I was thinking bloat more in the context of how much value does it really add
What damn bloat are you talking about? All it takes is a few hundreds of kilobytes on the laptop's flash memory thing. That's what you're whining about? A few hundreds of kilobytes on a 1 GB (or was it 512 MB?) memory?
How could anyone mod that insightful, that's an awful thing to say. Kids need to go to bed at a certain time, period. Even during summer break, because if kids starts to go to bed at 2am, even "exceptionally", then their rhythm is ruined, and you'll only have to blame it on yourself when they'll start sleeping on their desks at school.
I'm just asking you what I'm supposed to know. You carefully avoid mentioning anything I didn't mention and instead say "There are many factors", which leads me to think that you're an idiot who tries to sound smart.
For example, wether we like to go to war or not, attacking Britain, Australia, or hell, even France, is pretty much unthinkable. [...] Why?
"ICBM's, Nuke subs, etc", if not then tell me what else, I'm eager to hear it, as you seem to be so secretive about what "peaceniks" ignore.
1. What enables & perpetuates the reliable peace that currently exists between dozens of nations on this planet?
Enlighten me, oh wise master, and tell me what are these things that enable peace, besides ICBMs, nuclear submarines and the fact that not everybody loves going at war against anyone all the time for no reason?
Lets face it, if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure.
Oh come on. These type of posts on Slashdot crack me up. The "be a super-parent FFS!" type of post. The problem with "parenting" is not that people rely on machines to enforce rules, the problem is the lack of firm rules. You just need to watch an episode of Super Nanny to know what time it is, that is, a lot of children don't have any fixed set of rules, they can do whatever they want and it makes them very unhappy. In the real world, most people are far from being perfect parents, and they have trouble getting their authority respected. Such solutions help with that, by firmly enforcing rules that parents don't manage to enforce this firmly on their own.
In my experience, the parents who would be responsible enough to use such a feature don't need it anyways.
I don't completely agree, this feature can help enforce a rule, or give more legitimacy to a decision, for example, instead of trying to estimate how long your offspring has spent on the console and going "Mmmh I think you've played enough of it for today. -But Dad?!?", you can agree with them on a weekly amount and when the time runs out, there's no "but I didn't even play it while you were at work" arguments or anything of the sort, the time you agreed on has unambiguously ran out, and there's nothing to argue about.
By the way that would also be cool if that thing prevented the Xbox from running from say 10:30pm to 6am.
what is the probability that monkeys just hate one color over another
What's wrong with all you people thinking you're oh so smart for coming up with the idea that "maybe the monkey doesn't like the blue ones"??
RTFS FFS, it says in the first place monkeys didn't show preference for any colour of M&M's. Obviously that means that monkeys only start caring about colours once they must make a choice and that this choice affects their future choices by making the one they rejected more likely to be rejected again, although the choice of the first rejection was pretty much random in the first place. God I hate it when Average Nerdy Joes dismiss scientific papers with shitty little witty comments that took them less than 10 seconds to think up.
Oh congratulations, genius! You're so fucking smart it took you only a few seconds to find a fundamental flaw in the results of a research a team of scientists has spent weeks on! A quarter of the Slashdotters commenting on this story thought about it but not these scientists from Yale, wow, just wow, you know what that means, you guys are too smart for Yale!
Considered what most Slashdotters look like, it might be preferable if these space-babes were b.. oh wait.. why did the half of people who replied to your comment thought just like me?:-S
Cloud cover and atmospheric interference there is small
It's much smaller in the desert of Atacama.
in an area where it can view a great degree of the sky
No?! You can only see half of the sky there, and I'm pretty sure you couldn't see any of the satellites in the equatorial orbit, and the ones far enough for you to see would still be close to the horizon so you'd still have a lot of atmosphere to see through. That's close to the equator that you can see most of the sky in a day, not the poles..
They're stopped by the knowledge that we have the capability and possibly the will to retaliate overwhelmingly.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. They're not stopped by anything, we're the ones who will be stopped from invading them, if we ever do that, and you know the Bush administration wants that. You don't invade a country that actually has WMDs.
They attack us, they WILL be destroyed.
Once again, works the other way around too, and that's what matters.
They don't attack us, they MIGHT be destroyed.
You didn't learn anything from the Cold War, did you? We're not going to do a damn thing to North Korea, and everybody knows that.
One might argue that equation isn't as valid for the sort of people who spawn suicide bombers, but Asians are generally known for being more circumspect.
Yeah, asians would never do such a thing as killing themselves to kill enemies. Except maybe Kamikazes, lol.
You guys stared down the USSR for the entirety of the cold war, facing an enemy with superior numbers and brutal methods who you were very much aware had nukes, and you got by just fine.
I agree here, for about 30 years the USA stared at the USSR in the eyes with both the finger on the button that would unleash a crapload of ICBMs on each other, and we got many times close to seeing that happened, and now we're scared of a couple of crappy countries who are trying to develop a military nuclear program to make sure they survive (Iran obviously doesn't want to nuke us only to undergo an ICBM shower that would entirely tick it off the map, they just want to make sure they're not the next Iraq).
After us vs. the nazi/fascist/japanese axis of evil, and after us vs. the communist axis of evil, it's like we don't have a real enemy to produce bombs and drop them on anymore, so we declare that we have a new axis of evil, whose attacks against us are resumed by a handful of nutters attacking us every once in a while (last time was 6 years ago). Sad.
The country that has the dubious honor of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons on humans doesn't get to take the moral high ground and lecture Iran about their nuclear ambitions.
Well actually, no, while the US were the only ones to use nukes during war, they weren't the only ones to use them against people. Think about atmospheric tests. As for morality and lecturing, it's more that the US want to keep the option of invading Iran, which would be impossible if Iran had operational ICBMs.
It may be impossible to travel to other stars, but we don't know that for certain. We have to try, and then declare it impossible.
Oh God, did you even think before you pulled that one out? Of course we do not have to "try" to find out it's "impossible", we know damn well what we can or can't do and the thing is as of now we couldn't send a probe to another star in a timely manner, let alone astronauts. "Trying" would be like trying to simulate the folding of proteins with a DEC PDP-1. We just can't do that as of now, period.
Being the freest doesn't make one free. Haven't been to Europe lately I take it?
I live in France. Can you tell me how France is "not freer" than the USA? Or any other European country for that matter? Are you sure the USA are freer than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and every country of Europe (not put together)?
My point is, if the USA have ever been "the freest country in the world", it had to be a long time ago, if ever (for example, a few countries had abolished slavery before the USA even existed)
Here's exactly the kind of comment I hate whenever we're talking about something dealing more or less with extraterrestrial life, it's how we go from very down-to-Earth claims such as "here's what we know about exoplanets" to "here's what we might find out a few years from now" to "teh extraterrians they wont care about us cause were so inferior omg!". I know extraterrestrial life is an exciting topic, but because they're so little to satisfy ourselves with people are so quick to wildly speculate that they forget that the next important and exciting steps are to find a planet where conditions for life as we know it is there and then to detect biological activity on a planet, and at this stage we're most likely talking about bacterial forms of life and such.
But you people don't care, you'd rather push your imagination to its limits to the point you'd find it disappointing if we found an alien civilisation but that they wouldn't communicate with us in a satisfactory manner. It's like people only care about what would the alien Britney Spears be like, what would aliens think about us, or what their technology must be like, that kind of stuff.
by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.
The problem, is that the wobble we measure is a lot more messy, as we have relatively poor signal/noise ratios. The wobble isn't even very messy when you look at it in the frequency domain (its spectra), as basically each planet orbiting it represents a single vertical line, provided that their orbit is not too eccentric.
There was this java program I tried to analyse the "wobble" data of stats in order to find planets, i just don't remember what it's called, however usually the community of people who use that find about planets before the press releases.
Who the hell is building these prisons that it's as easy to kill someone inside as out?
First off, it's easy to kill someone. If you had watched the show Oz, you should know that by attaching a razor blade to a stick, by taking a spring, straightening on of its ends and rubbing the tip against a wall to make it sharp, or same with a toothbrush, you can make and easily concealable weapon (not to mention that you don't necessarily need a weapon to kill), even if it doesn't make murder as easy as running a car at full speed into a crowd or shooting a crowd with an assault rifle.
Secondly, it's not "as easy" inside as it is outside of jail, it's that people in jail are more willing to kill that the rest of the population. I for one am surprised murder rates are this low in jail.
After all, it's kind of hare to commit a second murder while in jail.
You've never watched Oz have you?;)
More seriously, here's an interesting fact : "During 2002, there was a higher homicide rate among the U.S. resident population (6 per 100,000) than either in state prisons (4 per 100,000) or in local jails (3 per 100,000)." (source). So while there are less murders in jail than there is in society, it still happens (but it also shows how grossly exagerated it is in shows dealing with life in prison), so you're right.
Nah, this thing is fake to a certain extent. I've never seen human poop looking like that, they probably stuffed some brown stuff up their bottom and "crapped" it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking bloat more in the context of how much value does it really add
What damn bloat are you talking about? All it takes is a few hundreds of kilobytes on the laptop's flash memory thing. That's what you're whining about? A few hundreds of kilobytes on a 1 GB (or was it 512 MB?) memory?
But that's prime gaming time!
How could anyone mod that insightful, that's an awful thing to say. Kids need to go to bed at a certain time, period. Even during summer break, because if kids starts to go to bed at 2am, even "exceptionally", then their rhythm is ruined, and you'll only have to blame it on yourself when they'll start sleeping on their desks at school.
Are you admitting you don't know?
I'm just asking you what I'm supposed to know. You carefully avoid mentioning anything I didn't mention and instead say "There are many factors", which leads me to think that you're an idiot who tries to sound smart.
For example, wether we like to go to war or not, attacking Britain, Australia, or hell, even France, is pretty much unthinkable. [...] Why?
"ICBM's, Nuke subs, etc", if not then tell me what else, I'm eager to hear it, as you seem to be so secretive about what "peaceniks" ignore.
Isn't that just an appeal to authority?
I beg your pardon? What are you trying to say?
1. What enables & perpetuates the reliable peace that currently exists between dozens of nations on this planet?
Enlighten me, oh wise master, and tell me what are these things that enable peace, besides ICBMs, nuclear submarines and the fact that not everybody loves going at war against anyone all the time for no reason?
Like, show me the bigger picture, dude.
Lets face it, if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure.
Oh come on. These type of posts on Slashdot crack me up. The "be a super-parent FFS!" type of post. The problem with "parenting" is not that people rely on machines to enforce rules, the problem is the lack of firm rules. You just need to watch an episode of Super Nanny to know what time it is, that is, a lot of children don't have any fixed set of rules, they can do whatever they want and it makes them very unhappy. In the real world, most people are far from being perfect parents, and they have trouble getting their authority respected. Such solutions help with that, by firmly enforcing rules that parents don't manage to enforce this firmly on their own.
By the way, that's "of course", not "offcourse".
In my experience, the parents who would be responsible enough to use such a feature don't need it anyways.
I don't completely agree, this feature can help enforce a rule, or give more legitimacy to a decision, for example, instead of trying to estimate how long your offspring has spent on the console and going "Mmmh I think you've played enough of it for today. -But Dad?!?", you can agree with them on a weekly amount and when the time runs out, there's no "but I didn't even play it while you were at work" arguments or anything of the sort, the time you agreed on has unambiguously ran out, and there's nothing to argue about.
By the way that would also be cool if that thing prevented the Xbox from running from say 10:30pm to 6am.
what is the probability that monkeys just hate one color over another
What's wrong with all you people thinking you're oh so smart for coming up with the idea that "maybe the monkey doesn't like the blue ones"??
RTFS FFS, it says in the first place monkeys didn't show preference for any colour of M&M's. Obviously that means that monkeys only start caring about colours once they must make a choice and that this choice affects their future choices by making the one they rejected more likely to be rejected again, although the choice of the first rejection was pretty much random in the first place. God I hate it when Average Nerdy Joes dismiss scientific papers with shitty little witty comments that took them less than 10 seconds to think up.
Oh congratulations, genius! You're so fucking smart it took you only a few seconds to find a fundamental flaw in the results of a research a team of scientists has spent weeks on! A quarter of the Slashdotters commenting on this story thought about it but not these scientists from Yale, wow, just wow, you know what that means, you guys are too smart for Yale!
Considered what most Slashdotters look like, it might be preferable if these space-babes were b.. oh wait.. why did the half of people who replied to your comment thought just like me? :-S
Cloud cover and atmospheric interference there is small
It's much smaller in the desert of Atacama.
in an area where it can view a great degree of the sky
No?! You can only see half of the sky there, and I'm pretty sure you couldn't see any of the satellites in the equatorial orbit, and the ones far enough for you to see would still be close to the horizon so you'd still have a lot of atmosphere to see through. That's close to the equator that you can see most of the sky in a day, not the poles..
They're stopped by the knowledge that we have the capability and possibly the will to retaliate overwhelmingly.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. They're not stopped by anything, we're the ones who will be stopped from invading them, if we ever do that, and you know the Bush administration wants that. You don't invade a country that actually has WMDs.
They attack us, they WILL be destroyed.
Once again, works the other way around too, and that's what matters.
They don't attack us, they MIGHT be destroyed.
You didn't learn anything from the Cold War, did you? We're not going to do a damn thing to North Korea, and everybody knows that.
One might argue that equation isn't as valid for the sort of people who spawn suicide bombers, but Asians are generally known for being more circumspect.
Yeah, asians would never do such a thing as killing themselves to kill enemies. Except maybe Kamikazes, lol.
You guys stared down the USSR for the entirety of the cold war, facing an enemy with superior numbers and brutal methods who you were very much aware had nukes, and you got by just fine.
I agree here, for about 30 years the USA stared at the USSR in the eyes with both the finger on the button that would unleash a crapload of ICBMs on each other, and we got many times close to seeing that happened, and now we're scared of a couple of crappy countries who are trying to develop a military nuclear program to make sure they survive (Iran obviously doesn't want to nuke us only to undergo an ICBM shower that would entirely tick it off the map, they just want to make sure they're not the next Iraq).
After us vs. the nazi/fascist/japanese axis of evil, and after us vs. the communist axis of evil, it's like we don't have a real enemy to produce bombs and drop them on anymore, so we declare that we have a new axis of evil, whose attacks against us are resumed by a handful of nutters attacking us every once in a while (last time was 6 years ago). Sad.
The country that has the dubious honor of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons on humans doesn't get to take the moral high ground and lecture Iran about their nuclear ambitions.
Well actually, no, while the US were the only ones to use nukes during war, they weren't the only ones to use them against people. Think about atmospheric tests. As for morality and lecturing, it's more that the US want to keep the option of invading Iran, which would be impossible if Iran had operational ICBMs.
It may be impossible to travel to other stars, but we don't know that for certain. We have to try, and then declare it impossible.
Oh God, did you even think before you pulled that one out? Of course we do not have to "try" to find out it's "impossible", we know damn well what we can or can't do and the thing is as of now we couldn't send a probe to another star in a timely manner, let alone astronauts. "Trying" would be like trying to simulate the folding of proteins with a DEC PDP-1. We just can't do that as of now, period.
Being the freest doesn't make one free. Haven't been to Europe lately I take it?
I live in France. Can you tell me how France is "not freer" than the USA? Or any other European country for that matter? Are you sure the USA are freer than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and every country of Europe (not put together)?
My point is, if the USA have ever been "the freest country in the world", it had to be a long time ago, if ever (for example, a few countries had abolished slavery before the USA even existed)
Yup. And actually they've had an update related to today's release which is quite relevant.
#1 : The earliest computer games didn't offer exploration.
Yeah, except Ken Thompson's 1967 Space Travel game which involved exploring a vector-graphics solar system.
Here's exactly the kind of comment I hate whenever we're talking about something dealing more or less with extraterrestrial life, it's how we go from very down-to-Earth claims such as "here's what we know about exoplanets" to "here's what we might find out a few years from now" to "teh extraterrians they wont care about us cause were so inferior omg!". I know extraterrestrial life is an exciting topic, but because they're so little to satisfy ourselves with people are so quick to wildly speculate that they forget that the next important and exciting steps are to find a planet where conditions for life as we know it is there and then to detect biological activity on a planet, and at this stage we're most likely talking about bacterial forms of life and such.
But you people don't care, you'd rather push your imagination to its limits to the point you'd find it disappointing if we found an alien civilisation but that they wouldn't communicate with us in a satisfactory manner. It's like people only care about what would the alien Britney Spears be like, what would aliens think about us, or what their technology must be like, that kind of stuff.
and the parent star is 41 light years away, is that like... next door? next town? next country?
Next town. ((41 light years) / (1 AU)) * 0.7 mm = 1.82 kilometers
You could have found out on your own I'm sure ;-)
by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.
The problem, is that the wobble we measure is a lot more messy, as we have relatively poor signal/noise ratios. The wobble isn't even very messy when you look at it in the frequency domain (its spectra), as basically each planet orbiting it represents a single vertical line, provided that their orbit is not too eccentric.
There was this java program I tried to analyse the "wobble" data of stats in order to find planets, i just don't remember what it's called, however usually the community of people who use that find about planets before the press releases.
So, no actual cool GPS iPhone-killer phone? Oh the unimaginable disappointment!
Is Copeland going to write a sequel to Microserfs?
You mean.. JPod? (Seriously, all I had to do was to click one of the first links on the page you linked to..)
"In fact, JPod can be seen as "a 21st-century sibling" to [Microserfs], in the "Google age"."
Who the hell is building these prisons that it's as easy to kill someone inside as out?
First off, it's easy to kill someone. If you had watched the show Oz, you should know that by attaching a razor blade to a stick, by taking a spring, straightening on of its ends and rubbing the tip against a wall to make it sharp, or same with a toothbrush, you can make and easily concealable weapon (not to mention that you don't necessarily need a weapon to kill), even if it doesn't make murder as easy as running a car at full speed into a crowd or shooting a crowd with an assault rifle.
Secondly, it's not "as easy" inside as it is outside of jail, it's that people in jail are more willing to kill that the rest of the population. I for one am surprised murder rates are this low in jail.
After all, it's kind of hare to commit a second murder while in jail.
You've never watched Oz have you? ;)
More seriously, here's an interesting fact : "During 2002, there was a higher homicide rate among the U.S. resident population (6 per 100,000) than either in state prisons (4 per 100,000) or in local jails (3 per 100,000)." (source). So while there are less murders in jail than there is in society, it still happens (but it also shows how grossly exagerated it is in shows dealing with life in prison), so you're right.
A better question would be why so many much-less-heinous crimes are receiving punishments similar to murder.
As other people pointed out, other types of criminals such as rappists tend to do it again, as most murderers only kill once.
Nah, this thing is fake to a certain extent. I've never seen human poop looking like that, they probably stuffed some brown stuff up their bottom and "crapped" it.