As that other guy said, thinkgeek is the place to go. I actually saw some chick wearing one around the computer science building at my university sometime last week.
And yes, it is definitely a cool shirt. I rather like Sun's sense of humour... unlike what other people are saying, I think that all these ads really just show that Sun has finally figured out that much their target audience (ie. Slashdot-reading sysadmins) are easily amused and often lack the maturity level of their more businesslike colleagues.
Hey, the title of the site does not specify what kind of nerds it caters to -- sometimes us science/history nerds need news too. It's neat learning where things come from, whether those things are ancient cocktails or pieces of software.
Plus the booze angle appeals to the average computer scientist/student:)
I would suggest just piping "yes" into everything you do, but that would probably require authentication too:)
I do sometimes use "yes" for a similar purpose (ie. preventing myself from destroying anything important), though. My account on my university's Solaris server defaults to aliasing rm to rm -i, and I don't trust myself enough to change it. However, when I definitely want to remove a whole directory full of files, I just use something like "yes | rm -rf [directory name]" and save myself the trouble of agreeing to delete every single file.... and because I have to take the time to construct a simple pipeline, I'm less likely to just do something stupid by mistake.
Immigration may not be a right, but in many countries it's a necessity. If Canada didn't have immigrants coming in, our population would actually fall, and I'm pretty sure that's also the case for a number of European countries. Simply put, we can't just shut down the borders and expect our own birth rate to suddenly go up to replace all the smart people that we would have been importing otherwise.
There is also the issue of how you define hosility to "the nation's culture". What is the culture anyway? Is it just what the government/majority religion/media says it is? For example, would protesters against the erosion of human rights be considered "hostile to the nation's culture" and expelled, or would a person have to be Muslim who's offended by women walking around with their tits hanging out to qualify? You'd probably end up just driving out all your rich/talented/educated people since the poor would lack the resources to leave even if they wanted to.
I have a Brother laser printer (HL-1435, in case you're curious). It's about 2 years old so far, and has enjoyed heavy use via big comp sci assignments and my boyfriend's rpg habit. I have yet to have a problem with it.
Incidentally, this printer was initially ordered online and shipped to Halifax, moved into storage for a summer, moved to a new place (still in Halifax) and then shipped via Canada Post from Halifax to Vancouver. I think it's experienced more wear and tear than the average printer, but it's probably one of my most cooperative pieces of hardware.
... but little else. I listened to a few on the website, and it's way too random for casual listening. From a geek perspective, it's still interesting, but as a music lover, I'm generally not going to listen to something that sounds surprisingly similar to the output of a loop playing random musical notes via the PC speaker. As game music, however, it might be ok... especially for small-scale projects where a talented composer just isn't available. A bit of randomness might make things interesting in that situation, and it might even suit the atmospheres of some games.
A lot of the stuff on the site sounds like old Nintendo music anyway (as other posters also apparently noticed).
Hmm... that's a bit of a generalization. I will agree that MOST anime sucks because of the lack of plot/etc., but there are some very very good series out there. Besides, most Western shows are crap as well:)
If you want something that isn't non-linear/non-sensical, try out Planetes, Monster, or Cowboy Bebop. Monster in particular is slow-moving, but very plot-driven. It's dark and serious for the most part, and I find that the characters are surprisingly "human". I don't think that Monster is licensed in the US yet, but I'm pretty sure Cowboy Bebop is played on Adult Swim, and Planetes is at least licensed over here. Serial Experiments Lain also has a pretty good plot, but it gets kinda weird...
As for your problem with dubs... that's what subs are for, fanmade or otherwise:)
I'm from Canada, and I notice that you bolded highschool but ignored my mention of 1 and a half years of biology at university. Yeah, ok, so first/second year classes don't teach anything particularly interesting, but it's still university-level biology, and at least one of my profs actually specialized in evolutionary biology.
It's not my fault that you were never taught about macro and microevolution:) It's part of the regular curriculum in the parts of Canada where I've lived... and I have NEVER had a teacher or prof mention creationism or intelligent design except in passing. We're just not taught that kind of fake science.
Also, having the same mechanism does NOT mean we can't differentiate between large and small-scale changes. That kind of classification makes our lives a lot easier.
I was a biology major for a year and a half. All through highschool biology, as well as first and second year biology classes (two of the second year classes being Ecology and Genetics), I was taught about microevolution. I think it's important to differentiate between things happening on a small scale vs. things happening on a large scale... at least in part because the former is much easier to reverse than the latter. For example, there were the moths that almost completely changed colour in response to pollution and then changed back when the pollution was cleaned up (I'm sure you know the example I'm thinking of) because the required genes had not been eliminated from the population and no speciation had occurred. With macroevolution, however... well, I suppose it's possible that a chickadee may someday evolve back into a dinosaur, but I suspect that it would require an awful lot of mutation rather than a simple gene shift within the population.
But... that's how evolution works. Microevolution anyway, and that's generally what we're talking about when we describe a change within a species. Ok, so technically, they just found a certain set of data, but based on the best theories we have (and the wealth of data that supports them), they can draw at least some conclusions based on their findings.... and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
I have an old (and cheap) keyboard at my parents' place which is really starting to show its age: many of the letters have rubbed off, and the plastic is actually wrinkled in places. My dad actually refuses to use this keyboard because of the lack of letters... on one hand, this is good because it means he won't touch my stuff, but on the other, well... when I just want him to type in a password, it's a pain in the ass. Obviously my crappy old keyboard lacks the geek appeal of Das Keyboard (which I've been admiring on ThinkGeek for a while), but it's given me some insight into the upsides and downsides of an unlabelled minimilist design.
You might want to check out Teamspeak if you want a free voice service with a Linux server and client available. My boyfriend used to use Ventrilo as well, but when we discovered Teamspeak, we and basically everyone else we wanted to talk to quickly switched over.
I do kind of wish that WoW would work without Cedega, though. The only semi-real game that I have on my laptop is Creatures Dockingstation, and that's more of a demo than anything... so it would be awfully nice if I could level my cow at school as well as at home. However, I'm not willing to shell out extra money to do it.
From what I hear from people who've accepted jobs as software engineers at EA here in Vancouver, the starting salary there is about $50K Canadian, give or take a little. Of course, since they're on salary and work insane hours (80 hour weeks do indeed seem to be the norm for at least some unlucky people, my bf included), I suspect that if you calculated their wage per hour, it would be obscenely low for the work they do.
I'm not sure how that compares to other places... hopefully I'll know a little more after I do my first co-op work term:)
I'm pretty sure I -have- seen extensive discussions of how war leads to the adoption of many new technologies, at least in the comments. Whether we like it or not, many of the "geek/technology things" that we take for granted were initially developed to help kill people... or to help people get off.
You still don't have to be interested of course, but you can't deny that the topic is relevent to Slashdot:)
There may well be many more dimensions than those we're used to dealing with, but basically saying that if we can't see it, it must be in a different dimension makes part of me wonder if the scientists are trying to take the easy way out.
But then again, if they do manage to actually find solid evidence (not just its apparent invisibility in our traditional 3 or 4 dimensions) of matter in an unexpected dimension, I will be extremely impressed. It's an interesting theory at any rate, and worth looking into.
This kind of thing makes me wonder how static the current shape of our galaxy is. Do stars (dead or otherwise) leave all the time, and do they ever come in from somewhere else? Do ejected stars form the cores of new galaxies? I doubt we'll ever get a chance to see much of this in action anyway since the galaxy in general moves so slowly, but it's still neat.
It also occurs to me that this isn't really news: depending on how far away the star is/was, there's a fair chance that it left our galaxy millions of years ago:)
Hotlinking is different from linking normally. They could have just provided a link to his main page, and I suspect he would have had less of a problem with that, but they didn't.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the section with his name/url was something that -he- put there. Nothing was mentioned about him on the company's page. As a casual viewer, I would have assumed that the game was made by a Fuddruckers employee, since I would expect at least a small notice that it was created by a 3rd party developer otherwise.
On the topic of bandwidth, again, I don't think he would have cared nearly as much if they'd just provided a link to the main page of his site. Then he would have been able to use the traffic to gain prestige/solicit donations/whatever flash game makers do to balance out the cost of bandwidth. Instead, Fuddruckers tried to just anonymously leech from him. Since what they were doing was just to advertise their own products, they could have at least hosted the thing themselves.
I'm not trying to claim that what they did was illegal or anything, just that I can definitely see why the game maker got pissed off.
The problem here is that the company was using his game without telling him, giving him credit, or considering that maybe, just maybe, he might not want them to use his bandwidth (let alone his game) to advertise their product.
Oh, I am amazed by it all, and I'm sorry if I implied anything different in my post. I just find it a wee bit unsettling that something "80 million miles away through an airless void" should look so familiar. One of my various life goals (many of which conflict with each other, so I know I won't be able to achieve most) is to work for a space agency. It doesn't really matter which one, I just want to contribute to space exploration in some meaningful way... and hopefully bring back more from Mars than pretty pictures and small amounts of data.
I am always amazed by just how mundane pictures of Mars are. I'm not sure what I expect to see... something different anyway. Something "alien".
But no matter how many times I look at these pictures (and others before them), part of me is always surprised to see red sand and rocky dunes that remind me of PEI and a dusky orange sky that looks just like that above any major city on a cloudy night.
This actually made me giggle. Not because it's from The Onion, but because it looks like even the/. editors have finally realized that this community's obsession with Google has gone a little too far. This article follows close on the heels of innumerable other articles -- if you look under the Google topic you'll see that there's usually at least one per day -- most of which are a bizarre fanboyish mix of solid facts (eg. Google hired some guy! Google bought an ordinary piece of hardware!) and conjecture (eg. Google is clearly going to make a whole new internet!).
This article calls attention to just how silly the whole thing is. Before I'm modded as a troll, I'd like to point out that I like Google too, but it isn't healthy to worship them this much or post every single Google-related rumour on the internet on this site.
And of course, if Zonk actually did think it was real, that just makes everything I said all the more true...
Just yesterday, I went down to my university to try and convince my laptop (currently running Fedora Core 4) to accept the existance of my wireless network card. Upon getting there, I discovered that a) I didn't have the university WAN hostname and other connection information saved, and b) I couldn't get on any computer nearby to check the UBC wireless Getting Started guide.
One quick grep through the Firefox cache, and I found the information I wanted. I'm still essentially a Linux n00b too, and certainly not a trained "investigator"... so how hard can it be for these people? (And yes, I know that the cache itself isn't always available, but I suspect that most of the people who the police are investigating aren't bright enough to clear it after doing something illegal.)
If every published scientific paper was 100% "right", the whole process of scientific discovery would be pretty much over already. After all, why would we need a new paper on any subject that scientists already know The Truth about?
As others have said, the scientific method is such that any given theory is put forward with the assumption that someday, somebody is probably going to prove it wrong and come up with a better idea. That's how progress works, and almost any paper that you look at these days will be sitting on the shoulders of hundreds if not thousands of older papers that have been proven at least partially wrong (possibly by the paper that you're looking at).
Wouldn't something that destroys regular proteins get the prions as well? To my knowledge, part of the problem with these little guys is that they're pretty much identical to the proteins that we need to live except for one thing -- their shape. If we had a vat of prions (instead of prions intermingled with regular proteins in the human body), I'm pretty sure that a protein digesting enzyme (protease? I forget) or a brief trip to a lysosome would do the trick.
But then again, I could be wrong. I'm not a biology major anymore, and I've only taken one genetics class (I think that was where I learned about prions), so I'm not exactly an expert:)
It works fine for me. I have it working on both my Windows and Linux machines, and the only problem I've had has been with project downtime. However, I think I prefer the old client anyway.
It's kinda fun being involved in other projects via Boinc, though.
Slashdot Mirror
As that other guy said, thinkgeek is the place to go. I actually saw some chick wearing one around the computer science building at my university sometime last week.
And yes, it is definitely a cool shirt. I rather like Sun's sense of humour... unlike what other people are saying, I think that all these ads really just show that Sun has finally figured out that much their target audience (ie. Slashdot-reading sysadmins) are easily amused and often lack the maturity level of their more businesslike colleagues.
Hey, the title of the site does not specify what kind of nerds it caters to -- sometimes us science/history nerds need news too. It's neat learning where things come from, whether those things are ancient cocktails or pieces of software.
:)
Plus the booze angle appeals to the average computer scientist/student
I would suggest just piping "yes" into everything you do, but that would probably require authentication too :)
I do sometimes use "yes" for a similar purpose (ie. preventing myself from destroying anything important), though. My account on my university's Solaris server defaults to aliasing rm to rm -i, and I don't trust myself enough to change it. However, when I definitely want to remove a whole directory full of files, I just use something like "yes | rm -rf [directory name]" and save myself the trouble of agreeing to delete every single file.... and because I have to take the time to construct a simple pipeline, I'm less likely to just do something stupid by mistake.
Immigration may not be a right, but in many countries it's a necessity. If Canada didn't have immigrants coming in, our population would actually fall, and I'm pretty sure that's also the case for a number of European countries. Simply put, we can't just shut down the borders and expect our own birth rate to suddenly go up to replace all the smart people that we would have been importing otherwise.
There is also the issue of how you define hosility to "the nation's culture". What is the culture anyway? Is it just what the government/majority religion/media says it is? For example, would protesters against the erosion of human rights be considered "hostile to the nation's culture" and expelled, or would a person have to be Muslim who's offended by women walking around with their tits hanging out to qualify? You'd probably end up just driving out all your rich/talented/educated people since the poor would lack the resources to leave even if they wanted to.
I have a Brother laser printer (HL-1435, in case you're curious). It's about 2 years old so far, and has enjoyed heavy use via big comp sci assignments and my boyfriend's rpg habit. I have yet to have a problem with it.
Incidentally, this printer was initially ordered online and shipped to Halifax, moved into storage for a summer, moved to a new place (still in Halifax) and then shipped via Canada Post from Halifax to Vancouver. I think it's experienced more wear and tear than the average printer, but it's probably one of my most cooperative pieces of hardware.
... but little else. I listened to a few on the website, and it's way too random for casual listening. From a geek perspective, it's still interesting, but as a music lover, I'm generally not going to listen to something that sounds surprisingly similar to the output of a loop playing random musical notes via the PC speaker. As game music, however, it might be ok... especially for small-scale projects where a talented composer just isn't available. A bit of randomness might make things interesting in that situation, and it might even suit the atmospheres of some games.
A lot of the stuff on the site sounds like old Nintendo music anyway (as other posters also apparently noticed).
Hmm... that's a bit of a generalization. I will agree that MOST anime sucks because of the lack of plot/etc., but there are some very very good series out there. Besides, most Western shows are crap as well :)
:)
If you want something that isn't non-linear/non-sensical, try out Planetes, Monster, or Cowboy Bebop. Monster in particular is slow-moving, but very plot-driven. It's dark and serious for the most part, and I find that the characters are surprisingly "human". I don't think that Monster is licensed in the US yet, but I'm pretty sure Cowboy Bebop is played on Adult Swim, and Planetes is at least licensed over here. Serial Experiments Lain also has a pretty good plot, but it gets kinda weird...
As for your problem with dubs... that's what subs are for, fanmade or otherwise
I'm from Canada, and I notice that you bolded highschool but ignored my mention of 1 and a half years of biology at university. Yeah, ok, so first/second year classes don't teach anything particularly interesting, but it's still university-level biology, and at least one of my profs actually specialized in evolutionary biology.
:) It's part of the regular curriculum in the parts of Canada where I've lived... and I have NEVER had a teacher or prof mention creationism or intelligent design except in passing. We're just not taught that kind of fake science.
It's not my fault that you were never taught about macro and microevolution
Also, having the same mechanism does NOT mean we can't differentiate between large and small-scale changes. That kind of classification makes our lives a lot easier.
I was a biology major for a year and a half. All through highschool biology, as well as first and second year biology classes (two of the second year classes being Ecology and Genetics), I was taught about microevolution. I think it's important to differentiate between things happening on a small scale vs. things happening on a large scale... at least in part because the former is much easier to reverse than the latter. For example, there were the moths that almost completely changed colour in response to pollution and then changed back when the pollution was cleaned up (I'm sure you know the example I'm thinking of) because the required genes had not been eliminated from the population and no speciation had occurred. With macroevolution, however... well, I suppose it's possible that a chickadee may someday evolve back into a dinosaur, but I suspect that it would require an awful lot of mutation rather than a simple gene shift within the population.
But... that's how evolution works. Microevolution anyway, and that's generally what we're talking about when we describe a change within a species. Ok, so technically, they just found a certain set of data, but based on the best theories we have (and the wealth of data that supports them), they can draw at least some conclusions based on their findings.... and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
I have an old (and cheap) keyboard at my parents' place which is really starting to show its age: many of the letters have rubbed off, and the plastic is actually wrinkled in places. My dad actually refuses to use this keyboard because of the lack of letters... on one hand, this is good because it means he won't touch my stuff, but on the other, well... when I just want him to type in a password, it's a pain in the ass. Obviously my crappy old keyboard lacks the geek appeal of Das Keyboard (which I've been admiring on ThinkGeek for a while), but it's given me some insight into the upsides and downsides of an unlabelled minimilist design.
You might want to check out Teamspeak if you want a free voice service with a Linux server and client available. My boyfriend used to use Ventrilo as well, but when we discovered Teamspeak, we and basically everyone else we wanted to talk to quickly switched over.
I do kind of wish that WoW would work without Cedega, though. The only semi-real game that I have on my laptop is Creatures Dockingstation, and that's more of a demo than anything... so it would be awfully nice if I could level my cow at school as well as at home. However, I'm not willing to shell out extra money to do it.
From what I hear from people who've accepted jobs as software engineers at EA here in Vancouver, the starting salary there is about $50K Canadian, give or take a little. Of course, since they're on salary and work insane hours (80 hour weeks do indeed seem to be the norm for at least some unlucky people, my bf included), I suspect that if you calculated their wage per hour, it would be obscenely low for the work they do.
:)
I'm not sure how that compares to other places... hopefully I'll know a little more after I do my first co-op work term
I'm pretty sure I -have- seen extensive discussions of how war leads to the adoption of many new technologies, at least in the comments. Whether we like it or not, many of the "geek/technology things" that we take for granted were initially developed to help kill people... or to help people get off.
:)
You still don't have to be interested of course, but you can't deny that the topic is relevent to Slashdot
But then again, if they do manage to actually find solid evidence (not just its apparent invisibility in our traditional 3 or 4 dimensions) of matter in an unexpected dimension, I will be extremely impressed. It's an interesting theory at any rate, and worth looking into.
This kind of thing makes me wonder how static the current shape of our galaxy is. Do stars (dead or otherwise) leave all the time, and do they ever come in from somewhere else? Do ejected stars form the cores of new galaxies? I doubt we'll ever get a chance to see much of this in action anyway since the galaxy in general moves so slowly, but it's still neat.
:)
It also occurs to me that this isn't really news: depending on how far away the star is/was, there's a fair chance that it left our galaxy millions of years ago
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the section with his name/url was something that -he- put there. Nothing was mentioned about him on the company's page. As a casual viewer, I would have assumed that the game was made by a Fuddruckers employee, since I would expect at least a small notice that it was created by a 3rd party developer otherwise.
On the topic of bandwidth, again, I don't think he would have cared nearly as much if they'd just provided a link to the main page of his site. Then he would have been able to use the traffic to gain prestige/solicit donations/whatever flash game makers do to balance out the cost of bandwidth. Instead, Fuddruckers tried to just anonymously leech from him. Since what they were doing was just to advertise their own products, they could have at least hosted the thing themselves.
I'm not trying to claim that what they did was illegal or anything, just that I can definitely see why the game maker got pissed off.
The problem here is that the company was using his game without telling him, giving him credit, or considering that maybe, just maybe, he might not want them to use his bandwidth (let alone his game) to advertise their product.
Oh, I am amazed by it all, and I'm sorry if I implied anything different in my post. I just find it a wee bit unsettling that something "80 million miles away through an airless void" should look so familiar. One of my various life goals (many of which conflict with each other, so I know I won't be able to achieve most) is to work for a space agency. It doesn't really matter which one, I just want to contribute to space exploration in some meaningful way... and hopefully bring back more from Mars than pretty pictures and small amounts of data.
But no matter how many times I look at these pictures (and others before them), part of me is always surprised to see red sand and rocky dunes that remind me of PEI and a dusky orange sky that looks just like that above any major city on a cloudy night.
This article calls attention to just how silly the whole thing is. Before I'm modded as a troll, I'd like to point out that I like Google too, but it isn't healthy to worship them this much or post every single Google-related rumour on the internet on this site.
And of course, if Zonk actually did think it was real, that just makes everything I said all the more true...
Just yesterday, I went down to my university to try and convince my laptop (currently running Fedora Core 4) to accept the existance of my wireless network card. Upon getting there, I discovered that a) I didn't have the university WAN hostname and other connection information saved, and b) I couldn't get on any computer nearby to check the UBC wireless Getting Started guide.
One quick grep through the Firefox cache, and I found the information I wanted. I'm still essentially a Linux n00b too, and certainly not a trained "investigator"... so how hard can it be for these people? (And yes, I know that the cache itself isn't always available, but I suspect that most of the people who the police are investigating aren't bright enough to clear it after doing something illegal.)
As others have said, the scientific method is such that any given theory is put forward with the assumption that someday, somebody is probably going to prove it wrong and come up with a better idea. That's how progress works, and almost any paper that you look at these days will be sitting on the shoulders of hundreds if not thousands of older papers that have been proven at least partially wrong (possibly by the paper that you're looking at).
But then again, I could be wrong. I'm not a biology major anymore, and I've only taken one genetics class (I think that was where I learned about prions), so I'm not exactly an expert :)
It's kinda fun being involved in other projects via Boinc, though.