I agree.. the entire shortchange seems due to the fact that the author got some false postiives (ham ranked as spam). I find this really surprising, since in the year or so that I've been using POPFile, on hundreds of incoming emails a day, at about 85% spam/ham ratio (yes, that's about 6/7 are spam) and I think I got maybe *one* false positive in that whole year.. And even that one took me a couple readings to decide that it really wasn't spam. In pre-filter days, that one message would have stood a pretty decent chance of me just deleting it on a first read, so I'd assert the filter is no worse than human judgement.
So maybe the author just needs some tutorials about training or something.. Or maybe he mis-classified something (these *will* throw off your false positives and negatives, and need to be manually fixed generally).
And I even "cheated" on training my POPFile install. I have been saving spam in my eudora folders for a while and I just dumped them into a flat-file and bulk-loaded it into POPFile. I was getting 98% filtering success on day 1, and it only got better as I did some real training over the coming weeks.
So my note to anyone who read the article and is still waffling, don't just take one person's "experiment" as your benchmark.. find some people who have been using the tools for a while and solicit their opinions. POPFile radically changed my view of email, and made several spam-overwhelmed addresses useable again.
Shame that Taco didn't pick the "Soothing Green Light" one as a favorite of his, because I liked it the best of the set.
Can we have a writein vote where the most popular one with the readers also gets made into a shirt? If so, this is my vote for the "soothing green light" one...
Oh, and don't forget extended sizes.. XXL or XXXL would be a nice thing. Some of us like our shirts baggy.
The sad part is that I did the same decode and wondered the same thing. I guess deciphering bit patterns on t-shirts really does mean one belongs here..
Yeah, the battery compartment was poorly designed. My cover is barely hanging on at this point. I've got a couple heavy rubber bands around it to give it a fighting chance, but one good thump and I'm sure it would finally break.
Also why did they have to have it take *3* batteries? Those cells are almost always sold in 2 packs, so unless you had a friend with the same model, you had a leftover that would go stale on you...
Re:how extraordinary
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I too found it interesting that not once in the article did the author mention sarcasm (at least not by name). He contrasted irony to about half a dozen oft-mistaken concepts, but never differentiated or likened irony to sarcasm. Most strange. If I had to differentiate the two I would say that sarcasm is intentional irony, whereas irony more often manifests itself naturally.
Therefore the references he made to sources like the Onion would probably more likely qualify as sarcasm (and strictly for the sake of humor; I disagree with the comment that sarcarm is only nominally for hurtful situations) and not irony. Irony would be if the Onion ran some tongue-in-cheek article about Gates and then the next week, Gates actually did something close to what they described...
Thus their comments were "sarcasm", Gates actually doing so would be "irony", and while "coincidental", it would also fall under the umbrella of irony. Plain coincidence would be if Cnet said that Gates should do something, and then he happened to do it.. Nothing ironic there. But when the Onion publishes a farsical untruth, which then comes to fruition, *that* would be irony.
I omitted a point I wanted to make... Several of the folks on here used criteria of "playing games for hours" as examples to supposedly disprove ADD/ADHD. This just isn't true. It's widely accepted in the current ADD/ADHD literature of the ability of most AD[H]Ders to "hyperfocus", that is, to devote exceptional amounts of attention to a single task, usually one that interests or captivates them.
This also explains why many ADDers do better in school than expected (since one would normally expect distractive behavior to be fundamentally problematic). They are able to bring this powerful level of focus, usually onto one subject or assignment at a time and tend to score well on it. Cases where monotony sets in (long reports/theses, repetitive or unchallenging homework) tend to reflect lower grades, but the excitement of a big test can often lead to very good grades.
In short, anything that the ADDer finds challenging, even if it is of long duration (like gaming), they may be able to persist at for far longer periods of time than things that don't interest them.
Anyway, google for hyperfocus (or "hyper-focus") and ADD (or ADHD) and you'll find lots more on this particular subject.
Again, sorry for the addendum... Slashdot needs a re-edit function...
I've got it too (Well, ADD, not the hyperactive bit). I discovered that fact by accident after reading a book on the subject and finding an alarming number of exact matching anecdotal examples of my behavior. My mother has a PhD in psychology so I bounced it off her and reviewed the symptoms and she completely agreed with me...
So, back to the matter at hand. Yeah, there are lots of threads on here about how Ritalin is bogus or ADHD is overhyped. Whatever. There are a fair number of us with these symptoms, and if folks want to discount the research or the medications, that's their prerogative. Those ranters and doomsayers aren't very helpful to the rest of us.
Here's what's helpful:
50% of the solution is being able to identify the behavior in yourself. I was amazed, after the self-diagnosis, at how many times I caught myself slipping into ADD behavior. Just recognizing the symptoms and actions is huge. Try to get yourself into the habit of "auditing" yourself and determining what your behavior is at that moment. You may be shocked at how often the traits emerge. Meds (if/when you find one that works for you) just eliminate this need since they artificially keep you on a steadier keel.
Another useful tip is to use some periodic reminder to keep you on task. I have a runner's watch that I can set to beep at any recurring delay. Granted, this would be annoying at an office, but when I'm trying to get stuff accomplished around the house, having a little beep each 10 minutes is a good reminder to put down the magazine I've suddenly become engrossed in and get back to what I was originally working on. In the office, I'm sure you could use Outlook, or a screensaver, or any other of a bajillion reminder popup tools to perform the same function.
A book that I'm trying to finish (and ironically, ADD is making it hard for me to do so) is called ADD-Friendly Ways To Organize Your Life. It's not about meds or lifestyle changes. It's about simple strategies that work better for us ADD-ers at trying to keep things organized. My wife is borderline obsessive-compulsive about neatness and I'll admit right up front that the organization issue has brought us closer to divorce than anything else! The book is helping.. I'm trying to get the hang of each bit before moving on to the next.
Another thing to know about is that ADD/ADHD is often present along with other related issues, called the "Affective Spectrum. You might want to check to see if you experience any of those other disorders as well. They are finding that medication that works for one often will improve the others as well. Sometimes we stumble on one of the lesser disorders in ourselves and in the process discover a larger unidentified problem from one of the others. Googling for "affective spectrum" will turn up tons of research on the subject...
Anyway, welcome to the club. The first step is to admit to the problem. The rest gets easier after that...;)
What I found particularly ironic was at a prior company that I worked for, several employees felt perfectly at home copying pirated software (games, Office, etc) while at the same time going to great lengths to add copy-protection to the very software we wrote and sold.
I guess pirated software was okay as long as it was *someone else's* profits that were being ripped off..
The whole thing stank. It took me nearly 15 minutes to get the password, then it took like a dozen tries to submit my answers at the end, smacking me with 14 minutes worth of penalties, which I'm pretty sure will give me a negative overall score...
What a waste of a saturday morning.. I had looked forward to this but the whole thing was completely ruined by their lousy server. They'll have no hope of guaranteeing the people with the highest scores are really the brightest candidates.. they just had faster network connections...
Low ping bastards for a puzzle contest.. who'da'thought?
is it just a coincidence or is Microsoft picking langauge names that a lot of search engines can't handle? C#? F#?
I just did some tests with C# and less than half the search engines I looked at actually used the full string for the query. The rest dropped the # as punctuation and gave me any generic "C" results it could find.
Was there any thought put into this? Have we heard any statements or interviews from Microsoft about this?
Personally, with C, C++, and C# all looking identical to some search engines, I think they are going to make life rough for developers trying to look up documents/tips/errors/FAQs about their respective languages...
If you go to the space.com website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.
We all know Jupiter is big but this rare chance to phyicially see it compared to our own planet is kinda profound...
Now I can't claim to have experimented much with Mozilla's implementation of the bayes stuff, but I've been using Popfile for a while and let me just propose that if you're getting a false positive every other day, then at some point you must have (well, may have) classified a real message as spam. I saw that happen to me once. So I reviewed as much of my corpus as possible and found the offender. I reclassified it and viola haven't had a false positive since! And that's with hundreds of messages a day...
Again, perhaps Popfile is just a twinge smarter than Mozilla's, but I can't knock the 99% accuracy I've been getting, and with only false negatives (spam getting through, not filtered good mail)
You could test this by blowing away your corpus (or maybe just save it for re-use later) and see if you still experience it with a fresh set of good and bad corpus...
so then i must test every possible value of 'x' to make sure this still prints hello world?
Actually, yes. I mean, isn't that exactly how buffer overrun bugs work after all? There is some certain length of string that just happens to roll the subsequent code onto the stack or something...
Now, this specific example was a little trite, since it's almost entirely safe to assume that unless your compiler is wonky, x=2 and x=3 will behave the same. But you still have to at least test every boundary condition and first you have to identify every one of those too..
So it weighs a little more but is otherwise generally smaller than the OZ wizard models. As soon as they hit our shores and can be found less than list price, I'd love to pick one up. I love my OZ-650 but wish it had network capabilities. The Samba share feature of the new SLs will be sweet!
For me, I thought the article meandered a bit and even outright contradicted itself in places.
To wit: He espouses how important it is to keep the design fluid and to change it midstream as necessary, even being fast and loose with data types. While that may indulge the hacker in being creative, it also wreaks havoc on one conveniently omitted aspect of software: maintainability. Rare indeed is the code that is written and never touched ageain. I'm sure someone can toss in statistics about what percent of time or effort is invested in the creation of code, versus all the maintenance required in it later...
To ensure you are not shooting yourself in the foot with this method, the hacker/developer/maker needs to devote a certain amount of time in thought and design before beginning to code. If a stumbling block is detected, legitimate thought must be put into how much code must be *undone* and started over to ensure clean code at the finish. Merely exploiting the fact that you have sloppy data types that can be used in multiple ways will only lead to more convoluted (and certainly less intuitive) code.
Another issue that Paul just sort of tosses out as fact is his claim of how most mediums were at their peak "early on", as in "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed.". Now, I'm no art expert, but doesn't painting predate this by several millennia? Wouldn't the use of perspective by the Greeks seem like a monumental echelon above the flat art of the Egyptians? And aren't the Eqyptians to be praised for their realistic portraits relative to cave art? I'm pretty sure that 15th century art only represents generation after generation of gradual improvements. The fact that the artists following that era began to explore more abstract approaches like impressionism, expressionism and whatnot (http://www.quizbowlonline.com/artmovements.html) does not automatically elevate the "realists" to the pinnacle of the medium.
In any case, it was oversimplifications like this that made the premise a little harder for me to swallow. Very valid points were made, but the analogies do break down in a few places...
But I still marvel at how effective Popfile is. Paul has his moments of genius, there's no doubt.
If they want Hollywood ones, the list is long.. Gort (from "The Day the Earth Stood Still") Johnny Five (from "Short Circuit") Half the cast of "The Black Hole" Any of the Star Wars ones... Plus the evil one from "Saturn V", Logan's Run, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica and so on...
The public will recognize those.. I doubt there are many (if any?) non-fictitious robots that the general public could name or recognize.
Actually, the "Sonic Wind 1" is at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico. The Kansas Cosmosphere has the "Sonic Wind 2" on display... </nitpick>
if there were humans driving it at the start then there wouldn't have been at the end. apart from the fact that the sled stopped yb hitting an immobile object, the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways
Not this time, anyway. Although over at the International Space Hall of Fame, only about 15 miles from where the above test occured, is the rocket sled ("Sonic Wind 1") that John Stapp rode in 1954 at the same testing grounds when he earned the title "Fastest Man Alive". Granted that was only 632 mph, but he did sustain a deceleration of around 40 Gs that reportly forced his eyes partially out of their sockets.
The forces on this particular test would have easily killed a human, so it's safe to assume that this one was riderless.;)
[I'm a former Space Hall tour guide, just sharing some trivia..]
Not quite so. There are various installation guidelines that have to be adhered to for cabling to retain its rating. "Cat5 cable" is cable designed for a certain rating and engineered to certain minimum quality specifications, but your actions will dictate whether it keeps that rating.
Examples include no sharp bends, no more than 25 lbs of pulling force, certain distances from power lines, and so on.
You can overengineer and use Cat6 certified cabling which gives you more leeway, but you still do best to properly handle whatever you purchase..
I've been a member for a rather long time (almost 3 years) but I don't watch movies very promptly (their records show that I've only watched and returned 11 films in the past 3 months). So I guess I fall into "we like thi$ cu$tomer" category.
I just checked and I have 59 movies in my rental queue, and every single one of them is listed as "Now" availability. Granted, most of them are uncommon foreign and indie films so I'm not in competition with all those folks trying to get the latest "Austin Powers" movie or something, but still, having 59 flicks all sitting there at my disposal is probably indicative of some favoritism.
But back to the subject of shipping times. Personally I'm amazed at how quickly turnaround times are for me. I frequently will drop a disc in the mail on a Saturday afternoon, see it register with Netflix on Monday, and have my next disc by Tuesday or Wednesday. I never checked to see which center mine go to but I'm in Vancouver, WA if anyone knows off the top of their head..
So I don't think it decreases with time (length of membership).. I think it's more to do with the original hypothesis of number of films rented. I'm probably paying $6-7 bucks for each of mine now, but given the fact that I have a toddler and my wife and I both work, we're willing to pay that for the convenience. (I only make it out to the theaters a couple times each year).
I just did a quick test and stuck Solaris(1972) in my queue. Availability = "now". That's sad. Want me to rent it and send it to ya? As a new service emerges: scalping Netflix films...;)
Gecko? It's a name of the Engine, which applications are not limited to web-browsing, fortunately.
Well, you've kinda supported my point here. It's an "engine".. let's call it an "engine". And while it's not strictly for "browsing", it is just for rendering HTML: From the Mozilla FAQ: "Gecko (formerly Raptor) is the new HTML rendering engine in Mozilla."
All I was proposing was calling it the "Gecko Engine"... And the Gecko browser in turn uses the Gecko Engine. There's already precedent for this exact model. I mean, picture the "Quake engine". Lots of "non-quake" games use the "Quake engine" and that doesn't seem to throw anyone for a loop... So lots of apps will use the "Gecko Engine", one of them being Gecko the browser....
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.. the entire shortchange seems due to the fact that the author got some false postiives (ham ranked as spam). I find this really surprising, since in the year or so that I've been using POPFile, on hundreds of incoming emails a day, at about 85% spam/ham ratio (yes, that's about 6/7 are spam) and I think I got maybe *one* false positive in that whole year.. And even that one took me a couple readings to decide that it really wasn't spam. In pre-filter days, that one message would have stood a pretty decent chance of me just deleting it on a first read, so I'd assert the filter is no worse than human judgement.
So maybe the author just needs some tutorials about training or something.. Or maybe he mis-classified something (these *will* throw off your false positives and negatives, and need to be manually fixed generally).
And I even "cheated" on training my POPFile install. I have been saving spam in my eudora folders for a while and I just dumped them into a flat-file and bulk-loaded it into POPFile. I was getting 98% filtering success on day 1, and it only got better as I did some real training over the coming weeks.
So my note to anyone who read the article and is still waffling, don't just take one person's "experiment" as your benchmark.. find some people who have been using the tools for a while and solicit their opinions. POPFile radically changed my view of email, and made several spam-overwhelmed addresses useable again.
Put Red Hat and SCO in a cage and run it on pay-per-view...
"Let's Get It ON!"
Shame that Taco didn't pick the "Soothing Green Light" one as a favorite of his, because I liked it the best of the set.
Can we have a writein vote where the most popular one with the readers also gets made into a shirt? If so, this is my vote for the "soothing green light" one...
Oh, and don't forget extended sizes.. XXL or XXXL would be a nice thing. Some of us like our shirts baggy.
The sad part is that I did the same decode and wondered the same thing. I guess deciphering bit patterns on t-shirts really does mean one belongs here..
;)
I feel like such a poster child now.
Yeah, the battery compartment was poorly designed.
...
My cover is barely hanging on at this point. I've got a couple heavy rubber bands around it to give it a fighting chance, but one good thump and I'm sure it would finally break.
Also why did they have to have it take *3* batteries? Those cells are almost always sold in 2 packs, so unless you had a friend with the same model, you had a leftover that would go stale on you
I too found it interesting that not once in the article did the author mention sarcasm (at least not by name). He contrasted irony to about half a dozen oft-mistaken concepts, but never differentiated or likened irony to sarcasm. Most strange. If I had to differentiate the two I would say that sarcasm is intentional irony, whereas irony more often manifests itself naturally.
Therefore the references he made to sources like the Onion would probably more likely qualify as sarcasm (and strictly for the sake of humor; I disagree with the comment that sarcarm is only nominally for hurtful situations) and not irony. Irony would be if the Onion ran some tongue-in-cheek article about Gates and then the next week, Gates actually did something close to what they described...
Thus their comments were "sarcasm",
Gates actually doing so would be "irony",
and while "coincidental", it would also fall under the umbrella of irony. Plain coincidence would be if Cnet said that Gates should do something, and then he happened to do it.. Nothing ironic there. But when the Onion publishes a farsical untruth, which then comes to fruition, *that* would be irony.
Oh look, a dead horse... now where's my bat...?
I omitted a point I wanted to make...
Several of the folks on here used criteria of "playing games for hours" as examples to supposedly disprove ADD/ADHD. This just isn't true. It's widely accepted in the current ADD/ADHD literature of the ability of most AD[H]Ders to "hyperfocus", that is, to devote exceptional amounts of attention to a single task, usually one that interests or captivates them.
This also explains why many ADDers do better in school than expected (since one would normally expect distractive behavior to be fundamentally problematic). They are able to bring this powerful level of focus, usually onto one subject or assignment at a time and tend to score well on it. Cases where monotony sets in (long reports/theses, repetitive or unchallenging homework) tend to reflect lower grades, but the excitement of a big test can often lead to very good grades.
In short, anything that the ADDer finds challenging, even if it is of long duration (like gaming), they may be able to persist at for far longer periods of time than things that don't interest them.
Anyway, google for hyperfocus (or "hyper-focus") and ADD (or ADHD) and you'll find lots more on this particular subject.
Again, sorry for the addendum... Slashdot needs a re-edit function...
I've got it too (Well, ADD, not the hyperactive bit). I discovered that fact by accident after reading a book on the subject and finding an alarming number of exact matching anecdotal examples of my behavior. My mother has a PhD in psychology so I bounced it off her and reviewed the symptoms and she completely agreed with me...
;)
So, back to the matter at hand. Yeah, there are lots of threads on here about how Ritalin is bogus or ADHD is overhyped. Whatever. There are a fair number of us with these symptoms, and if folks want to discount the research or the medications, that's their prerogative. Those ranters and doomsayers aren't very helpful to the rest of us.
Here's what's helpful:
50% of the solution is being able to identify the behavior in yourself. I was amazed, after the self-diagnosis, at how many times I caught myself slipping into ADD behavior. Just recognizing the symptoms and actions is huge. Try to get yourself into the habit of "auditing" yourself and determining what your behavior is at that moment. You may be shocked at how often the traits emerge. Meds (if/when you find one that works for you) just eliminate this need since they artificially keep you on a steadier keel.
Another useful tip is to use some periodic reminder to keep you on task. I have a runner's watch that I can set to beep at any recurring delay. Granted, this would be annoying at an office, but when I'm trying to get stuff accomplished around the house, having a little beep each 10 minutes is a good reminder to put down the magazine I've suddenly become engrossed in and get back to what I was originally working on. In the office, I'm sure you could use Outlook, or a screensaver, or any other of a bajillion reminder popup tools to perform the same function.
A book that I'm trying to finish (and ironically, ADD is making it hard for me to do so) is called ADD-Friendly Ways To Organize Your Life. It's not about meds or lifestyle changes. It's about simple strategies that work better for us ADD-ers at trying to keep things organized. My wife is borderline obsessive-compulsive about neatness and I'll admit right up front that the organization issue has brought us closer to divorce than anything else! The book is helping.. I'm trying to get the hang of each bit before moving on to the next.
Another thing to know about is that ADD/ADHD is often present along with other related issues, called the "Affective Spectrum. You might want to check to see if you experience any of those other disorders as well. They are finding that medication that works for one often will improve the others as well. Sometimes we stumble on one of the lesser disorders in ourselves and in the process discover a larger unidentified problem from one of the others. Googling for "affective spectrum" will turn up tons of research on the subject...
Anyway, welcome to the club. The first step is to admit to the problem. The rest gets easier after that...
What I found particularly ironic was at a prior company that I worked for, several employees felt perfectly at home copying pirated software (games, Office, etc) while at the same time going to great lengths to add copy-protection to the very software we wrote and sold.
I guess pirated software was okay as long as it was *someone else's* profits that were being ripped off..
The whole thing stank. It took me nearly 15 minutes to get the password, then it took like a dozen tries to submit my answers at the end, smacking me with 14 minutes worth of penalties, which I'm pretty sure will give me a negative overall score...
What a waste of a saturday morning.. I had looked forward to this but the whole thing was completely ruined by their lousy server. They'll have no hope of guaranteeing the people with the highest scores are really the brightest candidates.. they just had faster network connections...
Low ping bastards for a puzzle contest.. who'da'thought?
is it just a coincidence or is Microsoft picking langauge names that a lot of search engines can't handle? C#? F#?
I just did some tests with C# and less than half the search engines I looked at actually used the full string for the query. The rest dropped the # as punctuation and gave me any generic "C" results it could find.
Was there any thought put into this? Have we heard any statements or interviews from Microsoft about this?
Personally, with C, C++, and C# all looking identical to some search engines, I think they are going to make life rough for developers trying to look up documents/tips/errors/FAQs about their respective languages...
If you go to the space.com website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.
We all know Jupiter is big but this rare chance to phyicially see it compared to our own planet is kinda profound...
or maybe I just need to get out more.
Now I can't claim to have experimented much with Mozilla's implementation of the bayes stuff, but I've been using Popfile for a while and let me just propose that if you're getting a false positive every other day, then at some point you must have (well, may have) classified a real message as spam. I saw that happen to me once. So I reviewed as much of my corpus as possible and found the offender. I reclassified it and viola haven't had a false positive since! And that's with hundreds of messages a day...
Again, perhaps Popfile is just a twinge smarter than Mozilla's, but I can't knock the 99% accuracy I've been getting, and with only false negatives (spam getting through, not filtered good mail)
You could test this by blowing away your corpus (or maybe just save it for re-use later) and see if you still experience it with a fresh set of good and bad corpus...
so then i must test every possible value of 'x' to make sure this still prints hello world?
Actually, yes. I mean, isn't that exactly how buffer overrun bugs work after all? There is some certain length of string that just happens to roll the subsequent code onto the stack or something...
Now, this specific example was a little trite, since it's almost entirely safe to assume that unless your compiler is wonky, x=2 and x=3 will behave the same. But you still have to at least test every boundary condition and first you have to identify every one of those too..
Nice. For comparison, if you use one of the older Wizard models (true, more of an "organizer" than a PDA), it's even smaller:
SL-C760: 120mm(W) 23.2mm(H) 83mm(D) 250g
SL-C750: 120mm(W) 18.6mm(H) 83mm(D) 225g
OZ-650: 153mm(W) 20.8mm(H) 85mm(D) 210g
OZ-770: 162mm(W) 19.9mm(H) 82mm(D) 220g
So it weighs a little more but is otherwise generally smaller than the OZ wizard models. As soon as they hit our shores and can be found less than list price, I'd love to pick one up. I love my OZ-650 but wish it had network capabilities. The Samba share feature of the new SLs will be sweet!
For me, I thought the article meandered a bit and even outright contradicted itself in places.
To wit:
He espouses how important it is to keep the design fluid and to change it midstream as necessary, even being fast and loose with data types. While that may indulge the hacker in being creative, it also wreaks havoc on one conveniently omitted aspect of software: maintainability. Rare indeed is the code that is written and never touched ageain. I'm sure someone can toss in statistics about what percent of time or effort is invested in the creation of code, versus all the maintenance required in it later...
To ensure you are not shooting yourself in the foot with this method, the hacker/developer/maker needs to devote a certain amount of time in thought and design before beginning to code. If a stumbling block is detected, legitimate thought must be put into how much code must be *undone* and started over to ensure clean code at the finish. Merely exploiting the fact that you have sloppy data types that can be used in multiple ways will only lead to more convoluted (and certainly less intuitive) code.
Another issue that Paul just sort of tosses out as fact is his claim of how most mediums were at their peak "early on", as in "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed.". Now, I'm no art expert, but doesn't painting predate this by several millennia? Wouldn't the use of perspective by the Greeks seem like a monumental echelon above the flat art of the Egyptians? And aren't the Eqyptians to be praised for their realistic portraits relative to cave art? I'm pretty sure that 15th century art only represents generation after generation of gradual improvements. The fact that the artists following that era began to explore more abstract approaches like impressionism, expressionism and whatnot (http://www.quizbowlonline.com/artmovements.html) does not automatically elevate the "realists" to the pinnacle of the medium.
In any case, it was oversimplifications like this that made the premise a little harder for me to swallow. Very valid points were made, but the analogies do break down in a few places...
But I still marvel at how effective Popfile is. Paul has his moments of genius, there's no doubt.
Any tv screens that they use (for displays or footage or whatnot) ought to have the silhouettes of Tom Servo and Crow on them...
If they want Hollywood ones, the list is long..
Gort (from "The Day the Earth Stood Still")
Johnny Five (from "Short Circuit")
Half the cast of "The Black Hole"
Any of the Star Wars ones...
Plus the evil one from "Saturn V",
Logan's Run,
Buck Rogers,
Battlestar Galactica
and so on...
The public will recognize those.. I doubt there are many (if any?) non-fictitious robots that the general public could name or recognize.
Actually, the "Sonic Wind 1" is at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico.
The Kansas Cosmosphere has the "Sonic Wind 2" on display...
</nitpick>
Are there even human beings "driving" it?
I think it's safe to say "no"
if there were humans driving it at the start then there wouldn't have been at the end. apart from the fact that the sled stopped yb hitting an immobile object, the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways
Not this time, anyway. Although over at the International Space Hall of Fame, only about 15 miles from where the above test occured, is the rocket sled ("Sonic Wind 1") that John Stapp rode in 1954 at the same testing grounds when he earned the title "Fastest Man Alive". Granted that was only 632 mph, but he did sustain a deceleration of around 40 Gs that reportly forced his eyes partially out of their sockets.
The forces on this particular test would have easily killed a human, so it's safe to assume that this one was riderless.
[I'm a former Space Hall tour guide, just sharing some trivia..]
Not quite so. There are various installation guidelines that have to be adhered to for cabling to retain its rating. "Cat5 cable" is cable designed for a certain rating and engineered to certain minimum quality specifications, but your actions will dictate whether it keeps that rating.
Examples include no sharp bends, no more than 25 lbs of pulling force, certain distances from power lines, and so on.
You can overengineer and use Cat6 certified cabling which gives you more leeway, but you still do best to properly handle whatever you purchase..
Uh. yeah... I could if I was at home. But I'm at work.
I wasn't gonna delay my post til I got home just so that I could tack on trivia about which warehouse my netflix discs come from...
I've been a member for a rather long time (almost 3 years) but I don't watch movies very promptly (their records show that I've only watched and returned 11 films in the past 3 months). So I guess I fall into "we like thi$ cu$tomer" category.
;)
I just checked and I have 59 movies in my rental queue, and every single one of them is listed as "Now" availability. Granted, most of them are uncommon foreign and indie films so I'm not in competition with all those folks trying to get the latest "Austin Powers" movie or something, but still, having 59 flicks all sitting there at my disposal is probably indicative of some favoritism.
But back to the subject of shipping times. Personally I'm amazed at how quickly turnaround times are for me. I frequently will drop a disc in the mail on a Saturday afternoon, see it register with Netflix on Monday, and have my next disc by Tuesday or Wednesday. I never checked to see which center mine go to but I'm in Vancouver, WA if anyone knows off the top of their head..
So I don't think it decreases with time (length of membership).. I think it's more to do with the original hypothesis of number of films rented. I'm probably paying $6-7 bucks for each of mine now, but given the fact that I have a toddler and my wife and I both work, we're willing to pay that for the convenience. (I only make it out to the theaters a couple times each year).
I just did a quick test and stuck Solaris(1972) in my queue. Availability = "now". That's sad. Want me to rent it and send it to ya? As a new service emerges: scalping Netflix films...
Gecko? It's a name of the Engine, which applications are not limited to web-browsing, fortunately.
Well, you've kinda supported my point here. It's an "engine".. let's call it an "engine". And while it's not strictly for "browsing", it is just for rendering HTML:
From the Mozilla FAQ:
"Gecko (formerly Raptor) is the new HTML rendering engine in Mozilla."
All I was proposing was calling it the "Gecko Engine"... And the Gecko browser in turn uses the Gecko Engine.
There's already precedent for this exact model. I mean, picture the "Quake engine". Lots of "non-quake" games use the "Quake engine" and that doesn't seem to throw anyone for a loop... So lots of apps will use the "Gecko Engine", one of them being Gecko the browser....
Nah.. too recent.. I say we call it "Mosaic"!