http://www.tug.org/whatis.html - details of the bug bounty are at the bottom of the page. Typos in the books are $2.56 each (he's a computer scientist, what did you expect?).
Our vital functions (ability to breed, regulate temperature, etc.) are not very sensitive to day length, wide ranges of temperature, humidity, etc. There are a lot of animals for which that isn't true, and they would have to develop a very high degree of technology in order to spread very far. Our ancestors were able to spread over a comparatively large amount of the earth with nothing more than stone flakes. A stone flake would not get a panda which is dependent on bamboo very far. Hominids could have developed thick fur, claws, or any of a wide variety of other adaptations, but intelligence is of less use in a relatively static environment than other adaptations. You need a varying, diverse environment to evolve intelligence, and if you die out quickly if things change too much, you're not going to even get the chance. It's not happenstance that rats, cockroaches and other such environmentally insensitive animals have high intelligence for their brain size. But rats and cockroaches don't need complex tools, I suspect that kind of intelligence is either a fluke or connected to the size of brain that we are able to support.
The bug bounty doubled each year (not each bug report), and they eventually had to cap it. Many bug bounty checks never got cashed, they got framed and hung on a wall.
Actually, only if you are a good little boy. If you are a good little girl who marries a good little boy, you can be a goddess in his universe, but you'll never have one of your own.
We still have a landline, but we only answer it if the caller ID shows someone we want to talk to, and people taking surveys are not people we want to talk to.
I think that the estimates for f_i and f_c (fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life, and fraction of intelligent life that develops radio communication) in the Drake equation are way way too high. Intelligence is overrated as a survival characteristic, and human dominance is more related to the fact that like rats and cockroaches, we can eat almost anything and aren't overly sensitive to the environment.
We have yet to prove that we are intelligent enough not to drive ourselves into extinction through the ruination of our environment, something which has happened to numerous animal and human populations in the past.
Well, duh, the black sheep of the family who showed up leeched it out of her. She'd willed most of her estate to a charity she'd spent her life supporting, and there was almost nothing left after her house was sold and expenses paid. Before it became apparent there was nothing left, said black sheep were making noises about contesting her will.
It has been a major consideration for us in ensuring that our children are cared for should we die before they reach adulthood. It's difficult to ensure that there is no way that blood relatives can override our wishes by petitioning the court. Our best defense is to make sure the leeches never find out how much money is involved in the first place.
You're assuming that those calories would be simply added on. Juice is more than just sugar, it also has vitamins, minerals, and various phytochemicals/antioxidants in it.
Studies have shown that people adjust their intake of food in the future if they eat a higher calorie food today. One such study used starch to "invisibly" boost the calorie content of soup that was served with a soup and sandwich lunch. The sandwiches were served cut up into small measured portions, the participants could take as many mini-sandwiches as they wanted. Those who received the higher calorie soup took fewer sandwiches the day after they consumed the soup.
The "clean your plate" and "don't snack, you'll spoil dinner" mentality is responsible for a lot of the obesity "epidemic". My kids have two rules: 1) eat when you are hungry, even if it isn't "time", and 2) stop when you are full. We don't put artificial rules on what they can eat. If there is cake in the house, and they want cake for dinner, they can have it. They rarely choose cake for dinner, even when it is available. When there is prewashed and prepared fruit and veggies in the fridge, they prefer that over things like candy bars, chips, ice cream, etc. But if there isn't anything ready to eat, they will go for the convenience junk foods.
Now if a kid is choosing the juice over water because that is what their peers are drinking, rather than because it is what they want, that is one thing, but if they child considers juice/water and feels like they want the juice, then they should have the juice.
Yeah, I don't get it either. At my kids' school, parents can buy punch cards that are held by the school, not the student. I'm not really up on the details because my kids take their lunches instead of buying them.
There isn't really a lot of technology in a swipe card system though. We were using these at college over 20 years ago.
Once, it somehow became knowledge within my extended family that someone had come by a lot of money (the story I heard was some antique that was sold for a lot of cash). Certain relatives that most of us hadn't heard from in years suddenly popped up and began spending a lot of time with the wealthy person. When the supposedly wealthy person died a few years later, the executor (not a member of the family) discovered that she was barely more than peniless and surviving only on Social Security. The only real asset she had was her house.
We all know what happened to the money, but nobody can prove it.
I've explained some basic concepts from calculus and quantum mechanics to kindergarteners, and some can understand them.
Algebra should be taught right along with basic math. There's no excuse for not doing so, and there are at least some schools that do so.
My daughter's class is a multi-grade class (1st through 5th grade), and they are studying electronics at the moment. Many are working on the same sorts of things that I was only exposed to once I got to college.
There are many kids, who while they don't know the formal symbolism and terminology of math, develop an internal knowledge of it, much as a good basketball player has an intuitive internal knowledge of parabolas and the interaction of gravity with the force they apply to the ball. You show these kinds of kids how you can make a drumhead vibrate in a standing wave with a tone generator (using dark sand to illuminate the pattern), and then set them loose with whatever they need to explore that concept, and they rapidly progress through other concepts such as harmonics, wave interference and reinforcement, etc.
Yes, the scripts were that bad. They were copying posts from one thread into another quickly enough that it was difficult to actually find the posts that were actually legitimately connected to the topic at hand.
People with excellent karma appear to not have to deal with it. I think they should extend the same to non-AC posters, or at least those who have been around for awhile.
I dunno. I just had my driver's license renewed, and my number was called before I could even sit down. Took about 10 minutes tops from walking in the door to walking out. Driver licensing offices are government run.
Now vehicle registration offices are subcontracted to businesses, often car dealers will run them as an adjunct to their business since they need to be licensed in order to do the vehicle registrations on the cars they sell anyway. Since it became possible to do vehicle registrations online, I haven't set foot in an actual office because they are often dingy, decrepit places with no place to sit while you wait and wait and wait and wait.
It's a term that dates from the Cold War. The "first world" were the western style democracies. The "second world" were the communist bloc countries. And the "third world" was everything else that the first world and the second world were fighting over.
But you're right it is archaic and insulting and should be dropped.
The only part of that search that won't work is the wildcard. But you can use -site:florida.com to exclude a particular site. You can also do stuff like comment (ebay OR slashdot) site:com -site:florida.com
If there is no accountability, then why would missing Wall Street numbers mean anything? If the founders still have control and have no intention of selling their controlling shares, then what do they care what Wall Street thinks? That's a double edged sword, either they can completely screw over the other shareholders or they can thumb their nose at the "making next quarter's numbers" mentality and think about the long term.
I once worked for a company whose definition of working (as a programmer) was "staring at the screen and hitting keys". If I was sketching a program or data structure on paper, that was "not working". If I was staring into space thinking through a problem, that was "not working". Taking a walk around the building to clear my head was "not working". In spite of the fact that I was the most productive person they ever had, I was always getting in trouble for "not working".
Being able to push a knotty problem to the back of the brain for a bit really helps. Human beings are not machines, and if you try to treat them like machines, you end up losing what they can give you that machines can't.
Hah, that's funny. When I went to the UW we had a "heterogenous environment" meaning we had systems from a number of different vendors. We were told it was so that students would be exposed to a wide variety of stuff they might work with in the outside world. Shortly after I graduated, Bill Gates donated a bunch of money to the UW, and all of a sudden they're ripping everything out and putting all Windoze boxes in, saying the new "homogenous environment" will be more consistent and less confusing for students. The students started developing a serious Microsoft-worship complex, everybody wanted to work there.
Must be galling to Bill that the students at "his" bought and paid for university now have Google-stars in their eyes.
That isn't even what I was talking about. Calling triglycerides a "cholesterol-like substance"? And this whole thing reads like whoever wrote it has no idea what triglycerides are.
What about music that isn't really suited to performance in a large concert hall? Music that works best as background to some other activity, like a meal, or reading a book, or whatever.
I would agree with you that government sponsored research should not end up with patents in private hands. But pointing to one abuse won't change the fact that a lot of R&D is not government sponsored. For instance, I know of a partnership that surveys rental units and publishes statistics such as average rents, vacancy rates, etc. At least two people work at this full time, and they have clients who consider this data valuable, and are willing to pay them for it. But in your world, the moral imperative would be that they would have to work for free, and hope for donations, I guess.
When you come up with a system for making sure that the people who produce can actually make a living at it without some sort of enforced payment, get back to me.
I know several musicians who make a living off of CD sales. Their live performances drive the sales of their CD's, and their income from CD sales far outstrips what they get from live performances. Of course, they write their own music, so they're not paying royalties to the songwriters. The crappy tracks on many CD's were written by the performer specifically so they could get songwriter royalties from the CD. How do songwriters get paid from ticket sales, anyway?
The big question is, do we get more access to art and information with the copyright system or without it? Given that I know of a lot of valuable (i.e. people value it because they're willing to pay for it) art and information that simply would not get produced if there was no mechanism for recouping the costs and making sure that people could make a living. Your other various models for compensating artists basically ensure that only the music that rich people like gets well supported. Ticket sales only benefit performers, not songwriters. I have a decent voice and I can play the piano, but I doubt I could write a good song, I'd have to rely on someone else for that. The two copies of the sheetmusic that I bought for the singer and pianist at my wedding were a pittance compared to the fees I paid them. The barriers to access this art are very low, and I'm quite happy to ensure that the songwriter who wrote this very beautiful song is getting paid for it. I don't want to live in a world where people can't make a living unless some rich patron happens to like their work.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.tug.org/whatis.html - details of the bug bounty are at the bottom of the page. Typos in the books are $2.56 each (he's a computer scientist, what did you expect?).
Our vital functions (ability to breed, regulate temperature, etc.) are not very sensitive to day length, wide ranges of temperature, humidity, etc. There are a lot of animals for which that isn't true, and they would have to develop a very high degree of technology in order to spread very far. Our ancestors were able to spread over a comparatively large amount of the earth with nothing more than stone flakes. A stone flake would not get a panda which is dependent on bamboo very far. Hominids could have developed thick fur, claws, or any of a wide variety of other adaptations, but intelligence is of less use in a relatively static environment than other adaptations. You need a varying, diverse environment to evolve intelligence, and if you die out quickly if things change too much, you're not going to even get the chance. It's not happenstance that rats, cockroaches and other such environmentally insensitive animals have high intelligence for their brain size. But rats and cockroaches don't need complex tools, I suspect that kind of intelligence is either a fluke or connected to the size of brain that we are able to support.
The bug bounty doubled each year (not each bug report), and they eventually had to cap it. Many bug bounty checks never got cashed, they got framed and hung on a wall.
Actually, only if you are a good little boy. If you are a good little girl who marries a good little boy, you can be a goddess in his universe, but you'll never have one of your own.
Many SMTP servers will refuse connections that claim to be themselves.
We still have a landline, but we only answer it if the caller ID shows someone we want to talk to, and people taking surveys are not people we want to talk to.
I think that the estimates for f_i and f_c (fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life, and fraction of intelligent life that develops radio communication) in the Drake equation are way way too high. Intelligence is overrated as a survival characteristic, and human dominance is more related to the fact that like rats and cockroaches, we can eat almost anything and aren't overly sensitive to the environment.
We have yet to prove that we are intelligent enough not to drive ourselves into extinction through the ruination of our environment, something which has happened to numerous animal and human populations in the past.
Well, duh, the black sheep of the family who showed up leeched it out of her. She'd willed most of her estate to a charity she'd spent her life supporting, and there was almost nothing left after her house was sold and expenses paid. Before it became apparent there was nothing left, said black sheep were making noises about contesting her will.
It has been a major consideration for us in ensuring that our children are cared for should we die before they reach adulthood. It's difficult to ensure that there is no way that blood relatives can override our wishes by petitioning the court. Our best defense is to make sure the leeches never find out how much money is involved in the first place.
You're assuming that those calories would be simply added on. Juice is more than just sugar, it also has vitamins, minerals, and various phytochemicals/antioxidants in it.
Studies have shown that people adjust their intake of food in the future if they eat a higher calorie food today. One such study used starch to "invisibly" boost the calorie content of soup that was served with a soup and sandwich lunch. The sandwiches were served cut up into small measured portions, the participants could take as many mini-sandwiches as they wanted. Those who received the higher calorie soup took fewer sandwiches the day after they consumed the soup.
The "clean your plate" and "don't snack, you'll spoil dinner" mentality is responsible for a lot of the obesity "epidemic". My kids have two rules: 1) eat when you are hungry, even if it isn't "time", and 2) stop when you are full. We don't put artificial rules on what they can eat. If there is cake in the house, and they want cake for dinner, they can have it. They rarely choose cake for dinner, even when it is available. When there is prewashed and prepared fruit and veggies in the fridge, they prefer that over things like candy bars, chips, ice cream, etc. But if there isn't anything ready to eat, they will go for the convenience junk foods.
Now if a kid is choosing the juice over water because that is what their peers are drinking, rather than because it is what they want, that is one thing, but if they child considers juice/water and feels like they want the juice, then they should have the juice.
Yeah, I don't get it either. At my kids' school, parents can buy punch cards that are held by the school, not the student. I'm not really up on the details because my kids take their lunches instead of buying them.
There isn't really a lot of technology in a swipe card system though. We were using these at college over 20 years ago.
Once, it somehow became knowledge within my extended family that someone had come by a lot of money (the story I heard was some antique that was sold for a lot of cash). Certain relatives that most of us hadn't heard from in years suddenly popped up and began spending a lot of time with the wealthy person. When the supposedly wealthy person died a few years later, the executor (not a member of the family) discovered that she was barely more than peniless and surviving only on Social Security. The only real asset she had was her house.
We all know what happened to the money, but nobody can prove it.
I've explained some basic concepts from calculus and quantum mechanics to kindergarteners, and some can understand them.
Algebra should be taught right along with basic math. There's no excuse for not doing so, and there are at least some schools that do so.
My daughter's class is a multi-grade class (1st through 5th grade), and they are studying electronics at the moment. Many are working on the same sorts of things that I was only exposed to once I got to college.
There are many kids, who while they don't know the formal symbolism and terminology of math, develop an internal knowledge of it, much as a good basketball player has an intuitive internal knowledge of parabolas and the interaction of gravity with the force they apply to the ball. You show these kinds of kids how you can make a drumhead vibrate in a standing wave with a tone generator (using dark sand to illuminate the pattern), and then set them loose with whatever they need to explore that concept, and they rapidly progress through other concepts such as harmonics, wave interference and reinforcement, etc.
People put it in .sigs in order to nail the kinds of people who didn't trim before replying, including trimming the .sig.
The BitNET RELAY server for VM/CMS was written in REXX.
Damn, I feel old.
Yes, the scripts were that bad. They were copying posts from one thread into another quickly enough that it was difficult to actually find the posts that were actually legitimately connected to the topic at hand.
People with excellent karma appear to not have to deal with it. I think they should extend the same to non-AC posters, or at least those who have been around for awhile.
I agree. I checked out the Seattle link as I live there, and it's basically "open your wifi network so everybody else can have free access."
Say what?
Your link is 404, and searching CNN for Doohan gets only very old links.
It's not nice to troll Mother Slashdot.
I dunno. I just had my driver's license renewed, and my number was called before I could even sit down. Took about 10 minutes tops from walking in the door to walking out. Driver licensing offices are government run.
Now vehicle registration offices are subcontracted to businesses, often car dealers will run them as an adjunct to their business since they need to be licensed in order to do the vehicle registrations on the cars they sell anyway. Since it became possible to do vehicle registrations online, I haven't set foot in an actual office because they are often dingy, decrepit places with no place to sit while you wait and wait and wait and wait.
It's a term that dates from the Cold War. The "first world" were the western style democracies. The "second world" were the communist bloc countries. And the "third world" was everything else that the first world and the second world were fighting over.
But you're right it is archaic and insulting and should be dropped.
They don't even have an effective monopoly. According to http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2 156431 they only receive 48% of all searches.
The only part of that search that won't work is the wildcard. But you can use -site:florida.com to exclude a particular site. You can also do stuff like comment (ebay OR slashdot) site:com -site:florida.com
No booleans? Search terms are automatically and'ed, and you can put in OR if you want.
What do they have a monopoly on? I'm not aware of any product they have that doesn't have substantial competition.
If there is no accountability, then why would missing Wall Street numbers mean anything? If the founders still have control and have no intention of selling their controlling shares, then what do they care what Wall Street thinks? That's a double edged sword, either they can completely screw over the other shareholders or they can thumb their nose at the "making next quarter's numbers" mentality and think about the long term.
I once worked for a company whose definition of working (as a programmer) was "staring at the screen and hitting keys". If I was sketching a program or data structure on paper, that was "not working". If I was staring into space thinking through a problem, that was "not working". Taking a walk around the building to clear my head was "not working". In spite of the fact that I was the most productive person they ever had, I was always getting in trouble for "not working".
Being able to push a knotty problem to the back of the brain for a bit really helps. Human beings are not machines, and if you try to treat them like machines, you end up losing what they can give you that machines can't.
Hah, that's funny. When I went to the UW we had a "heterogenous environment" meaning we had systems from a number of different vendors. We were told it was so that students would be exposed to a wide variety of stuff they might work with in the outside world. Shortly after I graduated, Bill Gates donated a bunch of money to the UW, and all of a sudden they're ripping everything out and putting all Windoze boxes in, saying the new "homogenous environment" will be more consistent and less confusing for students. The students started developing a serious Microsoft-worship complex, everybody wanted to work there.
Must be galling to Bill that the students at "his" bought and paid for university now have Google-stars in their eyes.
That isn't even what I was talking about. Calling triglycerides a "cholesterol-like substance"? And this whole thing reads like whoever wrote it has no idea what triglycerides are.
What about music that isn't really suited to performance in a large concert hall? Music that works best as background to some other activity, like a meal, or reading a book, or whatever.
I would agree with you that government sponsored research should not end up with patents in private hands. But pointing to one abuse won't change the fact that a lot of R&D is not government sponsored. For instance, I know of a partnership that surveys rental units and publishes statistics such as average rents, vacancy rates, etc. At least two people work at this full time, and they have clients who consider this data valuable, and are willing to pay them for it. But in your world, the moral imperative would be that they would have to work for free, and hope for donations, I guess.
When you come up with a system for making sure that the people who produce can actually make a living at it without some sort of enforced payment, get back to me.
I know several musicians who make a living off of CD sales. Their live performances drive the sales of their CD's, and their income from CD sales far outstrips what they get from live performances. Of course, they write their own music, so they're not paying royalties to the songwriters. The crappy tracks on many CD's were written by the performer specifically so they could get songwriter royalties from the CD. How do songwriters get paid from ticket sales, anyway?
The big question is, do we get more access to art and information with the copyright system or without it? Given that I know of a lot of valuable (i.e. people value it because they're willing to pay for it) art and information that simply would not get produced if there was no mechanism for recouping the costs and making sure that people could make a living. Your other various models for compensating artists basically ensure that only the music that rich people like gets well supported. Ticket sales only benefit performers, not songwriters. I have a decent voice and I can play the piano, but I doubt I could write a good song, I'd have to rely on someone else for that. The two copies of the sheetmusic that I bought for the singer and pianist at my wedding were a pittance compared to the fees I paid them. The barriers to access this art are very low, and I'm quite happy to ensure that the songwriter who wrote this very beautiful song is getting paid for it. I don't want to live in a world where people can't make a living unless some rich patron happens to like their work.