Geeze I hate when people take a summary and blow it up into something they can pick at, with pieces they've spun out of nothing. Maybe I should have mentioned the random beatings for no reason other than being in the way. Maybe I should have mentioned that I had my life directly threatened on several occasions and was too scared to ask anyone for help. Maybe I should have mentioned that their entire parenting method involved as little personal involvement on their part as possible, and that they thought that kids were something you had so you could get away with slavery. No difference, you would probably have still blown that into something else to make a straw man out of. I've been directly involved in the development of a child for several years now, and that's working out great but I don't suppose that matters either.
PCs sharpen your problem solving skills only if you can be bothered to try and solve their problems. TV makes you smart too, if your whole involvement with them is to design and/or repair them. Either device can also be used for sitting in front of to rot.
You temporarily lose IQ points all the time. Try taking IQ tests at different times: take a test after staying up for 36 hours, take a test while piss-drunk, or take a test in a room full of horny women who think geeks are really hot.
Well I think it's sort of analagous to a poket calculator. You don't need to remember what 14*6 is because you can just punch it in. You don't need to remember anything you learn on google either, as long as you remember the search term you used you'll find it again, right? I have to use the Microsoft knowledge base daily in my job, there's all kinds of fixes I know about, but can't remember the steps of most of them, because I don't need to, it's always there when I need it rapidly. I could devote more energy to memorizing these things, but part of my brain automatically goes, "But why? We know where it is. Let's move on to more interesting things instead. Let's see what's on Slashdot..."
My parents used to lock up my C64 in a filing cabinet whenever they wanted to mess with me, and I was usually in the middle of working on a program when it would happen. Their reasons were often superfluous, as seen through the hindsight of a mid-thirties adult now. They would take away my books sometimes also, did whatever they could to stifle creativity because it's so 'impractical'. I haven't spoken to them in years now and I don't expect to be at their funerals either.
don't need spiffy document layouts to underscore the seriousness
Yeah, but wasn't the last shuttle disaster supposed to have been Powerpoint's fault? I think the message may simply be that humans are careless with reading, and a poorly-formatted doument doesn't do anything to help that.
There's a particular Philips drive, not sure if it's the one you have or not, but it's been out for the last little while. You have to go get the firmware upgrade for it because, and this is weird, unless you upgrade the firmware, you have to make sure to put in a burned disc FIRST when you first try to use it. If you don't, it won't read anything BUT burned discs. The other rule with this drive, is that, without the firmware upgrade, that trick will work UNTIL the drive is slightly jarred by something, at which point it will stop working again. How's that for crazy?
I work in tech support, and fairly often people call in because their CD or DVD rom drive isn't working anymore. Roughly 60% of the time or more, it's actually a software problem and their drive is just fine. This usually happens when burning software has been removed, or replaced by another program, windows can't load the driver anymore and there's some stuff you have to clear out of the registry before it will work again. Or sometimes you just have to remove the IDE controller, reboot and let windows reinstall it and find the optical drives again.
I do tech support, and recently had someone call in from an office somewhere, concerned that the computer they had just given her wasn't working properly. She said that whenever she turned it on, she got a black screen that said Windows XP down in the corner. She was trying everything she could think of to make it work, which mainly involved trying different combinations of the buttons on the monitor that work the onscreen display for adjusting monitor settings. She turned it off and then on again, and 'instantly' it would go to a black screen with Windows XP in the corner, no BIOS. That's because the computer had been on the whole time, she was turning the monitor on and off, and was seeing the default XP screen saver. Once we sorted that out she asked me where she was supposed to put in her password, and being that my company has nothing to do with hers other than we sold them the computers, I had to tell her to ask someone in her office for that, since she was obviously already signed into the computer and must be wondering about a password for some work-related software, not sure why she thought I would know that. And she's getting paid to sit in front of that thing.
I thought the whole point of a company was to make money, because without money the company cannot run. Also, everyone on this planet has to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head, whether a worker-bee or a CEO, that will never change. Money is the motivator to expend effort in the world, because it provides the basic necessities of life, and the benefits of being in a civilized society. Do really well and you can get at more of those benefits.
I certainly agree that doggedly pursuing the money is an incorrect focus, and that as you say, make your product or service great and the money will come. But underneath it all, everyone involved is there to pay their bills, and that's one huge impact in their life if they suddenly lose that. The other reasons they work at it, such as a love of the work or whatever, can be replaced with further work in time. But bills aren't going to wait around. Sometimes drastic steps are taken in an effort to shoot a bunch of money into a company, because it is failing to deliver in the important ways. That's done out of a need to preserve the income of the company as a whole, which affects the personal life of everybody involved.
What's particularly telling, is the repeated mention of their tetrahedral shape making them reliable movers by 'toppling' to get around. How is that of any relevance at all when they are tiny, and their nodes are all joined to neighboring robots? None that I can determine, for the system would need to move by articulating the joined node-points. Toppling wouldn't mean anything in that system, so I don't get the buzz. Anyhow, I also think a shape with more than 4 nodes would be needed for the kind of nanobot swarms they seem to want, that could form themselves into a billowing parachute and then a snake, or whatever.. 4 just doesn't seem enough to get enough versatility out of them. It's a cool idea to keep around, but it needs work, and the article presented is just too fanciful right now.
Some people complain that they feel the effects of melatonin all through the next day,
I noticed that at first, felt the grogginess, but I quickly figured that since it had already worked so well to help me get to sleep the night before, I might have simply taken too much for my body chemistry. I had only taken one, but the bottle I have is of 2.5 mg tablets. So the next time, I chopped the pill in half. That was still a bit too much, and I've found that taking a quarter, about.6 mg is just right for me. You're not supposed to take it all the time, just when you need to reset your sleep pattern to a different time, like when dealing with jet lag. Or if you have a changing work schedule like mine, where I work the same hours everyday for a month and then it changes, sometimes by several hours. When I need to adjust, I'll determine the new wakeup time and take the melatonin 8 hours before that, though still stay up at the computer if I want. I'll get that feeling, like it's really late, and want to crash. I often work through it for awhile, maybe an hour, it doesn't seem to matter much, I'll still get to sleep real easy once I lie down. The amount of actual sleep I get seems less important than the resetting of the body's clock. I'll do it maybe 2 nights at a time, 3 max then leave it alone until I need to switch hours again.
Did you check your version to be sure though? Because I got one of those update notifiers last night, and I clicked on it. It said it was an update to tweak downloads. And it did indeed fix my download tab, which had been broken for the last couple versions because I did a clean OS install along the way but had migrated my entire profile folder saved from an older version to a newer version on the clean OS, and a bug that had been present for me in that older version was apparently a borked setting somewhere in the profile. That got fixed by the update I clicked on last night. But my About box still said 1.0.1 as the version, after restarting the computer. I just went and manually got 1.0.2 and overlaid that, and now it's showing the new version properly.
Definitely, that's why I've always said that if anybody ever does manage to make a self-replicating machine that can make all kinds of useful things, they should not try to patent it and profit from it themselves because they'll likely wind up dead. The only way to create such a machine and survive is to spread the plans on the internet and whatever other media possible so as to make it pointless for those that have to rethink their whole business model, to kill him and get rid of his machine as a means of protecting their industries. This guy in the article seems to have the same idea.
I tried to watch it, I really did. I had the TV on and everything. But I also ordered food a short while after the show started, and forgot all about the trailer while I worked on the computer, and then the food arrived. I ran downstairs to get it, came back up, got in my chair, looked at the TV, saw the back of Darth Vader's head and then the title came up, it was over. FUCK!
Slashdot Mirror
Geeze I hate when people take a summary and blow it up into something they can pick at, with pieces they've spun out of nothing. Maybe I should have mentioned the random beatings for no reason other than being in the way. Maybe I should have mentioned that I had my life directly threatened on several occasions and was too scared to ask anyone for help. Maybe I should have mentioned that their entire parenting method involved as little personal involvement on their part as possible, and that they thought that kids were something you had so you could get away with slavery. No difference, you would probably have still blown that into something else to make a straw man out of. I've been directly involved in the development of a child for several years now, and that's working out great but I don't suppose that matters either.
Fuck off.
PCs sharpen your problem solving skills only if you can be bothered to try and solve their problems. TV makes you smart too, if your whole involvement with them is to design and/or repair them. Either device can also be used for sitting in front of to rot.
You temporarily lose IQ points all the time. Try taking IQ tests at different times: take a test after staying up for 36 hours, take a test while piss-drunk, or take a test in a room full of horny women who think geeks are really hot.
Well I think it's sort of analagous to a poket calculator. You don't need to remember what 14*6 is because you can just punch it in. You don't need to remember anything you learn on google either, as long as you remember the search term you used you'll find it again, right? I have to use the Microsoft knowledge base daily in my job, there's all kinds of fixes I know about, but can't remember the steps of most of them, because I don't need to, it's always there when I need it rapidly. I could devote more energy to memorizing these things, but part of my brain automatically goes, "But why? We know where it is. Let's move on to more interesting things instead. Let's see what's on Slashdot..."
My parents used to lock up my C64 in a filing cabinet whenever they wanted to mess with me, and I was usually in the middle of working on a program when it would happen. Their reasons were often superfluous, as seen through the hindsight of a mid-thirties adult now. They would take away my books sometimes also, did whatever they could to stifle creativity because it's so 'impractical'. I haven't spoken to them in years now and I don't expect to be at their funerals either.
Take off the processor fan, that way he'll only get to play about 10 minutes at a time. Problem solved. :)
don't need spiffy document layouts to underscore the seriousness
Yeah, but wasn't the last shuttle disaster supposed to have been Powerpoint's fault? I think the message may simply be that humans are careless with reading, and a poorly-formatted doument doesn't do anything to help that.
There's a particular Philips drive, not sure if it's the one you have or not, but it's been out for the last little while. You have to go get the firmware upgrade for it because, and this is weird, unless you upgrade the firmware, you have to make sure to put in a burned disc FIRST when you first try to use it. If you don't, it won't read anything BUT burned discs. The other rule with this drive, is that, without the firmware upgrade, that trick will work UNTIL the drive is slightly jarred by something, at which point it will stop working again. How's that for crazy?
I work in tech support, and fairly often people call in because their CD or DVD rom drive isn't working anymore. Roughly 60% of the time or more, it's actually a software problem and their drive is just fine. This usually happens when burning software has been removed, or replaced by another program, windows can't load the driver anymore and there's some stuff you have to clear out of the registry before it will work again. Or sometimes you just have to remove the IDE controller, reboot and let windows reinstall it and find the optical drives again.
I do tech support, and recently had someone call in from an office somewhere, concerned that the computer they had just given her wasn't working properly. She said that whenever she turned it on, she got a black screen that said Windows XP down in the corner. She was trying everything she could think of to make it work, which mainly involved trying different combinations of the buttons on the monitor that work the onscreen display for adjusting monitor settings. She turned it off and then on again, and 'instantly' it would go to a black screen with Windows XP in the corner, no BIOS. That's because the computer had been on the whole time, she was turning the monitor on and off, and was seeing the default XP screen saver. Once we sorted that out she asked me where she was supposed to put in her password, and being that my company has nothing to do with hers other than we sold them the computers, I had to tell her to ask someone in her office for that, since she was obviously already signed into the computer and must be wondering about a password for some work-related software, not sure why she thought I would know that. And she's getting paid to sit in front of that thing.
I thought the whole point of a company was to make money, because without money the company cannot run. Also, everyone on this planet has to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head, whether a worker-bee or a CEO, that will never change. Money is the motivator to expend effort in the world, because it provides the basic necessities of life, and the benefits of being in a civilized society. Do really well and you can get at more of those benefits.
I certainly agree that doggedly pursuing the money is an incorrect focus, and that as you say, make your product or service great and the money will come. But underneath it all, everyone involved is there to pay their bills, and that's one huge impact in their life if they suddenly lose that. The other reasons they work at it, such as a love of the work or whatever, can be replaced with further work in time. But bills aren't going to wait around. Sometimes drastic steps are taken in an effort to shoot a bunch of money into a company, because it is failing to deliver in the important ways. That's done out of a need to preserve the income of the company as a whole, which affects the personal life of everybody involved.
It's the new iPed.
What's particularly telling, is the repeated mention of their tetrahedral shape making them reliable movers by 'toppling' to get around. How is that of any relevance at all when they are tiny, and their nodes are all joined to neighboring robots? None that I can determine, for the system would need to move by articulating the joined node-points. Toppling wouldn't mean anything in that system, so I don't get the buzz. Anyhow, I also think a shape with more than 4 nodes would be needed for the kind of nanobot swarms they seem to want, that could form themselves into a billowing parachute and then a snake, or whatever.. 4 just doesn't seem enough to get enough versatility out of them. It's a cool idea to keep around, but it needs work, and the article presented is just too fanciful right now.
An MMO where people run around killing people randomly for no reason at all, with no roleplay involved? Hmm, sounds like every MMO I've played. :)
links that have been handpicked by humans
Which is why when I clicked on 'Complete Pink Floyd Collection' I got the goatse man instead. Gotta remember to check that damn status bar.
Some people complain that they feel the effects of melatonin all through the next day,
.6 mg is just right for me. You're not supposed to take it all the time, just when you need to reset your sleep pattern to a different time, like when dealing with jet lag. Or if you have a changing work schedule like mine, where I work the same hours everyday for a month and then it changes, sometimes by several hours. When I need to adjust, I'll determine the new wakeup time and take the melatonin 8 hours before that, though still stay up at the computer if I want. I'll get that feeling, like it's really late, and want to crash. I often work through it for awhile, maybe an hour, it doesn't seem to matter much, I'll still get to sleep real easy once I lie down. The amount of actual sleep I get seems less important than the resetting of the body's clock. I'll do it maybe 2 nights at a time, 3 max then leave it alone until I need to switch hours again.
I noticed that at first, felt the grogginess, but I quickly figured that since it had already worked so well to help me get to sleep the night before, I might have simply taken too much for my body chemistry. I had only taken one, but the bottle I have is of 2.5 mg tablets. So the next time, I chopped the pill in half. That was still a bit too much, and I've found that taking a quarter, about
1) Do you want a bigger pen1s?
2) Need help with your m0rtg@ge?
3) Would you like to help a persecuted stranger in a foreign country to make money?
Did you check your version to be sure though? Because I got one of those update notifiers last night, and I clicked on it. It said it was an update to tweak downloads. And it did indeed fix my download tab, which had been broken for the last couple versions because I did a clean OS install along the way but had migrated my entire profile folder saved from an older version to a newer version on the clean OS, and a bug that had been present for me in that older version was apparently a borked setting somewhere in the profile. That got fixed by the update I clicked on last night. But my About box still said 1.0.1 as the version, after restarting the computer. I just went and manually got 1.0.2 and overlaid that, and now it's showing the new version properly.
back to the senders email address
Wow, kdjfuusidow@lerlkdfudfo.org is gonna be mighty upset when they see all their spam coming back at them.
Quite a different world would result.
Definitely, that's why I've always said that if anybody ever does manage to make a self-replicating machine that can make all kinds of useful things, they should not try to patent it and profit from it themselves because they'll likely wind up dead. The only way to create such a machine and survive is to spread the plans on the internet and whatever other media possible so as to make it pointless for those that have to rethink their whole business model, to kill him and get rid of his machine as a means of protecting their industries. This guy in the article seems to have the same idea.
Well answered! I had nothing to do with this exchange and I feel chastened.
Nah you just have to fill it with really HOT water.
Actually, I think that should have been modded insightful. Do that!
Particular stores though, would make fantastic feature-length movies. You could get a great three hour film out of Beren and Luthien.
I tried to watch it, I really did. I had the TV on and everything. But I also ordered food a short while after the show started, and forgot all about the trailer while I worked on the computer, and then the food arrived. I ran downstairs to get it, came back up, got in my chair, looked at the TV, saw the back of Darth Vader's head and then the title came up, it was over. FUCK!