19498918
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
I've been learning various languages and I want to get some deep exposure. Sans-$100k employment, multiple 2 week vacations every year to various countries is untenable; therefor I have found an excellent solution: audio books and dead tree books in German, Japanese, Urdu, Russian, and the like. The only problem: I can't find such a thing. Amazon doesn't sell audio books on Amazon.de that I can find; maybe this is because my German is poor and I just can't find it. Any idea where to get audio books in other languages?
18976906
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
Is anyone else quickly getting sick of staring at this fuzzy, overly-cartoony iteration of the Slashdot UI? The last one was fine; this one is starting to cause nausea. Overly softened, looks like a kid's site. Digg's aesthetics look much better now.
18507822
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
The US is slated to reduce the amount of fluoride recommended for drinking water. According to WebMD, "The HHS is recommending that water supplies contain 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water, replacing the current recommended range of 0.7 to 1.2 milligrams. [...] The new HHS recommendation, Messina says, makes sense because in recent years the population has gotten more fluoride from other sources, such as toothpaste and mouthwashes. [...] Some data suggest that excess fluoride may also be linked with skeletal bone damage, she says, and possibly hormone disruption. It has also been deemed an emerging neurotoxin." Fluoride supplements are sourced directly from industrial toxic waste, which cannot safely be dumped into the environment and so instead goes into the water supply. Conspiracy theorists and crazy generals obsessed with commie plots to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids are, of course, rejoicing.
18401792
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
After almost a decade (it will be so in 9 months and some days), we still all remember 9/11. I can't for the life of me recall (or care about) the date for the Oklahoma City Bombing... in fact I can't recall anyone caring that much when it happened. Somebody blew stuff up, people died, it hit the news, there was a manhunt. It was time to demote 9/11 to this level of care back in 2005... beyond time. So why do we still remember it like a big important thing? Why do people still wave flags on September 11 of each year and claim it as a patriotic American holiday, a day of celebration, a day to applaud the stripping of our rights and the deaths of thousands? Is it time to move on? Must we actively antagonize people who make a big deal out of 9/11 until they feel foolish and give up on the whole thing?
17890342
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
As per Wikinews, "The new policy on tuition fees will allow universities to double the current tuition fees from £3,290 per year to around £6,000 per year, as well as allowing some universities to get special approval from the Office For Fair Access (OFFA) to raise their fees to £9,000 per year." Apparently teachers were encouraging high school students to walk right out of class for this, too; I guess when you can't hope to afford college it doesn't much matter. The economics here are, of course, non-trivial; but this is a huge fee hike all at once. This has got to be the only useful thing I've actually seen televised news cover in the US in a long long int time.
16842170
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
Before Risk, before Axis and Allies, before Pentago and Polarity and Settlers of Catan, before Dungeons and Dragons, even before Chess, there was Weiqi. Weiqi appeared somewhere around 2200BC in China, and soon spread to Korea as Baduk and Japan as Go; over 4000 years later, the game is as well known in Asia as Chess is in the rest of the world. Played by taking turns placing single, non-moving stones on a grid of 19x19 lines, the rules of Go are extremely simple; the playing of Go, however, is uniquely complex and contemplative.
Breaking with traditions, an up-front listing of resources for Go would seem appropriate. First off, the absolute best way to learn Go is to find a Go teacher and study with him; this works about as well outside of Japan as ordering Haggis in a Denny's works outside Scotland. In the English speaking world, however, Janice Kim's book series, "Learn to Play Go," is widely considered the best resource for beginning students. Sensei's Library provides an online resource for Go players in the form of a Wiki. Finally, the Internet Go Server allows players to observe or play games against each other online and automatically calculates rank and handicaps.
With that out of the way, Go is a fantastically simple game. The aforementioned book or a YouTube tutorial would introduce the game more clearly than a wall of text; but the rules are brief. Two players elect to play either black or white; black plays first. Players play on a 19x19 grid, or for faster games on 13x13 or 9x9 grids, by placing stones on the intersections. Each open space on the four cardinal directions represents a liberty; if one player surrounds the other player's stone on all 4 sides, that stone is captured. Stones of the same color sitting on adjacent liberties become a connected group, and thus the whole group must be surrounded to be captured.
The final rule, as consequence of the above play, is the Ko rule. The Ko rule simply states that one play cannot put the board into the exact preceding position. The Ko rule results in "Ko Fighting," a phenomena where a player cannot play a stone to recapture a point immediately, and thus instead must play a stone in a position that produces disproportionate gains if not answered immediately. The opponent will either respond to this threat, allowing recapture of the taken point and capture of the attacking stone; or settle the Ko, ignoring the threat and losing something in exchange.
Based on these simple rules, players must move to make territory: controlled area surrounded by the borders of their own stones. Players can reduce each others' territory by taking control of areas inside the opponent's border. For example, if black controls a third of the board mainly around the lower right corner, white can reduce this territory by taking control of a fifth of the board including the lower right corner. White must do this by creating life in that area: a group of stones is alive if there is no possible way to capture it. At the end of the game, the rules of scoring give each player one point for each point of surrounded territory minus one point for each stone the opponent has captured.
Between all this, the simple game of Go gives rise to many, many concepts. The primary concept of Go is that of Life and Death. A group of stones that is impossible to capture by correct play is "Alive," while a group of stones that cannot avoid capture by any means is "Dead." Groups are otherwise "unsettled." Further, there exists the concept of seki or "Dual Life" by which two groups of stones are both alive only because whichever player plays first to kill the other group will instead kill his own group. The study of life and death greatly improves a player's skill at Go: players that recognize shape early and move to prevent life can more easily retain territory; players who recognize shape and move to create shape that leads more easily to life can more easily invade their opponent's territory. As a final consequence of Life and Death, by the way, dead stones are removed from the board and captured automatically during scoring; therefor there is no reason to waste moves capturing unless your opponent forces the issue.
Another concept in Go is Joseki, which indicates a "settled pattern" of moves that produces a balanced outcome. Joseki are usually played in the opening and represent optimal play by both players: the outcome is balanced because neither player has a sufficient advantage to overwhelm the other, and thus deviation from Joseki weakens the player who deviates. Proper joseki helps players avoid entering midgame at a disadvantage when hostilities break out during the opening.
Other studies in Go follow connections and basic moves to play. While groups are only formed with solid connections, players can eliminate the threat of cutting a connection by playing non-solid connections such as diagonals and bamboo joints, or even wider shapes that cannot be effectively cut. Often moves such as the Knight's Move, hane (Turn the Corner), or Monkey Jump represent complex play that turns what appears at a glance to be a somewhat scattered set of stones into a strong, solid shape during combat and capturing races. Thus the playing of Go relies on extremely distant abstract thinking in situations that can rapidly change and have many, many open options for play.
Go does not rely on fate (as in Backgammon and other dice games) or conflict (as with Chess). It can be said that Backgammon is a man versus fate game, where winning depends on pure chance; while Chess is a man versus man game, concentrating on the concrete goal of outmaneuvering your opponent to capture his king. One can consider Go, on the other hand, as a problem of man versus self: the playing of Go is only improved by judgment, balance, and understanding of play, and such conflict and capturing that arises between the players is often brief and only a minor part of play. Go is a matter of playing the position, not playing a calculated military strategy. This makes Go extremely challenging and enlightening, and very rewarding for players who spend a fair amount of time not only playing, but also studying.
16013244
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
Got an Amazon.com account? When it asks for your password, you can tack on extra character at the end or mess with the case. If "password" works, then "PASSWORD" works, "PaSsWOrD" works, "password123" works, "PasswordOHMYGODMYEYES" works, and so on. Oops?
15238928
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
I've been wrestling with questions of sustainability of our society for quite some time now. I'm not talking about global warming, or peak oil (or wood), or the imminent outgassing of the gulf when the sea floor cracks and spills doomsday quantities of methane into the atmosphere. I'm talking about actually being able to survive our own technology. In this vein, I've come to consider the merits of pursuing a more low-tech social structure, mainly starting from the education level. This includes everything from teaching students slide-rules, Suhnpan math, and a selection of generalized mental arithmetic strategies to encouraging the adoption of such simple things as home-baking bread and grooming with old-style razors (straight, double-edge, with brush and soap) and toothbrushes (boar bristle). My major worry is that the acceleration of a high-tech society will deteriorate when we completely distance ourselves from a low-tech world that requires--or allows--us to use things we understand, as simple as a toothbrush made of materials not produced in a lab or as complex as the baking of bread and how an egg affects the texture. After that, innovation becomes difficult and the general population atrophies due to inability to deal with the world with more than a caveman's level of understanding of anything we touch--who here knows how electric toothbrushes magically charge? Are there any philosophers or social scientists out there already considering the question of Peak Technology?
14748408
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
In the pursuit of good Sci-Fi, I went way back into the archives of the 90s and picked out a series by Stephen R. Donaldson. The Gap Cycle apparently never shared the fame of Donaldson's first series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant; it also shares neither the genre or the style. While Donaldson's fantasy endeavor follows a linear telling focused on a single character trapped in a battle between obvious Good and Evil, The Gap Cycle instead follows a complex storyline with a deep political plot driving from the background and a large compromise of right and wrong.
As a piece of fiction, review of The Gap Cycle presents primary difficulty in the avoidance of spoilers. In that light, avoiding a book report and plot summary would help preserve the enjoyability of the book; especially in the case of The Gap Cycle, which wields so much complexity that it breeds spoilers in even the most vague discussion.
As best I can put it, The Gap Cycle mainly takes the form of a rather vanilla space opera for the first two books. Characters have space flight; space sicknesses occur as a result of advanced space flight; faster-than-light travel allows access to asteroid ore mines. Space stations service miners and illegal pirates both, and of course booze and bars exist well out in space. Advanced technology of the barest minimum necessary to support this exists: fancy personal teleporters, holograms, force fields, and gravity machines don't show up anywhere in the universe. Space ships utilize a cylindrical design with internal spin to simulate gravity.
The first two books exist mainly for character setup. In fact, The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story only spans around 250 pages in small hardback form, and specifically sets up the characters of Angus Thermopyle, Nick Succorso, and especially Morn Hyland. The setup of Morn's character limits the actual literary content of The Real Story, hence the short length; a hundred pages into The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge, it becomes obvious why.
By the end of Forbidden Knowledge's 500 page breadth, back-room dealings and political agendas start showing up. At the same time, the classic space opera becomes more exciting with the addition of new players with indeterminate loyalties. From then on out, the action just gets better on both fronts: the political dealings heat up in The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises and keeps getting both more complex and more aggressive right to the last pages in The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die. The real hard-core space battles ramp up right to the final scenes in This Day All Gods Die as well, still running on at the very last edges of burning political conflicts as the whole plot draws together.
All in all, I found The Gap Cycle a truly unique and awe-inspiring piece of sci-fi outside the normal library of top sellers and famous names. I nabbed the entire series for $25 in hardback in decent condition off Amazon; but it definitely earned its worth at full original sales price. An essential for anyone into deep sci-fi novels.
13220750
submission
InsertDicks writes:
There seems to be active discussion on the ramification of plans to remove the notification area in Ubuntu. Another damn fool move from the people that brought you non-clickable pop-up notifications and a meaningless move of window controls to the left side of the title bar?
12193546
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
I've tried learning several languages in my life. Studying Spanish in school got me enough to pass the class after four years, but not enough to hold any sort of conversation. Japanese in college didn't work out when I failed to learn three different writing systems (Romaji, Hiragana, Katakana) in two months. I've turned to self-study courses, particularly Pimsleur, although other options included Rosetta Stone or cheap "Learn-In-Your-Car" courses. Pimsleur won't teach me to read and write, though; it won't even teach me a wide vocabulary, or formal grammar. I've decided on ordering an excellent fiction novel I've read in English to both learn to read and expand my German vocabulary, if I can grasp the language from this course. What other methods, products, and strategies are available to learn languages? Which work, which don't? How do I retain the language, especially if I don't talk to native speakers frequently? Is the best learning method something that varies from person to person?
10977504
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
A couple would-be thieves thought it lucrative to steal $100,000 worth of Gillette Fusion blades from Proctor & Gamble. "The razor blades had a street value of more than $100,000," police Lt. James Hashem said. Interestingly, Fusion blades cost 8 cents a piece to manufacture, and sell for around $2.50. Gillette can produce them faster than demand; and the stolen property wasn't resold (a different crime), so no loss of sales occurred. This raises the question: are these two men guilty of $100,000 grand larceny, or just $3,200?
9250126
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
Penny Arcade commented today on a newscasting covering sexual predation on XBox Live. It seems getting on the Internet can result in talking to complete strangers; and some strangers may ask strange, sexual questions or--in the case of one 30-year-old woman talking to a 16-year-old boy--show you their boobs. As we all know, 16-year-old boys are severely damaged by the sight of boobs; breasts are horribly toxic to males until midnight of their 18th birthday.
8210824
submission
someone_with_too_much_time writes:
I've been wondering how to report and shut down fraud sites. Besides the usual, there's a lot of sites in what I've determined is a network centered on an organization called MeetSafer, which props up sites all claiming to do a "sex offender registry and criminal background check" by ... you guessed it, credit card number. I'd ignore them but... they're major pitch is that they "keep you safe" by "verifying" that your Craigslist hookup isn't going to murder you, and I have a personal problem with putting people in danger via false sense of security. By experimentation (with a ShopSafe BAC card given a $2 limit) I found that they use an erotic payment gateway to accept the card, and attempt to sign users up for porn sites immediately. They purport to be backed by the National Sex Offender and Criminal Organization Database certifying body; both the entire MeetSafer network and NSOCO hide their WhoIs data behind Moniker, a WhoIs privacy service. The question is, how do I report this to the FBI, DA, or... I can't tell who cares, much less how to tell them.
6265769
submission
bluefoxlucid writes:
New anti-smoking ad warns teens that 'smoking is gay.' The new ad campaign purports to increase effectiveness over previous anti-smoking campaigns by addressing issues relevant to today's teens, rather than focusing on the negative health aspects of cigarette and tobacco use.Link to Original Source
