we should not give the manifesto of a failure of humanity the time of day.
IMHO, such a document could give an insight into what went wrong here. Was the guy just crazy? Did something happen in his life that made him this way or was he going to go off the rails no matter what? Was he brainwashed by some cult? What, if anything, could have been done differently to make sure this can't happen again? I'm guessing the answer may well turn out to be "we just don't know", but I think think it deserves some analysis, in the same way that the writings of various other nutjobs from history have been recorded. Lessons from the past etc.
And you can be sure that if you ban it, it's suddenly going to become a whole lot more interesting to people.
If he enjoyed doing it, why is he looking for the most efficient method possible ?
Because he's a nerd? I have a ride-on mower too but still mow most of my 1 acre with the push mower, mainly because it's pretty much the only exercise I get. I enjoy it most of the time, but as i'm pushing it along I enjoy thinking about how I could be doing it better.
Believe it or not sometimes people are better at solving certain problems than computers. This is one of those fuzzy problems with lots of irregularities that a human is excellent at working out with just a little help from a stopwatch.
The problem being described is one that is solvable by doing it over and over again until you find the fastest path. With a 'zero turn' lawn tractor it's dead easy to model on a computer - not particularly fuzzy at all. A computer could simulate a full pass in seconds, while it takes Hugh around 3 hours. The computer sounds faster to me.
I agree that people are better at solving certain problems than computers, but this isn't one of those problems.
So these Americans want to partake in some outdoor activity that requires a bit of open grass. Their solution? Buy a 6 acre lawn
If your kids want to spend all day playing outside, as they should, and the nearest park is 6 blocks away across some busy intersections in a neighborhood not considered particularly safe for little kids to wander alone, a back yard is a great idea. 6 acre's is overkill obviously, but the poster never said it was for "partaking in some outdoor activity", it's just land he has to maintain. Even if you don't really use the area, you still have keep the grass fairly short otherwise the snakes move in and it becomes a problem in bushfire season.
Parks are great, but they aren't the answer to everyone's problems.
I wonder how much of that sort of driving they have put the googlemobile through? Being a tester would be a whole lot of fun... set the googlemobile down a freeway and everyone else gets to cut it off etc and see how it responds.
It'd make sense to do this in a simulator... a good deal cheaper... actually, come to think of it, I'd be vastly surprised if Google hasn't already done this.
Scene 2: A bunch of google tech's crowded around their broken googlemobile, scratching their heads and muttering "strange... it worked perfectly in the simulator"
cutting across three lanes of traffic, driving 90 MPH, weaving in and out, running red lights, etc
If you want that behavior download the @r53h0L3 patch...
cause crashes if I don't have to put up with the human glitches that call themselves licensed drivers.
I wonder how much of that sort of driving they have put the googlemobile through? Being a tester would be a whole lot of fun... set the googlemobile down a freeway and everyone else gets to cut it off etc and see how it responds.
If/when we ever get to the point that the human population is too large to be sustainable, it will correct itself.
Yes but it will be hard and it will hurt. A lot.
Some of the strong, smart, and lucky will survive to repopulate.
I wonder how many of those who survive will remember how they got into that mess in the first place, and act well enough to stop it happening again.
And it's not a given that anything will survive on this planet after we fuck it up. I don't think we understand the way the environment works well enough to say for sure that we won't hit some atmospheric tipping point and turn Earth into another Venus...
Re:Eyes ... can't ... focus ... everything ... blu
on
3D Hurts Your Eyes
·
· Score: 1
So does the 24 Hz refresh rate or the 48 Hz flicker of a regular movie bother you?
I think I can kind of notice it on bright scenes but it doesn't really bother me. I thought that what I noticed on computer screens was the beat frequency of the CRT + ambient lighting, but even with all the lights off and just a bit of sunlight I can still notice it.
I also notice the new LED taillights on cars. They flicker. Nobody I've met notices it but it's definitely there. You can exaggerate the effect if you move your eyes from left to right rapidly - the taillights leave a dashed trail in your eyeball instead of a constant trail.
Fortunately CRT screens are mostly a thing of the past. We have 2 CRT TV's in the house which never seem to bother me... probably because the flicker is so obvious. My second screen at home on my laptop is an old 19" CRT but the refresh is 75Hz so I can only notice it right out of the corner of my eye. But that's about all the CRT's I use anymore.
Eww. I hate having to have my shift approved by the committee. Which is what it feels like in a paddle shift car. You do know better than the car. It has no idea that a hill is coming up, or that you just hit the apex of the hill, or that you need to stay in lower gear going down a steep grade to avoid boiling the brakes.
If I don't feel like the car making decisions for me I just shift the stick over to manual and change the gears myself using either the stick or the paddles.. The only time the car will step in is if the revs drop so low the car will stall, or if the revs get up towards 6000 RPM (it is a diesel after all!).
That said, the car does handle the hills pretty well and seems to pick the right gear pretty consistently. The thing that it needs a bit of assistance on are the turns. If i slow down at a give way sign, check that it's all clear, then accelerate, the car will first change from 3rd to 2nd before actually accelerating, which adds half a second or so. It can be a bit of a pain on a busy road if i'm picking a gap in the traffic - half a second is a _long_ time. That's when I put it in sports mode or just use the paddles.
That is why I always stick to tires, much cheaper.
I forgot that tyre is spelled 'tire' in some parts of the world... strange. I guess we Aussies don't like our words overloaded so much.
Re:Eyes ... can't ... focus ... everything ... blu
on
3D Hurts Your Eyes
·
· Score: 2
I am yet to see a 3D movie. I tend to be a bit susceptible to motion sickness, and I can pick up on and be annoyed by a 60-70Hz refresh rate on a CRT that doesn't bother anyone else. And even if none of that is a problem, i'm just as likely to fall prey to the negative placebo effect, going into a movie just knowing it's going to make me feel sick:) I kind of suspect that this is the reason a lot of people have a problem with 3D.
That's because it's not 3D; at best, it's 2½D. The back side of the objects are not projected. There are true 3D projectors that create objects that are viewable from all sides (without special glasses). I call them 3D-in-a-box. You can stand in front of it and see things in 3D while somebody else can stand on the other side of the projector and see the other side of the objects (in 3D).
I wished they stop lying by calling it as 3D but that's not likely to happen.:(
Worse than that, the 'movement' you see on the big screen is just an illusion achieved by displaying still pictures fast enough that the brain is fooled into thinking it is seeing real movement.
And even worse still, I watched a '2D' movie the other day and one object actually moved behind another. That's not 2D. That's not even close.
Sarcasm aside:) I wonder if the 2D stuff we've been watching for the last 100 years or so has any negative effect on the eyes or the brain? Rapidly showing still pictures and showing an image that the brain thinks ought to be 3D but is flat....
I'd like to know what the MPG on the 6-speed manual version is."
Probably no better. This isn't 1981. Today's 6 and 7 speed automatic transmissions are efficient. They usually equal, and occasionally beat the manuals in some cases.
I get the best of both worlds. 6 speed manual transmission with no clutch pedal and automatic gear changes, so in theory I get the efficiency of a manual and the ease of an automatic. Unfortunately, because it's still internally a manual transmission and the robot still has to do the clutch and gear shift etc, the gear changes are a little slow (or a little rough, in sport mode), and because of the 'expense' of a gearchange, the car is sometimes reluctant to change gears when it maybe should. I have little paddles at my fingertips for changing up and down though if I think i know better than the car. I like driving it:)
$15,000 for a new car will pay for a lot of gas for the suburban.
I'm not defending the suburban, but you can't ignore the initial purchase price, particularly if the suburban is paid for. All you're buying is gas at that point.
'gas' isn't the only consumable that goes into a car. Tyres can be 2-5x the price on a big car compared to a little car. The service can be quite a bit more on a large car too (although a little turbo diesel can be surprisingly expensive to service, even if the service interval is 20000km).
So they have mid 40s on a pure diesel engine. I wonder what you could get if you added a battery pack to that design?
I've thought about this before too. Diesel engines are bigger and heavier, so there's a downside if you wanted to pack it full of batteries. Also I seem to remember that the Prius (and probably other hybrids) doesn't use a conventional 'otto cycle' petrol engine, rather an 'atkinson cycle' engine. The atkinson cycle engine is quite a bit more efficient and lighter but lower power. With all that in mind, the diesel seems like less of a good choice. Or maybe there is a different cycle of diesel engine available too that might better suit a hybrid?
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like Facebook's lawyers found a document that is better for Facebook in an area that was off limits for discovery as agreed by both parties.
which can almost be reduced to:
Lawyer: Objection!
Judge: On what grounds?
Lawyer: The truth is really damaging to my case!
zenophobia
Fear of enlightenment? Maybe you mean Xenophobia
(you probably knew that already and just made a typo... i'm just releasing some built up stress by wearing my grammar/spelling nazi hat :)
you make a valid point that it's valuable to understand what went wrong with the killer.
i feel that the decoding effort at hand isn't really interested in that.
Probably not. A puzzle is neither good or bad, it's just a puzzle, and a puzzle exists to be solved :)
we should not give the manifesto of a failure of humanity the time of day.
IMHO, such a document could give an insight into what went wrong here. Was the guy just crazy? Did something happen in his life that made him this way or was he going to go off the rails no matter what? Was he brainwashed by some cult? What, if anything, could have been done differently to make sure this can't happen again? I'm guessing the answer may well turn out to be "we just don't know", but I think think it deserves some analysis, in the same way that the writings of various other nutjobs from history have been recorded. Lessons from the past etc.
And you can be sure that if you ban it, it's suddenly going to become a whole lot more interesting to people.
The best solution: don't mow it.
I tried that with my block once. Some guys at the local council had a quiet word to me about fire danger.
Why the hell do you have 6 acres of grass? Plant some trees for christs sake.
I just assumed there was already trees on it... otherwise mowing it wouldn't really require much thought at all.
If he enjoyed doing it, why is he looking for the most efficient method possible ?
Because he's a nerd? I have a ride-on mower too but still mow most of my 1 acre with the push mower, mainly because it's pretty much the only exercise I get. I enjoy it most of the time, but as i'm pushing it along I enjoy thinking about how I could be doing it better.
Believe it or not sometimes people are better at solving certain problems than computers. This is one of those fuzzy problems with lots of irregularities that a human is excellent at working out with just a little help from a stopwatch.
The problem being described is one that is solvable by doing it over and over again until you find the fastest path. With a 'zero turn' lawn tractor it's dead easy to model on a computer - not particularly fuzzy at all. A computer could simulate a full pass in seconds, while it takes Hugh around 3 hours. The computer sounds faster to me.
I agree that people are better at solving certain problems than computers, but this isn't one of those problems.
So these Americans want to partake in some outdoor activity that requires a bit of open grass. Their solution? Buy a 6 acre lawn
If your kids want to spend all day playing outside, as they should, and the nearest park is 6 blocks away across some busy intersections in a neighborhood not considered particularly safe for little kids to wander alone, a back yard is a great idea. 6 acre's is overkill obviously, but the poster never said it was for "partaking in some outdoor activity", it's just land he has to maintain. Even if you don't really use the area, you still have keep the grass fairly short otherwise the snakes move in and it becomes a problem in bushfire season.
Parks are great, but they aren't the answer to everyone's problems.
I wonder how much of that sort of driving they have put the googlemobile through? Being a tester would be a whole lot of fun... set the googlemobile down a freeway and everyone else gets to cut it off etc and see how it responds.
It'd make sense to do this in a simulator... a good deal cheaper... actually, come to think of it, I'd be vastly surprised if Google hasn't already done this.
Scene 2: A bunch of google tech's crowded around their broken googlemobile, scratching their heads and muttering "strange... it worked perfectly in the simulator"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
Did you know that the death rate for pedestrians is 100%
The death rate for everything is 100%. What's your point?
cutting across three lanes of traffic, driving 90 MPH, weaving in and out, running red lights, etc
If you want that behavior download the @r53h0L3 patch...
cause crashes if I don't have to put up with the human glitches that call themselves licensed drivers.
I wonder how much of that sort of driving they have put the googlemobile through? Being a tester would be a whole lot of fun... set the googlemobile down a freeway and everyone else gets to cut it off etc and see how it responds.
If/when we ever get to the point that the human population is too large to be sustainable, it will correct itself.
Yes but it will be hard and it will hurt. A lot.
Some of the strong, smart, and lucky will survive to repopulate.
I wonder how many of those who survive will remember how they got into that mess in the first place, and act well enough to stop it happening again.
And it's not a given that anything will survive on this planet after we fuck it up. I don't think we understand the way the environment works well enough to say for sure that we won't hit some atmospheric tipping point and turn Earth into another Venus...
And the most lost on the most people at once analogy award goes to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom for anyone who doesn't know. If only i'd known before my 4 kids were born... (hi kids, if you're reading this!)
Even today science would have trouble explaining how rain could originate from the Moon, which doesn't actually have much surface water on it... :p
Thanks. I was wondering why it didn't compile.
if (review == negative && product_made_by == someone_we_received_cash_from)
review_fake = true
So does the 24 Hz refresh rate or the 48 Hz flicker of a regular movie bother you?
I think I can kind of notice it on bright scenes but it doesn't really bother me. I thought that what I noticed on computer screens was the beat frequency of the CRT + ambient lighting, but even with all the lights off and just a bit of sunlight I can still notice it.
I also notice the new LED taillights on cars. They flicker. Nobody I've met notices it but it's definitely there. You can exaggerate the effect if you move your eyes from left to right rapidly - the taillights leave a dashed trail in your eyeball instead of a constant trail.
Fortunately CRT screens are mostly a thing of the past. We have 2 CRT TV's in the house which never seem to bother me... probably because the flicker is so obvious. My second screen at home on my laptop is an old 19" CRT but the refresh is 75Hz so I can only notice it right out of the corner of my eye. But that's about all the CRT's I use anymore.
Eww. I hate having to have my shift approved by the committee. Which is what it feels like in a paddle shift car. You do know better than the car. It has no idea that a hill is coming up, or that you just hit the apex of the hill, or that you need to stay in lower gear going down a steep grade to avoid boiling the brakes.
If I don't feel like the car making decisions for me I just shift the stick over to manual and change the gears myself using either the stick or the paddles.. The only time the car will step in is if the revs drop so low the car will stall, or if the revs get up towards 6000 RPM (it is a diesel after all!).
That said, the car does handle the hills pretty well and seems to pick the right gear pretty consistently. The thing that it needs a bit of assistance on are the turns. If i slow down at a give way sign, check that it's all clear, then accelerate, the car will first change from 3rd to 2nd before actually accelerating, which adds half a second or so. It can be a bit of a pain on a busy road if i'm picking a gap in the traffic - half a second is a _long_ time. That's when I put it in sports mode or just use the paddles.
That is why I always stick to tires, much cheaper.
I forgot that tyre is spelled 'tire' in some parts of the world... strange. I guess we Aussies don't like our words overloaded so much.
I am yet to see a 3D movie. I tend to be a bit susceptible to motion sickness, and I can pick up on and be annoyed by a 60-70Hz refresh rate on a CRT that doesn't bother anyone else. And even if none of that is a problem, i'm just as likely to fall prey to the negative placebo effect, going into a movie just knowing it's going to make me feel sick :) I kind of suspect that this is the reason a lot of people have a problem with 3D.
That's because it's not 3D; at best, it's 2½D. The back side of the objects are not projected. There are true 3D projectors that create objects that are viewable from all sides (without special glasses). I call them 3D-in-a-box. You can stand in front of it and see things in 3D while somebody else can stand on the other side of the projector and see the other side of the objects (in 3D).
I wished they stop lying by calling it as 3D but that's not likely to happen. :(
Worse than that, the 'movement' you see on the big screen is just an illusion achieved by displaying still pictures fast enough that the brain is fooled into thinking it is seeing real movement.
And even worse still, I watched a '2D' movie the other day and one object actually moved behind another. That's not 2D. That's not even close.
Sarcasm aside :) I wonder if the 2D stuff we've been watching for the last 100 years or so has any negative effect on the eyes or the brain? Rapidly showing still pictures and showing an image that the brain thinks ought to be 3D but is flat....
I'd like to know what the MPG on the 6-speed manual version is."
Probably no better. This isn't 1981. Today's 6 and 7 speed automatic transmissions are efficient. They usually equal, and occasionally beat the manuals in some cases.
I get the best of both worlds. 6 speed manual transmission with no clutch pedal and automatic gear changes, so in theory I get the efficiency of a manual and the ease of an automatic. Unfortunately, because it's still internally a manual transmission and the robot still has to do the clutch and gear shift etc, the gear changes are a little slow (or a little rough, in sport mode), and because of the 'expense' of a gearchange, the car is sometimes reluctant to change gears when it maybe should. I have little paddles at my fingertips for changing up and down though if I think i know better than the car. I like driving it :)
$15,000 for a new car will pay for a lot of gas for the suburban.
I'm not defending the suburban, but you can't ignore the initial purchase price, particularly if the suburban is paid for. All you're buying is gas at that point.
'gas' isn't the only consumable that goes into a car. Tyres can be 2-5x the price on a big car compared to a little car. The service can be quite a bit more on a large car too (although a little turbo diesel can be surprisingly expensive to service, even if the service interval is 20000km).
So they have mid 40s on a pure diesel engine. I wonder what you could get if you added a battery pack to that design?
I've thought about this before too. Diesel engines are bigger and heavier, so there's a downside if you wanted to pack it full of batteries. Also I seem to remember that the Prius (and probably other hybrids) doesn't use a conventional 'otto cycle' petrol engine, rather an 'atkinson cycle' engine. The atkinson cycle engine is quite a bit more efficient and lighter but lower power. With all that in mind, the diesel seems like less of a good choice. Or maybe there is a different cycle of diesel engine available too that might better suit a hybrid?