That's modern parenting for you... plop your kid in front of the TV (in their bed room, of course), or Wii, or iPad, or whatever other gadget, and get them out of your hair for a couple hours after work until they pass out, exhausted, from extensive video screen stimulation.
Really? You think that's how this stuff happens?
I will hand my young son my phone with the Talking Tomcat "ca-caty!" application when I have to wait in a long checkout/service/wahtever line, lest I be holding a screaming toddler who -- like any 2.5-year-old -- prefers to run around the store rather than stand still for 10 minutes.
However, there is a link in the app to download extra features and animals, and even at his age, he can access it quite easily. I can't imagine what kind of charges I would have racked up in the thirty seconds I spend paying for groceries or arguing with Customer Service if my Android phone didn't require extra authorization before making purchases.
Mine aren't quite at that age, yet, but I fondly remember bothering my mother to color and cut me pancakes in this-and-that shape of the ASCII characters used in the Rogue tileset, morning after Kindergarten morning.
But it's got its bad security reputation because Microsoft made some poor marketing decisions and aimed it at people who believe they don't need any sysadmin skills to maintain it,
While I agree that this is part of the problem, the idea does not take into account the serious system security flaws that failed to even involve the user, skilled or otherwise.
From the article:
The root of the problem? In those days, Outlook used Internet Explorer to display HTML-based emails. Even though you never saw IE in action, it was there, lurking in the background, running VBS programs without permission. Years later, the Klez worm used the same approach, but with a different security hole.
I think the possible argument there would be that she typed it up in her driveway, but apparently forgot to post it (I know I do that sort of thing all the time).
If you are on a mobile phone, there could be a good few minute delay between hitting "send" and the post showing up on Facebook, anyways. The Facebook timestamp isn't enough evidence to say that she *didn't* post it while in her driveway.
As a long-time fan of tasvideos.org, I have to say that I, at least, am quite impressed by the very first transition of a movie to real, physical hardware... even if they had to get the controller out of the way.
It is not so much a seminal technical achievement, as a true landmark for TAS fans and aficionados.
This might push back the goalposts for the AI researchers.
AI != brain simulation. The stock markets run on AI. Cars and airplanes run on AI.
There is something known as the AI Effect which tends to prevent us from recognizing applications of artificial intelligence as actual examples of AI, but, looking closely, you see that AI has little to do with the way the human brain works.
...In fact, that is kind of the "magic" of AI. It is an alien intelligence--at least to our way of thinking. So this discovery may be a major hurdle for those attempting to simulate or emulate a human brain, but the ever-progressing field of Artificial Intelligence cares little for such things.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Simple, with a ski lift, you don't have to haul the engine everywhere you go. While a railroad involves massive engines which travel back and forth with each route, the motive force in a ropeway is provided by fixed elements and used to pull the cable around a cycle.
I agree with all of that except the "zero." Astrology makes people interested in astronomy, which is of enormous scientific merit.
I dunno, because then astrologers say things like this (from the article):
"When astronomers make fun of us, they're making fun of the human suffering that leads people to seek answers," he said. "People do get comfort and wisdom from astrology -- and science gives us Prozac."
The directions "North" and "South" were more than an order of magnitude more popular than "East" and "West" until ~1800, when they quickly caught up over the course of a decade or so. Perhaps this is due to the American revolution, but I noticed that lower-case versions of all four words didn't become popular until about the same time, as well.
Well, I can't speak for the GP, but I am an EE and "dBm/sqrt(Hz)" is a common measure of electrical noise. Such noise, from thermal and related contributions, is frequency dependent. However, noise is a statistical V^2/Hz value, so when looking at V, you need sqrt(Hz). As far as dBm... your signal and your noise are often separated by orders of magnitude. It is much easier (and common-sense) to use a log-scale such as dB when dealing with such things.
greed. Which is why I stopped playing Daggerfall after probably less than 20 hours due to sheer boredom & frustration with the repetitive environments and almost nonexistent AI.
Daggerfall did come out in 1996, you realize. Is that when you played it? 1996 is the same year as MoO II, Duke Nukem 3D, and Diablo. Given the contemporaries, it is not half bad.
Good to know, I hated to think there was a marketing team anywhere that thought this was a good idea. I don't know who raised this trial balloon but it seems to be punctured pretty well now.
Yeah...
We [Qualcomm] backed up Android early on because we saw, in the union of Google and Linux, the Next Big Thing to take on what was at the time an extremely Apple-dominated market... But it would be a mistake to think that we threw our whole weight behind it. We threw a little party when the first "Google Phone" from HTC came out and the (relatively small) Qualcomm Android team announced their success, then we got right back to work making chips for everybody else in the world.
Besides, we designed the Snapdragon ARM processor to be used with/by just about anything -- hence the ARM standard. Most of the Snapdragon smartphones on the market at the moment are Android based, thanks to the greater mobility of the OS, but there are plenty of Windows-based Snapdragon smartphones out there.
One 8-12x11" sheet of paper. Both sides. Put whatever you want on it. The kids who printed it up with every possible item in 3-point font failed, those who put down the relevant concepts and formulae in a quick and easy-access format succeeded, because the test was actually structured to test whether you had learned the concepts and how to apply them.
Indeed. Before I switched to EE, I was a physics major. In both the (good) second and third year Electricity & Magnetism physics classes I took, I tended to perform the best on exams where I memorized the least.
Not intentionally, of course... I would show up for the exam with my sheet of notes, and realize, looking at the first exam question, that I had no idea how to do this problem. But I remembered Maxwell's Equations, and I remembered my 3-d calculus shortcuts, and I remember us applying these techniques in class, so I was able to derive everything I needed from this starting point.
I aced both classes, and can still (6 years later) derive dozens of principles I haven't used since switching my major... as long as I can assume the metaphorical, spherical cow.
Or having it completely destroyed. I have kids and a cat, and trust me, there is no secure hiding spot aside from a locked safe (until one of the kids takes a level in rogue). They don't play the games (they are too young), but.... ooooh.... shiiiiny....
Maybe you should deploy your military to guard your borders...
From Wikipedia:
In a ceremony in the Cuartel Bellavista, Figueres broke a wall with a mallet symbolizing the end of Costa Rica's military spirit. In 1949, the abolition of the military was introduced in Article 12 of the Costa Rican Constitution.
That's right, Costa Rica is one of the few countries in the world (and the first, in modern times) to have completely re-purposed its military force and budget. Costa Rica split their formerly massive military budget between education, internal policing, and culture, years ago. (This is why Costa Rica is home to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as the UN University for Peace.)
Unfortunately, this liberal approach leaves them a bit unprepared to deal with "uppity" neighbors.
remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire from all the pollution?
Yes, as a Clevelander. After the nation finally got done pointing their fingers and laughing at us, we turned to celebrate this unique Cleveland heritage by loving songs about it [Purchasing the rights to use it as the introduction to Major League], naming annual events after it, and even celebrating it in a local brew.
2500 cycles before degradation according to their youtube video.
That's... that's incredible. Even if you assume that "degradation" means "absolutely no capacity remaining" (which it probably does not), and a linear decrease of capacity (also pretty pessimistic), that's still enough charge to get 200,000 miles at the very least. Not bad, at all.
A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.
Here's the point, though: Your power plant runs all day, while the charging only takes 6 minutes.
In this case, if we assume that each user charges twice per day, then the one power plant can support 270,000 charges per day, or 135,000 users charging twice per day. Now, if you worry about people not playing nice and charging their car at 4:00 AM to spread out the load more evenly, there is a straightforward technical solution: Have the charging stations draw power over the course of the day to charge up batteries or supercapacitors in, say, a 12 hour cycle, then dump the power to the car in 6 minutes. You already need a specialized station to do the AC/DC conversion, why not put some charge storage in it, too?
And here's the big point which many people are missing: You only need a 324 MJ charge if you completely emptied the battery! You would need to regularly drive 600 or more miles per day (assuming you drive at faster speeds and with less efficiency than this tweaked car) to require two full charges. If your average user only drives 50 miles per day, your users per power plant capacity jumps to over 3 million.
Let me throw out one more number, too. The average home uses between 920 - 1000 kWh per month depending on which reference you look at (or 1300 kWh, if you live in TN). Driving 50 miles per day and charging daily would add an extra... [drumroll]... 225 kWh per month. Not a bad tradeoff to eliminate burning the 60 gallons of gas you would have used, that month.
Look at the following: 2x > x So what happens when "x" is set to infinity? We know that "2x" is always greater than "x", but since infinity is an irrational number, different things happen.
No. Nononono. It hurts.
Infinity is not a number! You cannot 'set x equal to infinity'. x as used is here a variable which can contain some real (or perhaps complex, depending on how you look at ">") value, but it cannot contain a concept! That would be akin to setting x equal to addition or something like that.
Yes, in mathematics, we sometimes talk about an "infinite number of n" or a "set of infinite size", but this is a simplification which is applying the concept, rather than trying to count up the number of objects and saying that it is "equal to infinity". [Yes, I know the difference between countable and uncountable infinities. It is irrelevant -- "countable" is again a shorthand for a concept.]
Slashdot Mirror
That's modern parenting for you... plop your kid in front of the TV (in their bed room, of course), or Wii, or iPad, or whatever other gadget, and get them out of your hair for a couple hours after work until they pass out, exhausted, from extensive video screen stimulation.
Really? You think that's how this stuff happens?
I will hand my young son my phone with the Talking Tomcat "ca-caty!" application when I have to wait in a long checkout/service/wahtever line, lest I be holding a screaming toddler who -- like any 2.5-year-old -- prefers to run around the store rather than stand still for 10 minutes.
However, there is a link in the app to download extra features and animals, and even at his age, he can access it quite easily. I can't imagine what kind of charges I would have racked up in the thirty seconds I spend paying for groceries or arguing with Customer Service if my Android phone didn't require extra authorization before making purchases.
No, the ones in the trailer parks, have litters of kids. Way more than the 2.5 average.
I think you missed this part:
found out he'd been banging half the broads in the trailer park,
Denmark?
All right, you've covered 0.03 % of the earth's surface, there.
Assuming we manage to cram some absolutely astounding population density into that country, where should the other 6.75 billion humans live?
Does the shape of the food really matter?
I take it you've never had kids.
Mine aren't quite at that age, yet, but I fondly remember bothering my mother to color and cut me pancakes in this-and-that shape of the ASCII characters used in the Rogue tileset, morning after Kindergarten morning.
But it's got its bad security reputation because Microsoft made some poor marketing decisions and aimed it at people who believe they don't need any sysadmin skills to maintain it,
While I agree that this is part of the problem, the idea does not take into account the serious system security flaws that failed to even involve the user, skilled or otherwise.
From the article:
The root of the problem? In those days, Outlook used Internet Explorer to display HTML-based emails. Even though you never saw IE in action, it was there, lurking in the background, running VBS programs without permission. Years later, the Klez worm used the same approach, but with a different security hole.
I think the possible argument there would be that she typed it up in her driveway, but apparently forgot to post it (I know I do that sort of thing all the time).
If you are on a mobile phone, there could be a good few minute delay between hitting "send" and the post showing up on Facebook, anyways. The Facebook timestamp isn't enough evidence to say that she *didn't* post it while in her driveway.
As a long-time fan of tasvideos.org, I have to say that I, at least, am quite impressed by the very first transition of a movie to real, physical hardware... even if they had to get the controller out of the way.
It is not so much a seminal technical achievement, as a true landmark for TAS fans and aficionados.
This might push back the goalposts for the AI researchers.
AI != brain simulation. The stock markets run on AI. Cars and airplanes run on AI.
There is something known as the AI Effect which tends to prevent us from recognizing applications of artificial intelligence as actual examples of AI, but, looking closely, you see that AI has little to do with the way the human brain works.
...In fact, that is kind of the "magic" of AI. It is an alien intelligence--at least to our way of thinking. So this discovery may be a major hurdle for those attempting to simulate or emulate a human brain, but the ever-progressing field of Artificial Intelligence cares little for such things.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Simple, with a ski lift, you don't have to haul the engine everywhere you go. While a railroad involves massive engines which travel back and forth with each route, the motive force in a ropeway is provided by fixed elements and used to pull the cable around a cycle.
I agree with all of that except the "zero." Astrology makes people interested in astronomy, which is of enormous scientific merit.
I dunno, because then astrologers say things like this (from the article):
"When astronomers make fun of us, they're making fun of the human suffering that leads people to seek answers," he said. "People do get comfort and wisdom from astrology -- and science gives us Prozac."
Now here's an interesting one:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=North,South,East,West&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
The directions "North" and "South" were more than an order of magnitude more popular than "East" and "West" until ~1800, when they quickly caught up over the course of a decade or so. Perhaps this is due to the American revolution, but I noticed that lower-case versions of all four words didn't become popular until about the same time, as well.
Interesting...
I hear the official South Korean position is that they will respond to any nuclear action by the DPRK with a zerg rush.
If you are in the process of "responding" to your opponent's move, then it is already too late for a Zerg rush.
Well, I can't speak for the GP, but I am an EE and "dBm/sqrt(Hz)" is a common measure of electrical noise. Such noise, from thermal and related contributions, is frequency dependent. However, noise is a statistical V^2/Hz value, so when looking at V, you need sqrt(Hz). As far as dBm... your signal and your noise are often separated by orders of magnitude. It is much easier (and common-sense) to use a log-scale such as dB when dealing with such things.
greed. Which is why I stopped playing Daggerfall after probably less than 20 hours due to sheer boredom & frustration with the repetitive environments and almost nonexistent AI.
Daggerfall did come out in 1996, you realize. Is that when you played it? 1996 is the same year as MoO II, Duke Nukem 3D, and Diablo. Given the contemporaries, it is not half bad.
Good to know, I hated to think there was a marketing team anywhere that thought this was a good idea. I don't know who raised this trial balloon but it seems to be punctured pretty well now.
Yeah...
We [Qualcomm] backed up Android early on because we saw, in the union of Google and Linux, the Next Big Thing to take on what was at the time an extremely Apple-dominated market... But it would be a mistake to think that we threw our whole weight behind it. We threw a little party when the first "Google Phone" from HTC came out and the (relatively small) Qualcomm Android team announced their success, then we got right back to work making chips for everybody else in the world.
Besides, we designed the Snapdragon ARM processor to be used with/by just about anything -- hence the ARM standard. Most of the Snapdragon smartphones on the market at the moment are Android based, thanks to the greater mobility of the OS, but there are plenty of Windows-based Snapdragon smartphones out there.
I'm not a conspiracy kind of guy, but seriously - is Qualcomm behind this transparent marketing grab or what???
No.
I work for Qualcomm, and we think this is stupid.
(Seriously, PRTM... "Quadroid"? Really?)
One 8-12x11" sheet of paper. Both sides. Put whatever you want on it. The kids who printed it up with every possible item in 3-point font failed, those who put down the relevant concepts and formulae in a quick and easy-access format succeeded, because the test was actually structured to test whether you had learned the concepts and how to apply them.
Indeed. Before I switched to EE, I was a physics major. In both the (good) second and third year Electricity & Magnetism physics classes I took, I tended to perform the best on exams where I memorized the least.
... as long as I can assume the metaphorical, spherical cow.
Not intentionally, of course... I would show up for the exam with my sheet of notes, and realize, looking at the first exam question, that I had no idea how to do this problem. But I remembered Maxwell's Equations, and I remembered my 3-d calculus shortcuts, and I remember us applying these techniques in class, so I was able to derive everything I needed from this starting point.
I aced both classes, and can still (6 years later) derive dozens of principles I haven't used since switching my major
1) You don't have to worry about losing your DVD.
Or having it completely destroyed. I have kids and a cat, and trust me, there is no secure hiding spot aside from a locked safe (until one of the kids takes a level in rogue). They don't play the games (they are too young), but .... ooooh.... shiiiiny....
But I dunno about that name... "The Spaceship Co."? Seems a little uninspired.
I would prefer something like, say... "General Products".
Maybe you should deploy your military to guard your borders...
From Wikipedia:
In a ceremony in the Cuartel Bellavista, Figueres broke a wall with a mallet symbolizing the end of Costa Rica's military spirit. In 1949, the abolition of the military was introduced in Article 12 of the Costa Rican Constitution.
That's right, Costa Rica is one of the few countries in the world (and the first, in modern times) to have completely re-purposed its military force and budget. Costa Rica split their formerly massive military budget between education, internal policing, and culture, years ago. (This is why Costa Rica is home to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as the UN University for Peace.)
Unfortunately, this liberal approach leaves them a bit unprepared to deal with "uppity" neighbors.
High speed computers and electronics that don't depend on transistors are possibilities
Which high speed computer in use today doesn't use transistors?
I believe they meant: (High speed computers) and (electronics that don't depend on transistors) are possibilities.
Though... I'm not really certain *how* this invention enables such things, even after reading it over.
remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire from all the pollution?
Yes, as a Clevelander. After the nation finally got done pointing their fingers and laughing at us, we turned to celebrate this unique Cleveland heritage by loving songs about it [Purchasing the rights to use it as the introduction to Major League], naming annual events after it, and even celebrating it in a local brew.
Burn on, big river.
2500 cycles before degradation according to their youtube video.
That's... that's incredible. Even if you assume that "degradation" means "absolutely no capacity remaining" (which it probably does not), and a linear decrease of capacity (also pretty pessimistic), that's still enough charge to get 200,000 miles at the very least. Not bad, at all.
A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.
Here's the point, though: Your power plant runs all day, while the charging only takes 6 minutes.
... [drumroll] ... 225 kWh per month. Not a bad tradeoff to eliminate burning the 60 gallons of gas you would have used, that month.
In this case, if we assume that each user charges twice per day, then the one power plant can support 270,000 charges per day, or 135,000 users charging twice per day.
Now, if you worry about people not playing nice and charging their car at 4:00 AM to spread out the load more evenly, there is a straightforward technical solution: Have the charging stations draw power over the course of the day to charge up batteries or supercapacitors in, say, a 12 hour cycle, then dump the power to the car in 6 minutes. You already need a specialized station to do the AC/DC conversion, why not put some charge storage in it, too?
And here's the big point which many people are missing: You only need a 324 MJ charge if you completely emptied the battery! You would need to regularly drive 600 or more miles per day (assuming you drive at faster speeds and with less efficiency than this tweaked car) to require two full charges. If your average user only drives 50 miles per day, your users per power plant capacity jumps to over 3 million.
Let me throw out one more number, too. The average home uses between 920 - 1000 kWh per month depending on which reference you look at (or 1300 kWh, if you live in TN). Driving 50 miles per day and charging daily would add an extra
Look at the following: 2x > x So what happens when "x" is set to infinity? We know that "2x" is always greater than "x", but since infinity is an irrational number, different things happen.
No. Nononono. It hurts.
Infinity is not a number! You cannot 'set x equal to infinity'. x as used is here a variable which can contain some real (or perhaps complex, depending on how you look at ">") value, but it cannot contain a concept! That would be akin to setting x equal to addition or something like that.
Yes, in mathematics, we sometimes talk about an "infinite number of n" or a "set of infinite size", but this is a simplification which is applying the concept, rather than trying to count up the number of objects and saying that it is "equal to infinity". [Yes, I know the difference between countable and uncountable infinities. It is irrelevant -- "countable" is again a shorthand for a concept.]
We know that "2x" is always greater than "x"
And if x is less than zero?