I expect that if 3D displays become more common, humans will be growing up with them, and the brain will develop the requisite ability to accept that disconnect as normal.
No, it's a good idea with bad implementations, and little chance of those implementations improving. Using it for an actual election of consequence at this point would be bad. Let's not assume that everything that doesn't work in the foreseeable future is inherently bad, okay?
Atheism (literally meaning "no god") is the belief that there is no god.
Agnosticism (literally meaning "no special knowledge") is the lack of belief one way or the other.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Church of Christ Scientist does not have a specific position regarding organ donation.
Or, in other words, some followers believe different things from other followers, as noted previously. There are groups (whom I've dealt with personally) that oppose organ transplant. No, the entire religion doesn't oppose it, but groups within it do.
Though I can only speak for personal experience from a past career, I've dealt with religious opposition to medicine from people who call themselves:
Jewish
Roman Catholic
Methodist
Atheist (yes, really)
Christian Scientist
Hindu
Quaker
That list is from medical records where people opted out of organ donation, and cited religion as the reason. Elsewhere, they specified a religion. Now, I only worked with the data, and not the patients themselves, so I can't elaborate more (though if anyone has insight on the atheist, I'd love to hear it).
In short: No religion outright opposes organ donation. Many religious groups do.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The basic idea is that God made a body with its particular destiny, and it's not man's job to screw with that plan. Some followers believe this means God gave them knowledge, intelligence, and the ability to cure disease, and no matter what happens, it's because God allows it. Other followers believe this means God made a plan for every part of the body, and if someone acts against that natural plan, they're violating the plan.
I agree with GP: This is an issue between patients and their doctors. Personally, part of my overly-elaborate assisted-suicide (though I don't yet know who or what will assist or in what manner or at what time) plan is that if I'm ever in a situation where 4 out of 5 doctors randomly chosen say I'm beyond reasonable hope for recovery, start cutting out recoverable parts. I have no interest in using them again.
iOS is like IE6: one particular implementation with a huge market behind it. It has its own particular set of bugs, but they're well-known and apply consistently everywhere, so the devs are used to working around them.
Android is like standard HTML 4: A definition of how things should be defined, and many implementations following that specification. Each implementation comes with its own set of bugs, so when your program expects a certain undefined behavior, it fails on other implementations than what you tested.
As with web development, there are two solutions. You can stick with the "one implementation to rule them all" model, and ignore the rest of the world hoping it will go away, or you can write your program from the ground up to be compliant with the One True Spec, and you can port over to other implementations more easily.
On the other hand, China knows the US's reliance on its products, and knows that there is sufficient sentiment in America to restart such closed businesses. If China ever does shut down shipping, American factories will start back up quickly. We have the equipment and the people, both just waiting for a market to support them. I doubt very much that America would lose a war with China. We'll certainly be beaten back and spend the first several years hurting, but the logistics of China actually "winning" are a very tough obstacle. Both nations have the natural resources to continue fighting through the foreseeable future.
It's partly for that reason that I see a war as highly unlikely, despite the saber-rattling on both sides. Both nations are economically attached tighter than ever before, and they both must recognize it, despite the political irritation.
I've described my current employer's systems as a very large "what's wrong with this picture?" puzzle. This past week I found out that our remote offices aren't even logging on to our domain controller (located in the main office), because DNS requests weren't routed properly. Rather, the users there logged into their workstations with local accounts, then used RDP to access a workstation in the main office where they did all the actual work. For speed, they'd occasionally email themselves a file to be modified in a local copy of Office.
Effectively, this means that our confidential corporate data was being stored on machines with no password protection, despite the corporate password policy.
Never assume that being a big company implies any kind of decent security or sane practices. The disconnect between the ones who know and the ones who manage is just too great.
In an ideal AI-controlled automotive world, the road is monitored by multiple sensors, giving the vehicle complete knowledge of its environment.
In the case of a moose standing in the road, the vehicle's camera and rangefinder will simple see that where the road was expected, there is instead a gap in the trees with a moose-shaped object in the middle. The AI, having detected the moose from ample distance away, will slow down the vehicle until it can safely avoid the obstacle by going to one side or the other. A more advanced AI may even be specially configured for avoiding a moose, and will be able to see which end is the head (and therefore the most likely way the moose is walking). While approaching the moose, the smarter AI could veer slightly toward the rear of the moose, likely allowing a larger window through which to pass.
This does, of course, depend on having enough distance to detect the moose, recognize it, and stop. The AI can be programmed to be paranoid, slowing down to pass the top of hills or rounding a blind corner. With government help, those occasionally-useful "animal crossing" signs can be augmented by radio beacons, alerting the AI that its behavior should be even more paranoid, and assuming that stationary things on the side of the road are likely animals, not rocks (and be pleasantly surprised when they don't move).
Then there's two more difficult cases to consider: The moving moose and the hidden ice. Both are very difficult for humans to deal with already, and can be managed with adding more sensors to a car. Decent infrared vision is cheap, on the order of a few hundred dollars for an infrared/light-amplifying night-vision device. With IR vision showing living things separate from the surrounding trees, most of the AI's algorithms can be directly applied to otherwise-invisible objects. A moving moose in infrared is as easy to see as another car (that doesn't respond to radio negotiation), and can be avoided as easily.
The ice is actually more difficult, because it's easiest to see it (through basic sonar, laser, and stereo vision) as just plain road. To tell that it's actually ice, vehicles intended for cold conditions could be outfitted with additional sensors and AI to note the subtle differences, such as light reflection, snow thickness, color of tracks, or even density. All together, the extra cost would be about $1000, by my estimate. The vehicle would be best served by having independent traction, but that's not a necessity. The point of traction control is to apply brakes to a wheel that's spinning faster than needed, so it will slow down and grip the road again. That can be done with a whole axle, but it's just not as efficient.
None of the AI algorithms are affected by the size or weight of the vehicle, or what it's pulling. Rather, the vehicle AI knows its own base design, and can estimate weight within the first few minutes of driving, just based on acceleration profiles. It knows the engine put out a certain amount of power, and the vehicle accelerated up to a certain speed. From that, mass can easily be deduced.
Finally, all of this is accomplished with the car being fully independent. With the addition of radio communication with a nearby town, the vehicle could have known in advance about the ice or a moose in the area, but that's just helpful, not necessary.
, pulling in more data than sight alone.
Re:Someone should apply this to his data
on
The Numbers of a Life
·
· Score: 3, Funny
His name is known to millions of struggling female math students around the world. That he's apparently married might be the only thing holding him back in that field.
That depends on how the twinning occurs, and for identical (monozygotic) twins, they usually are genetically identical - mostly. There are differences in gene expression, but such differences are inconsequential in things like genetic relationship tests.
Fraternal (dizygotic) twins are genetically siblings, with a very small chance of having the same profile.
From what I can quickly find, Vista development started in May of 2001, and OS X was announced in 1998. OS X's initial release was actually two months prior to Vista's development start, in March of 2001.
Now, I'm sure we could trace bits of both OS's source back to NeXTSTEP and DOS (and likely earlier), but that's hardly relevant or meaningful.
I don't know about right, but it certainly matches up with my knowledge for "accurate". I recently spent some time living in a jurisdiction that bans all open flame, with no regard for size. That means that a romantic candlelight dinner with my wife is illegal without a permit.
Of course, it really means that the cops have clear-cut authority to tell the idiotic kids to stop playing with matches in their garage next to old propane tanks, and anybody using fire safely is left alone.
The Tazer bit's easy to explain, and standard protocol: Drug labs (specifically meth labs) produce fumes that make the cooks unpredictable, paranoid, and often more concerned with escape than self-preservation. If you were a cook, you could at any time decide that the best resolution was to throw said glassware at their faces and run. The Tazer's one of few things that can stop a sufficiently-crazy person. (Source: I spent a few months working with cops in a very unstable environment, culminating in a night where someone tried to steal the police chief's gun, and one of my coworkers took a fire extinguisher to the face. This was the discussion during the calm parts)
The lab equipment is also everything except a stove needed to cook precursor compounds. Methamphetamine recipes, if my memory serves me, basically consist of "throw stuff in a pan in measured amounts, and boil off the bad parts. Sell what's left."
The fact that you obviously know some real chemistry shows you're skilled, so if you are making illegal drugs, you'd likely have some lethal protection somewhere funded by one of the local nasties. I'd bet you scared the cops pretty well, until you spent some time showing them something kinda cool, corroborated your story, and showed a not-paranoid demeanor.
"That server's reporting SMART errors, but it's never had disk problems before. We'll go ahead and let it run, and don't worry about supervising the disks."
Not to claim that I'm aware of exactly what was said or tone of voice used, but it seems a police officer, in the normal course of duty, saw something suspicious, investigated, verified the presented story, and found nothing wrong. Isn't that their job?
Sounds to me like social services just found the guy's name involved in a child porn investigation and assume he's dangerous. This doesn't seem to be an issue of bad police intentionally making somebody's life miserable, but rather a miscommunication that now has to be investigated, verified, checked, reviewed, and accepted by half a dozen different departments before any resolution will come about.
The "technician" term is also used in places where the "engineer" term legally requires having an engineering degree.
I prefer to use "technician" for myself because I work almost exclusively with live productions, mostly as a hobby, and on a system that's set up and ready to go. The engineering work is already done. I generally just sit there adjusting levels, and fiddling with EQ occasionally. Personally, I don't think I do enough mutilation to take the title "engineer."
Well, sure... that's how they're used, and how it ought to be (in my opinion, as well)... but I don't recall a time where someone in power (ICANN) said "these TLDs belong to everybody". DNS started in the US, and those TLDs were the first, so they fell into US jurisdiction. Now, bearing in mind that I wasn't a big network user back then so I may be wrong, but I believe those TLDs predate the practicality of a globally-connected and globally-accessible Internet.
Last I knew,.com,.net,.gov,.mil,.edu,.org, and.us were all United States TLDs. For websites outside the US that want to keep all of their systems out of US jurisdiction, don't use a US-based domain name. Does this company also act surprised that the US government could access any US-based bank accounts it has?
Denon makes one of those, I think, and for only a few thousand dollars more it can include a high-speed copper track to provide a stable surface the electrons can travel on.
Slashdot Mirror
Give us slow humans a chance.
I expect that if 3D displays become more common, humans will be growing up with them, and the brain will develop the requisite ability to accept that disconnect as normal.
No, it's a good idea with bad implementations, and little chance of those implementations improving. Using it for an actual election of consequence at this point would be bad. Let's not assume that everything that doesn't work in the foreseeable future is inherently bad, okay?
Atheism (literally meaning "no god") is the belief that there is no god.
Agnosticism (literally meaning "no special knowledge") is the lack of belief one way or the other.
The Church of Christ Scientist does not have a specific position regarding organ donation.
Or, in other words, some followers believe different things from other followers, as noted previously. There are groups (whom I've dealt with personally) that oppose organ transplant. No, the entire religion doesn't oppose it, but groups within it do.
Though I can only speak for personal experience from a past career, I've dealt with religious opposition to medicine from people who call themselves:
That list is from medical records where people opted out of organ donation, and cited religion as the reason. Elsewhere, they specified a religion. Now, I only worked with the data, and not the patients themselves, so I can't elaborate more (though if anyone has insight on the atheist, I'd love to hear it).
In short: No religion outright opposes organ donation. Many religious groups do.
Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Shinto faith.I'm most familiar with the Christian Science viewpoint:
The basic idea is that God made a body with its particular destiny, and it's not man's job to screw with that plan. Some followers believe this means God gave them knowledge, intelligence, and the ability to cure disease, and no matter what happens, it's because God allows it. Other followers believe this means God made a plan for every part of the body, and if someone acts against that natural plan, they're violating the plan.
I agree with GP: This is an issue between patients and their doctors. Personally, part of my overly-elaborate assisted-suicide (though I don't yet know who or what will assist or in what manner or at what time) plan is that if I'm ever in a situation where 4 out of 5 doctors randomly chosen say I'm beyond reasonable hope for recovery, start cutting out recoverable parts. I have no interest in using them again.
It seems to be the other way around to me.
iOS is like IE6: one particular implementation with a huge market behind it. It has its own particular set of bugs, but they're well-known and apply consistently everywhere, so the devs are used to working around them.
Android is like standard HTML 4: A definition of how things should be defined, and many implementations following that specification. Each implementation comes with its own set of bugs, so when your program expects a certain undefined behavior, it fails on other implementations than what you tested.
As with web development, there are two solutions. You can stick with the "one implementation to rule them all" model, and ignore the rest of the world hoping it will go away, or you can write your program from the ground up to be compliant with the One True Spec, and you can port over to other implementations more easily.
On the other hand, China knows the US's reliance on its products, and knows that there is sufficient sentiment in America to restart such closed businesses. If China ever does shut down shipping, American factories will start back up quickly. We have the equipment and the people, both just waiting for a market to support them. I doubt very much that America would lose a war with China. We'll certainly be beaten back and spend the first several years hurting, but the logistics of China actually "winning" are a very tough obstacle. Both nations have the natural resources to continue fighting through the foreseeable future.
It's partly for that reason that I see a war as highly unlikely, despite the saber-rattling on both sides. Both nations are economically attached tighter than ever before, and they both must recognize it, despite the political irritation.
Oh, how true that is.
I've described my current employer's systems as a very large "what's wrong with this picture?" puzzle. This past week I found out that our remote offices aren't even logging on to our domain controller (located in the main office), because DNS requests weren't routed properly. Rather, the users there logged into their workstations with local accounts, then used RDP to access a workstation in the main office where they did all the actual work. For speed, they'd occasionally email themselves a file to be modified in a local copy of Office.
Effectively, this means that our confidential corporate data was being stored on machines with no password protection, despite the corporate password policy.
Never assume that being a big company implies any kind of decent security or sane practices. The disconnect between the ones who know and the ones who manage is just too great.
That last line should have read "AI's main strength for driving is that it can use more senses than humans, pulling in more data than sight alone."
In an ideal AI-controlled automotive world, the road is monitored by multiple sensors, giving the vehicle complete knowledge of its environment.
In the case of a moose standing in the road, the vehicle's camera and rangefinder will simple see that where the road was expected, there is instead a gap in the trees with a moose-shaped object in the middle. The AI, having detected the moose from ample distance away, will slow down the vehicle until it can safely avoid the obstacle by going to one side or the other. A more advanced AI may even be specially configured for avoiding a moose, and will be able to see which end is the head (and therefore the most likely way the moose is walking). While approaching the moose, the smarter AI could veer slightly toward the rear of the moose, likely allowing a larger window through which to pass.
This does, of course, depend on having enough distance to detect the moose, recognize it, and stop. The AI can be programmed to be paranoid, slowing down to pass the top of hills or rounding a blind corner. With government help, those occasionally-useful "animal crossing" signs can be augmented by radio beacons, alerting the AI that its behavior should be even more paranoid, and assuming that stationary things on the side of the road are likely animals, not rocks (and be pleasantly surprised when they don't move).
Then there's two more difficult cases to consider: The moving moose and the hidden ice. Both are very difficult for humans to deal with already, and can be managed with adding more sensors to a car. Decent infrared vision is cheap, on the order of a few hundred dollars for an infrared/light-amplifying night-vision device. With IR vision showing living things separate from the surrounding trees, most of the AI's algorithms can be directly applied to otherwise-invisible objects. A moving moose in infrared is as easy to see as another car (that doesn't respond to radio negotiation), and can be avoided as easily.
The ice is actually more difficult, because it's easiest to see it (through basic sonar, laser, and stereo vision) as just plain road. To tell that it's actually ice, vehicles intended for cold conditions could be outfitted with additional sensors and AI to note the subtle differences, such as light reflection, snow thickness, color of tracks, or even density. All together, the extra cost would be about $1000, by my estimate. The vehicle would be best served by having independent traction, but that's not a necessity. The point of traction control is to apply brakes to a wheel that's spinning faster than needed, so it will slow down and grip the road again. That can be done with a whole axle, but it's just not as efficient.
None of the AI algorithms are affected by the size or weight of the vehicle, or what it's pulling. Rather, the vehicle AI knows its own base design, and can estimate weight within the first few minutes of driving, just based on acceleration profiles. It knows the engine put out a certain amount of power, and the vehicle accelerated up to a certain speed. From that, mass can easily be deduced.
Finally, all of this is accomplished with the car being fully independent. With the addition of radio communication with a nearby town, the vehicle could have known in advance about the ice or a moose in the area, but that's just helpful, not necessary.
, pulling in more data than sight alone.
His name is known to millions of struggling female math students around the world. That he's apparently married might be the only thing holding him back in that field.
That depends on how the twinning occurs, and for identical (monozygotic) twins, they usually are genetically identical - mostly. There are differences in gene expression, but such differences are inconsequential in things like genetic relationship tests.
Fraternal (dizygotic) twins are genetically siblings, with a very small chance of having the same profile.
At least he has a name.
From what I can quickly find, Vista development started in May of 2001, and OS X was announced in 1998. OS X's initial release was actually two months prior to Vista's development start, in March of 2001.
Now, I'm sure we could trace bits of both OS's source back to NeXTSTEP and DOS (and likely earlier), but that's hardly relevant or meaningful.
I don't know about right, but it certainly matches up with my knowledge for "accurate". I recently spent some time living in a jurisdiction that bans all open flame, with no regard for size. That means that a romantic candlelight dinner with my wife is illegal without a permit.
Of course, it really means that the cops have clear-cut authority to tell the idiotic kids to stop playing with matches in their garage next to old propane tanks, and anybody using fire safely is left alone.
"Never attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence"
The Tazer bit's easy to explain, and standard protocol: Drug labs (specifically meth labs) produce fumes that make the cooks unpredictable, paranoid, and often more concerned with escape than self-preservation. If you were a cook, you could at any time decide that the best resolution was to throw said glassware at their faces and run. The Tazer's one of few things that can stop a sufficiently-crazy person. (Source: I spent a few months working with cops in a very unstable environment, culminating in a night where someone tried to steal the police chief's gun, and one of my coworkers took a fire extinguisher to the face. This was the discussion during the calm parts)
The lab equipment is also everything except a stove needed to cook precursor compounds. Methamphetamine recipes, if my memory serves me, basically consist of "throw stuff in a pan in measured amounts, and boil off the bad parts. Sell what's left."
The fact that you obviously know some real chemistry shows you're skilled, so if you are making illegal drugs, you'd likely have some lethal protection somewhere funded by one of the local nasties. I'd bet you scared the cops pretty well, until you spent some time showing them something kinda cool, corroborated your story, and showed a not-paranoid demeanor.
"That server's reporting SMART errors, but it's never had disk problems before. We'll go ahead and let it run, and don't worry about supervising the disks."
Not to claim that I'm aware of exactly what was said or tone of voice used, but it seems a police officer, in the normal course of duty, saw something suspicious, investigated, verified the presented story, and found nothing wrong. Isn't that their job?
Sounds to me like social services just found the guy's name involved in a child porn investigation and assume he's dangerous. This doesn't seem to be an issue of bad police intentionally making somebody's life miserable, but rather a miscommunication that now has to be investigated, verified, checked, reviewed, and accepted by half a dozen different departments before any resolution will come about.
PIR is a US-based organization, making everything they do inside US jurisdiction.
Coincidentally, .tv registrations are also unrestricted to a certain geographic region, and it's well-known to be the ccTLD for Tuvalu.
The "technician" term is also used in places where the "engineer" term legally requires having an engineering degree.
I prefer to use "technician" for myself because I work almost exclusively with live productions, mostly as a hobby, and on a system that's set up and ready to go. The engineering work is already done. I generally just sit there adjusting levels, and fiddling with EQ occasionally. Personally, I don't think I do enough mutilation to take the title "engineer."
Well, sure... that's how they're used, and how it ought to be (in my opinion, as well)... but I don't recall a time where someone in power (ICANN) said "these TLDs belong to everybody". DNS started in the US, and those TLDs were the first, so they fell into US jurisdiction. Now, bearing in mind that I wasn't a big network user back then so I may be wrong, but I believe those TLDs predate the practicality of a globally-connected and globally-accessible Internet.
Last I knew, .com, .net, .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, and .us were all United States TLDs. For websites outside the US that want to keep all of their systems out of US jurisdiction, don't use a US-based domain name. Does this company also act surprised that the US government could access any US-based bank accounts it has?
Denon makes one of those, I think, and for only a few thousand dollars more it can include a high-speed copper track to provide a stable surface the electrons can travel on.