See. My user name is my real name. I'm held accountable for things I say from day to day. Shouldn't that be true for things I say on the internet? One is responsible for verbal 'tact' when speaking to people. Shouldn't this also be true when you're broadcasting your opinion to the world?
When I need to say something privately, like this great plan I want to tell you guys about killing everyone in Edmonton, then I'll take the precautions I need. I find the cone of silence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence a bit too heavy to use all the time.
I agree with you. eldavojohn, I think you're pushing things a bit far. Everyone agrees that the chinese government is opressive. But this is not Orwell's 1984. The government provides stability, which was rarely present in chinese history. There is no mass shuffling of money from the poor to the rich, although there is increasing disparity these days as industrilization makes it harder to make a living in rural communities. The government really does put the well being of its people first. Ahead of their foreign reputation, which is why we all see them as the bad guys.
I believe China will evolve into a democracy in its own time.
Funny. The most 'odd' disadvantage to me was number 4. "The report claims that nuclear would undermine the drive for greater energy efficiency"
Walk this one through with me. We're saying that rather than providing enough energy for people, we should let a shortage occur so that industries are forced to addopt more energy efficient methods.
If this is a good idea (who knows! Maybe it's brilliant) How does it stand as an arguement against nuclear energy?
LOL. There are 'nuclear powerplants' that don't produce harmful radiation. They're electric, and are still in development. But that's an aside.
I trust that you just mean that the next generation powersupply will be better than what they have now.
I'm wondering though how well these exoskeletons work if you're not standing. Suppose it can't offer support to your arms (the picture doesn't show arm braces)
Then if you duck for cover, you go from feeling 5 pounds to feeling 170 pounds.
If that's the case, I'm guessing they're not intending these suits to be used in combat just yet. Just for moving supplies to hard to reach areas.
I think this would be useful is moving large weapons or communication systems (whatever fancy enemy triangulation spotting equipment you can think of) over uneven terrain. Wheels can't go everywhere.
If you can get a bigger gun in a more advantageous location, then I would want these in my army. They're certainly not being implemented as replacements for forklifts.
You're right though. This would not help in Iraq. Neither would gauss rifles mind you. It would be nice to see some more technological advances for the urban war.
Oh. 1 more point.
Technicians are worth their weight in gold and should be praised as gods by all junior engineers. The amount a seasoned technician knows can make him worth 10 junior engineers.
Sadly, they aren't given the respect they deserve. We do a little pay cheque comparison and think we're smarter than them.
Howdy. I'm an Engineering Physics student at Queen's University.
Consider for a second that there is a position which matches the missing pieces of your (zogger's) ideal engineer. It's the technician. The god of fiddly bits of equipment, master of the shop. He isn't paid as much as, is much better in the shop, but not as good at calculus.
Now in Europe, they call us Canadian (and American) engineers "Reader's Digest engineers" because their engineers and technicians are the same person. An engineer is expected to do both the design and mechanical manipulation of devices. There are arguments for this kind of position, namely that the hands on experience is useful for design, and vice versa. On the other hand, when have you ever heard of a design project being outsourced to Europe? You outsource to India if you want cheep engineering. Where do you outsource if you want GOOD engineering?
House construction does not require an engineer. Why? Because it's well understood. There's a big book of set standards that if followed will make a safe sturdy home. Think of it as a problem to which the solution has already been found. Example #2: Household plumbing doesn't require engineering, as plumbers have a standard to follow. An engineer is a designer, and is needed when there is no big book of set standards (yet).
You want your engineers to be these hands on guys, but that's not what engineering is about. My wood shop experience won't help designing a new WTC that can survive an aircraft impact. My ability to replace door hinges won't teach me to improve the fuel efficiency of cars. In Universities, engineering students are being taught how to be thinkers. We can't be taught how to solve the problems we are going to face in industry. They will be new problems, never before addressed.
All the people who duped items in Diablo II weren't charged with copyright infringement.
My friend charged into battle (as a sorcerer) allied with a barbarian. She got a huge number of badguys following her, and took their health down to 1 point using static charge. Then ran the badguys into the barbarian. Now he dies because he can't leach health or mana from heathless badguys. She takes all stuff he drops.
That was pretty damn low of her. Pre-meditated assault and theft. Right? He lost hours of experience and money and whatnot. It was "a huge pain."
But suppose I spend several months making a snowman, and a kid comes to push it over. That's a huge pain, but not illegal, and certainly not something you'd arrest the kid for. I made the snowman, but it does not belong to me. The snow doesn't belong to me. The amount of time I spent on it is a moot point.
If someone steals game items from me. Those items NEVER belonged to me. Whoever runs the MMORPG owns them. If they feel like turning off the servers, I can't demand my items back. I can trade these items because they allow me to. I can trade them for real money because there are people willing to buy them.
Not saying that they aren't. But generally there's nowhere near as big of a fuss over illegal photocopies of books as there is over illegal copies of music CDs.
But a photocopied book just isn't a good to read. The pages are too big, it takes a long time to make the copy, there isn't a nice binding or a hard cover.
Now what needs to be understood is that a song is information, and information will become more and more free as the information age matures. RIAA is fighting an uphill battle. If they want to continue to thrive against free information trading, they need to realize they aren't selling the music alone. They are selling the entire package, including the pretty jewel case, and the nice photos of that latest hot girl singer, or the boy band with no shirts on.
The music industry needs to develop a product that we prefer to actually own than simply copy. Just like we prefer to use a real book than sit in front of a monitor reading the electronic version. Even if it's just because we like having it sit on our bookshelf.
What about ISP level firewalls? Imagine the bite that would be taken out of the zombie armies if ISPs setup a port blocking firewall to their clients. Tell the customers that you're doing it. Establish a simple opt out system. That way, the people who know how to protect their systems can setup their firewalls the way they see fit. Those who aren't as computer savy will never notice.
Customers get fewer attacks on their computers, and the ISP saves on the bandwidth that the zombies would be eating up.
But you would prefer that the ISP does not interfere? Please explain this to me. I don't understand.
I agree my ISP shouldn't block my access to something I want, but what about if I don't mind some censorship from said monopoly OS worms?
If god is controling evolution, do you really think we would be able to witness it?
Suppose we did witness it. How would you differentiate between it and a non god controlled process? Would such a process be strangely unexplainable by what we've learned about the universe thusfar?
There are lots of things that happen that we simply don't understand. Consider 'action at a distance'. The concept that object one can apply a force on object two without touching it.
Science is a study of how the universe works. Science won't tell us WHY the universe works. So to say that Evolution is not controled by some suprime being, isn't a conclusion we can form. Science will never be able to disprove religion.
Probably doesn't apply so much to the \. crowd since I'm sure we all replace components like the newspaper in the bottom of a birdcage. But...
Peal sticker off fan. Add 1 drop of lubricant. Replace sticker.
The sticker on the mount side of the fan covers a hole which lets you see the axle of the fan. Be careful though. Take a look inside and if you see black flakes, the fan is lubricated with graphite, and adding oil isn't a great idea. Also, despite the rule of thumb regarding WD40. It will evaporate within a few weeks leaving your fan (nearly) as loud as before you lubricated.
I believe for GPS to work correctly, you also need a very accurate clock, which is broadcasted from ground stations. So your accuracy may be determined by the quality of the local ground station. This is probably more of a threat to your GPS system than some US signal weakening. (Not even sure how the US can selectively desensitize certain countries, other than little metal shields in front on the satellite anteni in the shape of evil country x)
If you need a very very accurate map (which you probably don't) it would be best to stick to tried and true methods. You make a concrete secured post and define it as the origin for you axes, and you use laser ranging with ground surveying. (in case anyone doesn't know, you've got the tripod with a self leveling, north aligning telescope, and a height bar with a bubble level, 2 people can map a whole region pretty easily)
Then you can simply improve the measurement for your origin with the GPS system as you require (and as technology will allow)
But I'm guessing you don't need anything this accurate.
In that case, purchase a satellite photo of the villages in question. I believe they are about $500, but need to be ordered several months in advance. This will give you something solid to work on. From there, you can use GPS to measure distances from landmarks you can see on the photo.
Aside from this, make sure you do a long and hard literature search for any mapping work, (topographic, satellite, etc) you can get your hands on. Don't go re-inventing the wheel.
I wasn't schooled in Ontario, but I'm attending university here. The recent changes they've made to the school system seem absolutely terrible to me. (do let me know if you disagree)
changes: 1. Students can not fail. You are asked to re-write the final exam (not a different version of the exam, the exact same one) until you obtain a passing grade.
The basic concept seems alright. If the student didn't learn what he needs to know, go home for a week to fill in the gaps and try again. But talk about bad implementation. You can't keep pushing kids into harder and harder classes when they didn't understand the first one.
2.All classes challenge multiple skills. Again, a great idea. But some of the results are rediculous.
The 12th grade math class. Can be passed without writing a single equation, because there is a 'math journal' which accounts for 50% of the grades and is marked on completion.
3.No skipped grades. Students who do exceptionally well are expected to learn to help their peers.
Again, sounds wonderful. But think of all the wasted tallent. Futhermore, does anyone have any idea how much trouble un unchallenged genius becomes? undeveloped morals + nothing else to do + brains = random explosions around the city.
I hate to say it, but I see school as it is designed right now as a holding tank for children. We isolate them like prisoners until they become useful to society.
Indeed, ESRB is now in a tight situation. Though, if they wanted to, they could simply apply the AO raiting. (If this was intentional, or they decide that this constitutes as being 'part of the game')
This would essentially be passing the buck on to Wal-Mart who would now have to carry AO games, or lose the profits from carying GTA.
Well, the issue is that you don't have to download a 'game mod' (for instance, like changing the skin on game characters) All the questionable material is on the game disk. It was made inaccessable through normal gameplay, but it was not removed from the game.
One could interpret this as a trick for hiding the content from the censors, while still delivering it to the public to avoid the AO kiss of death.
Personally, I believe the material should have been removed from the disk. Imagine if there was a picture of barney getting his head blown off in your 5-year old's book. Course, only visible if you peal open the secret compartment between pages 5 and 6.
A professor of mine told me "Fringe scientists are important and necessary to science. But they're still fringe scientists."
They seem to have a huge number of support seeking websites, yet only one actual research paper that I could find. Furthermore, the research paper's references were mostly conference conversations, and the author's own publications. I didn't specifically check, but it doesn't appear the paper is actually published in any journal.
I also can't seem to find any support from any other scientists outside of his team. Though an article on sciscoop says they have support from MIT.
Now that's all very rare. I would wager that any plasma physicists he's told his theory to has written him off as insane. Now, there is a chance that we have another enstein here, but there's a larger chance that we have a dud.
So right now, most users only have 1 processor intensive application running, so two symetric cores are not overly useful.
I wonder if the motherboard companies can make MBs that have 2 sockets, one for the current generation of processors and one for the last generation. That way, when you upgrade PCs, you can move your old processor and ram into the computer to act as a background slave.
I agree with your logic. It is quite sound. (well, exagerated a little, but that's ok)
Perhaps piracy is not theft. However, that doesn't make it any less illegal. Right now, it may only be considered copyright infringement, but it's certainly doing a lot more harm than photocopying a novel.
The punishment for a crime should be proportional the the amount of damage it does. So perhaps stricter laws here aren't a bad idea. Imagine if violating a patent was only considered copyright infringement. There would be many fewer inventors out there.
So, if I walk into a corner store while the clerk is in the back and take his cash register, then get caught by the police. If I tell them I was intending to return the cash register the following day, then I did not commit theft. My intent was not to permanently deprive.
Somehow I don't think they'll believe me. Sorry, this is off topic, I'm not trying to draw any metaphores regarding software piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Num lock seems to have some arguements both ways. And lots of people who can't read and think you want to have it removed and left OFF.
Now, ever since I was a wee lad. I wondered what the scroll lock button did. Well, I still haven't figured it out. Someone enlighten me.
Oh wait! There's a wikipedia article on scroll lock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_lock
Oops...
See. My user name is my real name. I'm held accountable for things I say from day to day. Shouldn't that be true for things I say on the internet? One is responsible for verbal 'tact' when speaking to people. Shouldn't this also be true when you're broadcasting your opinion to the world?
When I need to say something privately, like this great plan I want to tell you guys about killing everyone in Edmonton, then I'll take the precautions I need. I find the cone of silence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence a bit too heavy to use all the time.
I agree with you.
eldavojohn, I think you're pushing things a bit far. Everyone agrees that the chinese government is opressive. But this is not Orwell's 1984. The government provides stability, which was rarely present in chinese history. There is no mass shuffling of money from the poor to the rich, although there is increasing disparity these days as industrilization makes it harder to make a living in rural communities. The government really does put the well being of its people first. Ahead of their foreign reputation, which is why we all see them as the bad guys.
I believe China will evolve into a democracy in its own time.
Funny. The most 'odd' disadvantage to me was number 4.
"The report claims that nuclear would undermine the drive for greater energy efficiency"
Walk this one through with me. We're saying that rather than providing enough energy for people, we should let a shortage occur so that industries are forced to addopt more energy efficient methods.
If this is a good idea (who knows! Maybe it's brilliant)
How does it stand as an arguement against nuclear energy?
Why would you need nets? We don't use nets to catch the Thor rockets, and they're just a big giant long tube full of solid explosives.
You engineer the catapult to provide the needed amount of thrust, and no more.
LOL. There are 'nuclear powerplants' that don't produce harmful radiation. They're electric, and are still in development. But that's an aside. I trust that you just mean that the next generation powersupply will be better than what they have now. I'm wondering though how well these exoskeletons work if you're not standing. Suppose it can't offer support to your arms (the picture doesn't show arm braces) Then if you duck for cover, you go from feeling 5 pounds to feeling 170 pounds. If that's the case, I'm guessing they're not intending these suits to be used in combat just yet. Just for moving supplies to hard to reach areas.
I think this would be useful is moving large weapons or communication systems (whatever fancy enemy triangulation spotting equipment you can think of) over uneven terrain. Wheels can't go everywhere.
If you can get a bigger gun in a more advantageous location, then I would want these in my army. They're certainly not being implemented as replacements for forklifts.
You're right though. This would not help in Iraq. Neither would gauss rifles mind you. It would be nice to see some more technological advances for the urban war.
Oh. 1 more point. Technicians are worth their weight in gold and should be praised as gods by all junior engineers. The amount a seasoned technician knows can make him worth 10 junior engineers. Sadly, they aren't given the respect they deserve. We do a little pay cheque comparison and think we're smarter than them.
Howdy. I'm an Engineering Physics student at Queen's University.
Consider for a second that there is a position which matches the missing pieces of your (zogger's) ideal engineer. It's the technician. The god of fiddly bits of equipment, master of the shop. He isn't paid as much as, is much better in the shop, but not as good at calculus.
Now in Europe, they call us Canadian (and American) engineers "Reader's Digest engineers" because their engineers and technicians are the same person. An engineer is expected to do both the design and mechanical manipulation of devices. There are arguments for this kind of position, namely that the hands on experience is useful for design, and vice versa. On the other hand, when have you ever heard of a design project being outsourced to Europe? You outsource to India if you want cheep engineering. Where do you outsource if you want GOOD engineering?
House construction does not require an engineer. Why? Because it's well understood. There's a big book of set standards that if followed will make a safe sturdy home. Think of it as a problem to which the solution has already been found. Example #2: Household plumbing doesn't require engineering, as plumbers have a standard to follow. An engineer is a designer, and is needed when there is no big book of set standards (yet).
You want your engineers to be these hands on guys, but that's not what engineering is about. My wood shop experience won't help designing a new WTC that can survive an aircraft impact. My ability to replace door hinges won't teach me to improve the fuel efficiency of cars. In Universities, engineering students are being taught how to be thinkers. We can't be taught how to solve the problems we are going to face in industry. They will be new problems, never before addressed.
All the people who duped items in Diablo II weren't charged with copyright infringement.
My friend charged into battle (as a sorcerer) allied with a barbarian. She got a huge number of badguys following her, and took their health down to 1 point using static charge. Then ran the badguys into the barbarian. Now he dies because he can't leach health or mana from heathless badguys. She takes all stuff he drops.
That was pretty damn low of her. Pre-meditated assault and theft. Right? He lost hours of experience and money and whatnot. It was "a huge pain."
But suppose I spend several months making a snowman, and a kid comes to push it over. That's a huge pain, but not illegal, and certainly not something you'd arrest the kid for. I made the snowman, but it does not belong to me. The snow doesn't belong to me. The amount of time I spent on it is a moot point.
If someone steals game items from me. Those items NEVER belonged to me. Whoever runs the MMORPG owns them. If they feel like turning off the servers, I can't demand my items back. I can trade these items because they allow me to. I can trade them for real money because there are people willing to buy them.
Not saying that they aren't. But generally there's nowhere near as big of a fuss over illegal photocopies of books as there is over illegal copies of music CDs.
But a photocopied book just isn't a good to read. The pages are too big, it takes a long time to make the copy, there isn't a nice binding or a hard cover.
Now what needs to be understood is that a song is information, and information will become more and more free as the information age matures. RIAA is fighting an uphill battle. If they want to continue to thrive against free information trading, they need to realize they aren't selling the music alone. They are selling the entire package, including the pretty jewel case, and the nice photos of that latest hot girl singer, or the boy band with no shirts on.
The music industry needs to develop a product that we prefer to actually own than simply copy. Just like we prefer to use a real book than sit in front of a monitor reading the electronic version. Even if it's just because we like having it sit on our bookshelf.
What about ISP level firewalls? Imagine the bite that would be taken out of the zombie armies if ISPs setup a port blocking firewall to their clients. Tell the customers that you're doing it. Establish a simple opt out system. That way, the people who know how to protect their systems can setup their firewalls the way they see fit. Those who aren't as computer savy will never notice.
Customers get fewer attacks on their computers, and the ISP saves on the bandwidth that the zombies would be eating up.
But you would prefer that the ISP does not interfere? Please explain this to me. I don't understand.
I agree my ISP shouldn't block my access to something I want, but what about if I don't mind some censorship from said monopoly OS worms?
If god is controling evolution, do you really think we would be able to witness it?
Suppose we did witness it. How would you differentiate between it and a non god controlled process? Would such a process be strangely unexplainable by what we've learned about the universe thusfar?
There are lots of things that happen that we simply don't understand. Consider 'action at a distance'. The concept that object one can apply a force on object two without touching it.
Science is a study of how the universe works. Science won't tell us WHY the universe works. So to say that Evolution is not controled by some suprime being, isn't a conclusion we can form. Science will never be able to disprove religion.
Probably doesn't apply so much to the \. crowd since I'm sure we all replace components like the newspaper in the bottom of a birdcage. But...
Peal sticker off fan.
Add 1 drop of lubricant.
Replace sticker.
The sticker on the mount side of the fan covers a hole which lets you see the axle of the fan. Be careful though. Take a look inside and if you see black flakes, the fan is lubricated with graphite, and adding oil isn't a great idea. Also, despite the rule of thumb regarding WD40. It will evaporate within a few weeks leaving your fan (nearly) as loud as before you lubricated.
Well, you're in luck. Google is most likely the underdog here. I believe they are clearly in the wrong.
Basically, they want to say that a law in California makes a contract signed in Washington void. Does that make sense to you?
Oh, obviously, you wouldn't need to use the geological surveying methods if the GPS is accurate enough.
I'm not totally sure how you can discover if it is. The handsets don't report +/- values do they?
I believe for GPS to work correctly, you also need a very accurate clock, which is broadcasted from ground stations. So your accuracy may be determined by the quality of the local ground station. This is probably more of a threat to your GPS system than some US signal weakening. (Not even sure how the US can selectively desensitize certain countries, other than little metal shields in front on the satellite anteni in the shape of evil country x)
If you need a very very accurate map (which you probably don't) it would be best to stick to tried and true methods. You make a concrete secured post and define it as the origin for you axes, and you use laser ranging with ground surveying. (in case anyone doesn't know, you've got the tripod with a self leveling, north aligning telescope, and a height bar with a bubble level, 2 people can map a whole region pretty easily)
Then you can simply improve the measurement for your origin with the GPS system as you require (and as technology will allow)
But I'm guessing you don't need anything this accurate.
In that case, purchase a satellite photo of the villages in question. I believe they are about $500, but need to be ordered several months in advance. This will give you something solid to work on. From there, you can use GPS to measure distances from landmarks you can see on the photo.
Aside from this, make sure you do a long and hard literature search for any mapping work, (topographic, satellite, etc) you can get your hands on. Don't go re-inventing the wheel.
I wasn't schooled in Ontario, but I'm attending university here. The recent changes they've made to the school system seem absolutely terrible to me. (do let me know if you disagree)
changes:
1. Students can not fail. You are asked to re-write the final exam (not a different version of the exam, the exact same one) until you obtain a passing grade.
The basic concept seems alright. If the student didn't learn what he needs to know, go home for a week to fill in the gaps and try again. But talk about bad implementation. You can't keep pushing kids into harder and harder classes when they didn't understand the first one.
2.All classes challenge multiple skills. Again, a great idea. But some of the results are rediculous.
The 12th grade math class. Can be passed without writing a single equation, because there is a 'math journal' which accounts for 50% of the grades and is marked on completion.
3.No skipped grades. Students who do exceptionally well are expected to learn to help their peers.
Again, sounds wonderful. But think of all the wasted tallent. Futhermore, does anyone have any idea how much trouble un unchallenged genius becomes?
undeveloped morals + nothing else to do + brains = random explosions around the city.
I hate to say it, but I see school as it is designed right now as a holding tank for children. We isolate them like prisoners until they become useful to society.
Not that redundancy is a bad thing.
But if they are going to snap pictures of the belly at the ISS, isn't that enough to determine if there are cracks in the heat shielding?
This system will tell us when, where and how the damage occured. But then this is something they should have had all along.
Good post. That's a really good point.
Indeed, ESRB is now in a tight situation. Though, if they wanted to, they could simply apply the AO raiting. (If this was intentional, or they decide that this constitutes as being 'part of the game')
This would essentially be passing the buck on to Wal-Mart who would now have to carry AO games, or lose the profits from carying GTA.
but yeah... tough shoes to be in.
Well, the issue is that you don't have to download a 'game mod' (for instance, like changing the skin on game characters)
All the questionable material is on the game disk. It was made inaccessable through normal gameplay, but it was not removed from the game.
One could interpret this as a trick for hiding the content from the censors, while still delivering it to the public to avoid the AO kiss of death.
Personally, I believe the material should have been removed from the disk. Imagine if there was a picture of barney getting his head blown off in your 5-year old's book. Course, only visible if you peal open the secret compartment between pages 5 and 6.
A professor of mine told me "Fringe scientists are important and necessary to science. But they're still fringe scientists."
They seem to have a huge number of support seeking websites, yet only one actual research paper that I could find. Furthermore, the research paper's references were mostly conference conversations, and the author's own publications. I didn't specifically check, but it doesn't appear the paper is actually published in any journal.
I also can't seem to find any support from any other scientists outside of his team. Though an article on sciscoop says they have support from MIT.
Now that's all very rare. I would wager that any plasma physicists he's told his theory to has written him off as insane. Now, there is a chance that we have another enstein here, but there's a larger chance that we have a dud.
sorry.
So right now, most users only have 1 processor intensive application running, so two symetric cores are not overly useful.
I wonder if the motherboard companies can make MBs that have 2 sockets, one for the current generation of processors and one for the last generation. That way, when you upgrade PCs, you can move your old processor and ram into the computer to act as a background slave.
I agree with your logic. It is quite sound. (well, exagerated a little, but that's ok)
Perhaps piracy is not theft. However, that doesn't make it any less illegal. Right now, it may only be considered copyright infringement, but it's certainly doing a lot more harm than photocopying a novel.
The punishment for a crime should be proportional the the amount of damage it does. So perhaps stricter laws here aren't a bad idea. Imagine if violating a patent was only considered copyright infringement. There would be many fewer inventors out there.
So, if I walk into a corner store while the clerk is in the back and take his cash register, then get caught by the police. If I tell them I was intending to return the cash register the following day, then I did not commit theft. My intent was not to permanently deprive.
Somehow I don't think they'll believe me. Sorry, this is off topic, I'm not trying to draw any metaphores regarding software piracy.