dagobart

I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?

I see another benefit of using fail to ban. That is, it helps a little to keep the log files (a little) shorter.

Full link to the passage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren#Personal_life

And, given that it heats water, what if it gets applied to someone in heavy rain, say with clothes soaked? Would it go so far to effectively boil the person?

I initially thought along the same lines, but not outdoors.

Depending on the energy consumption, this technology might serve as a nice protection inside buildings. Like areas where you don't want unauthorized personel to go to. For everyone else you could "lower the shield" for the moment of passing-through.

So, pushing this thought a little further, I'd say such a (or any) deity and us have at least this one thing in common: looking in amazement at those primes.

The idea looks like what already failed on the fictional character of RoboCop - be too tame.

I disagree. Those are real people who do that kind of work. When I was looking for online work at sites like getafreelancer or rentacoder there usually were tons of job offers regarding forum posts/blog comments. Rarely labeled as forum/blog spam but often meaning that. Here's a typical (current) job offer for forum posts: http://is.gd/c3dIo (This is not intended as advertising but only to provide an impression of such a job offer and as evidence that such job offers actually do exist and are common, depending on where you look.)

In this particular job, they offer $20 for 400 posts (or 2000 replies). Most often, one condition of posting such stuff is that it is at least unique, "original work" or would "pass copyscape".

So, there seem to be people who actually do this kind of job manually.

A school days friend of mine stopped developing at age ~17. Some very rare condition. Now he's about fourty and about to out-live his mother. However, there's no chance he'll ever live on his own.

I didn't bother to read the actual article, just responding to the headline: Did you ever look at getafreelancer.com? There are tons of jobs for captcha solving. Permanently.

I did the exact opposite--one time I came across a very cheap keyboard with the keys wobbly and floppy. Was a relief to my hands.

Since then, as long as I used standalone keyboards I bought cheap keyboards where the situation of my fingertips hitting the key caps was that the caps evaded my fingers a little and required some kind-of adjusting of my finger movements to the individual key once my fingertips hit the key in question.

I guess the added movement helped to relax my fingers.

Having seen this, it turns out it's just the old three-panel view as seen in mail progs, but put upside down. But great to see someone has transferred the ideas to calendars now.

I read another piece on the iPad yesterday on a prominent German newspaper. I'm in line with you. My opinion yesterday was that the paper could be a little biased or in hope to get their market share back. A masses-loved closed device might be ideal for that.

Reading a comment like this one for the second time in this very thread, it too much reminds me about those folks who really wanted Pandora to be real.

So, hmm. Maybe scientists should start heading for some technology that converts really really hard wishes to reality.

Would you concede your geek card to me, please?

...except for forcing people to buy drinks.

(Which OTOH brings me to the question whether you'd slip through if you'd bring a (non-liquid) frozen block of water ice.)

Well, and then there was Firefox. Which simply won't run on old hardware, at least not in a current version. And not at all to mention YouTube or anything a more powerful computer requiring site. (GMail anyone?)

As much as I love keeping old computers alive using Linux, the nowadays common way using the web puts the spoke into the wheel.

Is that UI (user interface) design? If not, to my knowledge, UX refers to Unices, and wikipedia does not tell anything related else.

So, what is UX?

This is good advice. I should had have it earlier: I always believed that becoming an intern at a startup would be a good idea since (so my opinion) it would give/leave you the freedom to live your creativity at work and influence a little how the startup evolves.

I'm not a reader of The Onion, so what exactly is that value? (Could you give some details?)

> then we discover yet another subatomic particle

I guess that is a general principle: Just look at the thing (= what you have/what we know so far), then zoom in, ask: "Why is it that this is how it is?"

I guess you can do that on and for just anything we know, therefore we won't ever have a complete picture.

The Deutsche Post is just about to introduce email that's guaranteed to reach the addressee. https://www.onlinebrief.de/ That would invite everyone to use e-mail rather than snail, except for the (iirc) ¢20 price tag per mail.

Then, why not push it one step further -- some generalized recognition, independent of field of 'expertise' (well, we're talking about a machine/software here)

IMO it should split up the manual into pieces below the level of a level so one could collect those lesson snips one needs and skip the others. Could apply for any other kind of stuff to be teached too.

...or, why not some kind of Lego (?) nano bricks that can easily be ordered/reordered?

maybe somebody could make some shape-shifting general purpose key, locked/jailed down to only take the shapes matching the locks in your possession. Would need some very small actuators -- I guess, it's doable.

figure out how content is stored in brains, so we could skip learning and implement/initialize knowledge directly

I'd like to have the same for my bicycle, y/telling something like "you're supposed to give me 1 meter, not 30 centimeters".

Same for Linux. Regarding fraud profitabililty, I wonder whether it's really that a good idea to evangelize to get Windows users to switch platforms.

Well, I guess I want to use a different random number generator than the TSA does.