How many people knew Pacman was 30 years old today?
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversery today!
Thanks google!
BTW, if anyone has book 3 or 5 of the Pac-Man cross stitch patterns then I'd love to have them! (I have books 1, 2, 4, and 6.).
When you put it that way I'm actually almost convinced it's ok. It seems to me that when I buy a product I have a right to use that product however I want. As long as they're not doing anything that ties the DNA to specific individuals then it's just research and not individual violation of privacy.
It's too bad I haven't gotten mod points in years. I'd love to remove the unnecessary troll mod you've gotten.
When I read the book I felt the same way. They were interesting stories, but they didn't seem particularly important compared to the first two sections which discussed people who really made a big difference. However, the book seemed to have an arc which started out with super obsessives at MIT who made little/no money from their work then progressed to super obsessed hardware hackers who often made gobs of money and in some ways departed from a pure hacker ethic. Then it jumped to game programmers, some of whom had the hacker ethic, but mostly they were just in it for the money. The book ended with RMS and his talking about the loss of the true hacker culture at MIT due to most of the originals leaving for a lisp computer company.
I have to say that that book gives me the best impression of RMS that I've ever had.
By the end of the book I found myself really disliking Ken Williams. He sounds like a real jerk. It seems like the best games made at Sierra were the result of hackers who were devoted to making the best game possible, yet Ken seemed like he was happy to produce cheap crap as long as it produced money. That only works in the short term. If there are better alternatives out there then eventually users catch on and stop buying your crap.
FWIW, King's Quest isn't mentioned in the book. The book talks about their work on the Apple II and Atari 800 computers. I don't think King's Quest ever ran on the Apple II.
That was a very interesting article, but couldn't the same effect be achieved by using a video camera that displayed video in b&w or whatever it is that color blind people see?
Two states of planes could also describe time in a universe with only two spatial dimensions. Two states of lines would describe time in a universe with only one spatial dimension, etc.
Time could be thought of as a dimension we can travel in in only one direction and almost always at the same speed. I can't imagine why travelling fast in any of the other 3 dimensions would cause us to travel faster in the temporal dimension though.
Really, the temporal dimension just doesn't behave much like a spatial dimension.
Programming is not knowing an API by heart. That's something help files are here for.
That is profoundly untrue. It may be true that you can learn the basics of new APIs quickly, but most APIs have gotchas. Gotchas wouldn't be gotchas if they were easy to avoid. You learn them by using the API and then debugging the bugs and then remembering those gotchas the next time you use the API.
In Java, when you call new GregorianCalendar(2010,1,1) and end up with a date in February you'll learn a gotcha. When you create a date formatter with ("mm/dd/yyyy") and for some reason keep getting random values for the month you'll learn a gotcha.
There's also the simple fact that you often don't know what's in an API. New users of an API may often end up reinventing the wheel unnecessarily.
Granted, the better the API, the less of a problem this is. It's too bad that most APIs are very imperfect.
The term megabyte will always be ambiguous. Half the people are confederates who yell "don't mess with history!" (meaning computing history) and the other half are union people who yell "don't mess with standards!" (meaning SI unit standards).
In my opinion you can all megafuck off. The <prefix>-byte terms became ambiguous once people started arguing over the definitions. Even a gigawhine of arguments will not make them one kilowhit less ambiguous. A meter is only a meter because there is near universal agreement. Without agreement the term would be ambiguous.
The terms are ruined. Feel free to cry a terabucket of tears if you wish.
Music, movies, and games have been around for quite a while yet we keep creating them and paying for them. I see no reason why people would ever say "this is enough" and just play old games and listen to old music and watch old movies.
Regarding house painting, I cannot conceive of any reason to believe that people would volunteer to paint a stranger's house (other than Habitat for Humanity type organizations).
Regarding prostitutes, they would almost certainly be out of a job. We're talking about Star Trek. Their holodecks are more than real enough to allow people to have sex. For love people would still need other people (or very realistic AIs).
It would all be software. If you wanted the latest iPod you would need to buy the appropriate information required to make your replicator pump out the iPod. There would be open source designs, but many of the latest and greatest things would not be open source (the same situation as we have with software today).
You would still need to employ engineers to design new things. You would still need business people, sales people, etc., to market the software products.
You would still need people to make music and tv shows (or holo shows or whatever) which means you'd need actors or people who programmed fake actors.
If they don't have roving nanobots (nanobots that could function outside of a replicator) then they would still need to employ construction workers to put large things together unless someone made a replicator the size of a starship (or a house) or robots good enough to do the work for them.
Many service jobs would still need to exist. If you need a new paint job on a house it's probably easier to just repaint it rather than replicate the parts and put a new one together again.
Granted, some services wouldn't be necessary anymore. Prostitutes would be out of a job. In their place would be programmers who wrote holodeck sex programs. Holodecks would require a lot of space. Land would still cost a lot of money. So, you might need communal holodecks for people who can't afford large parcels of land.
Some forms of mining might still be necessary. You need raw materials for all this replication (although you might be able to just reuse old stuff).
Seems to me that capitalism would work just fine in that sort of environment.
By not going to college you are keeping your options open. By going to a trade school you are closing options off. If a person is absolutely certain about their future then perhaps that's ok. But, most people are probably not that certain and it's a bad idea to encourage people to close off options.
Your choice of direction after highschool has a huge impact on everything that happens for the rest of your life. It's important to not be too hasty.
Cut the spine off and run the pages through a scanner's page feeder... OCR if desired, then enjoy...
I'm surprised that Google doesn't do this, it would be SO much faster than scanning each page one at a time.
You just described a major plot point in Vernor Vinge's book "Rainbows End" except that instead of cutting off the spine they actually used paper shredders to cut up the books and then used computers to put the books back together. It was incredibly fast (no need to cut spines and feed pages, just shred the book and suck the results in through a hose and let the computer scan the particles as they fly past.
The downside was that a small subset of people wanted physical books to stay around and were willing to perform sabotage where necessary in order to prevent the destruction of the books.
If google did this they might just have to face a cadre of dangerous rogue librarians!
Like others I just boycott anything with a Sony name. This is particularly easy when it comes to consumer electronics because Sony products almost always use proprietary memory solutions which make the total cost (as opposed to the sticker price) of the product higher.
If a movie has anything to do with Sony then I just always buy it used even if I have to wait for a while.
The 2nd amendment is well defended. The NRA has more than enough clout to ensure that. There is no need for the ACLU to use precious resources defending it when there are so many other constitutional issues that need defending.
I personally use the "worse than Hitler" meme all the time. When highway crews block a road and back up traffic I refer to them as worse than Hitler. When my landlord said I had to put my garbage can somewhere else I referred to him as worse than Hitler. My fiance has even sometimes jokingly said that I am worse than Hitler when I make some small infraction just because I use the phrase all the time.
I personally consider it an expression of emotion rather than a logical statement.
I suppose that if you are a model or an actor then yes, being ugly could be considered a disorder.
Attention is required is most jobs. If lack of attention is imparing a person's ability to properly function then yes, it is a disorder and it should be dealt with.
You are right. I posted without thinking. If it happens every day whether rested or not then it is ADHD. If it happens even when the person enjoys doing what they are doing then it's ADHD.
However, what I was objecting to in my post (or at least, what I was thinking about objecting to in my post) was the silly idea that people should not take any medication for attention.
People constantly take medication in order to gain attention. There is nothing wrong with getting a prescription for something if the lack of focus is impacting their lives.
Humans did not evolve to sit at a desk, day after day, for most of their lives. Children being active and energetic is natural and healthy; it is not a disorder.
Yet sitting at a desk day after day is what most humans need to be able to do. If they can't do that then they can either fail at life or they can take steps (including medication) to modify the evolved behaviors to fit the way the real world requires.
Education is sometimes fun, but not everything can be made to be fun. Sometime you just have to learn lists of facts. Sometimes you have to work through the pain and learn something that you would rather not have to learn. Sometimes you need to work on a project at work which is not at all an enjoyable experience even if your job is enjoyable most of the time.
Some people have a ridiculous fear of all medications (as if caffeine wasn't an extremely common medication that vast numbers of people consume in order to address their natural ADHD).
Newsflash: Red Bull, coffee, and Coca Cola are medications for ADHD. If you need one of those to get through the day then you are self medicating. If that's enough then great, you don't need to take any prescription pills. If it's not enough then see a psychologist and get what you need to live your life properly.
The Voyager craft were sent out well before Kirk's birth. Given that no one in the federation interacted with Vger until it arrived back, it seems likely that Vger is already on its way in the new timeline. Presumably it should show up in 30 or 40 years.
That's almost never how it works. The minority doesn't provide a check over the majority. It just ensures that the majority is forced to put sufficient levels of pork into bills to get a few crossover votes.
Thankfully, the good thing is that the Democrats are rarely a single voting block. Unlike Republicans who are capable of voting in lockstep, Democrats often have far less uniformity.
Unfortunately that also just means that bills will be laden with pork in order to get those people on board.
The seniority system coupled with the inability to have single purpose bills in congress is the real problem. You need to be there for years before you are capable of bringing bills to the floor for a vote means that the bills that can be voted on will always be ones supported by the old guard.
I personally welcome any event which sidelines the extremists in congress. If Specter switching parties results in fewer Republican extremists with power then I'm all for it. The extremists in the Democratic party will never control the party completely. It's not that sort of party.
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I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversery today!
Thanks google!
BTW, if anyone has book 3 or 5 of the Pac-Man cross stitch patterns then I'd love to have them! (I have books 1, 2, 4, and 6.).
When you put it that way I'm actually almost convinced it's ok. It seems to me that when I buy a product I have a right to use that product however I want. As long as they're not doing anything that ties the DNA to specific individuals then it's just research and not individual violation of privacy.
It's too bad I haven't gotten mod points in years. I'd love to remove the unnecessary troll mod you've gotten.
When I read the book I felt the same way. They were interesting stories, but they didn't seem particularly important compared to the first two sections which discussed people who really made a big difference. However, the book seemed to have an arc which started out with super obsessives at MIT who made little/no money from their work then progressed to super obsessed hardware hackers who often made gobs of money and in some ways departed from a pure hacker ethic. Then it jumped to game programmers, some of whom had the hacker ethic, but mostly they were just in it for the money. The book ended with RMS and his talking about the loss of the true hacker culture at MIT due to most of the originals leaving for a lisp computer company.
I have to say that that book gives me the best impression of RMS that I've ever had.
By the end of the book I found myself really disliking Ken Williams. He sounds like a real jerk. It seems like the best games made at Sierra were the result of hackers who were devoted to making the best game possible, yet Ken seemed like he was happy to produce cheap crap as long as it produced money. That only works in the short term. If there are better alternatives out there then eventually users catch on and stop buying your crap.
FWIW, King's Quest isn't mentioned in the book. The book talks about their work on the Apple II and Atari 800 computers. I don't think King's Quest ever ran on the Apple II.
In an automatic it's trivial to shift into neutral. People just don't know to do that in a panic situation.
ctrl-shift-o is your friend. Deeply nested namespaces are rarely a problem for me. I just type the name of the class and hit ctrl-shift-o in eclipse.
That was a very interesting article, but couldn't the same effect be achieved by using a video camera that displayed video in b&w or whatever it is that color blind people see?
Two states of planes could also describe time in a universe with only two spatial dimensions. Two states of lines would describe time in a universe with only one spatial dimension, etc. Time could be thought of as a dimension we can travel in in only one direction and almost always at the same speed. I can't imagine why travelling fast in any of the other 3 dimensions would cause us to travel faster in the temporal dimension though. Really, the temporal dimension just doesn't behave much like a spatial dimension.
That is profoundly untrue. It may be true that you can learn the basics of new APIs quickly, but most APIs have gotchas. Gotchas wouldn't be gotchas if they were easy to avoid. You learn them by using the API and then debugging the bugs and then remembering those gotchas the next time you use the API.
In Java, when you call new GregorianCalendar(2010,1,1) and end up with a date in February you'll learn a gotcha. When you create a date formatter with ("mm/dd/yyyy") and for some reason keep getting random values for the month you'll learn a gotcha.
There's also the simple fact that you often don't know what's in an API. New users of an API may often end up reinventing the wheel unnecessarily.
Granted, the better the API, the less of a problem this is. It's too bad that most APIs are very imperfect.
The term megabyte will always be ambiguous. Half the people are confederates who yell "don't mess with history!" (meaning computing history) and the other half are union people who yell "don't mess with standards!" (meaning SI unit standards).
In my opinion you can all megafuck off. The <prefix>-byte terms became ambiguous once people started arguing over the definitions. Even a gigawhine of arguments will not make them one kilowhit less ambiguous. A meter is only a meter because there is near universal agreement. Without agreement the term would be ambiguous.
The terms are ruined. Feel free to cry a terabucket of tears if you wish.
We all have our opinions I guess. Zipping and unzipping files is a simple issue. 7zip does the job and stays out of the way. I prefer it.
Music, movies, and games have been around for quite a while yet we keep creating them and paying for them. I see no reason why people would ever say "this is enough" and just play old games and listen to old music and watch old movies.
Regarding house painting, I cannot conceive of any reason to believe that people would volunteer to paint a stranger's house (other than Habitat for Humanity type organizations).
Regarding prostitutes, they would almost certainly be out of a job. We're talking about Star Trek. Their holodecks are more than real enough to allow people to have sex. For love people would still need other people (or very realistic AIs).
It would all be software. If you wanted the latest iPod you would need to buy the appropriate information required to make your replicator pump out the iPod. There would be open source designs, but many of the latest and greatest things would not be open source (the same situation as we have with software today).
You would still need to employ engineers to design new things. You would still need business people, sales people, etc., to market the software products.
You would still need people to make music and tv shows (or holo shows or whatever) which means you'd need actors or people who programmed fake actors.
If they don't have roving nanobots (nanobots that could function outside of a replicator) then they would still need to employ construction workers to put large things together unless someone made a replicator the size of a starship (or a house) or robots good enough to do the work for them.
Many service jobs would still need to exist. If you need a new paint job on a house it's probably easier to just repaint it rather than replicate the parts and put a new one together again.
Granted, some services wouldn't be necessary anymore. Prostitutes would be out of a job. In their place would be programmers who wrote holodeck sex programs. Holodecks would require a lot of space. Land would still cost a lot of money. So, you might need communal holodecks for people who can't afford large parcels of land.
Some forms of mining might still be necessary. You need raw materials for all this replication (although you might be able to just reuse old stuff).
Seems to me that capitalism would work just fine in that sort of environment.
Your choice of direction after highschool has a huge impact on everything that happens for the rest of your life. It's important to not be too hasty.
You just described a major plot point in Vernor Vinge's book "Rainbows End" except that instead of cutting off the spine they actually used paper shredders to cut up the books and then used computers to put the books back together. It was incredibly fast (no need to cut spines and feed pages, just shred the book and suck the results in through a hose and let the computer scan the particles as they fly past.
The downside was that a small subset of people wanted physical books to stay around and were willing to perform sabotage where necessary in order to prevent the destruction of the books.
If google did this they might just have to face a cadre of dangerous rogue librarians!
Like others I just boycott anything with a Sony name. This is particularly easy when it comes to consumer electronics because Sony products almost always use proprietary memory solutions which make the total cost (as opposed to the sticker price) of the product higher.
If a movie has anything to do with Sony then I just always buy it used even if I have to wait for a while.
The 2nd amendment is well defended. The NRA has more than enough clout to ensure that. There is no need for the ACLU to use precious resources defending it when there are so many other constitutional issues that need defending.
I personally use the "worse than Hitler" meme all the time. When highway crews block a road and back up traffic I refer to them as worse than Hitler. When my landlord said I had to put my garbage can somewhere else I referred to him as worse than Hitler. My fiance has even sometimes jokingly said that I am worse than Hitler when I make some small infraction just because I use the phrase all the time.
I personally consider it an expression of emotion rather than a logical statement.
I suppose that if you are a model or an actor then yes, being ugly could be considered a disorder.
Attention is required is most jobs. If lack of attention is imparing a person's ability to properly function then yes, it is a disorder and it should be dealt with.
You are right. I posted without thinking. If it happens every day whether rested or not then it is ADHD. If it happens even when the person enjoys doing what they are doing then it's ADHD.
However, what I was objecting to in my post (or at least, what I was thinking about objecting to in my post) was the silly idea that people should not take any medication for attention.
People constantly take medication in order to gain attention. There is nothing wrong with getting a prescription for something if the lack of focus is impacting their lives.
Yet sitting at a desk day after day is what most humans need to be able to do. If they can't do that then they can either fail at life or they can take steps (including medication) to modify the evolved behaviors to fit the way the real world requires.
Education is sometimes fun, but not everything can be made to be fun. Sometime you just have to learn lists of facts. Sometimes you have to work through the pain and learn something that you would rather not have to learn. Sometimes you need to work on a project at work which is not at all an enjoyable experience even if your job is enjoyable most of the time.
Some people have a ridiculous fear of all medications (as if caffeine wasn't an extremely common medication that vast numbers of people consume in order to address their natural ADHD).
Newsflash: Red Bull, coffee, and Coca Cola are medications for ADHD. If you need one of those to get through the day then you are self medicating. If that's enough then great, you don't need to take any prescription pills. If it's not enough then see a psychologist and get what you need to live your life properly.
The Voyager craft were sent out well before Kirk's birth. Given that no one in the federation interacted with Vger until it arrived back, it seems likely that Vger is already on its way in the new timeline. Presumably it should show up in 30 or 40 years.
Doesn't mouthwash set off a breathalyser? (Scope contains alcohol). If so, the breathalyzer certainly isn't enough to prove that someone was drinking.
If that's true, why don't they just append a random number of 0 to 511 bytes to the end of all files?
That's almost never how it works. The minority doesn't provide a check over the majority. It just ensures that the majority is forced to put sufficient levels of pork into bills to get a few crossover votes.
Thankfully, the good thing is that the Democrats are rarely a single voting block. Unlike Republicans who are capable of voting in lockstep, Democrats often have far less uniformity.
Unfortunately that also just means that bills will be laden with pork in order to get those people on board.
The seniority system coupled with the inability to have single purpose bills in congress is the real problem. You need to be there for years before you are capable of bringing bills to the floor for a vote means that the bills that can be voted on will always be ones supported by the old guard.
I personally welcome any event which sidelines the extremists in congress. If Specter switching parties results in fewer Republican extremists with power then I'm all for it. The extremists in the Democratic party will never control the party completely. It's not that sort of party.
If it was founded in 1975 then that would make it 33 or 34 years old.