Sometimes I read a summary here on Slashdot and wonder why the submitter left out crucial pieces of information.
Then there are summaries like this which throw everything and the kitchen sink in. What's worse, there is only one submitted link, so it's not like there are multiple sources gathered together making this summary long, it's just a lazy submitter cutting and pasting from the article.
Growing axons is a nice step, but Christopher Reeves is dead already. It'll be hard to get another celebrity to put their weight behind this kind of research.
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
As for this guy in the article, it's pretty clear he was just trying to make a buck by ripping off the Beatles' music. I'm surprised that the judge didn't hand down a larger fine, actually. His "psycho-acoustic simulation" argument was laughable at best. Facepalm worthy, at least.
It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data.... Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music
With American cars, the floormats are optional and come with a big price tag. This is a safety feature to prevent exactly this type of problem.
It's exactly like when Ashlee Simpson appeared on SNL and was caught lip syncing. She knew that she couldn't sing live, so she played her auto-tuned voice over the speakers. When the playback stopped and she was shown to be faking it, she danced a little jig. American car floormat pricing is like that little jig.
And then there is this story which utterly contradicts whatever point it was you were trying to make.
Laptops aren't meant to be armor. The military (or whoever it is in charge of making these decisions) is mostly uninterested in providing adequate armor to the troops. Your little anecdote is a great advertisement for Panasonic, but not really a ringing endorsement of the military.
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft. If you can balance that action so that you end up only a couple pixels off the ground, you can safely put the lander down on any flat surface.
The other problem is to navigate to a flat surface, but that is also easily solved by pressing the left and right arrow keys.
As for actual controls, I prefer using the spacebar to activate the rockets, although some people like the down arrow key.
Dell seems to be taking a very different tack than Panasonic in this segment. Dell's target market seems to be military applications, which can be the only explanation for the high performance CPU and video card. Panasonic is targeting more mundane in-car law enforcement terminals, hospital information systems, and things like power meter readers.
It's no surprise that the military customers would require a lower ruggedness spec than civilian users. They have no real budget limit, the computers are typically damaged beyond repair if damaged at all, and the PCs are typically immobile. However, they need to run fast and well when running, so the good CPU and graphics chip are musts.
Civilian usage, OTOH, requires a device that is durable and lasts for years and can be used in any environment. They don't need great processing power, they just need something that can run their dedicated apps well enough. This is where Panasonic's focus on hardware quality really shines.
Even the most forgetful person can be reminded of an event and recall it with vivid clarity. Alzheimer's sufferers can overcome some of the difficulties of the disease with a device like the Life Recorder.
So when we say that someone's (or some rat's) memory is improved, what exactly is improved? Is it the recall ability? If so, does that mean that the rat is somehow able to logically filter out unnecessary information to reach the important memory? Or does it mean that the rat's memory has been structured in a better way? Is it only a spatial thing, or can it work for any type of information?
As someone with a bad memory, I would be very interested in understanding how this actually works within the rat's brain.
Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.
They even go on to say that this is about education, not laptops. So why are they working on building these devices when if all they want is a cheap Panasonic Toughbook? It seems that instead of trying to build cheaper devices, they could partner with a company (like Panasonic) to provide this kind of technology on the cheap.
By focusing so much on the technology, we are forgetting that the purpose of these devices is to enable kids around the world to become more connected. This can be done with an old Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2001, you don't need the latest and greatest software to access the Internet.
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
Before the Flood, this area was simply a low-lying area, but approximately 5000 years ago waters from the Mediterranean Sea spilled over the Bosporus and rapidly filled the Black Sea area within days. The massive influx of water wiped out many local civilizations and probably gave rise to the Flood legend.
If this rift is going to become a new ocean, the water must come from somewhere. If it all comes at once, we could see a massive loss of life and property, especially as the problematic area lies in some of the poorest parts of the globe. In another 5000 years, we could be debating if the Savior Adibi Christ walked with elephants!
Code is the least important part of any project. That is why programmers are given little attention in these types of surveys.
In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most. Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and other non-code related things are far more important than the day to day coding that most of the engineering staff engages in.
Not to say that the final product isn't important, but it is just much less important than the decisions that lead to the creation of that software. In this sense, Open Source has a chance to shine because it allows the hotshot programmer to drive technology in ways he wants to, but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.
So we'll never see another programmer at the top of these charts like we did back when Linux was first emerging as a valid alternative to entrenched Unix systems.
Symmetry plays a large role in physiology, so it would be very unlikely to see an evolutionary step that leads to 3 boobs. Lateral symmetry dictates that you'd be more likely to see 4 or 6 before that.
There is the possibility of radial symmetry kicking in and getting a non-even number of boobs, but that's just weird.
I'm not saying that Robert Jordan is one of the standard Sci-fi/Fantasy authors who simply couldn't write a good story to save their lives. It's just that the vast majority of this genre is little better than unillustrated comic books, and most of the readership is too unversed in other forms of literature to provide an objective opinion about a book's quality.
When people hold up Bradbury over Vonnegut or Niven over Murakami, you know that they aren't reading anything but pulp.
I suggest they use an 8x8 grid pattern as the basic city layout. Then, you can put a 20MW turbine in each corner and power all the houses within each block. The turbines themselves only take up a single block, so you still get 60 blocks of high density residential zoning with no pollution at all.
The alternative (and better choice) is to terraform a small area away from the city. By raising the level of the land and encouraging waterfalls, you can build a very efficient hydroelectric power farm that generates no pollution and never breaks down.
Nuclear fission has its related pollution problems. Fusion plants don't last longer than 50 years. Wind power is pretty inefficient as far as power generation goes. But Hydroelectric is built to last and has a great price/output ratio over the life of the plant.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I read a summary here on Slashdot and wonder why the submitter left out crucial pieces of information.
Then there are summaries like this which throw everything and the kitchen sink in. What's worse, there is only one submitted link, so it's not like there are multiple sources gathered together making this summary long, it's just a lazy submitter cutting and pasting from the article.
Growing axons is a nice step, but Christopher Reeves is dead already. It'll be hard to get another celebrity to put their weight behind this kind of research.
Generalize much?
never.
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
As for this guy in the article, it's pretty clear he was just trying to make a buck by ripping off the Beatles' music. I'm surprised that the judge didn't hand down a larger fine, actually. His "psycho-acoustic simulation" argument was laughable at best. Facepalm worthy, at least.
So, not really so much at all...?
With American cars, the floormats are optional and come with a big price tag. This is a safety feature to prevent exactly this type of problem.
It's exactly like when Ashlee Simpson appeared on SNL and was caught lip syncing. She knew that she couldn't sing live, so she played her auto-tuned voice over the speakers. When the playback stopped and she was shown to be faking it, she danced a little jig. American car floormat pricing is like that little jig.
The Dells are pieces of shit. The Panasonics are less POS
Going forward, which of these will be procured in greater numbers?
And then there is this story which utterly contradicts whatever point it was you were trying to make.
Laptops aren't meant to be armor. The military (or whoever it is in charge of making these decisions) is mostly uninterested in providing adequate armor to the troops. Your little anecdote is a great advertisement for Panasonic, but not really a ringing endorsement of the military.
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft. If you can balance that action so that you end up only a couple pixels off the ground, you can safely put the lander down on any flat surface.
The other problem is to navigate to a flat surface, but that is also easily solved by pressing the left and right arrow keys.
As for actual controls, I prefer using the spacebar to activate the rockets, although some people like the down arrow key.
Dell seems to be taking a very different tack than Panasonic in this segment. Dell's target market seems to be military applications, which can be the only explanation for the high performance CPU and video card. Panasonic is targeting more mundane in-car law enforcement terminals, hospital information systems, and things like power meter readers.
It's no surprise that the military customers would require a lower ruggedness spec than civilian users. They have no real budget limit, the computers are typically damaged beyond repair if damaged at all, and the PCs are typically immobile. However, they need to run fast and well when running, so the good CPU and graphics chip are musts.
Civilian usage, OTOH, requires a device that is durable and lasts for years and can be used in any environment. They don't need great processing power, they just need something that can run their dedicated apps well enough. This is where Panasonic's focus on hardware quality really shines.
Even the most forgetful person can be reminded of an event and recall it with vivid clarity. Alzheimer's sufferers can overcome some of the difficulties of the disease with a device like the Life Recorder.
So when we say that someone's (or some rat's) memory is improved, what exactly is improved? Is it the recall ability? If so, does that mean that the rat is somehow able to logically filter out unnecessary information to reach the important memory? Or does it mean that the rat's memory has been structured in a better way? Is it only a spatial thing, or can it work for any type of information?
As someone with a bad memory, I would be very interested in understanding how this actually works within the rat's brain.
From the OLPC website:
They even go on to say that this is about education, not laptops. So why are they working on building these devices when if all they want is a cheap Panasonic Toughbook? It seems that instead of trying to build cheaper devices, they could partner with a company (like Panasonic) to provide this kind of technology on the cheap.
By focusing so much on the technology, we are forgetting that the purpose of these devices is to enable kids around the world to become more connected. This can be done with an old Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2001, you don't need the latest and greatest software to access the Internet.
Oceans start out as seas, and we have seven of those. So just give it a little more time.
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
Before the Flood, this area was simply a low-lying area, but approximately 5000 years ago waters from the Mediterranean Sea spilled over the Bosporus and rapidly filled the Black Sea area within days. The massive influx of water wiped out many local civilizations and probably gave rise to the Flood legend.
If this rift is going to become a new ocean, the water must come from somewhere. If it all comes at once, we could see a massive loss of life and property, especially as the problematic area lies in some of the poorest parts of the globe. In another 5000 years, we could be debating if the Savior Adibi Christ walked with elephants!
Code is the least important part of any project. That is why programmers are given little attention in these types of surveys.
In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most. Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and other non-code related things are far more important than the day to day coding that most of the engineering staff engages in.
Not to say that the final product isn't important, but it is just much less important than the decisions that lead to the creation of that software. In this sense, Open Source has a chance to shine because it allows the hotshot programmer to drive technology in ways he wants to, but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.
So we'll never see another programmer at the top of these charts like we did back when Linux was first emerging as a valid alternative to entrenched Unix systems.
A "breed" of humans with a genetic propensity towards violence and lawlessness... I hope no one mentions the elephant in the middle of the room.
That's right. Pit bulls.
There is no genetic advantage to homosexuality. Therefore, there are no gay hippopotamuses.
Not counting this guy
To a male hippopotamus, a female hippopotamus is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Symmetry plays a large role in physiology, so it would be very unlikely to see an evolutionary step that leads to 3 boobs. Lateral symmetry dictates that you'd be more likely to see 4 or 6 before that.
There is the possibility of radial symmetry kicking in and getting a non-even number of boobs, but that's just weird.
Seriously, though, the logic is sound and the current population trends are clear.
Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women
Well, shit. That sucks.
I'm not trying to be judgmental, actually. If you like Kit Kat better than caviar, bully for you.
The world needs ditch diggers too.
I don't see how a non-native English speaker could be a better writer IN ENGLISH than an accomplished, talented guy like Niven.
Nabokov didn't speak English as his first language, yet he is head and shoulders better than most native speaking authors.
Hey, someone's reading Dan Brown's stuff.
Someone's also eating shit out of a cup. I prefer to try keeping an objective view of the available consumables and the people who consume them.
Maybe that makes me a snob.
I'm not saying that Robert Jordan is one of the standard Sci-fi/Fantasy authors who simply couldn't write a good story to save their lives. It's just that the vast majority of this genre is little better than unillustrated comic books, and most of the readership is too unversed in other forms of literature to provide an objective opinion about a book's quality.
When people hold up Bradbury over Vonnegut or Niven over Murakami, you know that they aren't reading anything but pulp.
I suggest they use an 8x8 grid pattern as the basic city layout. Then, you can put a 20MW turbine in each corner and power all the houses within each block. The turbines themselves only take up a single block, so you still get 60 blocks of high density residential zoning with no pollution at all.
The alternative (and better choice) is to terraform a small area away from the city. By raising the level of the land and encouraging waterfalls, you can build a very efficient hydroelectric power farm that generates no pollution and never breaks down.
Nuclear fission has its related pollution problems. Fusion plants don't last longer than 50 years. Wind power is pretty inefficient as far as power generation goes. But Hydroelectric is built to last and has a great price/output ratio over the life of the plant.