Only about an hour ago, there was a small anti-knife march going past my flat in East London.
I have to admit that I reckon that licensed regulation has always been a better method for lowering misuse of weapons than an outright ban. However, that's going to be bloody hard to achieve with knives, given their prevalence as a tool in the real world. Oh well.
It's just a wonder that they haven't gotten as far as mounting an armistice on archery equipment, such as compound and recurve bows, or crossbows. Oh, that's right: it requires skill to use those. I guess I'm not so worried about the police coming to take my bows away from me, then.
I work for a London University; I'm one of their IT technical monkeys, with some serverside and strategic work thrown in. I get to call myself SysAdmin, and they get their computers fixed. It's not an ideal job, but I enjoy it, and, more importantly, it's possible to buy a home based on the wage packet. If you can bite the bullet and admit to yourself that you're not going to get that lovely three-bedroom detached house with a double garage until you're in your forties, then life can be good.
I live in East London, and I own a flat there. Even with the stupid house prices, even with the crippling interest rates, even with the ever-increasing food and energy bills, it's still possible to live, and do so comfortably.
You're technical people. Get used to the fact that you'll never earn anything like what a CEO's PA does: they've got more on their plate thn we give them credit for. Not only have they got to organise a capricious meatsack with an ego the size of God, they've got to interpret the whims and rants of said person into intelligible commands for their minions. On top of that, they've got to look good while doing it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not belittling our associated trades: I love what I do, and the day that I give it up for something else will be a sad one. The 'engineer as demi-god' days are over, for now, because we don't have the same sociological drives anymore: we're not in a post-war depression, there is no cold war, there is no great enemy that's immediately tangible. We are, currently, comfortable, aside from the self-imposed economic problems.
While we're not as socially respected as we once were, I don't believe that we were ever part of a richer social subset, unless employed by a government program of some description.
Culturally, we're more used to luxury now. The traditional view of an engineer/technician is that of someone who is rather conservative in their habits, choosing to express themselves through their craft and abilities, rather than having three EeePCs.
Of course, having said that, the next manager that asks me why I'm so special, and whether I deserve the money that I earn, because 'we can outsource' is going to get a knee in the groin.
I wondered how long this would take to hit Slashdot. I built one for the Science Museum in London back in December.
Far from new, and the design has been adapted heavily many, many times. The original Bowyer designs had some horrible friction issues. They're fun to make, provided you're not doing it totally on your own. The one that we made is from lasercut plywood; it took several days just to glue the pieces together...
Either way, the design of the fab@home system is a bit more refined, but at several times the cost. We managed to put our RepRap together for a couple of hundred quid. The stepper motors were the only expensive thing.
Why -1 troll? This guy makes a fair point: Everyone's happy to watch savants on TV shows, telling some flat out stupid presenter what day of the week that March 12th 1732 was, but people are apparently afraid to try and make use of such talents.
There's nothing stopping people with high-level autism from providing a useful function in society, other than some relatively prudish ideals about people being 'used'. Most savants tend to *enjoy* using their exclusive skill, and more often than not it's one that can be made into something very, very useful.
I'm just wondering, because if anyone's going to try and take it down, it'll be the scientologists: torrents obviously provide a far safer distribution method.
I just don't want the UK government to tell me that I'm in the wrong and subject to prosecution. Scientology has little sway over here, so its only the government that I'm worried about...
Although I really, really lament the fact that Ordnance Survey decided that they didn't like the work that had been done for the 3D London. I was really hoping to be able to check out what me flat looked like in 3D. The only alternative is to go outside, and that doesn't bear thinking about...
It'd also be really good for plotting trajectories so I can pick off the local chavs with my soon-to-be-complete trebuchet.
And I find it worrying just how easy it is to smuggle such stuff in...
Yeah, ok - you can't expect X-Ray jockeys to know about every single type of new laptop available: the blogger was an arse for expecting them to. However, the fact that you can have 3oz of 'jello' (jelly, to the rest of us) on board with you should flag some concerns. There are, insofar as I'm aware, several materials that resemble gelatinous liquids that can be encouraged to go 'bang' by introducing a small electrical charge, such as that from any electronic item, which can also be carried in hand luggage.
I dunno. I just think that as laudable as the pursuit of safety is, there's no sane way of doing it. You don't exactly need much to bring a plane down: many airlines still believe that it can be done simply by having a telephone turned on: it's definitely possible if you've got something that can transmit radio signals on the right frequency.
Paranoia's making you look in the wrong directions. People who plan to do stuff like take a plane down are usually smart, and can think their way round this rudimentary attempt at security without any serious hassle.
...I can comfortably say that antidepressants aren't all that.
This is not to say that they have no effect, though.
The way that an antidepressant works (from the point of view of someone that isn't a chemist/biologist/pharmacist) is that it's much like a compression filter: it chops off the bottom end and the top end of emotional response. The purpose of them is not to 'make you happy' - that would cause a mass addiction problem, I reckon. They take you out of the horrific depths of depression, be it suicidal or not, and give you enough breathing space to gain some perspective.
There are people who cannot cope without antidepressants. Most of us (depressives, that is) can survive without them, though, once we've managed to level ourselves out a bit.
I personally found them to be pretty hard work: anything that messes with your brain chemistry tends to have other results, too: I became prone to very short bursts of high activity, with long, long periods of lethargy and listlessness. Think stoned but jittery, with moments of sharp and fast clarity.
The important thing to remember is that there is a vast difference between mild depression, and very serious depression. Serious depression will stay with you for your entire life, while mild depression is more transitory. It hits you hard, regardless of whether it's 'mild' or not, but it's less likely to come back in any significant capacity if it's milder depression.
Don't forget that by muting the depths of depression, you can actually benefit a lot with the alleviation of many of the other associated problems. I found that my horrific insomnia (as in 1-2 hours of real sleep a night, tops) started to ease, purely because my mind wasn't working overtime on considering and worrying about my problems. That proved to be enough to help me start to fix myself, which is, I believe, the real purpose of antidepressants. Despite my doctor's belief that they're some kind of magic bullet...
Do you reckon that they wrote their own 3D software? It looks like complete arse: I'm pretty happy to say that it makes South Park look really sophisticated, you know?
Mobile phone (Cell phone for you USians) black spots. Yes, that's right, places where there's little to no signal. They still exist, and they're pretty much ignored by the phone providers these days, because they make them look bad.
So, it'd be possible to not only store, but work with radioactive materials in pretty much plain sight, because no-one's phone is bleeping at them, saying that there are naughty things occurring.
Technology's great and all, but there are times when the flaws are greater.
If this is going to be implemented, then do it off the back of the wired phone system, and not the cellular network. There's already enough traffic on there as it is, and not everywhere is covered, as I've just suggested.
Has anyone actually found a copy of the patent that Lancor are claiming has been infringed?
I've searched for about 40 minutes, and can't find it anywhere. Apparently, it's registered as patent number RD8489.
I was on the Underground today, and was listening to these two teenage girls chatting about how 2005 was "back in the day", as if it was some significant period of time ago. We've managed to serve up such an instantaneous consumer culture that 2 years is considered an age of man: paired up with utterly unmemorable 'music', and you've got the reason. I reckon it's not got a huge amount to do with file sharing: it's all about the lowest common denominator.
Everything is marketed and labelled as if it were utterly new. People seem to forget that almost everything is recycled in some aspect. Amy Winehouse is not new. Nor is her drug-taking, pillock-marrying lifestyle. People have been doing that (in the public eye, at least) for nearly half a century. Get over yourselves.
MTV only worsens matters by making damn sure that on their 'Bestest Music Evar!' shows, on the rare occasion that they actually play them, only includes the same regurgitated pop crap that's sourced from within the previous five years, thus compounding the illusion that current pop music is innovative.
Well yeah, hallucinogens aren't really what they're suggesting here, I'd hope. Otherwise, TV Poker would be even more boring than usual, because all that'd be going would be a table of players going "Woah, that dude's, like, putting a sword through his head. Or maybe it's my head, maaaan. Y'know, like, uh, swords. Yeah. Swords are sharp man. Y'know, like cutting, right? Yeah."
Actually, there's a chance that it may make it entertaining enough to actually watch... Who knows? On with the drug trials!
Seriously: if you can find a F/OSS package that's analogous to Flash in behaviour and output, then yes, by all means, teach them the F/OSS stuff - they'll learn to think outside the GUI, which will do them no end of good. If, however, you can't find a suitable replacement, then don't. Flash 5 is not even remotely appropriate any more - it bears little to no resemblance to the current versions of Flash. Photoshop 7 is fine, although the layering method has changed a bit: you can now nest them, as well as play about with layer comps, which you can't do in pre-CS versions. Dreamweaver - well, do you really need to ask? As for Movie Maker: you can download a free version of Avid, or try and get hold of Kino or something along those lines. Teaching them Movie Maker will not do anyone any favours.
Well, glad that I got an (unintended) laugh there, at least...
Thanks for the answers though, guys. I appreciate it. I come from a graphics background, so I think in terms of 3D graphics, not advanced semi-theoretical physics...
but I'm trying to figure out how this can be applied to our current electronic designs.
If we use electron spin to store data, and presuming that we can determine which way it's spinning, then that gives us a total of six possibilities, right?
+pitch
-pitch
+yaw
-yaw
+roll
-roll
Or, of course, this could be denoted as 0 and 1 instead of + and -. However, doesn't that throw out the current binary model? This'll effectively be base six, instead of base two, won't it?
I dunno - this isn't exactly my field, so I'm just trying to understand, is all.
Re:Windows UAP is a bolted on afterward system....
on
Security in Ten Years
·
· Score: 1
Yeah - it's the troutware that OS X users have really got to be worried about now...
Long before: http://www.animazoo.com/ I saw these guys give a presentation about two years ago: the processing's almost entirely done with the suit. It's even possible to capture information at a significant distance: a major motorcycle manufacturer used it to work out the applied ergonomics of their more recent sports models, and adapt it so that it would give a 'more optimal ride', I believe the term was.
Slashdot Mirror
Only about an hour ago, there was a small anti-knife march going past my flat in East London. I have to admit that I reckon that licensed regulation has always been a better method for lowering misuse of weapons than an outright ban. However, that's going to be bloody hard to achieve with knives, given their prevalence as a tool in the real world. Oh well.
It's just a wonder that they haven't gotten as far as mounting an armistice on archery equipment, such as compound and recurve bows, or crossbows. Oh, that's right: it requires skill to use those. I guess I'm not so worried about the police coming to take my bows away from me, then.
Slashdot really needs a '+5 Asshat' option...
http://www.derm.med.ed.ac.uk/06_teaching/redhairgen.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Evolution http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001371.html
Haha! You guys may well be screwed, but us ginger-haired folks are sorted: we've evolved in such a manner that we produce our own vitamin D...
I work for a London University; I'm one of their IT technical monkeys, with some serverside and strategic work thrown in. I get to call myself SysAdmin, and they get their computers fixed. It's not an ideal job, but I enjoy it, and, more importantly, it's possible to buy a home based on the wage packet. If you can bite the bullet and admit to yourself that you're not going to get that lovely three-bedroom detached house with a double garage until you're in your forties, then life can be good. I live in East London, and I own a flat there. Even with the stupid house prices, even with the crippling interest rates, even with the ever-increasing food and energy bills, it's still possible to live, and do so comfortably.
You're technical people. Get used to the fact that you'll never earn anything like what a CEO's PA does: they've got more on their plate thn we give them credit for. Not only have they got to organise a capricious meatsack with an ego the size of God, they've got to interpret the whims and rants of said person into intelligible commands for their minions. On top of that, they've got to look good while doing it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not belittling our associated trades: I love what I do, and the day that I give it up for something else will be a sad one. The 'engineer as demi-god' days are over, for now, because we don't have the same sociological drives anymore: we're not in a post-war depression, there is no cold war, there is no great enemy that's immediately tangible. We are, currently, comfortable, aside from the self-imposed economic problems.
While we're not as socially respected as we once were, I don't believe that we were ever part of a richer social subset, unless employed by a government program of some description. Culturally, we're more used to luxury now. The traditional view of an engineer/technician is that of someone who is rather conservative in their habits, choosing to express themselves through their craft and abilities, rather than having three EeePCs.
Of course, having said that, the next manager that asks me why I'm so special, and whether I deserve the money that I earn, because 'we can outsource' is going to get a knee in the groin.
I wondered how long this would take to hit Slashdot. I built one for the Science Museum in London back in December. Far from new, and the design has been adapted heavily many, many times. The original Bowyer designs had some horrible friction issues. They're fun to make, provided you're not doing it totally on your own. The one that we made is from lasercut plywood; it took several days just to glue the pieces together... Either way, the design of the fab@home system is a bit more refined, but at several times the cost. We managed to put our RepRap together for a couple of hundred quid. The stepper motors were the only expensive thing.
touche...
Why -1 troll? This guy makes a fair point: Everyone's happy to watch savants on TV shows, telling some flat out stupid presenter what day of the week that March 12th 1732 was, but people are apparently afraid to try and make use of such talents. There's nothing stopping people with high-level autism from providing a useful function in society, other than some relatively prudish ideals about people being 'used'. Most savants tend to *enjoy* using their exclusive skill, and more often than not it's one that can be made into something very, very useful.
They cost the equivalent of $26 in the UK.
I'm just wondering, because if anyone's going to try and take it down, it'll be the scientologists: torrents obviously provide a far safer distribution method. I just don't want the UK government to tell me that I'm in the wrong and subject to prosecution. Scientology has little sway over here, so its only the government that I'm worried about...
Although I really, really lament the fact that Ordnance Survey decided that they didn't like the work that had been done for the 3D London. I was really hoping to be able to check out what me flat looked like in 3D. The only alternative is to go outside, and that doesn't bear thinking about... It'd also be really good for plotting trajectories so I can pick off the local chavs with my soon-to-be-complete trebuchet.
And I find it worrying just how easy it is to smuggle such stuff in... Yeah, ok - you can't expect X-Ray jockeys to know about every single type of new laptop available: the blogger was an arse for expecting them to. However, the fact that you can have 3oz of 'jello' (jelly, to the rest of us) on board with you should flag some concerns. There are, insofar as I'm aware, several materials that resemble gelatinous liquids that can be encouraged to go 'bang' by introducing a small electrical charge, such as that from any electronic item, which can also be carried in hand luggage. I dunno. I just think that as laudable as the pursuit of safety is, there's no sane way of doing it. You don't exactly need much to bring a plane down: many airlines still believe that it can be done simply by having a telephone turned on: it's definitely possible if you've got something that can transmit radio signals on the right frequency. Paranoia's making you look in the wrong directions. People who plan to do stuff like take a plane down are usually smart, and can think their way round this rudimentary attempt at security without any serious hassle.
...I can comfortably say that antidepressants aren't all that.
This is not to say that they have no effect, though.
The way that an antidepressant works (from the point of view of someone that isn't a chemist/biologist/pharmacist) is that it's much like a compression filter: it chops off the bottom end and the top end of emotional response. The purpose of them is not to 'make you happy' - that would cause a mass addiction problem, I reckon. They take you out of the horrific depths of depression, be it suicidal or not, and give you enough breathing space to gain some perspective.
There are people who cannot cope without antidepressants. Most of us (depressives, that is) can survive without them, though, once we've managed to level ourselves out a bit. I personally found them to be pretty hard work: anything that messes with your brain chemistry tends to have other results, too: I became prone to very short bursts of high activity, with long, long periods of lethargy and listlessness. Think stoned but jittery, with moments of sharp and fast clarity.
The important thing to remember is that there is a vast difference between mild depression, and very serious depression. Serious depression will stay with you for your entire life, while mild depression is more transitory. It hits you hard, regardless of whether it's 'mild' or not, but it's less likely to come back in any significant capacity if it's milder depression.
Don't forget that by muting the depths of depression, you can actually benefit a lot with the alleviation of many of the other associated problems. I found that my horrific insomnia (as in 1-2 hours of real sleep a night, tops) started to ease, purely because my mind wasn't working overtime on considering and worrying about my problems. That proved to be enough to help me start to fix myself, which is, I believe, the real purpose of antidepressants. Despite my doctor's belief that they're some kind of magic bullet...
Do you reckon that they wrote their own 3D software? It looks like complete arse: I'm pretty happy to say that it makes South Park look really sophisticated, you know?
Prior art, dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stubblebine
Mobile phone (Cell phone for you USians) black spots. Yes, that's right, places where there's little to no signal. They still exist, and they're pretty much ignored by the phone providers these days, because they make them look bad. So, it'd be possible to not only store, but work with radioactive materials in pretty much plain sight, because no-one's phone is bleeping at them, saying that there are naughty things occurring. Technology's great and all, but there are times when the flaws are greater. If this is going to be implemented, then do it off the back of the wired phone system, and not the cellular network. There's already enough traffic on there as it is, and not everywhere is covered, as I've just suggested.
Has anyone actually found a copy of the patent that Lancor are claiming has been infringed? I've searched for about 40 minutes, and can't find it anywhere. Apparently, it's registered as patent number RD8489.
I was on the Underground today, and was listening to these two teenage girls chatting about how 2005 was "back in the day", as if it was some significant period of time ago. We've managed to serve up such an instantaneous consumer culture that 2 years is considered an age of man: paired up with utterly unmemorable 'music', and you've got the reason. I reckon it's not got a huge amount to do with file sharing: it's all about the lowest common denominator.
Everything is marketed and labelled as if it were utterly new. People seem to forget that almost everything is recycled in some aspect. Amy Winehouse is not new. Nor is her drug-taking, pillock-marrying lifestyle. People have been doing that (in the public eye, at least) for nearly half a century. Get over yourselves.
MTV only worsens matters by making damn sure that on their 'Bestest Music Evar!' shows, on the rare occasion that they actually play them, only includes the same regurgitated pop crap that's sourced from within the previous five years, thus compounding the illusion that current pop music is innovative.
Gah. It's all bollocks, anyway.
Well yeah, hallucinogens aren't really what they're suggesting here, I'd hope. Otherwise, TV Poker would be even more boring than usual, because all that'd be going would be a table of players going "Woah, that dude's, like, putting a sword through his head. Or maybe it's my head, maaaan. Y'know, like, uh, swords. Yeah. Swords are sharp man. Y'know, like cutting, right? Yeah."
Actually, there's a chance that it may make it entertaining enough to actually watch... Who knows? On with the drug trials!
Seriously: if you can find a F/OSS package that's analogous to Flash in behaviour and output, then yes, by all means, teach them the F/OSS stuff - they'll learn to think outside the GUI, which will do them no end of good. If, however, you can't find a suitable replacement, then don't. Flash 5 is not even remotely appropriate any more - it bears little to no resemblance to the current versions of Flash. Photoshop 7 is fine, although the layering method has changed a bit: you can now nest them, as well as play about with layer comps, which you can't do in pre-CS versions. Dreamweaver - well, do you really need to ask? As for Movie Maker: you can download a free version of Avid, or try and get hold of Kino or something along those lines. Teaching them Movie Maker will not do anyone any favours.
Well, glad that I got an (unintended) laugh there, at least...
Thanks for the answers though, guys. I appreciate it. I come from a graphics background, so I think in terms of 3D graphics, not advanced semi-theoretical physics...
but I'm trying to figure out how this can be applied to our current electronic designs. If we use electron spin to store data, and presuming that we can determine which way it's spinning, then that gives us a total of six possibilities, right?
+pitch -pitch +yaw -yaw +roll -roll
Or, of course, this could be denoted as 0 and 1 instead of + and -. However, doesn't that throw out the current binary model? This'll effectively be base six, instead of base two, won't it?
I dunno - this isn't exactly my field, so I'm just trying to understand, is all.
Yeah - it's the troutware that OS X users have really got to be worried about now...
Heh. I wondered how long the Flamebait tagging would take :D
Long before: http://www.animazoo.com/ I saw these guys give a presentation about two years ago: the processing's almost entirely done with the suit. It's even possible to capture information at a significant distance: a major motorcycle manufacturer used it to work out the applied ergonomics of their more recent sports models, and adapt it so that it would give a 'more optimal ride', I believe the term was.