Read a different story on this and my favorite quote was that it would probably never be able to pick up on a bomb made with Ammonium Nitrate, because, well, that's fertilizer...
Disclosure: I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom - 1964. I had the same argument you're making here with my dad 30 years ago. I could see the writing on the wall even then... I knew that Social Security would not "be there" for me like it was for him. I told him that I thought the way to fix the problem was pretty much what you're saying... The boomers should pay in until his generation died off. Then Social Security should have a stake put through it. It is a ponzi scheme, but not called that because it's government run. I still subscribe to this belief. I think when it's time for me to collect, they should kill the system for everyone. Then you and I can both stop paying, but I'll have sacrificed for the greater good. I still believe this. My dad's generation grew up in the depression, then had to fight WWII (which my dad did personally, flying B-17's over Europe). They lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation for most of the rest of their lives. They deserve their social security. Me and the rest of the boomers? Not so much. We grew up with relative wealth and security (except for that nuclear annihilation thing) and have had it pretty good. Most of us are baby heads. We're debt leveraged to the hilt. We're relative losers when compared to our parents. We don't really deserve Social Security. Perhaps our only saving grace would be to do as I describe and free you from the burdens of Social Security. Maybe then we can be a great generation after all. That'll leave you "millennials" to figure out how you can leave the world a better place. From the way you talk, you'll do worse than us. Crap... you're not even polite about screwing an entire generation!
The biggest reason that Tesla's investors abandoned him at the end was that he wanted to do wireless power transmission, using the Earth and it's ionosphere as the transmission medium. Using Tesla coils, he demonstrated that he could indeed transmit power wirelessly. Then they asked him how the electricity (that had to be produced at a significant cost) would be metered. When he told them there would be no way to meter it, they abandoned him. If you can't make money off of it, why would you do it was the question the inventors asked. Edison, OTOH, knew that it was ALL about making a buck. That's why Edison is revered today, and Tesla's wild claims and ideas are seen as borderline crackpot science today.
WRT the nobody caring about industry awards, the winner of that should go to George C. Scott... who was nominated for Best Actor for Patton, and won it. He didn't go to the ceremony and returned the Oscar to the Academy. When asked if he would watch the ceremony on TV, he said he was going to watch a hockey game, which apparently he did. He later said that the award should be sent to the Patton museum, but since he didn't put it in writing, it was never delivered. The award is now at the Virginia Military Institute, where generations of Patton's have attended...
"He will do anything to keep his face in the media."
You know, as I was reading this thread, I kept asking myself why he is still doing this kind of stuff. I'm from CT (and no, I didn't vote for this guy, I can't STAND him) but I kept thinking "Jeez, the election is OVER, and he won. Why is he doing this?"
Thanks for answering my question for me. It was so obvious it evaded me. Wish I had mod points!
Actually, if you look up the costs of care, Billy Bob is the cheapest case when he has no insurance. He probably has the "widow maker" heart attack at 60 and dies in his truck. (Hopefully at a rest stop) There's no expensive end of life scenarios - he doesn't spend $500 a day in a skilled nursing facility for 30 years - he doesn't go to intensive care several times in his old age. Sure, he doesn't see his grand kids graduate from college or even high school. But from a purely cost perspective, he's the cheap one. The Billy Bob on Universal Health Care ends up costing the system FAR more money.
LOL... I copied your spelling assuming it was correct... Decided not to do the link to Memory Alpha (all things Trek)
Don't even get me started on the reboot. I generally sum it up by saying that if I wanted to watch young punks tool around in powerful star ships, I'd have rented Star Wars Episode IV
Yeah - that's the Amazon... Now lets look at New England. 300 years ago, it was approximately 75% forested. 200 years ago, it was approximately 25% forested. Today it is approximately 75% forested. Why? Well, before the Europeans came, agriculture was practiced on a small scale. 200 years ago, the Europeans were firmly entrenched, had cut down most of the forests to create farms, and to use the old growth timber for ships masts and fuel. Between then and now, the farms were largely abandoned as the farmers moved to the midwest and west for more fertile ground (and less rocks)... Today, you can walk deep into a forest, and find a stone wall - just out in the middle of nowhere. Used to be a farm... It used to be somewhere.
So who's to say that after the Brazilians get tired of raising cattle on substandard land, and end up doing something else for a living, that the rain forests won't come back - without having to do anything at all?
I had a Tandy 1000 (still do actually) and ran Deskmate during the Windows 1.0 days... It is hard for people to understand just how messy things were in those days... printer drivers were essentially non-existent and you had to embed printer commands in documents if you were doing anything fancy (meaning different fonts or sizes). There were a plethora of TSR programs (Terminate-Stay Resident) like Sidekick. There were all kinds of hacks to make your machine use memory above 640k. Deskmate was basically something more similar to the Office suite than a real Windows replacement. There were all kinds of menuing programs at the time, many of them shareware, that would essentially allow you to build a simple application launch screen. Deskmate did a pretty fair job of documents and rudimentary spreadsheets... It was the MS Works of its day. Other applications like Lotus 123 and dBase (or Clipper) were the norm - and you ran one of them at a time. (No multitasking) So Windows 1.0 was basically a fancy menu program and as TFA points out, it had many competitors... It wasn't until Windows 2.1 came out that it advanced any farther than that...
Easy solution: Just put FrameMaker 7.7 on your resume. If they claim that you lied on your application, just say that they lied in their advertisement!
I never had any interest in the Mario Bros. game(s)... Everyone else seemed to though. I was perhaps the only one of my friends who really liked Duck Hunt. I LOVED that game! I only wish that you could have shot the dog when he laughed at you for missing.
... But not intentionally so... if you RTFA, and I did, you'll find that rare earths actually aren't really rare. So while China MINES 93 percent of the world's rare earths, and thus supplies 99% of it, most countries COULD also do this if they wanted to. In fact, the last mine in the US closed in 2002 because, according to the article, of a radiation leak... seems these rare earth's are usually found with radioactive thorium and uranium. So what has happened is that China positioned itself as a reliable supplier of rare earths, and did so cheaply. Although the article doesn't say this, my guess is that China probably doesn't take the same safety precautions with mines and the thorium, which the article did say was costly to dispose of.
What has happened here is that China, again, produces things in an environmentally unfriendly way (since they apparently don't care much about the cost of crapping on their own country), and thus does so with cheap labor, thus becoming the most economically viable producer. Only now do they start to flex that muscle they have built...
So the world has a few choices - they can continue to rely on China, and deal with politically induced supply disruptions, find other countries that are willing to cheaply crap on their own environments and buy from them, or produce such materials locally but at much higher cost.
Abolishing copyright and patents won't accomplish anything. Why would I work days and days, weeks and weeks, perhaps years and years to write a book, and then not be able to profit from it's publishing? I LIKE copyrights. I write software. Of course I want it. Same thing goes for songwriters and performers. If they want, they can opt out of copyrights. But the majority will want to be able to cash in on their hard work.
What is needed is reform of the copyright system, not abolition... I like the 14 years idea. And agree that the current system sucks. But it's abolition isn't the answer.
There is nothing weird about this- if you know lambda calculus, godel-number and Turing machines it's simple logic. We have never done anything to "split" the fields. All computer science did was to create a (very shallow) layer of pretense through which ot access the maths.
Cool... and since most porn is digital now, and displayed on computers, can we then say that porn is just a calculation in lambda calculus?
Who knew that watching porn was the equivalent of doing calculus!!!
Because something like this would neeeeeeever have the potential to be abused...
My favorite argument... Let's apply it to other things as well - things we already have... Should we get rid of the following because it has "the potential to be abused"??
Police Services?
Armed Forces?
Security Guards?
Guns?
Abortions?
Free Speech?
Freedom of Religion?
Here's the best one - how about the Internet itself? - it certainly has the potential to be abused - People use it all the time to steal identities, bilk people, plan terrorist attacks... So not only should we have the "kill" switch, but we ought to push the button immediately?
"Google’s capacity to control human thought makes the Catholic church jealous, I bet," Barlow said. "They wish they’d thought of it."
I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how exactly Google is controlling my thoughts. Sure, I use google, and gmail, and I have a Droid... how does that equate to controlling my thoughts? Maybe they have unique access to my thoughts, as written down, but that is a far different thing than control.
File this one under Rant/Drug Induced/EFF Nonsense
Probably not. But we're not just talking about pacemakers here and that is the point. Implantable technology will continue to get more and more common - the insulin pump was just one example. There are now rudimentary artificial eyes that hook into the brain. That opens up all kinds of risks. And these devices are getting more networked... Heck, even pacemakers "call home" over a phone line to check on their status (you literally hold a phone handset on your chest to do the communication for some of them). Guaranteed that someday there WILL be a virus that infects implanted devices... Quicker if we are not careful.
I agree with everyone that this demonstration was stupid... But the bigger question here deserves to be discussed - implanted devices CAN be infected with viruses, and we have to be careful about that... Implanted devices are becoming more and more common - it's not just pacemakers anymore. There was an article in Wired recently about the drive to create a "smart" insulin pump, one that would sense your blood sugar level and then adjust insulin delivery accordingly. This will become more and more common as we apply technology to "curing" disease... Keeping that technology virus free should be a high priority, especially as this technology gets integrated in more complex ways.
I watched only 2 episodes and only watched the second one because a person a work begged me to. They lost me in the premiere. A plane breaks apart from 40,000 feet, and there are SURVIVORS... okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, so I kept watching. There's a guy who wakes up on the ground. He starts wandering around, and comes up to a bunch of other survivors and a jet engine, inexplicably, continuing to run. Okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, but how the FREAK is a jet engine still running after a crash like that? Where is it getting its fuel? No matter, belief suspended. But I say to myself, "why do they need a jet engine running?" So someone can get sucked inside I say to myself. Of course, the guy wanders around a little more, and the engine is still running, and of course, someone walks over to the front of the engine and gets sucked through. Saw it coming 10 miles away. That's when Lost lost me. Watched the next episode out of obligation and never looked back. For 6 seasons, I've felt I dodged a bullet. Glad to find out that I did.
Slashdot Mirror
Read a different story on this and my favorite quote was that it would probably never be able to pick up on a bomb made with Ammonium Nitrate, because, well, that's fertilizer...
Disclosure: I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom - 1964. I had the same argument you're making here with my dad 30 years ago. I could see the writing on the wall even then... I knew that Social Security would not "be there" for me like it was for him. I told him that I thought the way to fix the problem was pretty much what you're saying... The boomers should pay in until his generation died off. Then Social Security should have a stake put through it. It is a ponzi scheme, but not called that because it's government run. I still subscribe to this belief. I think when it's time for me to collect, they should kill the system for everyone. Then you and I can both stop paying, but I'll have sacrificed for the greater good. I still believe this. My dad's generation grew up in the depression, then had to fight WWII (which my dad did personally, flying B-17's over Europe). They lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation for most of the rest of their lives. They deserve their social security. Me and the rest of the boomers? Not so much. We grew up with relative wealth and security (except for that nuclear annihilation thing) and have had it pretty good. Most of us are baby heads. We're debt leveraged to the hilt. We're relative losers when compared to our parents. We don't really deserve Social Security. Perhaps our only saving grace would be to do as I describe and free you from the burdens of Social Security. Maybe then we can be a great generation after all. That'll leave you "millennials" to figure out how you can leave the world a better place. From the way you talk, you'll do worse than us. Crap... you're not even polite about screwing an entire generation!
The biggest reason that Tesla's investors abandoned him at the end was that he wanted to do wireless power transmission, using the Earth and it's ionosphere as the transmission medium. Using Tesla coils, he demonstrated that he could indeed transmit power wirelessly. Then they asked him how the electricity (that had to be produced at a significant cost) would be metered. When he told them there would be no way to meter it, they abandoned him. If you can't make money off of it, why would you do it was the question the inventors asked. Edison, OTOH, knew that it was ALL about making a buck. That's why Edison is revered today, and Tesla's wild claims and ideas are seen as borderline crackpot science today.
WRT the nobody caring about industry awards, the winner of that should go to George C. Scott... who was nominated for Best Actor for Patton, and won it. He didn't go to the ceremony and returned the Oscar to the Academy. When asked if he would watch the ceremony on TV, he said he was going to watch a hockey game, which apparently he did. He later said that the award should be sent to the Patton museum, but since he didn't put it in writing, it was never delivered. The award is now at the Virginia Military Institute, where generations of Patton's have attended...
"He will do anything to keep his face in the media."
You know, as I was reading this thread, I kept asking myself why he is still doing this kind of stuff. I'm from CT (and no, I didn't vote for this guy, I can't STAND him) but I kept thinking "Jeez, the election is OVER, and he won. Why is he doing this?"
Thanks for answering my question for me. It was so obvious it evaded me. Wish I had mod points!
Actually, if you look up the costs of care, Billy Bob is the cheapest case when he has no insurance. He probably has the "widow maker" heart attack at 60 and dies in his truck. (Hopefully at a rest stop) There's no expensive end of life scenarios - he doesn't spend $500 a day in a skilled nursing facility for 30 years - he doesn't go to intensive care several times in his old age. Sure, he doesn't see his grand kids graduate from college or even high school. But from a purely cost perspective, he's the cheap one. The Billy Bob on Universal Health Care ends up costing the system FAR more money.
LOL... I copied your spelling assuming it was correct... Decided not to do the link to Memory Alpha (all things Trek)
Don't even get me started on the reboot. I generally sum it up by saying that if I wanted to watch young punks tool around in powerful star ships, I'd have rented Star Wars Episode IV
I'm revoking your Trek card... The Utopia Planetia shipyards are on Mars, not in orbit. Are or will be anyway...
Yeah - that's the Amazon... Now lets look at New England. 300 years ago, it was approximately 75% forested. 200 years ago, it was approximately 25% forested. Today it is approximately 75% forested. Why? Well, before the Europeans came, agriculture was practiced on a small scale. 200 years ago, the Europeans were firmly entrenched, had cut down most of the forests to create farms, and to use the old growth timber for ships masts and fuel. Between then and now, the farms were largely abandoned as the farmers moved to the midwest and west for more fertile ground (and less rocks)... Today, you can walk deep into a forest, and find a stone wall - just out in the middle of nowhere. Used to be a farm... It used to be somewhere. So who's to say that after the Brazilians get tired of raising cattle on substandard land, and end up doing something else for a living, that the rain forests won't come back - without having to do anything at all?
I had a Tandy 1000 (still do actually) and ran Deskmate during the Windows 1.0 days... It is hard for people to understand just how messy things were in those days... printer drivers were essentially non-existent and you had to embed printer commands in documents if you were doing anything fancy (meaning different fonts or sizes). There were a plethora of TSR programs (Terminate-Stay Resident) like Sidekick. There were all kinds of hacks to make your machine use memory above 640k. Deskmate was basically something more similar to the Office suite than a real Windows replacement. There were all kinds of menuing programs at the time, many of them shareware, that would essentially allow you to build a simple application launch screen. Deskmate did a pretty fair job of documents and rudimentary spreadsheets... It was the MS Works of its day. Other applications like Lotus 123 and dBase (or Clipper) were the norm - and you ran one of them at a time. (No multitasking) So Windows 1.0 was basically a fancy menu program and as TFA points out, it had many competitors... It wasn't until Windows 2.1 came out that it advanced any farther than that...
Easy solution: Just put FrameMaker 7.7 on your resume. If they claim that you lied on your application, just say that they lied in their advertisement!
Did anybody else misread "Grande" as "Gang"?
I never had any interest in the Mario Bros. game(s)... Everyone else seemed to though. I was perhaps the only one of my friends who really liked Duck Hunt. I LOVED that game! I only wish that you could have shot the dog when he laughed at you for missing.
... But not intentionally so... if you RTFA, and I did, you'll find that rare earths actually aren't really rare. So while China MINES 93 percent of the world's rare earths, and thus supplies 99% of it, most countries COULD also do this if they wanted to. In fact, the last mine in the US closed in 2002 because, according to the article, of a radiation leak... seems these rare earth's are usually found with radioactive thorium and uranium. So what has happened is that China positioned itself as a reliable supplier of rare earths, and did so cheaply. Although the article doesn't say this, my guess is that China probably doesn't take the same safety precautions with mines and the thorium, which the article did say was costly to dispose of.
What has happened here is that China, again, produces things in an environmentally unfriendly way (since they apparently don't care much about the cost of crapping on their own country), and thus does so with cheap labor, thus becoming the most economically viable producer. Only now do they start to flex that muscle they have built...
So the world has a few choices - they can continue to rely on China, and deal with politically induced supply disruptions, find other countries that are willing to cheaply crap on their own environments and buy from them, or produce such materials locally but at much higher cost.
Abolishing copyright and patents won't accomplish anything. Why would I work days and days, weeks and weeks, perhaps years and years to write a book, and then not be able to profit from it's publishing? I LIKE copyrights. I write software. Of course I want it. Same thing goes for songwriters and performers. If they want, they can opt out of copyrights. But the majority will want to be able to cash in on their hard work.
What is needed is reform of the copyright system, not abolition... I like the 14 years idea. And agree that the current system sucks. But it's abolition isn't the answer.
Cool... and since most porn is digital now, and displayed on computers, can we then say that porn is just a calculation in lambda calculus?
Who knew that watching porn was the equivalent of doing calculus!!!
You need a constitutional amendment for what you are asking... removing the president from office is clearly documented there, not in mere laws.
Because something like this would neeeeeeever have the potential to be abused...
My favorite argument... Let's apply it to other things as well - things we already have... Should we get rid of the following because it has "the potential to be abused"??
Police Services?
Armed Forces?
Security Guards?
Guns?
Abortions?
Free Speech?
Freedom of Religion?
Here's the best one - how about the Internet itself? - it certainly has the potential to be abused - People use it all the time to steal identities, bilk people, plan terrorist attacks... So not only should we have the "kill" switch, but we ought to push the button immediately?
You forgot the 18 minute gap on the Watergate tapes. Oh yeah, and the 4323 ball point pens I misplaced.
"Google’s capacity to control human thought makes the Catholic church jealous, I bet," Barlow said. "They wish they’d thought of it."
I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how exactly Google is controlling my thoughts. Sure, I use google, and gmail, and I have a Droid... how does that equate to controlling my thoughts? Maybe they have unique access to my thoughts, as written down, but that is a far different thing than control.
File this one under Rant/Drug Induced/EFF Nonsense
SeaQuest DSV - "Splashdown" !!!
Probably not. But we're not just talking about pacemakers here and that is the point. Implantable technology will continue to get more and more common - the insulin pump was just one example. There are now rudimentary artificial eyes that hook into the brain. That opens up all kinds of risks. And these devices are getting more networked... Heck, even pacemakers "call home" over a phone line to check on their status (you literally hold a phone handset on your chest to do the communication for some of them). Guaranteed that someday there WILL be a virus that infects implanted devices... Quicker if we are not careful.
I agree with everyone that this demonstration was stupid... But the bigger question here deserves to be discussed - implanted devices CAN be infected with viruses, and we have to be careful about that... Implanted devices are becoming more and more common - it's not just pacemakers anymore. There was an article in Wired recently about the drive to create a "smart" insulin pump, one that would sense your blood sugar level and then adjust insulin delivery accordingly. This will become more and more common as we apply technology to "curing" disease... Keeping that technology virus free should be a high priority, especially as this technology gets integrated in more complex ways.
I work for an insurance company. For me, that ship sailed a LONG time ago...
I watched only 2 episodes and only watched the second one because a person a work begged me to. They lost me in the premiere. A plane breaks apart from 40,000 feet, and there are SURVIVORS... okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, so I kept watching. There's a guy who wakes up on the ground. He starts wandering around, and comes up to a bunch of other survivors and a jet engine, inexplicably, continuing to run. Okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, but how the FREAK is a jet engine still running after a crash like that? Where is it getting its fuel? No matter, belief suspended. But I say to myself, "why do they need a jet engine running?" So someone can get sucked inside I say to myself. Of course, the guy wanders around a little more, and the engine is still running, and of course, someone walks over to the front of the engine and gets sucked through. Saw it coming 10 miles away. That's when Lost lost me. Watched the next episode out of obligation and never looked back. For 6 seasons, I've felt I dodged a bullet. Glad to find out that I did.