I learned something from slashdot today! I would have assumed the tail lights were unmodulated DC too, so thanks all for posting.
A long, long time ago I went to see a secretary at a large company who complained her very expensive 20+ inch monitor kept flickering. Every component in it had been replaced 2 or 3 times, and the field engineers all complained they never actually saw it flicker. The problem was quite apparent. I asked if I could have one of the POLO mints from the packet she always had on her desk, started crunching away like she did, and I could see the flicker too! I struggled to explain that she needed to suck instead of chew, but the problem was solved.
If you'd like to test this but don't have access to boiled sweets, you could ask some of your colleagues to stand behind you rapping you on the skull with hard objects (not quite in synchrony) while you stare at a CRT. I'd be interested to know how you get on.
I can't believe so many people are using the "they'll do what they're told" line of reasoning. When was the last time you programmed a robot? What you tell them to do is "move this here, that there,... until battery dies".
Only in Sci Fi can you program a robot "kill bad guys, 'kay?". "Slaughter a village" is probably as fine-grained a command as you can give to a robot. Today's autonomous killing machines have a program like:
void motion(void){ // TODO check for bad guy?
bang();
}
I suspect you'll know all about the first drop of truly autonomous robot soldiers, all the real ones will be evacuated, and so will anybody owning a camera. I strongly doubt there'll be any refinement above "enforce no living thing above 40kg in this zone for 100 days" for a very long time. I can see the irony in autonomous machine warfare - all it can really do is "get biblical" on an enemy.
Another cat brain? Anybody remember Hugo de Garis, the CAM-Brain machine and Robokoneko? Is there a pervasive pussy fixation among AI researchers? He didn't get any, I hope these guys do better.
Fix the problem by not talking about it, yea that works.
I had to reply to this - it's modded Insightful. Where I grew up, the Race Relations Act really did work. No law stops anybody talking (to friends in the pub, for example) about race, only against using race to discriminate in a substantial way. When I was a kid, nignogs were the butt of jokes on peaktime TV, and if you didn't like one riding on your bus, you could beat him up and throw him off in broad daylight, while wearing your bus corporation conductor's uniform. I saw that happen twice when I was about 10 years old. A couple of years later, a lot of my school friends were rushing home to put their DMs on to go 'paki bashing' with their mates.
Making racial slurs and discrimination illegal doesn't fix the underlying problem - possibly something to do with 'birds of a feather', I don't know I'm not a social scientist - what it does is it gradually makes that kind of barbaric behaviour socially unacceptable, as a kind of inoculation against ending up on the wrong end of the law.
You are kind of right, a lot of racists are hidden in the society I grew up in, but they're hidden in prisons, and lost-all-hope housing estates, and aren't-dying-quick-enough blue-rinse villages. And don't even get me started on arguments based on comparing genetic composition to lifestyle choices (like religion, vi/emacs, masturbation, gay sex, alcohol etc).
Silence doesn't solve the problem, but it does mean I mostly don't have to listen to the people who want to blame someone else for their own problem, and neither do my children. Things have improved a lot where I come from, since it was open season on darkies, I expect it will only continue to get better, now that they're people, just like me.
What you just described is already taken care of with laws against inciting riots
I'm not sure it is. Riots are often not aimed at any person or group of persons - it's hard to find a victim of a riot. If your car is torched during a riot, you're the victim of criminal damage. Maybe someone incited the riot, but are they really liable for incitement to criminal damage in the case of your car? "Kill Salman Rushdie" is incitement to murder, clearly. "Purge the world of the scourge of gingas" is a hard one to call. I'm not sure if many jurisdictions have specific laws against genocide. It's easy (you know what I mean, I hope) once someone dies - someone is guilty of murder, but is the ginga-hater guilty of incitement in the specific case of the dead ginga? I guess it depends how awful you think genetic-composition-based hate is. It certainly lies somewhere between the diffuse crime of incitement to riot and the specific crime of incitement to murder.
IANAL by the way. I no longer have the mane of a ginga either, age is drawing my tricolour coat towards drab with white highlights.
But who would be subsidised? I don't want anybody to categorise me as an 'atheist'. They'll be telling me it's my religion next. What happens after that? Is there a special word for a non-dog-owner? Atheists are never likely to get subsidies because it's not a uniting cause. There's nothing to rally behind. I can't just walk up to someone in the park and say "hey, nice lack of spiritual bliss on your face, I also don't have something similar on mine, see?".
It's not like Irish-setter owners forging similar-dog-based relationships. We just don't have religion: it doesn't come with funny handshakes and dietary requirements. It just isn't anything at all, just like not having a dog. I have known people who thought it was odd that someone shouldn't have a dog, but not many. I don't understand why so many should think it's odd to not have any gods, or special to have none.
There are already plenty of atheist organisations - Virgin Atlantic, Microsoft (maybe), De Beers, Chelsea Football Club - they don't get subsidies for the same reason religious organisations shouldn't - there's no/reason/ why they should.
Well I wonder about laws that seem to only make it harder to be honest.
From a legal point of view, wouldn't having stolen a phone to have a conversation soliciting a murder make it harder to use the defence "I was only joking!"? Perhaps these kind of laws make establishing intent a little easier, and allow heavier sentencing for heinous criminals where it might otherwise be difficult to establish intent?
Malaysia has a SIM card register - not phones. I didn't read the article, did it say phones? Even for a pre-paid SIM card, which costs only the equivalent of USD2 here, you have to provide a local MyKAD (ID card) or a passport.
Nitpicking? Or sleight of hand? I know I should at least wikipedia first, but couldn't the common ancestor still be... an ape? I guess classifications might have been different back then.
I suspect for many unbelievers, the idea of a common ancestor might be even more repugnant than a 'pure ape' ancestor. What would it be like? Hairy, stooped, slightly long arms, but wearing glasses with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mail tucked under its arm while waiting at a pre-historic bus stop? The easy guess puts it half-way between apes and humans, with the attendant 'eww someone fucked a monkey' problem, if you're not terribly good at thinking.
Depending on which 'way' the DNA has changed, couldn't the common ancestor have been/exactly/ an ape?
I suspect (without trying to find out) the common ancestor, being both pre-human and pre-ape, was something even less attractive than an ape. A fascinating subject for discussion perhaps, but possibly an even harder sell, than "actually, we're all monkeys, just really cute ones".
Am I the only one who read that list of comments and thought "Oh irony! That's funny!". Perhaps I'm being too generous, like the commenters were with their apostrophe's.
The Turing Test is way past it's prime by this point.
I don't agree. Not only with your apostrophe usage, but with the idea that the Turing test isn't as good today as the day he thought of it.
Maybe next year I'll agree, but for now, 'fooling' me is as good as it gets, for machines and for humans. The imposition of a teletype is as valid now as it was then. Back then, the mild-steel framework, glowing vacuum tubes and clicking relays would have given a 'non-human' away in the blink of an eye. Today, it wouldn't matter if you embedded Eliza in a RealDoll with the best air muscles from shadow.org, you wouldn't mistake it for human for long. Well, not unless you'd been left alone with it, maybe.
Even the best attempts at repairs or 'cosmetic alterations' in humans interfere with the act of generosity you make when you think "I know I think, that seems quite like me, it must think too". Stephen Hawking doesn't seem completely 'like' me - is he really super intelligent, or does his chair do some of the thinking? Tell me that doubt wasn't already at the back of your mind.
Perhaps there is room for other tests though. Turing's test emphasises function over form. If debating by teletype is what really motivates you, then Turing is the way to go, I believe. I'm really impressed by the emotional effects of those gurning heads (at MIT?), and stuff like Paro the seal. What's so great about thinking anyway? Don't you ever wish somebody around you would stop thinking? I don't know where you'd start with an emotional test to see if you couldn't spot the difference between a machine and a human. In the dark, with Eliza's volume turned down, I guess.
My first admin responsibility was an AT&T 3B2 400, running SYSVR4. The bad days always had a slightly comical edge to them. Who couldn't feel sorry for a console that said only:
KERNEL: DOUBLE PANIC The kernel panicked while trying to panic
I couldn't find that on Google just now. Damn kids and their hardened systems.
The concept of carpet bombing was strongly influenced by the inter-war theories of the Italian strategist Admiral Giulio Douhet, who suggested that future wars would be fought by armies and navies fighting holding actions, while opposing sets of air forces attacked the enemies civilian centres of population. A few days of such destruction would, he opined, cause one side to rapidly sue for peace.
There is no question that cities were razed because the bombaimer missed. My father was a bombaimer in WWII, and he tells me on those runs he didn't even look out of the 'plane.
Perhaps WWII had the largest civilian headcount ever, but I suspect the ratio civilians / soldier is higher now as the number of legally qualifying enemy 'soldiers' drops to zero.
So what if there are guns near the dead bodies? You could carpet bomb the USA without remorse using the same justification.
Look, IANAL, and I realise I've just used the phrase 'carpet bomb the USA', but you do realise it was jus CARRIER LOST
Wouldn't it only be a lift to geo-stationary orbit height, and then a fall after that? It would be like cycling up a 100km-high mountain, imagine the coast 'downhill' to the far end!
Couldn't it be started from earth by making buoyant cylinders? I'm imagining like cells in the stalk of an underwater plant, only filled with hydrogen or something. You'd have to have some thrusters on them to counteract the wind, and maybe for some upthrust at high altitude where the load from wind might be less.
Done right, it could make a catastrophic failure less catastrophic, with pieces earth-side having a limited ability for a soft landing, and pieces space-side perhaps not following the Valley Forge.
Disclaimer: I Am An Engineer In A Totally Unrelated Field. I didn't RTFA, and I haven't done any calcs. But at least I didn't suggest a pulley with counterweights.
Are they like over a metre, like a parking meter, or around 20 centimetres, like a gas meter, or what?
And is there an international reference meter somewhere?
the only way you're going to come close to exercising all groups
When my exercise buddies started making excuses (and I made them too), I had to think of something to replace the activity that had kept me athletic and out of the public eye: caving. I'm not recommending it to anyone, if it's your cup of tea, it has a way of finding you.
What I replaced it with a few years ago was indoor climbing. There might be a few places near you. They're very variable, as are the customers, but I reckon climbing's hard to beat if you're looking for 'all muscle groups'.
It costs next to nothing to take up. The funny shoes do make a lot of difference, but you can often rent them. You can start just a few centimetres off the floor with 'problems' - sequences of just a few moves you do over and over again for training. The good places have lots marked out or let the customers mark their own. Even the shoddy places, you'll find someone who'll point out a few of their favourites. You can do it alone or with friends, and it does focus your mind on getting fitter and not carrying any extra weight!
The Irish ancestry of Patterson's husband sparked the name Cuil, which is taken from a Celtic folklore character called Finn McCuill
Some people think "Irishness" is cool. I'm sure we're only a few domain registrations away from the search engines "Dark-e" and "Slowp". It must be hard coming up with a marketable excuse for the only 4-letter domain name you could find available.
I'm not convinced hoisting the colours of one nation or community is such a great idea for an Internet venture, I'm sure it must alienate as many as it wins over. Would it have been better if they'd said "Like 'cool', only spelt funny"?
I saw this, and laughed. They don't know who sends queries? cURL tells me their webserver is CherryPy - I don't know it, but I have a strong feeling that CherryPy knows exactly who (what IP address) sent a query. I'd imagine unless they're running on a single server (and they did say they were running out to buy some more, see some other post.. somewhere on this page), there'll be a raft of load balancing / proxy software on their servers that all know the IP addresses queries are coming from. Do they seriously expect us to believe none of those systems are making logs?
It's not for geek types! Back in 1980 or 81, the first home computers were practically DOA. They didn't do anything when you switched them on, except print a question mark, maybe, if you were lucky. If you wanted to 'play' with your new toy, you had to find out how to make it do something. It didn't even look good. Unlike LEGO, you couldn't even sort it into piles of same-colour, or same-shape pieces. You couldn't really pretend it was a tea-set. On the face of it, it seems to be an appalling thing to have bought for a kid. But we didn't have penis pictures back then. We didn't have any kind of pictures, except the ones from the camera that was too expensive for parents to let you touch, and cost an arm and a leg to see the results, and then they were tiny things, hidden away like precious jewels. There wasn't any choice, back then. It was interesting new thing, or nothing at all.
I think a scripting language is essential as a primary way of "tinkering" with something like the OLPC. I had never even heard of "source code" when I submitted machine code as a list of bytes (as decimal numbers!) to Sinclair User Magazine when I was a teenager. It was just what I had to do in order to write games, which were still not easy to buy, and mostly not very good, back then.
I moved to a "Vibrant, Multi-Racial, Progressive, Developed South East Asian Nation" a few years ago, and many of my teenage neighbours spend their Vibrant, Progressive, Developing years chasing cockroaches, stealing fags or photocopying colouring in books to make them last longer.
The OLPC is not aimed at kids who have considered the option of sending penis pics and decided a 'Code Poet' tee shirt goes better with their emo lifestyle, it's for kids who might develop better given a second or third choice when cockroaches and colouring-in appears to be all there is.
They do sometimes have a PC in the house, but because their parents care about their children's futures, they have gone out and bought a pirated copy of the World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim so their kids can 'write CVs', but they don't allow them to have Internet access because their government cautions that it's pretty much all penis pics, and if they want a 'good job' with the government, they should develop their Typewriter Sim skills, because that's what's really important in some countries.
I wish OLPC was coming here. There are places in the world where managing change is about ensuring the same incompetents remain in charge. If you want to succeed at their game, you really need to improve your World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim skills. If you want to develop, you need absolutely anything else.
What exactly are you comparing? My car running over your cat on your property while I'm on mine? It could happen, I imagine... Are you comparing the utility of something designed to carry users to a distant destination to something designed to allow a user to cause great damage to something at a distance?
Cars cause about four times more fatalities than guns (correct me if I'm wrong)
Is that a comparison of one body count against another, or fatalities per hour of use? Are you quoting that "4x" from somewhere? I don't think you're wrong in so far as it should be '3' or '5' or 'half as many', but your source should be in the beast-of-burden-pounding place for "using numbers with intent". How do murder-suicide-spam-kings stack up against guns? Should we all have one in our homes, given their low body count? I'm enjoying this logic tutorial, you don't publish a newsletter, do you?
Woah Mr Digression, nobody's trying to take your gun away, a van drove onto a guy's property and saw his crop. Afraid of StreetView? Don't post 'no trespassing' signs, get a polytunnel:
The point that's nearest to being on-topic in your post is
held responsible for what they DO
. I have tried cannabis a few times, and I drink alcohol. I've got no intention of having some cannabis again, it just didn't float my boat. I don't care if my neighbours are growing it or using it - it's unlikely to become my business. What bothers me is that if it does become my business the law in my country can take (to me) the bizarre view that it's a mitigating circumstance:
If a criminal taking behaviour modifying substances is a mitigating factor, then I'm surprised anybody commits a crime sober. I don't get it - that's like blaming the inanimate substance for the crime. I would feel much happier if they legalised the activities of growers and consumers and made "wilfully lowering your ability to predict the consequence of your actions" an aggravating circumstance in sentencing. Spend the "fight against drugs" money on telling everybody how to have a laugh, safely.
I don't want to talk about guns - why did you bring that up? That's not a question of approval: if my neighbour spills his drink, my leg might get wet. If he drops his gun, he might pop a cap in my beast of burden. You lot should think of the poor animals.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned something from slashdot today! I would have assumed the tail lights were unmodulated DC too, so thanks all for posting.
A long, long time ago I went to see a secretary at a large company who complained her very expensive 20+ inch monitor kept flickering. Every component in it had been replaced 2 or 3 times, and the field engineers all complained they never actually saw it flicker. The problem was quite apparent. I asked if I could have one of the POLO mints from the packet she always had on her desk, started crunching away like she did, and I could see the flicker too! I struggled to explain that she needed to suck instead of chew, but the problem was solved.
If you'd like to test this but don't have access to boiled sweets, you could ask some of your colleagues to stand behind you rapping you on the skull with hard objects (not quite in synchrony) while you stare at a CRT. I'd be interested to know how you get on.
It's not just the subs. You have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer if you want to become a citizen of the UK, too:
Life in the UK - Accessibility
Only the bottom half is stairs! The top half is the astro-slide everyone will want to ride!
What I want to know is: how are they going to print an animated GIF on T-shirts?
I can't believe so many people are using the "they'll do what they're told" line of reasoning. When was the last time you programmed a robot? What you tell them to do is "move this here, that there, ... until battery dies".
Only in Sci Fi can you program a robot "kill bad guys, 'kay?". "Slaughter a village" is probably as fine-grained a command as you can give to a robot. Today's autonomous killing machines have a program like:
void motion(void){
// TODO check for bad guy?
bang();
}
I suspect you'll know all about the first drop of truly autonomous robot soldiers, all the real ones will be evacuated, and so will anybody owning a camera. I strongly doubt there'll be any refinement above "enforce no living thing above 40kg in this zone for 100 days" for a very long time. I can see the irony in autonomous machine warfare - all it can really do is "get biblical" on an enemy.
Another cat brain? Anybody remember Hugo de Garis, the CAM-Brain machine and Robokoneko? Is there a pervasive pussy fixation among AI researchers? He didn't get any, I hope these guys do better.
I had to reply to this - it's modded Insightful. Where I grew up, the Race Relations Act really did work. No law stops anybody talking (to friends in the pub, for example) about race, only against using race to discriminate in a substantial way. When I was a kid, nignogs were the butt of jokes on peaktime TV, and if you didn't like one riding on your bus, you could beat him up and throw him off in broad daylight, while wearing your bus corporation conductor's uniform. I saw that happen twice when I was about 10 years old. A couple of years later, a lot of my school friends were rushing home to put their DMs on to go 'paki bashing' with their mates.
Making racial slurs and discrimination illegal doesn't fix the underlying problem - possibly something to do with 'birds of a feather', I don't know I'm not a social scientist - what it does is it gradually makes that kind of barbaric behaviour socially unacceptable, as a kind of inoculation against ending up on the wrong end of the law.
You are kind of right, a lot of racists are hidden in the society I grew up in, but they're hidden in prisons, and lost-all-hope housing estates, and aren't-dying-quick-enough blue-rinse villages. And don't even get me started on arguments based on comparing genetic composition to lifestyle choices (like religion, vi/emacs, masturbation, gay sex, alcohol etc).
Silence doesn't solve the problem, but it does mean I mostly don't have to listen to the people who want to blame someone else for their own problem, and neither do my children. Things have improved a lot where I come from, since it was open season on darkies, I expect it will only continue to get better, now that they're people, just like me.
I'm not sure it is. Riots are often not aimed at any person or group of persons - it's hard to find a victim of a riot. If your car is torched during a riot, you're the victim of criminal damage. Maybe someone incited the riot, but are they really liable for incitement to criminal damage in the case of your car? "Kill Salman Rushdie" is incitement to murder, clearly. "Purge the world of the scourge of gingas" is a hard one to call. I'm not sure if many jurisdictions have specific laws against genocide. It's easy (you know what I mean, I hope) once someone dies - someone is guilty of murder, but is the ginga-hater guilty of incitement in the specific case of the dead ginga? I guess it depends how awful you think genetic-composition-based hate is. It certainly lies somewhere between the diffuse crime of incitement to riot and the specific crime of incitement to murder.
IANAL by the way. I no longer have the mane of a ginga either, age is drawing my tricolour coat towards drab with white highlights.
But who would be subsidised? I don't want anybody to categorise me as an 'atheist'. They'll be telling me it's my religion next. What happens after that? Is there a special word for a non-dog-owner? Atheists are never likely to get subsidies because it's not a uniting cause. There's nothing to rally behind. I can't just walk up to someone in the park and say "hey, nice lack of spiritual bliss on your face, I also don't have something similar on mine, see?".
It's not like Irish-setter owners forging similar-dog-based relationships. We just don't have religion: it doesn't come with funny handshakes and dietary requirements. It just isn't anything at all, just like not having a dog. I have known people who thought it was odd that someone shouldn't have a dog, but not many. I don't understand why so many should think it's odd to not have any gods, or special to have none. There are already plenty of atheist organisations - Virgin Atlantic, Microsoft (maybe), De Beers, Chelsea Football Club - they don't get subsidies for the same reason religious organisations shouldn't - there's no /reason/ why they should.
Well I wonder about laws that seem to only make it harder to be honest. From a legal point of view, wouldn't having stolen a phone to have a conversation soliciting a murder make it harder to use the defence "I was only joking!"? Perhaps these kind of laws make establishing intent a little easier, and allow heavier sentencing for heinous criminals where it might otherwise be difficult to establish intent?
Malaysia has a SIM card register - not phones. I didn't read the article, did it say phones? Even for a pre-paid SIM card, which costs only the equivalent of USD2 here, you have to provide a local MyKAD (ID card) or a passport.
....the opposite of irony is ebony
Nitpicking? Or sleight of hand? I know I should at least wikipedia first, but couldn't the common ancestor still be ... an ape? I guess classifications might have been different back then.
I suspect for many unbelievers, the idea of a common ancestor might be even more repugnant than a 'pure ape' ancestor. What would it be like? Hairy, stooped, slightly long arms, but wearing glasses with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mail tucked under its arm while waiting at a pre-historic bus stop? The easy guess puts it half-way between apes and humans, with the attendant 'eww someone fucked a monkey' problem, if you're not terribly good at thinking.
Depending on which 'way' the DNA has changed, couldn't the common ancestor have been /exactly/ an ape?
I suspect (without trying to find out) the common ancestor, being both pre-human and pre-ape, was something even less attractive than an ape. A fascinating subject for discussion perhaps, but possibly an even harder sell, than "actually, we're all monkeys, just really cute ones".
Am I the only one who read that list of comments and thought "Oh irony! That's funny!". Perhaps I'm being too generous, like the commenters were with their apostrophe's.
I don't agree. Not only with your apostrophe usage, but with the idea that the Turing test isn't as good today as the day he thought of it.
Maybe next year I'll agree, but for now, 'fooling' me is as good as it gets, for machines and for humans. The imposition of a teletype is as valid now as it was then. Back then, the mild-steel framework, glowing vacuum tubes and clicking relays would have given a 'non-human' away in the blink of an eye. Today, it wouldn't matter if you embedded Eliza in a RealDoll with the best air muscles from shadow.org, you wouldn't mistake it for human for long. Well, not unless you'd been left alone with it, maybe.
Even the best attempts at repairs or 'cosmetic alterations' in humans interfere with the act of generosity you make when you think "I know I think, that seems quite like me, it must think too". Stephen Hawking doesn't seem completely 'like' me - is he really super intelligent, or does his chair do some of the thinking? Tell me that doubt wasn't already at the back of your mind.
Perhaps there is room for other tests though. Turing's test emphasises function over form. If debating by teletype is what really motivates you, then Turing is the way to go, I believe. I'm really impressed by the emotional effects of those gurning heads (at MIT?), and stuff like Paro the seal. What's so great about thinking anyway? Don't you ever wish somebody around you would stop thinking? I don't know where you'd start with an emotional test to see if you couldn't spot the difference between a machine and a human. In the dark, with Eliza's volume turned down, I guess.
My first admin responsibility was an AT&T 3B2 400, running SYSVR4. The bad days always had a slightly comical edge to them. Who couldn't feel sorry for a console that said only:
KERNEL: DOUBLE PANIC
The kernel panicked while trying to panic
I couldn't find that on Google just now. Damn kids and their hardened systems.
From wikipedia's article on "carpet bombing":
There is no question that cities were razed because the bombaimer missed. My father was a bombaimer in WWII, and he tells me on those runs he didn't even look out of the 'plane.
Perhaps WWII had the largest civilian headcount ever, but I suspect the ratio civilians / soldier is higher now as the number of legally qualifying enemy 'soldiers' drops to zero.
So what if there are guns near the dead bodies? You could carpet bomb the USA without remorse using the same justification.
Look, IANAL, and I realise I've just used the phrase 'carpet bomb the USA', but you do realise it was jus CARRIER LOST
Wouldn't it only be a lift to geo-stationary orbit height, and then a fall after that? It would be like cycling up a 100km-high mountain, imagine the coast 'downhill' to the far end!
Couldn't it be started from earth by making buoyant cylinders? I'm imagining like cells in the stalk of an underwater plant, only filled with hydrogen or something. You'd have to have some thrusters on them to counteract the wind, and maybe for some upthrust at high altitude where the load from wind might be less.
Done right, it could make a catastrophic failure less catastrophic, with pieces earth-side having a limited ability for a soft landing, and pieces space-side perhaps not following the Valley Forge.
Disclaimer: I Am An Engineer In A Totally Unrelated Field. I didn't RTFA, and I haven't done any calcs. But at least I didn't suggest a pulley with counterweights.
a small population of mice to low Earth orbit aboard a spinning spacecraft
But will it blend?
Are they like over a metre, like a parking meter, or around 20 centimetres, like a gas meter, or what? And is there an international reference meter somewhere?
When my exercise buddies started making excuses (and I made them too), I had to think of something to replace the activity that had kept me athletic and out of the public eye: caving. I'm not recommending it to anyone, if it's your cup of tea, it has a way of finding you.
What I replaced it with a few years ago was indoor climbing. There might be a few places near you. They're very variable, as are the customers, but I reckon climbing's hard to beat if you're looking for 'all muscle groups'.
It costs next to nothing to take up. The funny shoes do make a lot of difference, but you can often rent them. You can start just a few centimetres off the floor with 'problems' - sequences of just a few moves you do over and over again for training. The good places have lots marked out or let the customers mark their own. Even the shoddy places, you'll find someone who'll point out a few of their favourites. You can do it alone or with friends, and it does focus your mind on getting fitter and not carrying any extra weight!
Some people think "Irishness" is cool. I'm sure we're only a few domain registrations away from the search engines "Dark-e" and "Slowp". It must be hard coming up with a marketable excuse for the only 4-letter domain name you could find available. I'm not convinced hoisting the colours of one nation or community is such a great idea for an Internet venture, I'm sure it must alienate as many as it wins over. Would it have been better if they'd said "Like 'cool', only spelt funny"?
I saw this, and laughed. They don't know who sends queries? cURL tells me their webserver is CherryPy - I don't know it, but I have a strong feeling that CherryPy knows exactly who (what IP address) sent a query. I'd imagine unless they're running on a single server (and they did say they were running out to buy some more, see some other post.. somewhere on this page), there'll be a raft of load balancing / proxy software on their servers that all know the IP addresses queries are coming from. Do they seriously expect us to believe none of those systems are making logs?
It's not for geek types! Back in 1980 or 81, the first home computers were practically DOA. They didn't do anything when you switched them on, except print a question mark, maybe, if you were lucky. If you wanted to 'play' with your new toy, you had to find out how to make it do something. It didn't even look good. Unlike LEGO, you couldn't even sort it into piles of same-colour, or same-shape pieces. You couldn't really pretend it was a tea-set. On the face of it, it seems to be an appalling thing to have bought for a kid. But we didn't have penis pictures back then. We didn't have any kind of pictures, except the ones from the camera that was too expensive for parents to let you touch, and cost an arm and a leg to see the results, and then they were tiny things, hidden away like precious jewels. There wasn't any choice, back then. It was interesting new thing, or nothing at all.
I think a scripting language is essential as a primary way of "tinkering" with something like the OLPC. I had never even heard of "source code" when I submitted machine code as a list of bytes (as decimal numbers!) to Sinclair User Magazine when I was a teenager. It was just what I had to do in order to write games, which were still not easy to buy, and mostly not very good, back then.
I moved to a "Vibrant, Multi-Racial, Progressive, Developed South East Asian Nation" a few years ago, and many of my teenage neighbours spend their Vibrant, Progressive, Developing years chasing cockroaches, stealing fags or photocopying colouring in books to make them last longer. The OLPC is not aimed at kids who have considered the option of sending penis pics and decided a 'Code Poet' tee shirt goes better with their emo lifestyle, it's for kids who might develop better given a second or third choice when cockroaches and colouring-in appears to be all there is.
They do sometimes have a PC in the house, but because their parents care about their children's futures, they have gone out and bought a pirated copy of the World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim so their kids can 'write CVs', but they don't allow them to have Internet access because their government cautions that it's pretty much all penis pics, and if they want a 'good job' with the government, they should develop their Typewriter Sim skills, because that's what's really important in some countries.
I wish OLPC was coming here. There are places in the world where managing change is about ensuring the same incompetents remain in charge. If you want to succeed at their game, you really need to improve your World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim skills. If you want to develop, you need absolutely anything else.
Is that a comparison of one body count against another, or fatalities per hour of use? Are you quoting that "4x" from somewhere? I don't think you're wrong in so far as it should be '3' or '5' or 'half as many', but your source should be in the beast-of-burden-pounding place for "using numbers with intent". How do murder-suicide-spam-kings stack up against guns? Should we all have one in our homes, given their low body count? I'm enjoying this logic tutorial, you don't publish a newsletter, do you?
Maybe your neighbours could oblige!
Woah Mr Digression, nobody's trying to take your gun away, a van drove onto a guy's property and saw his crop. Afraid of StreetView? Don't post 'no trespassing' signs, get a polytunnel:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/reefer-madness-do-the-drug-laws-work-822160.html
The point that's nearest to being on-topic in your post is
. I have tried cannabis a few times, and I drink alcohol. I've got no intention of having some cannabis again, it just didn't float my boat. I don't care if my neighbours are growing it or using it - it's unlikely to become my business. What bothers me is that if it does become my business the law in my country can take (to me) the bizarre view that it's a mitigating circumstance:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bucks/herts/6033077.stm
If a criminal taking behaviour modifying substances is a mitigating factor, then I'm surprised anybody commits a crime sober. I don't get it - that's like blaming the inanimate substance for the crime. I would feel much happier if they legalised the activities of growers and consumers and made "wilfully lowering your ability to predict the consequence of your actions" an aggravating circumstance in sentencing. Spend the "fight against drugs" money on telling everybody how to have a laugh, safely.
I don't want to talk about guns - why did you bring that up? That's not a question of approval: if my neighbour spills his drink, my leg might get wet. If he drops his gun, he might pop a cap in my beast of burden. You lot should think of the poor animals.