~1 year--those endless blinking red or blue screens as the system refused to actually recognize the game. The slightest bit of dust or bent pin would throw off the precise timing that the 10NES chip used to verify the games, leading to the famous ritual of blowing on the cartridges.
Now that I think about it, Tengen's later reverse engineering of the lockout system would probably be forbidden by the DMCA... Ahh! How could we have lived without Gauntlet?!?
The current theory is that certain (blue-ish) frequencies of light create radical pairs--charged particles--that are affected by the Earth's magnetic field. Some (unkown, I believe) mechanism detects the effect on these particles (perhaps a Hall voltage?) and interprets that as magnetic field information.
Ah hah!
... ... or not.
The hand's in the other shoe, now!
I wish to coin a phrase: "The Wizard of Oz Effect". ... Now I just have to write a paper about it.
Whenever I see a new story out about how well Google is doing, the first thing I do is find all instances of the word "chair" on the comments page.
I see my strategy continues to succeed.
it might show that joggers are just as happy as sunbathers.
... having done both of the above, I'd say that the former is much more enjoyable than the latter.
Though I can't say I put much faith in the readings of the E-Meter-wannabe, I don't understand the logic behind the above statement. It seems to suggest that joggers are supposed to be less happy...
Exercise induced endorphins, anyone?
But it still makes me nostalgic...