I actually considered this and weighed the options when looking at an apartment. Eventually, though I chose to live where rent is cheaper and suck up the expenses of two cars for my family for one main reason: Medical care.
My wife needs to see a doctor about once every two weeks, I need to see some sort of specialist at least once a month, and my son is special needs and goes to therapy 2-3 times a week. There is *no way* we would be able to manage this on public transportation, in this city -- a single trip to the clinics would take hours that I cannot to spare in transportation time alone on the bus & light rail lines. In fact, the transportation networks that lead to my job and to the hospital are two entirely different systems, managed by different groups, and synchronized about as well as you would expect.
And of course, I'm not quite certain how I would carry both a toddler and groceries for 3.5 people on the two buses between my home and the supermarket.
Very often it is difficult to see at a glance whether a project is mature and stable or just dead. It would be interesting to see whether this type of visualisation can tell you at a glance how healthy the project is. If so it would be nice to have this view on sourceforge, etc.
Hmm... Would someone mind attempting to apply this view to Team Gizka's TSLRP for Knights of the Old Republic II?
Explain to me the part where I want to get on youtube and watch videos of people playing video games. And please convince why this would be better then actually playing the video games myself?
The commentary. The humor. The insightful analysis of the story.
Personally, I prefer to read screenshot-style Let's Play's, but I usually don't read them to learn about the game or to get the enjoyment that I would have earned from playing it myself.
Instead, I read Nakar's Ultima series for his unusual take on the characters, his peanut gallery dialog, and his game exploits and knowledge of hidden secrets. I read the Quest For Glory 1-5 Let's Play because I loved his well-fleshed-out rendition of the Hero, which is not present in the actual games. I read the Neverwinter Nights 2 Let's Play's because Lt. Danger wrote it alongside a graduate-level Lit student's analysis of the game's themes, tie-ins, ethics, and even deconstruction of the fantasy type. I read The Dark Id's Resident Evil series because it was simply laugh-out-loud hilarious.
I have no interest at all in owning a "smart phone" or whatever until per meg billing is abolished.
Many carriers have been moving to this billing method, over the past few years. My wife and I just moved from a Verizon plan with per meg billing on one phone and per text billing on the other to a Sprint plan with unlimited data and texts -- for the same price. The signal coverage isn't as good as Verizon (you get what you pay for), but it is quite liberating to not have to count texts or data allowances against days remaining in the billing cycle.
First off, since when is Nethack "forgotten"? Most people I know who still play it, do so on a centralized server like alt.org (mentioned in the article). There are even annual tournaments over at/dev/null/network.
Also, where is the MUD/MMORPG GemStone? (Gemstone II came out in 1988, though Gemstone III gained big popularity in the mid 90's.) Gemstone II predates The Realm, mentioned in the article as "one of the Internet's first MMORPG's", by nearly a decade.
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
My brother tried to work as a grocery checkout bagger a few days a week for a summer job when he was old enough to work legally. As part of the hiring process, he was required to sign contracts with the union before he could sign a contract with the store. He was only going to be working there for 1.5 months (summer accelerated classes and a big vacation started later), but they still required full union dues, which meant he never even saw his first few paychecks. They went right to the union bosses. In the end, he left the job having been paid for only a fraction of his work... he is now an un-unionized undergraduate math teacher, and loving it.
Err... no. PNG is always lossless. PNG is also always zlib-compressed, so is almost always smaller than the equivalent.BMP file. I've also never seen an implementation of PNG that supports numeric setting of compression level: the choices are normally between different strategies, although most modern implementations simply autodetect the best strategy for each line of the image.
Actually, GIMP does offer this. There is a slide-bar when you save a GIMP file as a PNG titled "compression level", which goes from 0 to 9. I'm not entirely certain what it does, however, unless it is just selecting the number of compression passes over the graphic.
Unfortunately, a good percentage of your clock cycle is taken up by the slewing of the clock and the charging of some 100's of millions of gate capacitances. You actually have much less than 1/f picoseconds to play with, not counting internal propagation delays, (and of course all the other factors ignored for this exercise).
Why not make the ground soft ?:)
I mean, semi-seriously, all our shiny expensive toys are very fragile. If the greatest danger is having them hit the floor, then let's make the floor mushy and soft instead of these steel-and-concrete gear crushers.
don't know where they are sourcing that term, but "Maker" was used extensively by Orson Scott Card in the book 'seventh son'.
Ah, tanj it. I read that series, and successfully blocked it from my consciousness until you mentioned it.
My first thought on reading about the "Maker" in the summary was Lois Lowry's The Giver... which apparently is only the first book of a trilogy. Who knew?
You are quoting the warning correctly, but do remember that the exact same warning lies way back in the Old Testament (in the 4th and 12th chapters of Deuteronomy), as Moses warned of adding to the law he had written down. Applying the same interpretation to both readings would not just ban later edits to scriptural works, but the majority of the Old and entirety of the New Testaments.
A careful reading of the language shows that it is a caution against changing specifically the words of the book of prophecy--i.e. Revelation; note that the remainder of the New Testament books deal less with prophecy and more with accounts of actions (Gospels + Acts) and lessons (the Epistles)--rather than the New Testament as a whole.
As an additional point, modern scholars on the authorship of the Johannine works tend to agree that the Gospel of John was written later than the book of Revelation. In other words, the common interpretation of those two verses would cut an entire quarter of the Gospels from the scripture.
Seriously? He was an employee. They asked him to do a job. He got the tools he needed and did it.
How did "destroying someone else's property" get modded insightful? It is not like he did this to his grandfather's oaken desk; rather, he converted a company computer desk into something more secure, as he was asked to do.
An article in the Guardian newspaper shows how parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control ants they infect [emphasis added]
No... not really. If you RTFA, it gives a nice outline of what we have known for many years about the fungus controlling the ants, and it mentions the new fact: That evidence of the behavior is found in 48 million-year-old fossilized plants. Nowhere does the article even hint that we have even a remote understanding of the "how".
Allow me to quote the end of the article:
He added: "Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host's behaviour.
Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?"
Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.
To be honest, I read that Wikipedia article a month or so ago and it completely blew my mind and forced me to fundamentally rearrange my understanding of E=MC^2. (And even my Physics minor!)
...Now I've got to go back and re-explain this to my brothers, with whom I have had many a discussion on relativity and quantum theory.
Given that this is Slashdot, however, I kind of assumed the OP was making a physics reference way over my head rather than assuming that he made a mistake.
But mass has been lost, because the binding energy between the nucleons counts in the mass of the atom. (In the reaction, binding energy was lost and converted to another form. Energy is mass.)
Only in the way that pouring water out of a cup counts as mass "lost". When you perform these experiments, you are just letting the mass escape your test bench, because, as you said, energy is mass (and vice versa).
[Your analysis is right, I just wanted to add an extra analogy for a reader who may get confused.]
A certain amount of matter is converted into energy in every nuclear blast. That is why the equation E=MC^2 comes into play.
No.
Okay, E=MC^2 is not about the conversion of matter to energy, it is about the equivalence of matter and energy. You are not converting one to the other. Rather, they are the same--different measurements of the same quantity.
In other words, if you took the mass of the bomb before hand, and then collected up all the fragments and took the mass again, you would find it to be less, *not* because matter was "converted" to energy [as they are the same!] but because energy escaped. You could theoretically collect every atom which was originally in the bomb (and the resulting fission/fusion byproducts) and still find the mass to be less.
Where did it come from/go? Let's take fission, for example: In this case, the nuclear binding energy of the large nucleus is huge, meaning that it has more mass. When you split it into two smaller nuclei with less net binding energy, allow that extra energy to escape, and mass the two remaining nuclei, you will find the mass to be less due to you letting some energy escape.
We assume that they are very directed... rather than assuming that 3.6 e26 grams of matter/antimatter are being annihilated every second (from a quick application of E=mc^2).
Most observed GRBs are believed to be a narrow beam of intense radiation released during a supernova event, as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole.
The other probable cause of GRB's, the merger or two neutron stars, would also rotate rapidly as the stars moved in more closely (conservation of angular momentum: think of a figure skater pulling in her arms). In both cases there exists a well-defined plane of rotation and emissions expelled along the axes.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually considered this and weighed the options when looking at an apartment. Eventually, though I chose to live where rent is cheaper and suck up the expenses of two cars for my family for one main reason: Medical care.
My wife needs to see a doctor about once every two weeks, I need to see some sort of specialist at least once a month, and my son is special needs and goes to therapy 2-3 times a week. There is *no way* we would be able to manage this on public transportation, in this city -- a single trip to the clinics would take hours that I cannot to spare in transportation time alone on the bus & light rail lines. In fact, the transportation networks that lead to my job and to the hospital are two entirely different systems, managed by different groups, and synchronized about as well as you would expect.
And of course, I'm not quite certain how I would carry both a toddler and groceries for 3.5 people on the two buses between my home and the supermarket.
Very often it is difficult to see at a glance whether a project is mature and stable or just dead. It would be interesting to see whether this type of visualisation can tell you at a glance how healthy the project is. If so it would be nice to have this view on sourceforge, etc.
Hmm... Would someone mind attempting to apply this view to Team Gizka's TSLRP for Knights of the Old Republic II?
I'd be curious to see how *that* turns out.
Explain to me the part where I want to get on youtube and watch videos of people playing video games. And please convince why this would be better then actually playing the video games myself?
The commentary. The humor. The insightful analysis of the story.
Personally, I prefer to read screenshot-style Let's Play's, but I usually don't read them to learn about the game or to get the enjoyment that I would have earned from playing it myself.
Instead, I read Nakar's Ultima series for his unusual take on the characters, his peanut gallery dialog, and his game exploits and knowledge of hidden secrets.
I read the Quest For Glory 1-5 Let's Play because I loved his well-fleshed-out rendition of the Hero, which is not present in the actual games.
I read the Neverwinter Nights 2 Let's Play's because Lt. Danger wrote it alongside a graduate-level Lit student's analysis of the game's themes, tie-ins, ethics, and even deconstruction of the fantasy type.
I read The Dark Id's Resident Evil series because it was simply laugh-out-loud hilarious.
i do not think that image is correct. nokia settled with qualcomm long ago.
This is correct. The big-deal-settlement and agreement occured in July of 2008, and now the companies are working together on getting Snapdragon-enabled Nokia smartphones out the door in 2010.
I would know... I'm a Qualcomm employee.
I have no interest at all in owning a "smart phone" or whatever until per meg billing is abolished.
Many carriers have been moving to this billing method, over the past few years. My wife and I just moved from a Verizon plan with per meg billing on one phone and per text billing on the other to a Sprint plan with unlimited data and texts -- for the same price. The signal coverage isn't as good as Verizon (you get what you pay for), but it is quite liberating to not have to count texts or data allowances against days remaining in the billing cycle.
Hmm...
/dev/null/network.
First off, since when is Nethack "forgotten"? Most people I know who still play it, do so on a centralized server like alt.org (mentioned in the article). There are even annual tournaments over at
Also, where is the MUD/MMORPG GemStone? (Gemstone II came out in 1988, though Gemstone III gained big popularity in the mid 90's.) Gemstone II predates The Realm, mentioned in the article as "one of the Internet's first MMORPG's", by nearly a decade.
NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
(Also, the lameness filter can bite me. C'mon. How many lowercase letters do you need?)
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
My brother tried to work as a grocery checkout bagger a few days a week for a summer job when he was old enough to work legally. As part of the hiring process, he was required to sign contracts with the union before he could sign a contract with the store. He was only going to be working there for 1.5 months (summer accelerated classes and a big vacation started later), but they still required full union dues, which meant he never even saw his first few paychecks. They went right to the union bosses. In the end, he left the job having been paid for only a fraction of his work... he is now an un-unionized undergraduate math teacher, and loving it.
This is the reason I buy every Civilization game just *after* the first expansion comes out.
Err... no. PNG is always lossless. PNG is also always zlib-compressed, so is almost always smaller than the equivalent .BMP file. I've also never seen an implementation of PNG that supports numeric setting of compression level: the choices are normally between different strategies, although most modern implementations simply autodetect the best strategy for each line of the image.
Actually, GIMP does offer this. There is a slide-bar when you save a GIMP file as a PNG titled "compression level", which goes from 0 to 9. I'm not entirely certain what it does, however, unless it is just selecting the number of compression passes over the graphic.
Very well.
I call Dubai's police chief a Tool.
Unfortunately, a good percentage of your clock cycle is taken up by the slewing of the clock and the charging of some 100's of millions of gate capacitances. You actually have much less than 1/f picoseconds to play with, not counting internal propagation delays, (and of course all the other factors ignored for this exercise).
Why not make the ground soft ? :)
I mean, semi-seriously, all our shiny expensive toys are very fragile. If the greatest danger is having them hit the floor, then let's make the floor mushy and soft instead of these steel-and-concrete gear crushers.
...
Because some of us go outside?
don't know where they are sourcing that term, but "Maker" was used extensively by Orson Scott Card in the book 'seventh son'.
Ah, tanj it. I read that series, and successfully blocked it from my consciousness until you mentioned it.
My first thought on reading about the "Maker" in the summary was Lois Lowry's The Giver... which apparently is only the first book of a trilogy. Who knew?
You are quoting the warning correctly, but do remember that the exact same warning lies way back in the Old Testament (in the 4th and 12th chapters of Deuteronomy), as Moses warned of adding to the law he had written down. Applying the same interpretation to both readings would not just ban later edits to scriptural works, but the majority of the Old and entirety of the New Testaments.
A careful reading of the language shows that it is a caution against changing specifically the words of the book of prophecy--i.e. Revelation; note that the remainder of the New Testament books deal less with prophecy and more with accounts of actions (Gospels + Acts) and lessons (the Epistles)--rather than the New Testament as a whole.
As an additional point, modern scholars on the authorship of the Johannine works tend to agree that the Gospel of John was written later than the book of Revelation. In other words, the common interpretation of those two verses would cut an entire quarter of the Gospels from the scripture.
Seriously? He was an employee. They asked him to do a job. He got the tools he needed and did it.
How did "destroying someone else's property" get modded insightful? It is not like he did this to his grandfather's oaken desk; rather, he converted a company computer desk into something more secure, as he was asked to do.
An article in the Guardian newspaper shows how parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control ants they infect [emphasis added]
No... not really. If you RTFA, it gives a nice outline of what we have known for many years about the fungus controlling the ants, and it mentions the new fact: That evidence of the behavior is found in 48 million-year-old fossilized plants. Nowhere does the article even hint that we have even a remote understanding of the "how".
Allow me to quote the end of the article:
He added: "Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host's behaviour.
Why go to the bother? Why are there not more of them?"
Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.
Sure!
To be honest, I read that Wikipedia article a month or so ago and it completely blew my mind and forced me to fundamentally rearrange my understanding of E=MC^2. (And even my Physics minor!)
...Now I've got to go back and re-explain this to my brothers, with whom I have had many a discussion on relativity and quantum theory.
Actually, it's the strong nuclear interaction.
I figured that...
Given that this is Slashdot, however, I kind of assumed the OP was making a physics reference way over my head rather than assuming that he made a mistake.
Call me when these ideas scale. Until then, your irrational hatred of the weak nuclear force makes you myopic and a slave to the middle east.
Okay, I get the overall picture, but could someone explain what particle physics has to do with the situation?
But mass has been lost, because the binding energy between the nucleons counts in the mass of the atom. (In the reaction, binding energy was lost and converted to another form. Energy is mass.)
Only in the way that pouring water out of a cup counts as mass "lost". When you perform these experiments, you are just letting the mass escape your test bench, because, as you said, energy is mass (and vice versa).
[Your analysis is right, I just wanted to add an extra analogy for a reader who may get confused.]
A certain amount of matter is converted into energy in every nuclear blast. That is why the equation E=MC^2 comes into play.
No.
Okay, E=MC^2 is not about the conversion of matter to energy, it is about the equivalence of matter and energy. You are not converting one to the other. Rather, they are the same--different measurements of the same quantity.
In other words, if you took the mass of the bomb before hand, and then collected up all the fragments and took the mass again, you would find it to be less, *not* because matter was "converted" to energy [as they are the same!] but because energy escaped. You could theoretically collect every atom which was originally in the bomb (and the resulting fission/fusion byproducts) and still find the mass to be less.
Where did it come from/go? Let's take fission, for example: In this case, the nuclear binding energy of the large nucleus is huge, meaning that it has more mass. When you split it into two smaller nuclei with less net binding energy, allow that extra energy to escape, and mass the two remaining nuclei, you will find the mass to be less due to you letting some energy escape.
Confused, yet? Wikipedia has an excellent article on the subject.
It would be like a single player game that goes and deletes your saves if you screw up.
Rogue?
Nethack?
Dwarf Fortress?
etc...
My first-glance interpretation was quite a bit more unsettling: Microsoft Signs License With Amalgamated Regional Militia.
What? Paranoid you say?
Do we know this wasn't somewhat directed?
We assume that they are very directed... rather than assuming that 3.6 e26 grams of matter/antimatter are being annihilated every second (from a quick application of E=mc^2).
From Wikipedia's entry on Gamma Ray Bursts [emphasis added]:
Most observed GRBs are believed to be a narrow beam of intense radiation released during a supernova event, as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole.
The other probable cause of GRB's, the merger or two neutron stars, would also rotate rapidly as the stars moved in more closely (conservation of angular momentum: think of a figure skater pulling in her arms). In both cases there exists a well-defined plane of rotation and emissions expelled along the axes.