Posts by GrimJack

I know that I first created an account, got my question answered and went away. Later, I had another question so i came back, got it answered, looked around and found a question I could answer. Finally, I fell into the Geek's Lounge and never managed to escape.

I am not sure if this is the right location but I just noticed my favorite web-comic site is looking for someone interested in writing Android aps.

Check it out

This just stunned me - better than schwarzenegger but... I am agog, i think

The earth will end in fire. Everyone now knows that our Sun will exhaust all energy and go super nova some day, and when that happens the Earth and all other planets will burn to a crisp.

er, actually it will end as a white dwarf and slowly fade away - no blaze of glory for us.

I don't think man can or will destroy all life on earth - there have been (at least) 5 major mass extinctions where 50% or more of all species went extinct (Cretaceous, Triassic, Permian, Late Devonian and Ordovician). The Permian is considered the worst with 96% of all marine species and 70% of land species wiped out completely but that is what is cool about evolution, life adapts to fill empty niches.

Man could wipe himself out but I doubt Man could kill off all life - just set life off on a different path. The world will net end just because Mankind kills itself off - not even it it manages to wipe out all the mammals - if it provides adaptive benefits, intelligence might even return.

i believe the inuits would disagree.

So would the Yupik and Inupiat

If the number is divisible by nine - its digits adds up to nine and/or are also divisible by nine.

another 'nine' - in accounting, if your books do not balance and the difference is divisible by nine, somewhere 2 digits were transposed

GrimJack would you be intrested? we could start a game with 3 people and then if more Daniweb people get intrested they can join as well.

I would be interested but would need the details - I am not sure I could add another game as complex as Olympia but something along those lines would be nice

Does any species adapt better than us?
We have colonised almost every part of the planet, every enviroment from tundra to desert.

Well, you should google extremophiles - there are species that exist on the surface of molten lava, in vents at the bottom of the ocean, in streams of boiling water in Yellowstone Park. The bright colors in the streams are different forms of algae that are adapted to specific temperatures. The reason you are supposed to throw out something that has spent more than 6 months in your freezer is because after that time the population of 'bugs' that can colonize at that temp. will have become significant enough to make you sick.

We have 'colonized' but not by adapting to the environment but by adapting the environment to us. This take energy; without sufficient energy, we are limited to equatorial and sub-equatorial ranges.

Currently, I am playing Olympia g3 - I have been in since turn 3. There are currently 214 players and more fodder er, players joining every turn.

For me, I learn a great deal in the research; plus, I have ADD so I learn even more from the tangents.

Thanks! Found the command prompts (dl-ed a 'console'). I understand the difference between interpreted and compiled programs so when I read this

After locating your program, Perl compiles the entire program to an internal form. If there are any compilation errors, execution of the program is not attempted. (This is unlike the typical shell script, which might run part-way through before finding a syntax error.)

I made assumptions. I think this implies a hybrid between compiler/interpreter - at least in this particular instance.

When I ask about an 'environment', I mean a program (shell??) in which I can edit and run programs or maybe step my way through it then make corrections and then run it again without having to leave the environment.

I was just looking at the 'help' file and it mentions VMS - oops! dec and the VAXes were bought up by compaq in the late '90s; by implication, this Perl doc is OLD! Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for the response.

I am playing a PBeM game called Olympia-game 3, it seems many of the players use Perl scripts to automate some tasks. They happily share the code but I am hesitant to press for programming help in the gaming forum so I come here. I downloaded Strawberry Perl and am now looking for an environment to play in (or how to compile and run the scripts on a Vista system). I did some programming about 30 years ago and am a little out of practice; and Vista does not seem to offer access to 'msdos'.

I was just on the bus, minding my own business when I heard a magical phrase "he knew 2 dozen languages and numerous dialects"; I just had to speak up because there is only one person in history who could fit that phrase:
My hero, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was an explorer, diplomat, linguist, author, translator - he was 6'4" tall, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and had this wonderful scar on his cheek. The British army still use the manual he wrote on how to fight with a bayonet, his "Book of Swords" is a master work, he was the original translator of the "One Thousand Nights and One Night" in 10 volumes with 7 volumes of notes anthropological and explanatory. He had himself circumcised in order to get into the Medina area and into Mecca. He could enter a completely unknown country and within a year, be indistinguishable from a native in dress, language and behavior.

Yes, I have many of his books and a copy of the 17 volume "Burton Society" 1001 Arabian Nights set, and a copy of his book of poetry. Did you know he came to the US, studies the Sioux language and tried to convince Brigham Young that he had converted to Mormonism (Brigham Young had many of Burton's books so he didn't fall for it).

Who is your hero and why?

What about cable/wiring on the floor? My roomba fails on wiring - almost caused marital problems as it rearranged the electric blanket controls so my control sent her temperatures in the wrong direction.

StarWars Tragedy-porn

thanks that was it

Hah! thanks, now I have to figure out how to get drivers to the laptop. Well, I have this laptop, I should be able to get the drivers from here to there with a thumb drive. Will let you know if that was it (and close the thread)

Thanks.

I just bought a new netgear wndr3700 router and am trying to get my g.f's laptop up on it. I can set the wireless pc card to full wpa2 protection but it can't seem to connect. It sees the router but the connection fails. I tried setting it up with windows network setup but was told I had to the netgear setup to get full encryption. So I set it up but it just won't connect.

I was wondering if there is an encryption limit with xp?

Man - this illusion took me a couple minutes to even realize what I wasn't seeing.

throwing knives and darts - not that wimpy, pub-crawl stuff - hunting darts, thrown hard and accurate enough to stop small game.

I run malariacontrol.net on boinc as one of my projects

The research into the malaria parasite is multi-pronged: the mosquito vector is one; Johns Hopkins is working on a vaccine for the people; there is netting that prevents contact and has a pesticide - I think the work is to intervene at the 5 different stages.

What a really kool legacy if the Gates Foundation eliminate malaria from the world!

I just discovered Daft Punk because of an interesting 'helmet' post.

I am eating leftover Christmas goose - wonderful stuff, with a small glass of St. Germain as a digestif

go to your local computer recycling center and beg there.

First you have to define what you consider a computer - almost any home or office device that you purchase today contains more computing power than what was generally for sale as a computer just 10 years ago. Unless you narrow your question a lot, there is no real answer that would not be wrong as soon as it was written.

a single company named Wuhan in China is set to produce 60 million desk top computers per year.

Merry Christmas any way.

The original researcher later replaced the marshmallow with an Oreo Cooky. One of the kids opened the cookie, licked off the center, and put it back together.

Agreed! They go back to the tests and results often - sometimes to the point of data mining. Sometimes, the latest 'paradigm' influences how they perceive the test results.

sometimes we can learn more about the investigators than the subjects, heh,heh.

Actually, there is a lot more to the test. It has a lot more to do with strategies developed to deal with the world. Children with limited strategies gave in sooner than children who had a wider range of strategies to help them deal with the dilemma. Some of the kids rocked the chair to distract themselves, there were a lot of different ways the kids were able to ignore or distract themselves from the marshmallow. Just telling the child to imagine that the marshmallow was only a picture of a marshmallow allowed them to hold out longer.

The ability to resist is more than self control (conversely, self control is more than the ability to resist) - it is about the strategies chosen to maintain self control. Is it any less about self control if the kid covers his/her eyes or crawls under the table?

The marshmallow test was the brain child (heh,heh double pun intended) of the father of 4 young girls around the age of 4 years old. He realized that his 4 y.o. could be convinced to put gratification now for something later. He developed a test where young children were told that they could have the marshmallow on the table now or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they could have two marshmallows. The researcher never actually returned, the test was about how long gratification could be delayed. The results varied from mere seconds to over 10 minutes. The children were local so later when his daughter was 17, he asked how some of her friends were doing. Some were off to college and some were 'dropping out'.

Interested, the researcher found as many of the subjects as he could find and it seems that those children who able to resist temptation the longest were doing better. In fact there seemed to be a significant correlation between the length of time the child could resist and their SAT scores. They have been following the 'children' for 40 years now and the correlation still seems to hold between success and resisting temptation

The difference was in hundreds of points on their SATs!! And thousands of dollars of income.

The interpretation of the results are pretty varied

The videos of the tests are incredibly cute - 4 year old kids trying to resist temptation. Take a …

It is actually the Coanda effect - not the Bernoulli principle - that causes the shower curtain to rise up against your legs.

I saw the news about the navy testing a rail gun that can hit targets 100 miles away (w/o all that big gun recoil) and was pretty impressed. Then I found this. Unfortunately, it seems that the actual instructions are have been deleted by the 'authors'. If you go down through the comments you will see that the kilojoules produced are on the lines of a .45 but still....

Oh, the navy shot is about 33 megajoules and travels 100 miles in 6 minutes. A Tomahawk missile costs US$600k each - you can build a couple rail guns for that.

Among the scary things that have come true in Max Headroom was the armed drones equipped with facial recognition software that was flying around gunning people down.

Other ideas put forth include instant ratings of network programs.
Television that watches you.

etc

I asked my partner to marry me traveling 80 mph on I5 at 3:00am - she accepted, that was 1991. We actually got our signatures on a marriage application in 2006 just before we flew to Paris. Hey, we will get around to it pretty soon now.

Do you drive a car? You have to have auto insurance if you drive. What is your point?

For those of you who live '20 minutes in the future', it might be encouraging to know that the complete MAX HEADROOM dvd set is out for xmas. It holds up pretty well and gets a lot of stuff right - and is over 20 years old (and has a young Amanda Pays).

Max sings - sorta

A little musical history

HG - Yeah, I saw some of their early work a couple months ago but since the TSA has been in the news a lot lately....

GE choreographs some flight plans

Here is a RL Fallout Vault from 8th to 7th centuries BCE in Turkey; later taken over by early Xtians around 500 - 1,000 CE. One of the cities could hold up to 35,000 people plus food storage, live animal storage, and wine making equipment. This city is Derinkuyu and it connects through underground passages to around 200 other cities.

The entries could be sealed from the inside by rolling huge stones across the openings

google the brand and look for how to lift the keyboard and clean it from there

Those dudes over at TSA have put together a calendar - as they say in the old cartoons:
Hubba hubba!

OMG - The Red Army Choir does 16 tons

I suggest you contact the owner of the copyright of the tutorial. If you are going to base your work on someone else's work, you must at least acknowledge their contribution.

Logic is the study of arguments; some arguments are valid and many are fallacies.

Disobedience is the failure to obey.

The difference between them is a gulf you appear unable to cross.

As soon as your shingles clear up - get the vaccine! My mom is suffering through a bout of shingles and was told that the vaccine only works after you clear up. Pain management is a biatch!!

Boys in camo - ghost-riding

There is a new video editing system that allows you to remove stuff from the 'live' feed. Looks pretty freaky - like how the TeaBaggers view the world - take a look

I do not know the details but it seems that many of the newer electrics are using capacitors in place of batteries:
1) batteries are to heavy and using chemical reactions to store energy has too many losses
2) the new ceramics/insulators/superconductors make capacitors way more effective.

Take a look here for small scale work.