One could always get a standing desk, and then also have an office chair which is tall enough to sit at the stand-up desk. This is how I do it at work, and rather like it.
This whole put a human face on a robot is a joke. We have lots of humans so why make a metallic crappy human. But I do want a robot to make things, paint my house, clean my floors, plant food, pick food, eat bugs, etc. I don't want to talk with it.
You might not want to talk to it, but there are a lot of lonely older people who wouldn't mind having a companion cube to talk WITH, not simply to. Heck, I think they already have those in Japan. Couple that with the ability of a robot to act as a liason for an elderly, disabled, blind, or deaf person, and you have a robot which could be a pretty meaningful mediator in a person's life.
Imagine if deaf people had legally-protected translator robots (so that they could sign to it, and it would translate to you, to the grocery store clerk, or to a sales drone at Best Buy), or if elderly people could send one out (in their autonomous car) to do their grocery shopping. Sure, it's not feasible now, but it seems like it could be something that would have a pretty viable market.
(I notice the British/Australian(?) spelling of "grey" is displacing the American "gray".)
I've always preferred spelling it "grey"; I suspect that it's related to my heavy reading of Tolkein in my youth. Given the proportion of nerds here on Slashdot, I'd not be surprised if others were doing the same.
Yep -- I saw that one first, in fact. I just meant that I didn't understand why there'd be a color balanced one (until I read the comment below about geologists -- great point!).
The thing is, If I were on Mars, the colors wouldn't look like they look here anyway -- because of the lighting that you mentioned. I'd rather see what it would look like on an alien world in its native lighting conditions, not rebalanced to look like it had our light conditions.
Exactly. It sounds like a really big deal at first, but in practice (and believe me, I am still new to Python) it no longer seems like a big deal. There's so much other good, expressive stuff in well-written python that minor annoyances are less critical, and the "whitespace rules" end up being no different than having an agreed-upon coding style (KNR, etc) in your organization. To be fair, this is likely because I happen to work with a codebase of what looks like very neatly written Python, and also prefer 4-space indentation. Moreover, from what I've read recently, 4-spaces is less important than _consistent_ indentation. (I'll have to double check, but I think it would work with 2-space indents too, if you preferred.)
when trying to limp in $2 poker game I picked up two $100 chips and threw them forward by mistake - I didn't get do-over even though everyone at the table new I made a mistake, my $198 raise into a $5 pot plays.
Perhaps this is natural to poker culture, but to an outsider I can't help but think that your friends are jerks.:-) Perhaps you weren't playing with friends, which might make it more excusable, but it still seems unnecessarily harsh to say "no, those chips stay" when someone says, "ah, crap, I meant to throw in these instead." (Assuming you caught the mistake when you did it, that is.) Pretty much everyone I'd consider playing cards (or other games) with would notice the outlier and say something like, "Did you mean to bet $100 when the pot's at two dollars?", on the assumption that it was a fumble.
Bloody hell -- double pasting what I meant to edit. I'm very sorry about that. Short version:
- I use whitespace conventions to read code more easily, so enforcing one is no different from using Emacs or Eclipse to autoformat everything. I find Python code indentation very similar to Lisp-y indentation. - I miss Perl's easy regex integration. - I miss being able to write one-liners on the command line, or toy implementations in the REPL. In practice, I nearly never need to do this. - List comprehensions (and dict comprehensions) are the bees' knees.
Give Python a shot if you have been avoiding it because "enforced whitespace is lame". It's easier to get over than you think.
I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.
I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.
One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.
#Perl: @foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar #Python: foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]
I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.
I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.
The one thing I miss from Perl is the degree to which regular expressions are embedded in the language, and the ease with which one can use them. It's a little harder with Python, which I find frustrating at times.
One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.
#Perl: @foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar #Python: foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]
If you have been holding off on playing with Python because you love Perl, great. It's still a great language to work with, and the whitespace is not as bad to deal with as you might imagine. My friends use vim with it; I prefer Komodo. There are several other good editors as well.
In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.
If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.
So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)
What level of training do you feel is appropriate for firearms ownership? Do you believe that the level of training required today for gun ownership is sufficient?
My bias: I don't own a firearm, don't plan to own one anytime soon, but I would someday like to, and when I do I would like to have a concealed carry permit, even if I do not plan to carry on a regular basis (and am unsure if I would at all). The history nerd in me feels strongly in support of the "shall not infringed" idea about guns.
Now, to answer your question. A lot of training, with mandatory annual range time or rounds fired. Practice makes perfect, and the more you hang out with people that value safety while armed, the more likely you are to incorporate that in your reflexes and actions. I believe that anyone looking to bear a gun should have similar training and upkeep of the skills of gun use and ownership. Here's the training I would like to have before I own a gun -- and who knows, a CC permit might even require more (I don't know, as I haven't looked):
Three months of two (or more) days per week training at an accredited school in handgun proficiency, including both range time and personal time with instructors. (Obviously, veterans would already have much of this covered.)
A course in using a handgun (or other weapon) for defense (self or home). I read years ago about a week-long course (?) where you learn things like room clearing, hostage rescue, etc and would love to take that. (I've since forgotten where it was that did this. Damn.)
Two hours per month (or X hours per three months?) of range time.
I think this would be an admirable and effective way to ensure that an armed populace knows how to use their weapons both effectively and safely. I have a hard time reconciling that with the language of the second amendment and the views of our founding fathers, but I imagine they figured that an idiot with a musket was unlikely to be able to hit anyone, let alone several, and that the people who could afford a weapon tended to be those who would know how to use one.
I stand corrected. I have never seen more than one person ever complete the entire course in the same competition, so I didn't know that. Thanks for the clarification!
Did you even watch the same dubbed Ninja Warrior that I did?? Sure some of it had slapstick, because occasionally people would compete (for lulz) in a tuxedo or something, but once things got serious (or the serious competitors were on) I can't think of anything slapstick about it. Wipe-out vs Ninja Warrior is like comparing Jersey Shore to the Seven Samurai.
I disagree. Because there is never a guarantee of a winner (unlike Survivor), and quite often only 1-2 people make it to the final round (and then both fail), everyone going in is hopeful that they will conquer it. The competition is merely in terms of who can overcome the challenges faster... if at all. That "at all", and the fact that often the course is Too Hard, means that it really is a test of true athleticism. You're right that they are friends, but I don't think that colors their attitudes as much as you appear to think. If you or I were to make it three rounds in and then have a heartbreakingly close failure on the final round, I suspect we'd get the same condolences, and would get the same accolades if we won.
I've never actually seen two people complete the same course. I've seen at least one time when both remaining competitors were less than a second away from completing it.
God, this makes me want to watch the show, now. It's both inspiring to see these people do it, and frustrating when I realize that I'll never devote my life to that pursuit as tirelessly as they do.
Agreed. This is what I loved about the Japanese show: I could honestly root for every single competitor, and sincerely hope that they could win. Those challenges are HARD! I love the spirit of camaraderie they show towards one another, and that some people compete just to have fun.
That seems a bid disingenuous: I wouldn't want an impaired doctor operating on me, whether it was because he had drunk a half liter of scotch, smoked pot, or were high on amphetamines. That would be negligent practice, and it's already something that they can get sued for.
DOTA started out as the "Defense of the Ancients" mod for Warcraft III ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients ). It basically had you control a hero, working in a team with some other players versus others. Just like CounterStrike started as a Half Life mod and grew, so did DOTA -- League of Legends is another game (spiritual successor?) that is basically similar. Past that I have no idea, other than that it appears to be very popular.
I'm certain that anyone who plays DOTA or League of Legends (or DOTA2) has lots if insight into the subtle differences (much as I could expound on the differences between Global Operations, Counter Strike, and Call of Duty multiplayer). For you, it's probably enough to know that it's a team-based RTS-like action game where you control your hero, level them up, and try to kill the opposing team's ancient in a manner that requires teamwork with two other people.:)
I find that I can't really tell the difference between high and low bitrates (or CD) when I'm driving. The road noise drowns out any imperfections, so I'm quite happy to just stream Digitally Imported (di.fm) all the time.
Exactly. I really don't give a fig about basketball, likely as I don't understand it, and I found this talk (and slides) fascinating! I thought it was interesting to see how he could correlate players similarity by statistics, and then use that to expose cheaper versions of awesome players, or to show how your team is missing a certain skillset.
Now if only I knew what a paint protector was and why it's important.:)
It would, however, be enough to make some random innocent person's day REALLY shitty when the police bust in their door at 1:30 am in full riot gear, and then shoot their dog too.
I would really love to see videos of cops doing their jobs as models of proper police behavior. It's much nicer than police footage that disappears, is lost, is confiscated, or otherwise isn't admissable.
Slashdot Mirror
One could always get a standing desk, and then also have an office chair which is tall enough to sit at the stand-up desk. This is how I do it at work, and rather like it.
This whole put a human face on a robot is a joke. We have lots of humans so why make a metallic crappy human. But I do want a robot to make things, paint my house, clean my floors, plant food, pick food, eat bugs, etc. I don't want to talk with it.
You might not want to talk to it, but there are a lot of lonely older people who wouldn't mind having a companion cube to talk WITH, not simply to. Heck, I think they already have those in Japan. Couple that with the ability of a robot to act as a liason for an elderly, disabled, blind, or deaf person, and you have a robot which could be a pretty meaningful mediator in a person's life.
Imagine if deaf people had legally-protected translator robots (so that they could sign to it, and it would translate to you, to the grocery store clerk, or to a sales drone at Best Buy), or if elderly people could send one out (in their autonomous car) to do their grocery shopping. Sure, it's not feasible now, but it seems like it could be something that would have a pretty viable market.
(I notice the British/Australian(?) spelling of "grey" is displacing the American "gray".)
I've always preferred spelling it "grey"; I suspect that it's related to my heavy reading of Tolkein in my youth. Given the proportion of nerds here on Slashdot, I'd not be surprised if others were doing the same.
Yep -- I saw that one first, in fact. I just meant that I didn't understand why there'd be a color balanced one (until I read the comment below about geologists -- great point!).
The thing is, If I were on Mars, the colors wouldn't look like they look here anyway -- because of the lighting that you mentioned. I'd rather see what it would look like on an alien world in its native lighting conditions, not rebalanced to look like it had our light conditions.
Exactly. It sounds like a really big deal at first, but in practice (and believe me, I am still new to Python) it no longer seems like a big deal. There's so much other good, expressive stuff in well-written python that minor annoyances are less critical, and the "whitespace rules" end up being no different than having an agreed-upon coding style (KNR, etc) in your organization. To be fair, this is likely because I happen to work with a codebase of what looks like very neatly written Python, and also prefer 4-space indentation. Moreover, from what I've read recently, 4-spaces is less important than _consistent_ indentation. (I'll have to double check, but I think it would work with 2-space indents too, if you preferred.)
when trying to limp in $2 poker game I picked up two $100 chips and threw them forward by mistake - I didn't get do-over even though everyone at the table new I made a mistake, my $198 raise into a $5 pot plays.
Perhaps this is natural to poker culture, but to an outsider I can't help but think that your friends are jerks. :-) Perhaps you weren't playing with friends, which might make it more excusable, but it still seems unnecessarily harsh to say "no, those chips stay" when someone says, "ah, crap, I meant to throw in these instead." (Assuming you caught the mistake when you did it, that is.) Pretty much everyone I'd consider playing cards (or other games) with would notice the outlier and say something like, "Did you mean to bet $100 when the pot's at two dollars?", on the assumption that it was a fumble.
Bloody hell -- double pasting what I meant to edit. I'm very sorry about that. Short version:
- I use whitespace conventions to read code more easily, so enforcing one is no different from using Emacs or Eclipse to autoformat everything. I find Python code indentation very similar to Lisp-y indentation.
- I miss Perl's easy regex integration.
- I miss being able to write one-liners on the command line, or toy implementations in the REPL. In practice, I nearly never need to do this.
- List comprehensions (and dict comprehensions) are the bees' knees.
Give Python a shot if you have been avoiding it because "enforced whitespace is lame". It's easier to get over than you think.
I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.
I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.
One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.
#Perl:
@foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar
#Python:
foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]
I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.
I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.
The one thing I miss from Perl is the degree to which regular expressions are embedded in the language, and the ease with which one can use them. It's a little harder with Python, which I find frustrating at times.
One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.
#Perl:
@foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar
#Python:
foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]
If you have been holding off on playing with Python because you love Perl, great. It's still a great language to work with, and the whitespace is not as bad to deal with as you might imagine. My friends use vim with it; I prefer Komodo. There are several other good editors as well.
Any terrorist that has to use the US Census Bureau to find a population center, as opposed to buying a map from AAA or using Wikipedia, is an idiot.
In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.
If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.
So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)
I wish I'd read your comment before I decided to comment, as I found that very insightful. Thank you.
What level of training do you feel is appropriate for firearms ownership? Do you believe that the level of training required today for gun ownership is sufficient?
My bias: I don't own a firearm, don't plan to own one anytime soon, but I would someday like to, and when I do I would like to have a concealed carry permit, even if I do not plan to carry on a regular basis (and am unsure if I would at all). The history nerd in me feels strongly in support of the "shall not infringed" idea about guns.
Now, to answer your question. A lot of training, with mandatory annual range time or rounds fired. Practice makes perfect, and the more you hang out with people that value safety while armed, the more likely you are to incorporate that in your reflexes and actions. I believe that anyone looking to bear a gun should have similar training and upkeep of the skills of gun use and ownership. Here's the training I would like to have before I own a gun -- and who knows, a CC permit might even require more (I don't know, as I haven't looked):
I think this would be an admirable and effective way to ensure that an armed populace knows how to use their weapons both effectively and safely. I have a hard time reconciling that with the language of the second amendment and the views of our founding fathers, but I imagine they figured that an idiot with a musket was unlikely to be able to hit anyone, let alone several, and that the people who could afford a weapon tended to be those who would know how to use one.
I stand corrected. I have never seen more than one person ever complete the entire course in the same competition, so I didn't know that. Thanks for the clarification!
Did you even watch the same dubbed Ninja Warrior that I did?? Sure some of it had slapstick, because occasionally people would compete (for lulz) in a tuxedo or something, but once things got serious (or the serious competitors were on) I can't think of anything slapstick about it. Wipe-out vs Ninja Warrior is like comparing Jersey Shore to the Seven Samurai.
I disagree. Because there is never a guarantee of a winner (unlike Survivor), and quite often only 1-2 people make it to the final round (and then both fail), everyone going in is hopeful that they will conquer it. The competition is merely in terms of who can overcome the challenges faster... if at all. That "at all", and the fact that often the course is Too Hard, means that it really is a test of true athleticism. You're right that they are friends, but I don't think that colors their attitudes as much as you appear to think. If you or I were to make it three rounds in and then have a heartbreakingly close failure on the final round, I suspect we'd get the same condolences, and would get the same accolades if we won.
I've never actually seen two people complete the same course. I've seen at least one time when both remaining competitors were less than a second away from completing it.
God, this makes me want to watch the show, now. It's both inspiring to see these people do it, and frustrating when I realize that I'll never devote my life to that pursuit as tirelessly as they do.
Agreed. This is what I loved about the Japanese show: I could honestly root for every single competitor, and sincerely hope that they could win. Those challenges are HARD! I love the spirit of camaraderie they show towards one another, and that some people compete just to have fun.
That seems a bid disingenuous: I wouldn't want an impaired doctor operating on me, whether it was because he had drunk a half liter of scotch, smoked pot, or were high on amphetamines. That would be negligent practice, and it's already something that they can get sued for.
He didn't say that people smoked heroin, he said that they smoked opium - any Sherlock Holmes fan will know how common this was at one time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin says that Heroin is:
an opiate analgesic synthesized ... by adding two acetyl groups to the molecule morphine, a derivative of the opium poppy
(emphasis mine).
I suspect that Trout007 has substantially more concept of where heroin came from than you, but now you know better.
DOTA started out as the "Defense of the Ancients" mod for Warcraft III ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients ). It basically had you control a hero, working in a team with some other players versus others. Just like CounterStrike started as a Half Life mod and grew, so did DOTA -- League of Legends is another game (spiritual successor?) that is basically similar. Past that I have no idea, other than that it appears to be very popular.
I'm certain that anyone who plays DOTA or League of Legends (or DOTA2) has lots if insight into the subtle differences (much as I could expound on the differences between Global Operations, Counter Strike, and Call of Duty multiplayer). For you, it's probably enough to know that it's a team-based RTS-like action game where you control your hero, level them up, and try to kill the opposing team's ancient in a manner that requires teamwork with two other people. :)
I find that I can't really tell the difference between high and low bitrates (or CD) when I'm driving. The road noise drowns out any imperfections, so I'm quite happy to just stream Digitally Imported (di.fm) all the time.
A Social Security card or a Passport are both documents should each be valid. I recommend the Passport, as the SS card should be kept safe(r).
Exactly. I really don't give a fig about basketball, likely as I don't understand it, and I found this talk (and slides) fascinating! I thought it was interesting to see how he could correlate players similarity by statistics, and then use that to expose cheaper versions of awesome players, or to show how your team is missing a certain skillset.
Now if only I knew what a paint protector was and why it's important. :)
It would, however, be enough to make some random innocent person's day REALLY shitty when the police bust in their door at 1:30 am in full riot gear, and then shoot their dog too.
I would really love to see videos of cops doing their jobs as models of proper police behavior. It's much nicer than police footage that disappears, is lost, is confiscated, or otherwise isn't admissable.