rogerthecamel

Id say not everyone who does it is seeking attention or is just bored. I mean the responses invoked from some people on these forums are really just amazing. I mean to receive threats of death for posting in a Linux forum that Linux will never be as powerful and flexible as windows is just astounding. I mean they are just operating systems and there are many people out there who honestly hold that opinion. Its the same reason some people tease or hassle others, because people react so badly and that is entertaining. I'm not sure why it is, but it just is. And I am sure these people aren't full time nonsense spammers, they probably spend the rest of their time doing their school homework or playing on their xbox.

I would personally avoid pie/circular menus. While there has been some research to suggest their use can be advantageous once you learn the location of items spatially, they are confusing to look at and hard to visually navigate. If you had a pop up menu I would think that a grid based one could be better, as long as it doesn't look too cluttered, it really depends on what you feel is the easiest to look through. You could try it out by making a mock up of a pop up menu with items in a list, in a pie and in a grid, and then just see how long it takes for you to figure out where things are and how easy it feels to look through. A list menu may even be the best.Interfering with programs defaults for mouse clicks can be a pain, you need to find a balance between a shortcut that isn't going to interfere with many programs and one that is easy to get to and remember. If its only for yourself and you have a mouse with more than 3 buttons, then that can be a good place to start.Things like spatial memory and Fitts law are key when trying to design interfaces like this, especially one that will be used many times every day. The good is though, that by designing it yourself you get to try it and change it, you'll know pretty quickly if you have a good interface or a mind numbingly frustrating one.

Here is an example of how a 2D fish might look:Basically as you suggested we can see the insides of it, complete with bones and its breathing/eating system. Obviously the picture doesn't include complete detail but it gives you an idea of what a fish might look like. Its tail works a lot like a 3D fish but a top down view, it can wave side to side to give propulsion. And its fins could "flap" to give extra propulsion or direction, which may or may not work but this model could potentially work for a flying animal. Flying and swimming are two similar mechanisms in many ways, one is just in a much thinner substance. Basically in a 2D world animals would have to turn right over to change direction unless they can just move in reverse, that is less of a problem for swimming and flying creatures.

2D creatures may not need to evolve better depth perception as they can rely on the same cues that we use every day to judge depth. That includes size of objects, occlusion, even paralax. This isn't necessarily correct. While a top down view works, at least for the creatures, the 2D universe would mean some interesting things. Firstly there would likely still be stars and planets and black holes and atoms, as all these things work perfectly fine in 2D. Living things could not exist without water or air just as they can't in the 3D world. So they would have to exist on a planet. So I think the easiest way a 2D creature could exist is kind of like a fish in the sea. There is the sea floor and the waters surface and the fish can swim everywhere in between. Birds would also be possible in a 2D world although their mechanism for flying would have to be different, but land walkers would be a lot less likely as they are restricted in their motion. Yes, I agree with this completely, otherwise there would be no way for the creature to have any internal organs as what you see in 2D is all that is there, nothing is hidden. But I never considered what you said about 4D creatures seeing the insides of us, which is completely true. I always just thought of it as them seeing the 3D world much like we do but all at once, so no objects are hidden behind others. But it makes complete sense that they would also see the insides of everything too. Interesting to think about how that would look.

You can't really say that words do not become obsolete in English. English in its current form today evolved from old english which looks something like this: "hu ?a ??elingas ellen fremedon" (from wikipedia). So as languages evolve and change words are created and dropped all the time.guhati, I realise you weren't saying that the Latin language is dead, that is what I was saying. What is interesting about the Latin language is that because it is dead now it no longer evolves and changes as English or any other in use language does. This is why they use it for scientific namings because they know that when they call a tree "Agathis australis" they know that in 100 years it will still mean the same thing. Kind of like if they used english and they had called a brightly coloured butterfly the "gay butterfly" back in the 1950's. Now days that would be seen as meaning homosexual butterfly but thats not the meaning intended. In Latin these meanings are unchanging because it is not in use anymore. Thats what I meant by the last sentence.

This seems to protrude quite far into the working space. Wouldn't this get in the way of windows you are working in? What if you had your entire task bar and start menu appear around the mouse when a certain mouse button is clicked, or when you move ur cursor to one of the screens corners. It does look nice though, would be interesting to try out. One problem with having the start menu a layer above the tasks is that it makes the start menu harder to click as you can move past it and click current tasks by mistake, Fitts law would determine that they are best put on the edge of the screen.

Its an interesting idea you have Suran, and while I don't understand your full explanation here are my thoughts on the matter.So a syphon works because:a) the weight of the liquid on the ascending end of the pipe is lower than the weight of all of the liquid on the descending end of the pipe:P the pipe is air tight so the liquid cannot escape and the pipe cannot fill up with airSo to extract liquid at the top of the syphon would require two things:a) only extract enough such that the weight of the liquid in the descending pipe is still more than that of the ascending pipeB) maintain the air tight nature of the system while managing to extract liquidThe first requirement is easy, say you have 100kgs of water in the pipe up and 200kgs of water in the pipe down, then you could extract almost 100kgs of water at the top before the syphon would stop at a standstill. The real problem is working out the mechanism to extract the water. I'm sure it has been done but its hard to say exactly how, without trying it out practically.

I just had a read over your link from GMC, and I guess I can understand why some people do it, although probably not all of them. I think posting something like that horrible game (I didn't actually try it) is an interesting exercise in seeing how worked up some people can get over something not worth their time. The problem as I see it isn't the person making the original post or even the ones replying to it and laughing along with it. It's the people who get so obviously worked up over something that is clearly some kind of joke and they have no real business caring about. I've never done it myself but I do usually find them funny to read over as the people who are in on the joke are clearly invoking a reaction that exceeds what it should. Its the user reactions that keep these trollers/spammers alive, they do it for the entertainment.

It may seem impossible to us to have another spatial dimension but to a 4 dimensional creature it would be totally natural. This is because we exist completely in 3 dimensions. Our brains don't really have the ability to comprehend what a 4 dimensional world would even look like.Nabb has some good points that I have to agree with. Time is a poor forth dimension as it doesn't work the same as any of the others, so a 4th or 5th dimension, if they exist would likely be spatial. And a 2 dimensional creature can still view shading, and it can use this shading of the light reflected off the objects to build a model in its 2D brain about how these fit together in a 2D way. Just as we build a model in our brains of the world in a 3D way even though our sight works in only 2 dimensions.jaychant:"1. 2D creatures rely on color to guide them; instead of using shapes to guide them, 2D creatures would use color. They would live in a colorful world and learn to recognize where they are by looking at the colors."The world doesn't conform to a creatures vision/senses, the creatures vision/senses evolve to fit the environment they are within. Bats in dark caves don't even use vision because of lack of light, they developed other senses to sense the world. The same is true of any environment lacking in some detail, even if its the third dimension.The real questions come from when you think about how this 2D world would really work, physically. I mean for starters their planet would be a circle which they walk on the surface of, but the problem with this, unlike most platform games the 2D creatures would not be able to walk past each other without climbing on top of them, because they cannot occupy the same space. For this reason it is likely 2D creatures would be swimming or flying (which are technically the same thing).

Have a look at this: https://www.thevenusproject.com/ Basically its a group dedicated to achieving some of the things you have mentioned here, but they "mostly" know what they are talking about and have experts involved. An interesting read but even that is a little far fetched from ever happening.

Well yeah, jetpacks exist too, but its not hard to see that the world today isn't as they invisaged it would be back in the 50's. My point is that the technologies/principles we think that we can use to achieve faster than light travel currently will probably not be what is actually used when it happens, its more likely that they will discover something completely new we never realised existed.

Well one thing you probably need to do before this topic goes much further is define what it means for a word to become extinct. The way I see it there are two possible meanings.a) a word falls out of all knowledge and becomes impossible to ever use again (except by chance when someone makes a new word). a word is dropped from a language because no one uses it and so the word is not considered to be correct in that language.While a) is what I was thinking of when discussing extinct words, it is also impossible to prove the existance of even though it is highly likely they exist. By finding one of these extinct words they instantly become not extinct and so there in lies the problem.Words fitting the definition of definitely exist as languages naturally evolve over time, and so words fall out of use and eventually become not part of the language. Simple examples are the word "colour" in American English, it is extinct and was replaced by "color". While it could be argued they are the same word there are likely more extreme examples.It is funny that you should reference Latin as it is a dead language. This basically means that no one speaks it naturally anymore. But words in this language will unlikely ever become extinct. This is why scientists use it for naming plants and animals because the language isn't changing or evolving anymore. So the names they give will never change in their meaning.

Remembering that 60 years ago they thought we'd be using jetpacks and flying cars by now and living on the moon and on mars. The thing about predictions is that they are usually wrong, so while wormholes seems like a theory now that seems to fit, in a few years time they might be disproven but something even better or more interesting takes their place. Such as teleportation via quantum entanglement or something. We really can't predict what the technology of the future will involve.Infact my prediction is that it is more likely is that eventually no one will need to travel anymore and we will all be contected to a large network which we can use to interact with people across large distances without having to get on a plane or drive a car for hours. Oh wait, its already starting... the internet is here!But my point is that as energy becomes an increasing issue it becomes more efficient to transport our consciousnesses across distances as opposed to our bodies, which will allow us to be all around the world with very little cost. But who knows, maybe wormholes can facilitate that.

Looking at your code, you probably don't want to do a direct comparison between your alarm datetime and your current datetime. This is because if for some reason you dont check on the exact second or minute that it is designed to trigger on then it won't be raised. It is best to check if the current time has passed the alarm time and then check the alarm off as having been triggered (to avoid repeat alerts). It depends if you are working in minutes or seconds, or even milliseconds and how often you check.

Super fast space travel I think is supposed to be different from wormhole theory. Im only really basing this on star gate but they were usually pretty accurate with some theories out there. Near the end they had ships which travelled thru subspace to get places faster, but wormhole travel (aka stargate) was still much much faster.Well really, as soon as they had radio, and as soon as they had computers, wifi wasn't that far away. Wifi messages broadcast everywhere, they don't direct to one computer, they just implement encryption to stop anyone from listening in or getting muddled with their own data.

Well your justification for why words won't go extinct is a little counter intuitive. The more words in a language that are synonyms(same meaning) the more likely the less often used ones will become extinct eventually. And your new word "Ombgajhlsdfsdo" will probably never be used beyond the scope of this thread and so in 100 years when the site no longer exists, the hard drives are all destroyed and unreadable and you and I don't even remember this conversation, then that word will have no way of coming back into use. Therefore it is extinct.Its the term "extinct" that makes this topic so hard, to say something is extinct implies finality, as in it can never be used ever again. For something like dinosaurs this is easy because we can say they are extinct when no more of them exist, they are finite in number at any given time and cannot be duplicated. To apply it to a word is like to apply it to computer data. Since data can be copied repeatedly, quickly and without much control over it, then even the most obscure files can still exist somewhere and then quickly go from only having one copy left to millions. Same with a word, all it requires is one person to remember it, start using it, and it can spread to be in full use again.

Unicorn... there I just named something that doesn't exist. Na, although I'm not sure what your logic is there Lightning73. Seeing a living dinosaur could simply mean recreating it.

Its more the notion of causing a bend in space to connect two points that doesn't seem to sit well. Unless creating a wormhole is more like bending the local space around the region of each end of the wormhole, in effect moving them closer together without effecting the rest of the universe... yes I like that, I think using that logic wormholes could definitely exist.

The problem with "bending" space time to create wormholes is that it hinges on the idea that we can manipulate the shape of space in any way. One common analogy is that space is "spherical" like the earth but in more dimensions. So going the long way is like travelling from one end of the earth to the other around the earth, while a wormhole would go straight through. Given the size of the earth this would go from a 20,000km trip to a 12,700km trip, which isn't a huge drop in distance. Then you have to consider the fact that you don't always want to travel to the opposite side. The advantages of distance reduce as the target gets closer and closer to us, meaning we might only see a decent speed increase if we want to travel to the opposite side of the universe, and the time reduction would be less than 50%. So a 10 million light year trip would now be a brief 6 million light years away.Admittedly these ratios might not stand true for more dimensions and the distances might be able to be significantly reduced. But the idea of having a machine that can "bend" the entire universe seems highly unlikely. Maybe though it will be like travelling through space by moving the entire universe rather than just yourself. Maybe we will be able to "bend" our own personal space to shift like this.

If you put on glasses that flip your vision upside down and then continuously wear them, eventually your brain will flip the image back upright.

Yes I think they do scan the contents of ZIP files, not sure why they won't let you send HTML or SWF though, probably because they may be able to have active content that can damage computers. Same with EXE files. Best bet is usually to rename extensions to something like TXT or even just _TML and _WF so that you know how to rename them back.

As soon as a word is written or recorded it can't become extinct until all record and memory of that word is removed. There are plenty of extinct words out there, I mean look at the ancient egyptian language, all thats left are pictures/symbols, nothing vocal. Because of this it is impossible to name any "extinct" word. Just words that have fallen out of use. Although you could probably argue that if a word is excluded from the dictionary of a language then it become extinct from that language. The word would be fallen out of use enough, or been replaced that it is technically no longer correct to use. This could include a word such as "thy" although I'm not sure if it is no longer part of the english language.To ban a name would not make it fall out of use, conversely it will probably be remembered throughout history as that strange time when the name John was banned and never used as a name again. But it would be remembered forever and therefore not become extinct.Your poll about what the most popular name is, well I wouldn't pick my own name, I know it isn't the most popular name and just because I hear it more often than any other name doesn't make it seem any more popular to me. Now if the poll was "What name do you hear the most often?" then I might be more inclined to choose my own, but there are actually probably others that I might hear more often, like "Rihanna", "Chris Brown", etc. These names are mentioned all the time on the radio more often than people need to refer to me by my name to get my attention.

To be honest, I learnt to program starting with QBasic and Visual Basic. They are both great for learning the basics of programming before trying to tackle some of the harder concepts. The other great thing about them is that it is really easy to get started, setting up C/C++ to start working with (especially the free versions) can be a bit of a nightmare. Plus you need to make sure you create a correct main function and what not. In VB (version 6 or lower) it is just a matter of writing some code and pressing 'play'. If there is anything wrong it will point it, sometimes even before you start the program. And you can make more complex programs with a GUI without needing a few months of learning.I have also begun learning PHP and while it is really useful, as a first language it probably isn't very forgiving. While the syntax is very C++ like it doesn't get compiled so debugging it can be a bit of a nightmare if you don't already know how do program or recognise any bad syntax. I have heard Python is another excellent starting language and is more C++ like. But you won't be making GUI's as easily.As for the syntax of printf vs cout, I'm pretty sure both can be used in either program, as long as the correct libraries are referenced. You need #include <stdio.h> to use printf. I find printf easier as the syntax is a little less retarded (printf still has its own retardations) and looks a lot more like normal C++.

I wasn't sure where to start this topic so I figured here would do. I thought I'd open a topic discussing Computer Vision. This is a topic that I am currently doing a PhD on and one that while highly interesting with cool potential applications, not many people know a great deal about. So I thought I'd start this thread to answer any questions about it or just open discussion in the area, giving others who have knowledge in the area a place to contribute.So computer vision is basically taking images/video and analysing them programatically to reach some understanding about them. This might be tracking an intruder walking in a restricted area, recognising an object and calculating its pose, or positioning a hand in video as some kind of input device. It is a reasonably new area of computer science as it requires usually a large amount of computing power. We are currently reaching processor speeds that are allowing us to do more real time computer vision processing which makes applications of it more interesting.To start you off, if you program in C/C++ then the OpenCV library (https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/) is a good place to start.

Marijuana or weed is definitely legal in Amsterdam, they can sell it in shops and what not. Drugs, a much broader term, has different levels of legality everywhere. Prostitution is legal in New Zealand, Not because they condone it but because they want to have law in place to help protect them from different types of exploitation.IQ depends on the measure of IQ. Measuring a monkeys IQ with a normal human IQ test would be pointless, for starters unless you somehow taught them english then they wouldn't understand the test. Regardless it is highly unlikely they have IQ's of 100 which is close to the average human IQ.The universe expands in "space" which means that distances increase while sizes stay the same. While the universe isn't proven to be infinite, it is possible to be both infinite and expanding. The analogy often used is to think of seeds sprinkled on the top of a loaf of bread before baking. They start all close together but as it bakes the surface expands while all the seeds stay the same size. They stay in the same positions relative to the space but get further apart.