Funny you mention that, since razors are the one toiletry that's advertized exactly like tech gadgets: "6 blades is SO last year! Now get the MACH 12 WITH 12 BLADES!":)
"If I'm buying a Kindle from Amazon that enables me to buy books from Amazon, I'm broadcasting a desire to buy Kindle books. I would welcome some subsidization of the hardware since I'm going to be buying content anyway. No, I really think Amazon priced the Kindle the way they did because they thought they could get away with doing so..."
Why is it only in the tech-gadget industry that people expect manufacturers to sell items for *less than cost*?
For what's it's worth, please note that the original poster's degree was in computer engineering, not computer science. "Computer engineering" means different things at different places, but IMHO the value of a master's in CE is a bit more than in CS.
No need to do that. I just leave the laptop in my bag. Usually the screeners don't notice/care; if they do notice, smile and apologetically say "whoops, sorry, I forgot." They'll then take it out and run it through separately. I've done this probably 10-15 times in the last year or two, and they've only taken it out for a separate scan once.
Exception: if some TSA guy before the x-ray belt asks me directly if I have a laptop, I take it out of my bag. There's no penalty for acting dumb for something you forgot to take out (or every high-school girl with a 6-oz bottle of shampoo would be doing time in federal prison), but I presume there's a significant penalty for lying to a TSA agent.
This seems to be a blanket statement that NYT puts on all their online articles. It might be insane in this case, but from their standpoint I understand why they do it: they put the publishing date there, and the fact that the article was Copyrighted then, and let the user figure out whether the laws in their jurisdiction actually allow the work to be copied. They have no idea what the hell laws Congress might pass (even applying retroactively) in the future, so pass the buck to someone else on determining that a given article is, in fact, not copyrighted.
I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just laziness on the part of some programmer; I can imagine something like this happening:
for (a in articles) { addStandardCopyrightMessage(a.date()); }
(I'm not saying that any of this is *right*; I'm just saying that I can see how this happened, and I'm not at all surprised.)
$4/line per month? Hell, I should try and get some code into this project... if I can get 2000 lines of code adopted, I'll make $96K/year for the rest of my life. Seems I'll be able to retire before 30 after all.:)
While I agree with your point in general, the particular example of
cout << "output" << endl;
is a poor one... it raises the obvious question of "what's <<?" which then requires either the "it's magic" answer or a lengthy discussion of operator overloading. Depending on compiler, you also might need to "using namespace std" (more magic) or write std::cout and std::endl (less magic but still requires an explanation). Also, what's "endl" and why can't I just write \n?
A better example from Hello World might be "public static void main(String[] args)"... compared to "void main()" there is a LOT of initially-unexplained garbage in the Java function declaration.:)
The book "Death from the Skies" by Phil Plait has a lengthy chapter devoted specifically to asteroid impacts and how we might consider avoiding them. The missile idea is a bad one, as the individual fragments will still hit Earth and quite possibly do more damage than the original asteroid due to immediately affecting an even wider area. A couple more promising ideas are gravitational deflection (park some other massive object nearby and allow the new object's gravity to slowly move the asteroid off a collision course) or putting a rocket on the asteroid and giving it some thrust in a harmless direction. Of course, the best strategy depends on how far ahead of time we know about the possible impact, and of course the sooner we know about it the "easier" it should be to avoid it. So building huge cameras like this is one of the more significant things we can do to prevent a possible Death from the Skies.
Really, the funniest thing about this is one of the "reviews":
Rated 2.0 out of 5.0 Service was OK - bob - Aug 1, 2008 Atmosphere could use some help, and gets a bit noisy at times (I could barely hear my lunchpal throughout the meal). The service was mediocre, because while they do exactly (most of the time) as you tell them, it takes a holler and sometimes a fervent hand wave to get their attention. Plus, you have to shout out your orders too. Food was decent but for the price, not really worth it.
"Scanning the full-res image is incredible. There's so much to see! Each dot, each smudge, is a full-blown galaxy, a collection of billions of stars. They're very, very far away; some of these galaxies are estimated to be 10 billion light years distant; you're seeing them as they were just a couple of billion years after the Universe itself began, and the faintest are one-billionth as bright as objects you can see with your own eye."
He also talks quite a bit about his favorite astronomical event - gamma-ray bursts.
Yeah, given that the *nix thread had over 2000 comments, I'd say there's a significant demand for more of these sorts of posts.
My only regret is that I wish they'd spaced out the articles a bit, so that I had some time to digest the tricks in one article before reading the next one -- I find that if I add too many tricks to my toolbox at once I tend to forget about some of them. I guess I should just re-read the articles in another month or so. (Also an indication that these are quality articles -- there's not many discussion threads on Slashdot that I'd even consider going back and re-reading later.)
I used to use this, but haven't for the last year or two because of sshfs, since sshfs lets you run arbitrary shell commands on the remote files as well.
I agree with most of what you're saying here, but it seems your solution will make problem #5 worse. If every developer releases a few-hour-long demo of their game, you can bet that all the best content will be packed into the first few hours of the game.
TFA is a bit short on details, as expected for a general-audience press release. In particular, they throw the word "Viterbi" out there without ever explaining what the heck it means; probably an artifact of USC containing the *Viterbi* School of Engineering. The juicy technical bits can be found in his thesis here:
Title: Quantum Coding with Entanglement Authors: Mark M. Wilde Thesis PDF... and for a basic overview of the underlying concepts, of course the Wikipedia page on the Viterbi algorithm is helpful.
The RoboCup 2008 world competition just finished in Suzhou, China -- new this year was a league where all the teams must use the Nao robots. The top two teams were from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and a combined Carnegie Mellon/Georgia Tech team. The final game was scoreless and decided by penalty kicks. Full results are here:
I wasn't at the competition but it's clear due to the scores that the league is still in its infancy, with scores being few and far between. As with any humanoid robot, falling over is a huge problem. I'm sure there will be some videos of the competition online once all the teams get home and have time to edit and upload them.
Here's a video of the robot walking, from the 2008 RoboCup US Open (where there was no competition but a couple small demos for the public.)
"Make all the highschoolers and college kids that have never had a real job take a "maturity test" if they really understand enough to vote."
Seniors are the most reliable voting bloc in the nation; highschoolers and college kids the least. I'm sure the 78 percent of voters 18-29 who *didn't fucking bother to vote* in the 2006 election would be *so* pissed off if they were disenfranchised.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello? Mr. Kettle? This is Pot. You're black.
Funny you mention that, since razors are the one toiletry that's advertized exactly like tech gadgets: "6 blades is SO last year! Now get the MACH 12 WITH 12 BLADES!" :)
"If I'm buying a Kindle from Amazon that enables me to buy books from Amazon, I'm broadcasting a desire to buy Kindle books. I would welcome some subsidization of the hardware since I'm going to be buying content anyway. No, I really think Amazon priced the Kindle the way they did because they thought they could get away with doing so..."
Why is it only in the tech-gadget industry that people expect manufacturers to sell items for *less than cost*?
For what's it's worth, please note that the original poster's degree was in computer engineering, not computer science. "Computer engineering" means different things at different places, but IMHO the value of a master's in CE is a bit more than in CS.
"... putting it in a separate tray for security."
No need to do that. I just leave the laptop in my bag. Usually the screeners don't notice/care; if they do notice, smile and apologetically say "whoops, sorry, I forgot." They'll then take it out and run it through separately. I've done this probably 10-15 times in the last year or two, and they've only taken it out for a separate scan once.
Exception: if some TSA guy before the x-ray belt asks me directly if I have a laptop, I take it out of my bag. There's no penalty for acting dumb for something you forgot to take out (or every high-school girl with a 6-oz bottle of shampoo would be doing time in federal prison), but I presume there's a significant penalty for lying to a TSA agent.
This seems to be a blanket statement that NYT puts on all their online articles. It might be insane in this case, but from their standpoint I understand why they do it: they put the publishing date there, and the fact that the article was Copyrighted then, and let the user figure out whether the laws in their jurisdiction actually allow the work to be copied. They have no idea what the hell laws Congress might pass (even applying retroactively) in the future, so pass the buck to someone else on determining that a given article is, in fact, not copyrighted.
I also wouldn't be surprised if this is just laziness on the part of some programmer; I can imagine something like this happening:
for (a in articles) { addStandardCopyrightMessage(a.date()); }
(I'm not saying that any of this is *right*; I'm just saying that I can see how this happened, and I'm not at all surprised.)
$4/line per month? Hell, I should try and get some code into this project... if I can get 2000 lines of code adopted, I'll make $96K/year for the rest of my life. Seems I'll be able to retire before 30 after all. :)
Am I the only person who read "to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon -- things like census data, gnomes, etc --"?
While I agree with your point in general, the particular example of
cout << "output" << endl;
is a poor one... it raises the obvious question of "what's <<?" which then requires either the "it's magic" answer or a lengthy discussion of operator overloading. Depending on compiler, you also might need to "using namespace std" (more magic) or write std::cout and std::endl (less magic but still requires an explanation). Also, what's "endl" and why can't I just write \n?
A better example from Hello World might be "public static void main(String[] args)" ... compared to "void main()" there is a LOT of initially-unexplained garbage in the Java function declaration. :)
The book "Death from the Skies" by Phil Plait has a lengthy chapter devoted specifically to asteroid impacts and how we might consider avoiding them. The missile idea is a bad one, as the individual fragments will still hit Earth and quite possibly do more damage than the original asteroid due to immediately affecting an even wider area. A couple more promising ideas are gravitational deflection (park some other massive object nearby and allow the new object's gravity to slowly move the asteroid off a collision course) or putting a rocket on the asteroid and giving it some thrust in a harmless direction. Of course, the best strategy depends on how far ahead of time we know about the possible impact, and of course the sooner we know about it the "easier" it should be to avoid it. So building huge cameras like this is one of the more significant things we can do to prevent a possible Death from the Skies.
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5322
5.3 gigapixel image of Hanauma Bay in Hawaii.
Really, the funniest thing about this is one of the "reviews":
Rated 2.0 out of 5.0
Service was OK - bob - Aug 1, 2008
Atmosphere could use some help, and gets a bit noisy at times (I could barely hear my lunchpal throughout the meal). The service was mediocre, because while they do exactly (most of the time) as you tell them, it takes a holler and sometimes a fervent hand wave to get their attention. Plus, you have to shout out your orders too. Food was decent but for the price, not really worth it.
Actually, for perspective, this image is approximately 1/500000th of the sky.
The image is 14.1 x 26.1 arcminutes according to ESO website. For reference, the moon is about 30 arcminutes.
Phil Plait has quite a bit to say about this image:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/07/voyaging-deep-into-the-universe/
"Scanning the full-res image is incredible. There's so much to see! Each dot, each smudge, is a full-blown galaxy, a collection of billions of stars. They're very, very far away; some of these galaxies are estimated to be 10 billion light years distant; you're seeing them as they were just a couple of billion years after the Universe itself began, and the faintest are one-billionth as bright as objects you can see with your own eye."
He also talks quite a bit about his favorite astronomical event - gamma-ray bursts.
Yeah, given that the *nix thread had over 2000 comments, I'd say there's a significant demand for more of these sorts of posts.
My only regret is that I wish they'd spaced out the articles a bit, so that I had some time to digest the tricks in one article before reading the next one -- I find that if I add too many tricks to my toolbox at once I tend to forget about some of them. I guess I should just re-read the articles in another month or so. (Also an indication that these are quality articles -- there's not many discussion threads on Slashdot that I'd even consider going back and re-reading later.)
I used to use this, but haven't for the last year or two because of sshfs, since sshfs lets you run arbitrary shell commands on the remote files as well.
I agree with most of what you're saying here, but it seems your solution will make problem #5 worse. If every developer releases a few-hour-long demo of their game, you can bet that all the best content will be packed into the first few hours of the game.
slashcode.com
TFA is a bit short on details, as expected for a general-audience press release. In particular, they throw the word "Viterbi" out there without ever explaining what the heck it means; probably an artifact of USC containing the *Viterbi* School of Engineering. The juicy technical bits can be found in his thesis here:
Title: Quantum Coding with Entanglement ... and for a basic overview of the underlying concepts, of course the Wikipedia page on the Viterbi algorithm is helpful.
Authors: Mark M. Wilde
Thesis PDF
The RoboCup 2008 world competition just finished in Suzhou, China -- new this year was a league where all the teams must use the Nao robots. The top two teams were from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and a combined Carnegie Mellon/Georgia Tech team. The final game was scoreless and decided by penalty kicks. Full results are here:
http://www.tzi.de/4legged/bin/view/Website/NaoResults2008
I wasn't at the competition but it's clear due to the scores that the league is still in its infancy, with scores being few and far between. As with any humanoid robot, falling over is a huge problem. I'm sure there will be some videos of the competition online once all the teams get home and have time to edit and upload them.
Here's a video of the robot walking, from the 2008 RoboCup US Open (where there was no competition but a couple small demos for the public.)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=N7USdkA0My8
... from the just-added-yourself-to-the-terrorist-watch-list-but-hopefully-it-was-worth-it dept. :)
You forgot: ./infect
"Make all the highschoolers and college kids that have never had a real job take a "maturity test" if they really understand enough to vote."
Seniors are the most reliable voting bloc in the nation; highschoolers and college kids the least. I'm sure the 78 percent of voters 18-29 who *didn't fucking bother to vote* in the 2006 election would be *so* pissed off if they were disenfranchised.
+1, Soul-Crushing.