It is not so much that MS has been losing relevance. It is much more that they have been throwing relevance away
You would have thought that MS would have learned their lesson when they changed their GUI so that it was easier for the casual user (around 95% of the market) to migrate to Ubuntu or some other Linux than to upgrade their WinXP. But no, MS in its grand vision and overarching wisdom chose to make even more changes to the interface until they now have Win8, which only works some of the time, and has the amateur free network of family and neighborhood gurus stymied about how to even get to the various settings, let alone how to change things so the actual users can do something useful on their new computers.
MS is destroying itself by being too clever. If the company had been as smart as it was clever, it would have continued to improve the performance of WinXP rather than trying to compete with it with crappy new products.
Which is why I never considered a.22LR rifle. I did own a.22Mag revolver when I lived back of beyond in the hill country. It was a good snake gun, although the snake shot rounds were spendy. Mostly I used it for mercy killings when a wounded deer got onto the place or a goat tore its leg open to the bone when it got tangled in a barbed wire fence. If I ever feel the need for a handgun again, I'd probably get another.22Mag revolver.
I was wrong, parent post is right. I just learned that the.22 "survival" carbine I had been thinking of has a steel barrel; the receiver and stock are nylon.
When I lived in more open country, I used to hunt with a.30-06 slide action and 2-7x scope. Now my hunting is in brushy country where shots over 100 yards are very rare, so I use a.30-30 lever action carbine with peep sights. I've never been in a situation where a.22 rifle would be of any use, so I never looked into that caliber.
There is a bit of an attitude coloring parent post. It is consistent with the mental and emotional development of a healthy 14 year old, but the moderately low user number suggests someone much older than that. Strange.
Be that as it may, during my career as an Intensive Care Unit RN I was involved in more than 100 codes-- too many to count. Often I was the one running the show until a physician arrived: I had had some pretty intense training in using some fancy protocols. Doing the chest compressions was often the best position for running the code, since with all the training the physical activity is an ingrained habit, and your mind and eyes are free to monitor what everyone else is doing and how the patient is responding. Keeping an eye on a robot phlebotomist would be easy. And using a robot phlebotomist that could identify veins with sensors that humans don't have would improve the patient's chances of survival. You need that life line in place ASAP; unless you can get the drugs on board, CPR and defibrilation often are not enough. What you don't need is two or three of the staff on the arms and legs, poking around for long minutes to find some vein somewhere that can carry the drugs to the heart.
There are several commercial.22 LR carbines with nylon or other non-metal barrels. Aside from being light weight, some have some interesting properties, like being either straight or broken but never bent.
I doubt it would be hard to build a receiver massive enough to handle.22 LR pressures.
But I doubt you could get a printed barrel that could handle the corrosive effects for more than a couple of rounds. The nylon barrels do it somehow, but I believe it took some fancy chemical research to come up with the formula.
For the purposes of demonstrating the possibilities, the same gun should be printed again, with the barrel cut down to 6 inches and the powder load reduced by firing.22 short ammunition. Such a gun would survive a couple of firings, probably. Probably literally burning out the bore would be its demise.
I doubt if any printed gun could ever last for more than a few rounds before its barrel was shot out so bad that the bullet would fall out the end. The muzzle blast might be impressive though.
So you have to have someone there to make sure the patient is in the right position, assess their health, make sure they are the right person getting the right treatment... remind me why that person can't do the needle stick?
Because that person is rather busy at the moment doing CPR?
I don't usually respond to ACs, but this is an exception.
Read Wolters' book, Family Dog. Do try to remember the guy was not a writer but a dog trainer. The writing is good enough to get his message across. This is a very quick read, but also a book to come back to, time and again.
I left something out in my description of using whistle commands.
I often had two dogs at a time. I learned early on that I needed a distinctive whistle pattern for each dog, basically a "Pay attention!" command, to be followed with the action command. So basically I gave each dog its own name in whistle-speak. The equivalent of teaching "Diogi! Come!" "Juna! Stay!"
As Wolters said, the first command every dog needs to learn is their name. That is a command, and the command is "You, pay attention to me!" Same thing goes with whistle training.
A dog trained in whistle-speak with its own whistle-speak name will do fine in a dog park. It is doubtful that any of the other dogs would respond to the whistle (each person's whistle has a its own distinctive pitch as well as its own distinctive patterns of short and long toots. Dogs hear those differences, and they are as distinctive as differences in voice.)
More to the point, dogs and man have co-evolved. They are symbiotic species: they evolved in such a way that each species had a much better chance of raising progeny to mating age than either species had on its own. That's a strong natural selection process.
Part of this is that dogs and man learned to communicate with each other to a greater degree than dogs in a pack communicate with each other. They seek eye contact and use a rich gesture language to communicate their feelings to each other. Human pointing is an extension of that. The evolutionary advantages of pointing are pretty much obvious.
It should not be surprising that many of man's social structures-- lodges, tio-spayes, clans, small villages, high school cliques, gangs, etc-- are more dog-like than they are ape-like. Humans would not be like they are if they had not teamed up with dogs.
I've had eight dogs over 35+ years, and tried to use a radio collar only once, and only for a brief time. There were RC hobbyists and ham radio nuts in the neighborhood and someone's equipment was causing false signals to the collar. Perhaps the new ones have better protection from that now.
Every dog I've owned has been trained with a silent whistle in "Come", "Drop", and "Stay" commands. I carried the whistle on my key chain. Its effective range was over a quarter mile on open fields, far beyond my yelling distance, and comparable to the range of a radio collar. Advantages over the radio collar is that the whistle was always with me, there were no batteries to bother with, it was unaffected by water, it was not a potential noose (collars can get hung up on wire fences, etc), and the big one: with distinctive patterns of long and short blasts, it can deliver more than one command. Such as "Drop, Stay" when the dog had gotten on the other side of a busy road.
Agreed, life is not threatened by this. And humanity will almost certainly survive.
What would be lost is much of the Internet, many airports, most seaports, lots of railways, roads, pipelines, electric grids. Basically much of the infrastructure that supports what we call "civilization". As frail as that is, it is our species crowning achievement, and I for one do not want to see it damaged, let alone broken.
Yeah, what we have done could probably be rebuilt. But I'd rather we tried not to go that way.
When an iceberg melts, the sea level remains exactly the same, since when it was floating it displaced the weight of the ice above the water. It is called "buoyancy" and the guy that first thought about it once yelled "Eureka" and ran naked as a jay bird to tell his King all about it. Look that up in your Wikipedia.
The problem with much of the ice in Antarctica is that it is piled up a couple of kilometers high on other ice that is frozen to the bedrock below current sea level. If the bottom of some of that ice melts away and a chunk breaks off, all of that ice is suddenly floating, probably after a monumental splash. That will raise the sea level all around the world, since it is now all buoyant. Maybe it would be a 10 cm meter rise. While I have no idea how big a chunk that would have to be, using numbers taken from other posts in this thread, it would be less than 0.1% of the total theoretical rise if all the ice melted. So it seems like it is within the realm of possibility.
However in this scenario, the sea level would not rise all at once everywhere. The splash would cause a world wide tsunami, moving at somewhere around 600 mph that would be low and wide enough on open ocean that ships would not notice its passing under them. But as it approached shorelines, it would do the tsunami thing and build upon itself until it was a few meters high. Much of the world would have several hours of warning, enough that New Yorkers could evacuate to high ground-- The Palisades would be a cool place to go to-- and watch the wave splash over the base of the Statue of Liberty and wash Wall Street clean of its inequities. (Cue other biblical smite references.) I'm guessing there would also be secondary tsunamis in the same way water will slosh back and forth in a tub after its initial disturbance. Some of those secondaries may reinforce each other at some shorelines, possibly creating larger local waves than the original. It would probably take a day or so before the oceans settled down. At that point they would all be 10 cm higher than they were before.
A worrisome thing is the recent finding that Antarctic ice is melting faster below the waterline that it is on top. The slightly warmer water of recent years is more effective at melting the ice than the changes in air temperature. If this is happening where submerged ice has hold of bedrock, then we may be in for some nasty big waves.
This is not a big issue for me, personally. I doubt if it will happen in the next 20 or 30 years, and I probably won't be around after that. It is something for the slashdot kids to contemplate. In much the same way as those of my generation contemplated the possibility of a hot end to the Cold War.
On the side, I wonder how many potential Snowden types are are lurking in the NSA, ready to explode with the wrong doing they see all around them.
More disturbing is the realization that there must be others who are like Snowden in terms of access and skills, but are motivated more by individual profit than by altruism. How many secrets of the Snowden type have been sold to whom?
The NSA is a nest of corruption that needs to be burned out, totally destroyed. With those in charge of it sent to prison for allowing such a criminal cesspool to exist within the USA government. These guys have their own secret courts and their own secret laws and lie with impunity to Congress. Why would they not also lie to the White House and the Courts, including their own secret courts?
These idiots have some level of access to the assets that the NSA is developing.
And that is reason enough to shut the NSA down completely, and charge its career bureaucrats with criminal negligence wrt corruption of the US Constitution which they are supposed to be protecting.
If the NSA can allow these idjits to mess around, then how many of their other, more intelligent, personnel have found ways to make a little cash on the side by selling the kind of stuff Snowden has given away?
It is justified. If only because the underlying tech that brought so many images of the crash so fast from smart phones and whatnot give evidence of the degree that new tech is influencing news.
Also of techie interest is that so many of the passengers survived such a destructive crash. Planes today are a lot more crashworthy than the last generation.
I grant that the babes among us who have never learned to use a sliderule and probably most of them have never even touched one might not recognize the techie aspects of this. But the old geezers among us-- you know, the ancient ones who made the Internet and the digital cameras and cell phones and things like that-- appreciate this story and others like it. It helps us see just what kind of benefits our work has brought to society.
Lobbying does not do any good when dealing with a rogue government organization. It only works on those parts of the US government that work the way the US Constitution says they should.
If the NSA can get away with brazenly lying to Congress, as it is doing, then why would anyone think it is telling the President or the Courts the truth?
This is a rogue government agency that needs to be broken up in such a way that its various parts can never be put back together again. And everyone involved in the design and implementation of its secretive functions and secretive oversight groups needs to be investigated as a probable traitor to the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
So we have government agency working to prevent surprise attacks by enemy nations and terrorism against the US
Is that all that they are supposed to be doing? Nothing more than that? How do we know since if there is any effective oversight, it is by some secret agency that is not itself accountable under USA Constitution or law?
And then there are all the things that the NSA might be doing that are outside of its mandate. If it allows some low functionary like Snowden to walk out and give away all the information he was able to obtain, what is to stop someone with baser motives from collecting information that a corporation or foreign government would pay him for?
Even if the NSA could somehow function legally, it is so ripe for corruption that it should be shut down. And the perpetrators of this massive crime should be investigated.
I did not hear anything that sounded like the NSA does not consider the American public to contain adversaries. Judging from the information publicly available (thanks, Snowden, Assange, et al), it appears that the NSA does regard some portion of the American public to be adversaries.
If these NSA recruiters were USA Government employees, then they are bound by their Civil Service jobs to uphold the USA Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. This comes before any requirement to do as they are told by their supervisors. Both of these recruiters should be fired. They clearly do not have their priorities aligned properly with the fundamental requirements of their positions. Their supervisors should also be fired. And there should be an investigation into whether deliberate treason through violation of the USA Constitution has occurred.
If these NSA recruiters were employed by a company with a contract with the USA government, then that contract should be terminated, and the corporate officers and the USA officials who signed that contract should face charges for conspiring to commit treason by violation of the USA Constitution.
Of course none of this is going to happen. These are just what should happen. And what patriotic USA citizens should be demanding of their government.
By the way, parent post evidently missed the recent news that the USA Postal Service has been taking digital photos of every piece of First Class mail sent through its sorting devices for some time now. That huge amount of data is also being fed into the NSA database. So it is not just Internet and cell phone activity (and probably credit card activity, too).
Gee, what could possibly go wrong? All the guys and gals handling this data are so squeaky clean there is no way that none of it could get into the wrong hands, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Agree fully with that.
At their 64th birthday, some persons have 64 years of experience. Others have 8 years of experience, repeated 8 times.
It is not so much that MS has been losing relevance. It is much more that they have been throwing relevance away
You would have thought that MS would have learned their lesson when they changed their GUI so that it was easier for the casual user (around 95% of the market) to migrate to Ubuntu or some other Linux than to upgrade their WinXP. But no, MS in its grand vision and overarching wisdom chose to make even more changes to the interface until they now have Win8, which only works some of the time, and has the amateur free network of family and neighborhood gurus stymied about how to even get to the various settings, let alone how to change things so the actual users can do something useful on their new computers.
MS is destroying itself by being too clever. If the company had been as smart as it was clever, it would have continued to improve the performance of WinXP rather than trying to compete with it with crappy new products.
I have the Marlin 336 in the synthetic wood stock. Its proving to be a good gun. A lot lighter and easier to maneuver than the .30-06 was.
Which is why I never considered a .22LR rifle. I did own a .22Mag revolver when I lived back of beyond in the hill country. It was a good snake gun, although the snake shot rounds were spendy. Mostly I used it for mercy killings when a wounded deer got onto the place or a goat tore its leg open to the bone when it got tangled in a barbed wire fence. If I ever feel the need for a handgun again, I'd probably get another .22Mag revolver.
Blacktail deer.
I was wrong, parent post is right. I just learned that the .22 "survival" carbine I had been thinking of has a steel barrel; the receiver and stock are nylon.
When I lived in more open country, I used to hunt with a .30-06 slide action and 2-7x scope. Now my hunting is in brushy country where shots over 100 yards are very rare, so I use a .30-30 lever action carbine with peep sights. I've never been in a situation where a .22 rifle would be of any use, so I never looked into that caliber.
There is a bit of an attitude coloring parent post. It is consistent with the mental and emotional development of a healthy 14 year old, but the moderately low user number suggests someone much older than that. Strange.
Be that as it may, during my career as an Intensive Care Unit RN I was involved in more than 100 codes-- too many to count. Often I was the one running the show until a physician arrived: I had had some pretty intense training in using some fancy protocols. Doing the chest compressions was often the best position for running the code, since with all the training the physical activity is an ingrained habit, and your mind and eyes are free to monitor what everyone else is doing and how the patient is responding. Keeping an eye on a robot phlebotomist would be easy. And using a robot phlebotomist that could identify veins with sensors that humans don't have would improve the patient's chances of survival. You need that life line in place ASAP; unless you can get the drugs on board, CPR and defibrilation often are not enough. What you don't need is two or three of the staff on the arms and legs, poking around for long minutes to find some vein somewhere that can carry the drugs to the heart.
There are several commercial .22 LR carbines with nylon or other non-metal barrels. Aside from being light weight, some have some interesting properties, like being either straight or broken but never bent.
I doubt it would be hard to build a receiver massive enough to handle .22 LR pressures.
But I doubt you could get a printed barrel that could handle the corrosive effects for more than a couple of rounds. The nylon barrels do it somehow, but I believe it took some fancy chemical research to come up with the formula.
You make some valid points.
For the purposes of demonstrating the possibilities, the same gun should be printed again, with the barrel cut down to 6 inches and the powder load reduced by firing .22 short ammunition. Such a gun would survive a couple of firings, probably. Probably literally burning out the bore would be its demise.
I doubt if any printed gun could ever last for more than a few rounds before its barrel was shot out so bad that the bullet would fall out the end. The muzzle blast might be impressive though.
So you have to have someone there to make sure the patient is in the right position, assess their health, make sure they are the right person getting the right treatment... remind me why that person can't do the needle stick?
Because that person is rather busy at the moment doing CPR?
I don't usually respond to ACs, but this is an exception.
Read Wolters' book, Family Dog. Do try to remember the guy was not a writer but a dog trainer. The writing is good enough to get his message across. This is a very quick read, but also a book to come back to, time and again.
Then read Monks of New Skete books on training german shepherds and other breeds: How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend: A Training Manual for Dog Owners is the one to start with. The monks are both articulate and highly skilled in training dogs.
Then synthesize what these guys are saying.
Do that right, Grasshopper, and you will begin the journey to the more perfect world of man and dog that you seek.
I left something out in my description of using whistle commands.
I often had two dogs at a time. I learned early on that I needed a distinctive whistle pattern for each dog, basically a "Pay attention!" command, to be followed with the action command. So basically I gave each dog its own name in whistle-speak. The equivalent of teaching "Diogi! Come!" "Juna! Stay!"
As Wolters said, the first command every dog needs to learn is their name. That is a command, and the command is "You, pay attention to me!" Same thing goes with whistle training.
A dog trained in whistle-speak with its own whistle-speak name will do fine in a dog park. It is doubtful that any of the other dogs would respond to the whistle (each person's whistle has a its own distinctive pitch as well as its own distinctive patterns of short and long toots. Dogs hear those differences, and they are as distinctive as differences in voice.)
More to the point, dogs and man have co-evolved. They are symbiotic species: they evolved in such a way that each species had a much better chance of raising progeny to mating age than either species had on its own. That's a strong natural selection process.
Part of this is that dogs and man learned to communicate with each other to a greater degree than dogs in a pack communicate with each other. They seek eye contact and use a rich gesture language to communicate their feelings to each other. Human pointing is an extension of that. The evolutionary advantages of pointing are pretty much obvious.
It should not be surprising that many of man's social structures-- lodges, tio-spayes, clans, small villages, high school cliques, gangs, etc-- are more dog-like than they are ape-like. Humans would not be like they are if they had not teamed up with dogs.
Beep collar. Okay, that can work.
I've had eight dogs over 35+ years, and tried to use a radio collar only once, and only for a brief time. There were RC hobbyists and ham radio nuts in the neighborhood and someone's equipment was causing false signals to the collar. Perhaps the new ones have better protection from that now.
Every dog I've owned has been trained with a silent whistle in "Come", "Drop", and "Stay" commands. I carried the whistle on my key chain. Its effective range was over a quarter mile on open fields, far beyond my yelling distance, and comparable to the range of a radio collar. Advantages over the radio collar is that the whistle was always with me, there were no batteries to bother with, it was unaffected by water, it was not a potential noose (collars can get hung up on wire fences, etc), and the big one: with distinctive patterns of long and short blasts, it can deliver more than one command. Such as "Drop, Stay" when the dog had gotten on the other side of a busy road.
High tech is kewl. Appropriate tech is better.
Agreed, life is not threatened by this. And humanity will almost certainly survive.
What would be lost is much of the Internet, many airports, most seaports, lots of railways, roads, pipelines, electric grids. Basically much of the infrastructure that supports what we call "civilization". As frail as that is, it is our species crowning achievement, and I for one do not want to see it damaged, let alone broken.
Yeah, what we have done could probably be rebuilt. But I'd rather we tried not to go that way.
I'm not as think as you dumb I am. Just too lazy.
You have no idea how dumb I think you are.
When an iceberg melts, the sea level remains exactly the same, since when it was floating it displaced the weight of the ice above the water. It is called "buoyancy" and the guy that first thought about it once yelled "Eureka" and ran naked as a jay bird to tell his King all about it. Look that up in your Wikipedia.
The problem with much of the ice in Antarctica is that it is piled up a couple of kilometers high on other ice that is frozen to the bedrock below current sea level. If the bottom of some of that ice melts away and a chunk breaks off, all of that ice is suddenly floating, probably after a monumental splash. That will raise the sea level all around the world, since it is now all buoyant. Maybe it would be a 10 cm meter rise. While I have no idea how big a chunk that would have to be, using numbers taken from other posts in this thread, it would be less than 0.1% of the total theoretical rise if all the ice melted. So it seems like it is within the realm of possibility.
However in this scenario, the sea level would not rise all at once everywhere. The splash would cause a world wide tsunami, moving at somewhere around 600 mph that would be low and wide enough on open ocean that ships would not notice its passing under them. But as it approached shorelines, it would do the tsunami thing and build upon itself until it was a few meters high. Much of the world would have several hours of warning, enough that New Yorkers could evacuate to high ground-- The Palisades would be a cool place to go to-- and watch the wave splash over the base of the Statue of Liberty and wash Wall Street clean of its inequities. (Cue other biblical smite references.) I'm guessing there would also be secondary tsunamis in the same way water will slosh back and forth in a tub after its initial disturbance. Some of those secondaries may reinforce each other at some shorelines, possibly creating larger local waves than the original. It would probably take a day or so before the oceans settled down. At that point they would all be 10 cm higher than they were before.
A worrisome thing is the recent finding that Antarctic ice is melting faster below the waterline that it is on top. The slightly warmer water of recent years is more effective at melting the ice than the changes in air temperature. If this is happening where submerged ice has hold of bedrock, then we may be in for some nasty big waves.
This is not a big issue for me, personally. I doubt if it will happen in the next 20 or 30 years, and I probably won't be around after that. It is something for the slashdot kids to contemplate. In much the same way as those of my generation contemplated the possibility of a hot end to the Cold War.
On the side, I wonder how many potential Snowden types are are lurking in the NSA, ready to explode with the wrong doing they see all around them.
More disturbing is the realization that there must be others who are like Snowden in terms of access and skills, but are motivated more by individual profit than by altruism. How many secrets of the Snowden type have been sold to whom?
The NSA is a nest of corruption that needs to be burned out, totally destroyed. With those in charge of it sent to prison for allowing such a criminal cesspool to exist within the USA government. These guys have their own secret courts and their own secret laws and lie with impunity to Congress. Why would they not also lie to the White House and the Courts, including their own secret courts?
These idiots have some level of access to the assets that the NSA is developing.
And that is reason enough to shut the NSA down completely, and charge its career bureaucrats with criminal negligence wrt corruption of the US Constitution which they are supposed to be protecting.
If the NSA can allow these idjits to mess around, then how many of their other, more intelligent, personnel have found ways to make a little cash on the side by selling the kind of stuff Snowden has given away?
It is justified. If only because the underlying tech that brought so many images of the crash so fast from smart phones and whatnot give evidence of the degree that new tech is influencing news.
Also of techie interest is that so many of the passengers survived such a destructive crash. Planes today are a lot more crashworthy than the last generation.
I grant that the babes among us who have never learned to use a sliderule and probably most of them have never even touched one might not recognize the techie aspects of this. But the old geezers among us-- you know, the ancient ones who made the Internet and the digital cameras and cell phones and things like that-- appreciate this story and others like it. It helps us see just what kind of benefits our work has brought to society.
Now get off my damn lawn.
Lobbying does not do any good when dealing with a rogue government organization. It only works on those parts of the US government that work the way the US Constitution says they should.
If the NSA can get away with brazenly lying to Congress, as it is doing, then why would anyone think it is telling the President or the Courts the truth?
This is a rogue government agency that needs to be broken up in such a way that its various parts can never be put back together again. And everyone involved in the design and implementation of its secretive functions and secretive oversight groups needs to be investigated as a probable traitor to the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
So we have government agency working to prevent surprise attacks by enemy nations and terrorism against the US
Is that all that they are supposed to be doing? Nothing more than that? How do we know since if there is any effective oversight, it is by some secret agency that is not itself accountable under USA Constitution or law?
And then there are all the things that the NSA might be doing that are outside of its mandate. If it allows some low functionary like Snowden to walk out and give away all the information he was able to obtain, what is to stop someone with baser motives from collecting information that a corporation or foreign government would pay him for?
Even if the NSA could somehow function legally, it is so ripe for corruption that it should be shut down. And the perpetrators of this massive crime should be investigated.
I did not hear anything that sounded like the NSA does not consider the American public to contain adversaries. Judging from the information publicly available (thanks, Snowden, Assange, et al), it appears that the NSA does regard some portion of the American public to be adversaries.
Parent post is true, as far as it goes.
If these NSA recruiters were USA Government employees, then they are bound by their Civil Service jobs to uphold the USA Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. This comes before any requirement to do as they are told by their supervisors. Both of these recruiters should be fired. They clearly do not have their priorities aligned properly with the fundamental requirements of their positions. Their supervisors should also be fired. And there should be an investigation into whether deliberate treason through violation of the USA Constitution has occurred.
If these NSA recruiters were employed by a company with a contract with the USA government, then that contract should be terminated, and the corporate officers and the USA officials who signed that contract should face charges for conspiring to commit treason by violation of the USA Constitution.
Of course none of this is going to happen. These are just what should happen. And what patriotic USA citizens should be demanding of their government.
By the way, parent post evidently missed the recent news that the USA Postal Service has been taking digital photos of every piece of First Class mail sent through its sorting devices for some time now. That huge amount of data is also being fed into the NSA database. So it is not just Internet and cell phone activity (and probably credit card activity, too).
Gee, what could possibly go wrong? All the guys and gals handling this data are so squeaky clean there is no way that none of it could get into the wrong hands, right?