Temperature is odd about that, what feels chilly in the summer seems hot in the winter. The body acclimates to the weather. When it's freezing outside you come inside, 75 feels hot. When it's 100 outside and you come inside, 75 feels cold.
If I set my thermostat (granted, it's a cheep one) using Celsius it will keep the correct temperature, but I'm much more likely to be hot or cold because there can be as much as a 3 degree (Fahrenheit) difference.
Your problem is that birds make lousy thermometers. Crickets work much better.
So you can actually tell the difference between say... 15C and 16C but there really is little meaningful difference between say 71F and 72F.
I can tell the difference.
I can live without any of the rest of the metric system, but for temperature, it is significantly more useful.
I find that to be backwards. For anything but temperature, metric is easier to use (and I grew up in the US). Oh, temperature and cooking; decimal is easily divisible by 10s, but cups and gallons are based on quarters, thirds, halves, other fractions. How much is a third of a litre?
For many purposes, yes. But 1 degree celcius is too wide a scale for figuring out whether or not you need a jacket. Unless it's 30 below zero, both are the same at that temperature.
I wonder why it's giving you F and me C? It certainly could be smarter...
The difference is, that Google does not tell the answer.
It does on an android. Ask it the current temperature and it will tell you -- in centigrade, which is pretty dumb since it knows I'm in Illinois and we use Fahrenheit for air temperature here. You have to specify Fahrenheit. When they had the floods in Colorado I pulled out my phone and asked the elevation of Colorado Springs and it told me. I asked it how far it was to Bellville and it said "94 miles" which surprised me; I was expecting kilometers since it answers temperature with Centigrade.
It has trouble with "fur lined gloves", it thinks you're saying "for lined gloves" with laughable results.
Of course not. It's an IBM machine, they'll sell Google as many as Google wants to buy. Of course, so can Microsoft but they don't have a good track record at all.
I wish Google did have a Watson. This morning I asked my Android "where can I buy a good pair of fur-lined leather gloves" and it thought I said "where can I buy a good pair of for lined leather gloves" and returned no useful results at all. The programmer was a southerner, I guess? "How much does them go fer?"
Amazing what it does get right, but Google, buy a few Watsons!
Already here. CrystaLens, artificial knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, cochlear implants, artificial hearts... you will be assimilated (I already have been).
physical immortality
You may live to see it if you're young enough. But nobody's going to be uploading brains any time soon, and you would have to go 1/10th the speed of light to reach Alpha Proxima in 400 years.
It's a pipe dream. Before you're going to build a computer that works like a human brain you're going to have to figure out how the human brain actually works. Neuroscientists aren't clueless, but they don't have very many clues. The science is in its infancy, and thinking you can replicate something you don't understand is the height of ignorant hubris.
Yes, you can easily program a computer to fool a human into thinking it thinks like a human. Trivially easy, humans are easy to fool. Just ask the Amazing Randi or David Copperfield; that's how IBM's Watson "thinks". Smoke and mirrors. A logic gate has no resemblance whatever to a neuron or axion, and an electronic bit has no analog to serotonin or other brain chemicals.
They were taught well. He was incredibly bad for anyone but the rich, specifically for his idiotic (probably more like disingenuous) "trickle down theory" and passing legislation that slashed the capital gains tax. It loosed an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers that cost me 1/4th of my income when Disney was fighting the Romneyesque pirates, trying to keep from being bought up, sliced apart, the pieces sold and the employees all fired.
Nixon was worse with his wage-price freeze (at least he signed environmental legislation, the US was just FILTHY before 1970).
Bush II, OTOH, was bad for each and every person on the planet. I never thought I'd ever see a worse president than that useless Carter, but Shrub proved me wrong.
The truth is, the only two Presidents in my lifetime who were actually good for the working man were Eisenhower (interstate highway system) and Clinton, who ended generational welfare, balanced the budget that Reagan and Bush had left in deep deficit, and took us out of their recession into the biggest boom I'd seen.
And I voted for Reagan the first time he ran, against his re-election. Exactly the opposite with Clinton, who I judged a sleaze (it turned out I was right about sleazy but wrong about what kind of sleaze) and voted against him, then for his reelection when I saw he was doing a good job.
About 2000 I woke up and realized I'd been voting for men who wanted me in prison and started voting third party (only one of the three viable alternatives want me in prison).
Some of your friends and relatives smoke pot, why do you vote for their incarceration? Speaking of the working man, almost all construction workers I know smoke pot when they get off work, so either mainstream party is bad for them (they've all been hurting since Bush crashed the economy late in his second term.
BTW, mods, he's not trolling, he's just uninformed.
After finishing my first completely nonfiction book (in print soon, bought ISBNs yesterday) I have to say that filling plot holes in a single story is hard, let alone a series that lasted as long as TNG.
All of my uncles were in WWII, but none of them talked about it. Probably wanted to leave the horror of war in the past; one of them was at Normandy Beach on D-Day, another was wounded when his ship was attacked. My dad was too young, he joined during the Korean war. One grandfather was in WWI and he never talked about that, either.
I remember once when I was really small asking someone, Dad or Grandpa, I don't remember who, some question and he said "I don't know, but it's in a book somewhere. Everything you want to know is in a book." Not true, but he believed it.
I did have an excellent first grade teacher, on the second day of second grade I freaked out a teacher who caught me reading a sixth grade reading level book. She didn't believe I was reading it until I read some out loud. A lot of grownups got really excited by that and I couldn't understand why.
I've discovered I have a knack for writing stuff people actually enjoy reading, I'll probably write full time when I retire next year.
If Einstein were alive, he would have told you, as he told them when he was still alive -- he wasn't particularly intelligent, only passionately curious.
How could one possibly be intelligent without being passionately curious?
run around town in your loafers not giving a fuck what anyone else thought of you.
Personally, I don't see giving a fuck what others think as a particularly intelligent trait. Not giving a fuck what people think has been beneficial to me. Followers give a fuck, creators seldom do.
Get another cup of coffee, he wants his old netbook to be the router. He doesn't want to BUY one, he's a nerd. He wants to make one out of junk. I commend him for it, I do the same when I can.
If I were doing the same thing with my setup, a wireless notebook and two wired towers, I'd slap a NIC or two (I'm sure I have some old ones somewhere) in one of the towers, feed the DSL to that and feed the home-made wireless router with that.
I'd still want advice on the best OSes for the two routers.
You guys all seem to be missing the point. He wants to repurpose old hardware without spending anything. I used to do something similar in my teenaged years (this was in the analog era) when I'd turn used transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes. "But you can get a professional one for only $250!" Yeah, but I could turn a broken radio into one for $2.50.
If my aging router dies before this notebook does I'll probably do something similar with it. Plugging a new router in is no fun, building your own out of useless junk is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well done, mods, I should have thought of that since databases is what I do, but I didn't. Kudos, excellent comment.
My phone links to "world weather powered by doineedajacket.com". Hardly a watson...
I tried that after the first time it gave celcius, figuring it would work, but it didn't.
Temperature is odd about that, what feels chilly in the summer seems hot in the winter. The body acclimates to the weather. When it's freezing outside you come inside, 75 feels hot. When it's 100 outside and you come inside, 75 feels cold.
If I set my thermostat (granted, it's a cheep one) using Celsius it will keep the correct temperature, but I'm much more likely to be hot or cold because there can be as much as a 3 degree (Fahrenheit) difference.
Your problem is that birds make lousy thermometers. Crickets work much better.
So you can actually tell the difference between say... 15C and 16C but there really is little meaningful difference between say 71F and 72F.
I can tell the difference.
I can live without any of the rest of the metric system, but for temperature, it is significantly more useful.
I find that to be backwards. For anything but temperature, metric is easier to use (and I grew up in the US). Oh, temperature and cooking; decimal is easily divisible by 10s, but cups and gallons are based on quarters, thirds, halves, other fractions. How much is a third of a litre?
For many purposes, yes. But 1 degree celcius is too wide a scale for figuring out whether or not you need a jacket. Unless it's 30 below zero, both are the same at that temperature.
I wonder why it's giving you F and me C? It certainly could be smarter...
The number of words in Nobots - 42 / 1000
No cites? Of course not, you're wrong. and since I saw your comment metamoderating, guess what?
Check any of those links and you'll see that 2/3 of the world's population is Christian, Islam, Hindu, or Bhuddist.
As I'm a Christian I'll consider that you're simply ignorant rather than lying. Judge not... but you're WAY overrated.
The difference is, that Google does not tell the answer.
It does on an android. Ask it the current temperature and it will tell you -- in centigrade, which is pretty dumb since it knows I'm in Illinois and we use Fahrenheit for air temperature here. You have to specify Fahrenheit. When they had the floods in Colorado I pulled out my phone and asked the elevation of Colorado Springs and it told me. I asked it how far it was to Bellville and it said "94 miles" which surprised me; I was expecting kilometers since it answers temperature with Centigrade.
It has trouble with "fur lined gloves", it thinks you're saying "for lined gloves" with laughable results.
Of course not. It's an IBM machine, they'll sell Google as many as Google wants to buy. Of course, so can Microsoft but they don't have a good track record at all.
I wish Google did have a Watson. This morning I asked my Android "where can I buy a good pair of fur-lined leather gloves" and it thought I said "where can I buy a good pair of for lined leather gloves" and returned no useful results at all. The programmer was a southerner, I guess? "How much does them go fer?"
Amazing what it does get right, but Google, buy a few Watsons!
Uploaded minds,
Not in the lifetime of an infant born today
electromechanical bodies,
Already here. CrystaLens, artificial knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, cochlear implants, artificial hearts... you will be assimilated (I already have been).
physical immortality
You may live to see it if you're young enough. But nobody's going to be uploading brains any time soon, and you would have to go 1/10th the speed of light to reach Alpha Proxima in 400 years.
It's a pipe dream. Before you're going to build a computer that works like a human brain you're going to have to figure out how the human brain actually works. Neuroscientists aren't clueless, but they don't have very many clues. The science is in its infancy, and thinking you can replicate something you don't understand is the height of ignorant hubris.
Yes, you can easily program a computer to fool a human into thinking it thinks like a human. Trivially easy, humans are easy to fool. Just ask the Amazing Randi or David Copperfield; that's how IBM's Watson "thinks". Smoke and mirrors. A logic gate has no resemblance whatever to a neuron or axion, and an electronic bit has no analog to serotonin or other brain chemicals.
These folks are fools or charlatans or both.
They were taught well. He was incredibly bad for anyone but the rich, specifically for his idiotic (probably more like disingenuous) "trickle down theory" and passing legislation that slashed the capital gains tax. It loosed an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers that cost me 1/4th of my income when Disney was fighting the Romneyesque pirates, trying to keep from being bought up, sliced apart, the pieces sold and the employees all fired.
Nixon was worse with his wage-price freeze (at least he signed environmental legislation, the US was just FILTHY before 1970).
Bush II, OTOH, was bad for each and every person on the planet. I never thought I'd ever see a worse president than that useless Carter, but Shrub proved me wrong.
The truth is, the only two Presidents in my lifetime who were actually good for the working man were Eisenhower (interstate highway system) and Clinton, who ended generational welfare, balanced the budget that Reagan and Bush had left in deep deficit, and took us out of their recession into the biggest boom I'd seen.
And I voted for Reagan the first time he ran, against his re-election. Exactly the opposite with Clinton, who I judged a sleaze (it turned out I was right about sleazy but wrong about what kind of sleaze) and voted against him, then for his reelection when I saw he was doing a good job.
About 2000 I woke up and realized I'd been voting for men who wanted me in prison and started voting third party (only one of the three viable alternatives want me in prison).
Some of your friends and relatives smoke pot, why do you vote for their incarceration? Speaking of the working man, almost all construction workers I know smoke pot when they get off work, so either mainstream party is bad for them (they've all been hurting since Bush crashed the economy late in his second term.
BTW, mods, he's not trolling, he's just uninformed.
If Microsoft's attempt at a tablet wasn't so abysmal, people would have bought it. They're just not that good at interfaces.
Plus upkeep. The mechanical horse only needs to be fed when you're using it, and you can store it in a crate no bigger than itself.
After finishing my first completely nonfiction book (in print soon, bought ISBNs yesterday) I have to say that filling plot holes in a single story is hard, let alone a series that lasted as long as TNG.
And lens flare...
Excellent, thank you!
All of my uncles were in WWII, but none of them talked about it. Probably wanted to leave the horror of war in the past; one of them was at Normandy Beach on D-Day, another was wounded when his ship was attacked. My dad was too young, he joined during the Korean war. One grandfather was in WWI and he never talked about that, either.
I remember once when I was really small asking someone, Dad or Grandpa, I don't remember who, some question and he said "I don't know, but it's in a book somewhere. Everything you want to know is in a book." Not true, but he believed it.
I did have an excellent first grade teacher, on the second day of second grade I freaked out a teacher who caught me reading a sixth grade reading level book. She didn't believe I was reading it until I read some out loud. A lot of grownups got really excited by that and I couldn't understand why.
I've discovered I have a knack for writing stuff people actually enjoy reading, I'll probably write full time when I retire next year.
Tsk. Curiosity generates intelligence.
I think that, but I don't know that. You're a biologist, could you explain the biology behind that to us? I'd be very interested.
If Einstein were alive, he would have told you, as he told them when he was still alive -- he wasn't particularly intelligent, only passionately curious.
How could one possibly be intelligent without being passionately curious?
run around town in your loafers not giving a fuck what anyone else thought of you.
Personally, I don't see giving a fuck what others think as a particularly intelligent trait. Not giving a fuck what people think has been beneficial to me. Followers give a fuck, creators seldom do.
Get another cup of coffee, he wants his old netbook to be the router. He doesn't want to BUY one, he's a nerd. He wants to make one out of junk. I commend him for it, I do the same when I can.
If I were doing the same thing with my setup, a wireless notebook and two wired towers, I'd slap a NIC or two (I'm sure I have some old ones somewhere) in one of the towers, feed the DSL to that and feed the home-made wireless router with that.
I'd still want advice on the best OSes for the two routers.
Google is your friend (I hope you're not spamming).
You guys all seem to be missing the point. He wants to repurpose old hardware without spending anything. I used to do something similar in my teenaged years (this was in the analog era) when I'd turn used transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes. "But you can get a professional one for only $250!" Yeah, but I could turn a broken radio into one for $2.50.
If my aging router dies before this notebook does I'll probably do something similar with it. Plugging a new router in is no fun, building your own out of useless junk is.