I was in the middle of playing that when I read the first news report about a possible epidemic. Good thing I've never read or even heard of Enders Game or I could have been really worried:)
That's silly: why would the solution to eradicating a disease be catching it when it's already out there?
I reached the same conclusion (that catching now would be better than later) but for different reasons. Assuming you are going to catch it at some point, if you caught it right now then you'd be one of a very small number of infected people, and you'd receive a lot of attention and a lot of care. If it spreads and pretty much everyone gets it, then good luck getting any sort of access to health care (if you actually need it - most people have gotten better without special care)
I think one of the biggest challenges we'll face in a pandemic is educating people to stay away from hospitals unless they are really really sick. Based on what i've seen in the past, everyone will be marching up to the hospital at the first sign of the sniffles... you're more likely to get beaten to death by an irate parent trying to get their child seen to than to actually get help:)
Thanks for clarifying that. When I read the article, I assumed that 50x less meant that if a normal computer used 10w, this device 'used' -500W, or actually generated 500W. Boy was I wrong!
(I'm kidding of course - I didn't read the article:)
when you register, linden labs clearly states that what the people make is their work, and linden labs doesn't interfere... so why does taser try this?
Because having that disclaimer there doesn't (necessarily) mean squat.
If you have a sign in your shop that says "we don't give refunds", and a court orders you to do a refund, then you give a refund.
If you have a sign in your playground that says "enter at own risk. we are not liable if you hurt yourself", and someone hurts themselves, and a court deems that you were negligent, then you will be liable.
Forget about the "right thing" here because Taser don't care.
They need to contact the maker, but of course it's easier to get linden labs.
I think you've answered your own question there. Not just because it's easier, but because it's more likely to succeed.
It could be an interesting court case though...
Taser: Someone is making Taser branded dildo's in your game. Make them stop and give us some money for damaging the image of our products. Linden: You can't sue us, you have to sue the person playing the game who is responsible for infringing on your trademark. Taser: Okay then, who is that? Linden: We're not going to tell you, without a court order.
time passes...
Taser: Here's a court order, give up the details Linden: Hmmm... all we seem to have is a name "I. P. Freely" and a post office box in Sweden. Maybe you should contact their ISP? Taser: What is their ISP? Linden: We can't give you that information without a court order
and so on.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control"
on
Bringing Up Bill
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Like him or not, Bill Gates is pretty high up in the list of people who had a large effect on the whole computing industry.As a nerd, and a parent, I'm interested in what makes him tick, so I don't make the same mistakes with my kids:)
His parents must do all right at christmas/birthdays/mothers day/fathers day/etc though... maybe there's something in that.
I wonder if, deep down, Microsoft Windows was just a way to rebel against his parents? eg "Fine then! I'm going to go and start a computing empire and make my products suckier and suckier and by the time people notice it will be too late for them to use anything else. And it be all your fault!:p:p:p"
Exactly. With bare feet, the soles of your feet have a few mm of 'give' to absorb the shock. If you add 5mm of artificial 'give' via a padded shoe then you are reducing the impulse force to at least half.
It's the same principle as 'crumple zones' in cars. If you can spread out the impact over a longer distance (and therefore longer time), you can reduce the effective force at any given time by quite a bit.
Evolution might not have taken into account nikes, but it also doesn't really take into account anything past your reproductive stage
It also probably didn't account for concrete. The sand, grass, and dirt which our ancient ancestors ran on is a lot softer than the stuff we run on these days.
People are also quite a bit heavier these days too, even people who run (just through being well fed, not necessarily obese). As you found, it's often the knees and not the feet that people have trouble with.
Here's an anecdote... if we get another one then we have data:)
About half way through my first semester at uni, I was getting out of my car and my sneakers fell apart. I took them off, chucked them in the car, and went barefoot for the next 2 years or so (mostly - they don't let you into cinemas etc without shoes on:).
My feet got really tough, 40C days walking on hot tarmac didn't bother me (unless I stood still for too long). I never got stung by a bee, never had any major injuries. I would only notice small pieces of glass stuck in my foot by the noise they made on concrete when I stepped:)
I did quite a bit of walking too, 5km each way too and from uni when my car wasn't going, which was often.
Then the first joint on my big toe started hurting on one foot. A day or so later, the other big toe started hurting in the same way. It was like an ache that shot up each leg every time I took a step. I put some shoes on (workboots) and the pain went instantly. I didn't go barefoot for a few weeks, but the next time I tried both feet were aching within hours. Haven't gone barefoot since.
Now that was about 12 years ago so I may have some of the facts muddled up, but obviously going barefoot just wasn't for me. I didn't really do any running so it's not completely relevant to the topic, but I can't imagine that running would have been any kinder to my feet than walking.
Maybe shoes mimic the sort of ground that humans evolved around, vs the rock hard tarmac and concrete that I was doing most of my walking on?
Re:Site already slashdotted ...
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 5, Funny
The main advantage of putting it in space is that you can start a bidding war between Coke and Pepsi on who's logo is going to be on the visible-from-earth-at-night structure:)
Considering how far the beam might deviate in 250 ms, I think the reaction time should be made much, much short. Microseconds.
All the realistic 'beam power from space' idea's i've heard of involve beaming the power down over a fairly large area. Large enough that the energy density per area is low enough that having the energy beaming down on your head for a short time wouldn't do you any harm.
Also, anything that knocked the satellite enough to deviate rapidly enough (eg for 250ms to be too short) would have to hit it pretty hard. Certainly hard enough for the satellite to know something was wrong and shut off.
Just take a minute to think about how quickly people would get lawyers involved if something went wrong. That's how careful they are going to be:)
Chess is an extreme example but the point is, some people play to compete. Maybe not in a direct confrontational way but they like getting some kind of advantage by playing "better".
Where's BadAnalogyGuy?
The best I can come up with is that your analogy sucks and it's more like paying someone to set up the chess pieces for you before a game and pack them up for you afterwards so that you can spend your time playing the game without mucking around with the fiddly stuff.
The solution, as someone else pointed out, is to make earning gold more fun or competitive too so that there isn't a perceived distinction between "earning gold" and "playing the game".
People who believe only what they told and not what they observe are always going to be in conflict with science
It's not quite as simple as that. This morning I watched the sun come up in the east. Right now it is more or less overhead, and i'm pretty sure it's going to go down in the west in a few more hours. It looks to me like the sun is revolving around the earth (which appears pretty flat from where i'm standing).
I know that the earth actually revolves around the sun because i've be told it does. From my viewpoint it's a pretty hard thing to observe though. I also know that the earth is pretty much round, because of some pictures i've been shown (which kind of amounts to being told).
Based on my observations, the weather in the last 10 years has been quite a bit hotter than the 10 years before that. People who have taken and recorded measurements over the last 20 years have told me that their numbers confirm my observations.
I've also been told that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which I kind of have to take their word on. But we have different groups of people saying:
. The increased temperature is nothing to do with the CO2 content, it's getting hotter due to natural climatic variations
. The increased temperature is related to the CO2 content in the atmosphere, but the CO2 content is a product of nature and nothing to do with us
. We put the CO2 there after digging it out of the ground, and that CO2 is the biggest contributing factor to global warming, and we need to start doing something about it yesterday
So who do you trust? At the end of the day you have to take all the available inputs (which always come to you from someone with an agenda to push) and figure out which one is most likely to be true. The sort of stuff we are talking about here is not something that is easily to 'observe' in any way that is useful to most people.
A private company that the government will later sell will end up with monopoly control over the last mile of everyone's internet connection.
Sad but history does have a habit of repeating itself. By all means sell of the retail arm (of which this new company will have none if I understand correctly) but to sell off the wholesale part like they did with Telstra is just stupid.
IMHO, it makes sense for a telecommunications network infrastructure to be government owned, because it's simply not something that works in a purely profit driven environment - if it's run by shareholders then the infrastructure build will be done where the money is.
I find that "correlation is not causation" to be a great way to filter out those with zero (well actually negative because they are actively spreading misinformation) knowledge of statistics.
How have you come up with this finding? What was your sample size?
Really, if X crashed, or if even worse, you had a kernel panic every time you set up a monitor on the left, how would you fix it?
Standard debugging techniques. I'd actually prefer a kernel bug as I've fixed those before and have enough of an idea about how the kernel hangs together to know what i'm doing in there. I'd be more inclined to just submit a bug report for X - if the code is anything like it was last time I looked then I don't want to know:)
But at least if I had the problem and nobody else was interested in fixing it, I'd most likely get there in the end. Especially for a bug that's 100% reproducible.
Windows on the other hand... why isn't Windows giving my storport driver buffers bigger than 16k??? Half the stuff you have to set up for a storport driver is completely at odds with what the documentation says it should be. The docs say "storport sets this value to X. Don't touch it", but it's all lies lies lies!!! Without the source these questions remain unanswered:(
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the middle of playing that when I read the first news report about a possible epidemic. Good thing I've never read or even heard of Enders Game or I could have been really worried :)
That's silly: why would the solution to eradicating a disease be catching it when it's already out there?
I reached the same conclusion (that catching now would be better than later) but for different reasons. Assuming you are going to catch it at some point, if you caught it right now then you'd be one of a very small number of infected people, and you'd receive a lot of attention and a lot of care. If it spreads and pretty much everyone gets it, then good luck getting any sort of access to health care (if you actually need it - most people have gotten better without special care)
I think one of the biggest challenges we'll face in a pandemic is educating people to stay away from hospitals unless they are really really sick. Based on what i've seen in the past, everyone will be marching up to the hospital at the first sign of the sniffles... you're more likely to get beaten to death by an irate parent trying to get their child seen to than to actually get help :)
Thanks for clarifying that. When I read the article, I assumed that 50x less meant that if a normal computer used 10w, this device 'used' -500W, or actually generated 500W. Boy was I wrong!
(I'm kidding of course - I didn't read the article :)
Actually instead of suing, maybe Taser should start making them in real life?
Taser - Electrify your love life!
when you register, linden labs clearly states that what the people make is their work, and linden labs doesn't interfere... so why does taser try this?
Because having that disclaimer there doesn't (necessarily) mean squat.
If you have a sign in your shop that says "we don't give refunds", and a court orders you to do a refund, then you give a refund.
If you have a sign in your playground that says "enter at own risk. we are not liable if you hurt yourself", and someone hurts themselves, and a court deems that you were negligent, then you will be liable.
Forget about the "right thing" here because Taser don't care.
I think you've answered your own question there. Not just because it's easier, but because it's more likely to succeed.
It could be an interesting court case though...
Taser: Someone is making Taser branded dildo's in your game. Make them stop and give us some money for damaging the image of our products.
Linden: You can't sue us, you have to sue the person playing the game who is responsible for infringing on your trademark.
Taser: Okay then, who is that?
Linden: We're not going to tell you, without a court order.
time passes...
Taser: Here's a court order, give up the details
Linden: Hmmm... all we seem to have is a name "I. P. Freely" and a post office box in Sweden. Maybe you should contact their ISP?
Taser: What is their ISP?
Linden: We can't give you that information without a court order
and so on.
Like him or not, Bill Gates is pretty high up in the list of people who had a large effect on the whole computing industry.As a nerd, and a parent, I'm interested in what makes him tick, so I don't make the same mistakes with my kids :)
His parents must do all right at christmas/birthdays/mothers day/fathers day/etc though... maybe there's something in that.
I wonder if, deep down, Microsoft Windows was just a way to rebel against his parents? eg "Fine then! I'm going to go and start a computing empire and make my products suckier and suckier and by the time people notice it will be too late for them to use anything else. And it be all your fault! :p :p :p"
Exactly. With bare feet, the soles of your feet have a few mm of 'give' to absorb the shock. If you add 5mm of artificial 'give' via a padded shoe then you are reducing the impulse force to at least half.
It's the same principle as 'crumple zones' in cars. If you can spread out the impact over a longer distance (and therefore longer time), you can reduce the effective force at any given time by quite a bit.
It also probably didn't account for concrete. The sand, grass, and dirt which our ancient ancestors ran on is a lot softer than the stuff we run on these days.
People are also quite a bit heavier these days too, even people who run (just through being well fed, not necessarily obese). As you found, it's often the knees and not the feet that people have trouble with.
Here's an anecdote... if we get another one then we have data :)
About half way through my first semester at uni, I was getting out of my car and my sneakers fell apart. I took them off, chucked them in the car, and went barefoot for the next 2 years or so (mostly - they don't let you into cinemas etc without shoes on :).
My feet got really tough, 40C days walking on hot tarmac didn't bother me (unless I stood still for too long). I never got stung by a bee, never had any major injuries. I would only notice small pieces of glass stuck in my foot by the noise they made on concrete when I stepped :)
I did quite a bit of walking too, 5km each way too and from uni when my car wasn't going, which was often.
Then the first joint on my big toe started hurting on one foot. A day or so later, the other big toe started hurting in the same way. It was like an ache that shot up each leg every time I took a step. I put some shoes on (workboots) and the pain went instantly. I didn't go barefoot for a few weeks, but the next time I tried both feet were aching within hours. Haven't gone barefoot since.
Now that was about 12 years ago so I may have some of the facts muddled up, but obviously going barefoot just wasn't for me. I didn't really do any running so it's not completely relevant to the topic, but I can't imagine that running would have been any kinder to my feet than walking.
Maybe shoes mimic the sort of ground that humans evolved around, vs the rock hard tarmac and concrete that I was doing most of my walking on?
They've switch to Solaris already???
(ducks and runs for cover :)
Shhh!
Exactly where do you draw the line between a pioneering hero and a darwin award contender? I'm guessing the line is pretty blurry.
That said, I think I agree that sitting on top of a home made rocket would clearly be on the "Darwin Award" side of that line :)
The main advantage of putting it in space is that you can start a bidding war between Coke and Pepsi on who's logo is going to be on the visible-from-earth-at-night structure :)
All the realistic 'beam power from space' idea's i've heard of involve beaming the power down over a fairly large area. Large enough that the energy density per area is low enough that having the energy beaming down on your head for a short time wouldn't do you any harm.
Also, anything that knocked the satellite enough to deviate rapidly enough (eg for 250ms to be too short) would have to hit it pretty hard. Certainly hard enough for the satellite to know something was wrong and shut off.
Just take a minute to think about how quickly people would get lawyers involved if something went wrong. That's how careful they are going to be :)
That's not a horrible idea... that's a fabulous idea :)
I pine for the balmy days of Devember. Instead we have to put up with this lousy Smarch weather...
Where's BadAnalogyGuy?
The best I can come up with is that your analogy sucks and it's more like paying someone to set up the chess pieces for you before a game and pack them up for you afterwards so that you can spend your time playing the game without mucking around with the fiddly stuff.
The solution, as someone else pointed out, is to make earning gold more fun or competitive too so that there isn't a perceived distinction between "earning gold" and "playing the game".
It's not quite as simple as that. This morning I watched the sun come up in the east. Right now it is more or less overhead, and i'm pretty sure it's going to go down in the west in a few more hours. It looks to me like the sun is revolving around the earth (which appears pretty flat from where i'm standing).
I know that the earth actually revolves around the sun because i've be told it does. From my viewpoint it's a pretty hard thing to observe though. I also know that the earth is pretty much round, because of some pictures i've been shown (which kind of amounts to being told).
Based on my observations, the weather in the last 10 years has been quite a bit hotter than the 10 years before that. People who have taken and recorded measurements over the last 20 years have told me that their numbers confirm my observations.
I've also been told that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which I kind of have to take their word on. But we have different groups of people saying:
. The increased temperature is nothing to do with the CO2 content, it's getting hotter due to natural climatic variations
. The increased temperature is related to the CO2 content in the atmosphere, but the CO2 content is a product of nature and nothing to do with us
. We put the CO2 there after digging it out of the ground, and that CO2 is the biggest contributing factor to global warming, and we need to start doing something about it yesterday
So who do you trust? At the end of the day you have to take all the available inputs (which always come to you from someone with an agenda to push) and figure out which one is most likely to be true. The sort of stuff we are talking about here is not something that is easily to 'observe' in any way that is useful to most people.
That dance wasn't as proxy as everyone thought it was.
Sad but history does have a habit of repeating itself. By all means sell of the retail arm (of which this new company will have none if I understand correctly) but to sell off the wholesale part like they did with Telstra is just stupid.
IMHO, it makes sense for a telecommunications network infrastructure to be government owned, because it's simply not something that works in a purely profit driven environment - if it's run by shareholders then the infrastructure build will be done where the money is.
How have you come up with this finding? What was your sample size?
oops. I'll hand in my card on the way out :(
And every month, someone is voted off the capsule, just like they would in a real mission to mars.
Probably a few intruders too, maybe Dr Spock, Marvin Martian, ET.
Not sure I'm looking for 'Survivor - Mars - Up Late' though.
Standard debugging techniques. I'd actually prefer a kernel bug as I've fixed those before and have enough of an idea about how the kernel hangs together to know what i'm doing in there. I'd be more inclined to just submit a bug report for X - if the code is anything like it was last time I looked then I don't want to know :)
But at least if I had the problem and nobody else was interested in fixing it, I'd most likely get there in the end. Especially for a bug that's 100% reproducible.
Windows on the other hand... why isn't Windows giving my storport driver buffers bigger than 16k??? Half the stuff you have to set up for a storport driver is completely at odds with what the documentation says it should be. The docs say "storport sets this value to X. Don't touch it", but it's all lies lies lies!!! Without the source these questions remain unanswered :(
This is an easy problem to solve. Create a website, put a bunch of pictures up there and wait for the ratings to come in.