I don't know how things are handled were you live, but around these parts, PET bottles are not recycled, they're just washed thorougly and reused. And hardy enough to go trough multiple iterations before they go out (and even then, it's probably more because they start to get scratchy, as in ugly, than any real unusability)
once you include sorting and transportation costs, which are not insignificant
Are you claiming there are no transportation costs for newly manufactured bottles? They just teleport themselves to the bottlers from factory, with no energy usage?
But surely we can define some quanities to measure? For example, breast size, hip/waist/chest ratio, height/width ratio, etc.
Perhaps. But the software would need to sift trough tens thousand pictures before finding one that is a) naked, b) has good enough webcam so it's actually identifiable as something else than blurry vaguely human shape c) is in good angle (or preferably several) to take those measurements.
And if it's manage to do all that, it doesn't even begin to touch the most important part: face.
we've found a way to bring the objectification of women to a new level.
No we haven't. It's not a women. It's not even human, it's a goddamnit computer program. And similar things have existed for a LOOOOONG time, only you haven't needed to pay money to use them and pretend that makes it somehow more real.
This is slashdot, you probably won't find a better collection of youngish hopelessly single men anywhere in the world, and even there, guys think this is pathetic. The real ultimate in objectification of women are all kind of horrid mail-order-bride systems, since they actually do that to women, not bunch of pixels on the screen.
Articles like this are why I'm so excited about the possibilities of genetic engineering. I feel like the only way to get this bug out of the system is to change the source code. Imagine a world of humans without gender or race - imagine what we could accomplish!
Well, that's pretty goddamn easy to imagine. We could accomplish nothing. See, conflict and competition may suck big time, but they are, along with curiosity, the strong driving forces in us. Take it away and maybe you'll have happier humans (or you might have humans that are boring to death, whichever pleases you), but you don't make us accomplish more, but less.
To give an idea of the timescale involved here, a black hole with a mass of a metric ton is predicted to evaporate because of Hawking radiation in about 9 nanoseconds- see the Wikipedia article.
And just to put that the frame of reference, the black hole that would be created in a collider would be quite a few orders of magnitude smaller than metric ton, very near the smallest possible (planck mass), which is around 20 micrograms (quite massive for something created in particle accelerator, but hey it is a black hole after all)
I saw PM, it sucked, others say AtoC was crap and that's enough combined with own experience from the first one, I don't have slightest "realistical" compulsion to shell out money for something I know is a piece of shit, or even sacrifice the very small amount of work and time it would take to just warez it, because I absolutely don't have any need to see it.
I just _may_ watch it in few years when it's in TV, if I don't happen to have anything more interesting to do at the moment (doesn't take much to accomplish that, though)
Same goes for the episode 3, whatever it's called, if reviews by sane people show it isn't mud, I may take it under consideration.
One should wonder how much energy is needed to create a small black hole.
According to the Standard Model, a lot - many orders of magnitude more than our puny accelerators can do.
On the other hand, there are some new ideas that believe gravity is much stronger at very small scale, if those turn out to be correct, not so lot - well within capabilities of LHC in 2007. Note that if this is correct, collisions of similar energy levels - and the resulting black holes - are already created literally all the time in the upper atmosphere by cosmic ray bombardment, and they havent eaten us.
However, this process is very slow; unless it happened very quickly, it would drift into the matter rich wall of the collider eventually.
Incorrect. The process is not slow, the smaller the black hole, the faster it evaporates, very, very, very, very small holes that could conceivably be created will dissipate in billionths of billionths of nanosecond. It's also way too small to even hit, much less "swallow" anything.
So rest easily, even if we manage to cook up some black holes, they're not quite the monsters their big brothers are. Only evidence you'll have about it ever being there is a small cloud of particles as it bursts apart.
Since when have you needed a flat surface for building a straight _tunnel_ (that word ought to give some hints), you realize these things are built underground, right? No need to follow the curvature of surface.
Yes, it's not a transparent metal, but I'd say that calling it "Transparent Aluminum" would be within reason.
No it would not be within reason. Aluminum is a metal and that's it.
And as you stated, it's Al2O3, it has more another element in it than aluminum, and neither does it have any of the properties that everyone associates with aluminum. Wouldn't it be more "within reason" to call it "Transparent Solid Oxygen"?
Do you also tend to call rust red iron and water liquid hydrogen? All just as reasonable... let's just forget what the stuff is made of and call it what it is, we all know chemical properties of molecules often do not resemble those of their participating atoms at all, and naming like that suggest that they do.
We were talking about common sense, right? What makes you think lacking common sense would make you bad at designing bridges?
Designing huge-ass metal things that weight zillions of tons is absolutely not within the bounds of common sense, which - as noted in the name - deals with common things within human experience and scale. Same probably holds true for ASIC design...
Designing a bridge using common sense instead of scientific sense would probably lead to craploads of falling bridges. Which means... engineers lacking common sense or at least trying to apply it into their work is a good thing.
OK, your patient has some wacky theories. But you're an idiot if you just dismiss them because they're not in your textbook.
He's even bigger idiot if he starts treating something as if it's physical just because of those wacky theories, even if he's already tested her and knows that it is not the case.
A perfectly sane person can think themselves into all kinds of immunological difficulties.
And that perfectly sane person still happens to have a mental condition, untreatable by a physician, which means he needs to forward her to a psychiatrist for there to be any hope for cure, but you can't have that, it's "stereotyping you as a wacko", right? What the hell should doctor do if NOT guide the patient to a professional who is trained to deal with that kind of illness? Order her to an insulation room for all the eternity because nothing ever will possibly cure her from an allergy that only exists in her mind?
It's possible to adapt to tolerate an allergen, but it's kind of hard to believe that from lactose intolerance, since it's not an allergy.
Lactose intolerance is genetic. If you're missing a mutation that produces lactase enzyme, no amount of milk drinking can change that.
Nevertheless, I too was diagnosed as a kid with lactose intolerance, and am nevertheless able to withstand more or less milk (though it's kind of hard to say, since I mostly drink milk with coffee and caffeine can lead to same symptoms, especially slight diarrhea), which seems kind of contradictory. Perhaps we build tolerance to the bacteria that actually break up the lactose, or some byproducts of their digestion..
I hear this one a lot. I don't have any statistics on cost of making a game to hand, so I'll have to put my point another way.
Which, if course immediately screws the argument. The cost is an important part of the function.
For example, you can also derive hundreds of hours of entertainment from a simple $1 pack of cards, should it cost thousands, despite the fact that making one costs just about nothing?
4. Ah, like Valve are doing with Steam? I really don't see how that's better than making the disk uncopyable (I don't want to _have_ to be connected to the Internet to play multiplayer games across my LAN).
You CAN'T make the disk uncopyable (well, at least without making it unreadable as well, which would be kind of pointless). Someone will crack it, no matter how intrusive and offensive copy protections you throw on it, StarForce is no exception.
And usually cd-keys for multiplayer have only been checked when you're actually playing in the 'net, and LAN games should be fine. It's probably the only "anti-pirate" method of all they've used to date that has actually WORKED.
They're not treating you like a criminal. Does the museum treat you like a criminal because it has an alarm on its multi-million dollar exhibit? Of course not.
If they implant a bug in you and send a team to shadow you home to make sure you didn't steal anything even though there's no reason to assume you did? OF COURSE THEY DO!
IMHO, it still encourages bad writing, it doesn't matter if it detectable or not, if stupid webmonkey foo knows broken feature bar is now working in another browser, then s/he's more likely to use it without testing. Assuming stupid webmonkeys know Mozilla featureset is probably vastly overestimating the intelligence of quite a few in that lot, but...
Nor does it probably actually help with anything, if someone is stupid enough to blindly use that, there are probably other equally stupid, non-supported things on that site as well.
Undetected document.all support has been added to Mozilla (Good for some dumb IE-only sites)
Okay. Since when have Mozilla folks started to work around IE brokenness, and why?
I know many folks whine that there should be more this kind of features, but it sounds like a slippery slope, not to mention encourages writing MORE bad DHTML instead of fixing the existing.
I'd love to know what the point is in a "personal firewall" - seriously.
There are lots of points.
Rather than running hundreds of services you don't need and then blocking them, it would be far better to have a unified way of telling all services which interface to bind to - to the end user this would appear like a firewall configurator anyway.
And the biggest one of them is this: THE SYSTEM YOU DESCRIBE DOESN'T EXIST, and probably never will. It's not even possible to close all ports opened by braindead services on something like Windows, much less have a "unified interface" for them - and yes, those services do sometimes include ones that you DO need, that have useful local properties so you can't shut them down completely, which leaves blocking as only alternative.
Are you suggesting all the Windows users should just sit with all the bindings open to the 'net while waiting for MS to create that, might be even ready in ten years or so, and even after that, they can't force all the third party software makers to interface with the "unified interface"? Don't give me any crap about switching to a "working" system either, I use Linux but 95% of people don't, and any amount of bitching on Slashdot won't magically change that at this very second.
Yelling about whoever is guilty having a responsibility for fixing things won't make that fix come any closer either, in the meanwhile, we do have a need and point for workarounds.
And yes, some people really do use even "personal" (which definition you handily didn't provide) firewalls to only allow traffic from certain networks, etc.
No idea about XP, but 2000 netstat does not have -o option, it just prints the same usage notice it does with any invalid parameter if you try to feed it that.
I don't know much about flash memory technology or the reliability associated with it. I don't give a hoot how fast it is. If it's solid state (no moving parts) and can guarantee me it won't one day decide to utterly destroy itself, I'm sold.
Total self-destruction of whole chip at once probably isn't very likely, but it WILL wear out with time.
A block of flash can only take so many write-cycles before it's done with. It might last for a long time if you'll use it in WORM fashion, but if you're planning on replacing typical desktop hard drive with flash, it'll probably be dead long before the HD would be.
Price is the universal differentiator, though. A USB drive is still relatively expensive, whereas I can buy a floppy drive for ~$8.00
Double that and you'll almost get 128MB USB keydrive, throw in another ten bucks/EUR and count the size doubled. No need to shell out for the poptart, whatever it may be and whatever it may cost....for a straberry poptart (maybe cinnamon sugar, depends on the store).
I really don't know what that is, how much it costs, and probably don't want to know either, but 100 pack of floppies would seem to cost about $14 based on quick pricewatch check.
$20 for 128MB USB vs. $22 "144MB" for floppies (count on half of those cheap-ass floppies being broken out of the box, however) doesn't really sound too big a bargain for the floppies, relative or no.
Especially if you count your time and data worth absolutely anything, you'll be swapping those things for quite a while after I'm gone with that USB thingy, not to even mention cursing when you'll need to do that second time after they break.
Yes, anti piracy schemes get cracked, but cars also get broken into, you wouldnt see Ford selling cars without a doorlock. They are there to slow down the casual pirates, not the hardcore people.
You think Ford would bother including doorlocks any more if it only took ONE breached lock and it would start a shockwave that would open all the Ford locks in entire world in few hours?
So how do you suggest webmasters should've dealt with it in a way that wasn't "foolish"? By removing all pictures from the Internet?
JPEG was designed to be patent free, you can't avoid these problems even if you do know your history. There's no guarantee that some submarine won't yet hit even PNG, even though it was designed to and so far seems free of them.
Only way you can deal with it is by abolishing the stupid software patents and laws that allow their existence, and we all know how likely THAT is.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how things are handled were you live, but around these parts, PET bottles are not recycled, they're just washed thorougly and reused. And hardy enough to go trough multiple iterations before they go out (and even then, it's probably more because they start to get scratchy, as in ugly, than any real unusability)
once you include sorting and transportation costs, which are not insignificant
Are you claiming there are no transportation costs for newly manufactured bottles? They just teleport themselves to the bottlers from factory, with no energy usage?
But surely we can define some quanities to measure? For example, breast size, hip/waist/chest ratio, height/width ratio, etc.
Perhaps. But the software would need to sift trough tens thousand pictures before finding one that is a) naked, b) has good enough webcam so it's actually identifiable as something else than blurry vaguely human shape c) is in good angle (or preferably several) to take those measurements.
And if it's manage to do all that, it doesn't even begin to touch the most important part: face.
we've found a way to bring the objectification of women to a new level.
No we haven't. It's not a women. It's not even human, it's a goddamnit computer program. And similar things have existed for a LOOOOONG time, only you haven't needed to pay money to use them and pretend that makes it somehow more real.
This is slashdot, you probably won't find a better collection of youngish hopelessly single men anywhere in the world, and even there, guys think this is pathetic. The real ultimate in objectification of women are all kind of horrid mail-order-bride systems, since they actually do that to women, not bunch of pixels on the screen.
Articles like this are why I'm so excited about the possibilities of genetic engineering. I feel like the only way to get this bug out of the system is to change the source code. Imagine a world of humans without gender or race - imagine what we could accomplish!
Well, that's pretty goddamn easy to imagine. We could accomplish nothing. See, conflict and competition may suck big time, but they are, along with curiosity, the strong driving forces in us. Take it away and maybe you'll have happier humans (or you might have humans that are boring to death, whichever pleases you), but you don't make us accomplish more, but less.
we can detect facial patterns from video, why not levels of attractiveness?
Because there's no such thing? Beauty is in the eye of beholder and attractiveness is subjective.
Actually, just doing that isn't wholly sufficient. :(
That depends. Maybe it isn't for you (AC), but if you're logged in, everything already comes trough article.pl so the simple mod is enough.
To give an idea of the timescale involved here, a black hole with a mass of a metric ton is predicted to evaporate because of Hawking radiation in about 9 nanoseconds- see the Wikipedia article.
And just to put that the frame of reference, the black hole that would be created in a collider would be quite a few orders of magnitude smaller than metric ton, very near the smallest possible (planck mass), which is around 20 micrograms (quite massive for something created in particle accelerator, but hey it is a black hole after all)
No, no we don't. But realistically we do.
No. We don't.
I saw PM, it sucked, others say AtoC was crap and that's enough combined with own experience from the first one, I don't have slightest "realistical" compulsion to shell out money for something I know is a piece of shit, or even sacrifice the very small amount of work and time it would take to just warez it, because I absolutely don't have any need to see it.
I just _may_ watch it in few years when it's in TV, if I don't happen to have anything more interesting to do at the moment (doesn't take much to accomplish that, though)
Same goes for the episode 3, whatever it's called, if reviews by sane people show it isn't mud, I may take it under consideration.
One should wonder how much energy is needed to create a small black hole.
According to the Standard Model, a lot - many orders of magnitude more than our puny accelerators can do.
On the other hand, there are some new ideas that believe gravity is much stronger at very small scale, if those turn out to be correct, not so lot - well within capabilities of LHC in 2007. Note that if this is correct, collisions of similar energy levels - and the resulting black holes - are already created literally all the time in the upper atmosphere by cosmic ray bombardment, and they havent eaten us.
However, this process is very slow; unless it happened very quickly, it would drift into the matter rich wall of the collider eventually.
Incorrect. The process is not slow, the smaller the black hole, the faster it evaporates, very, very, very, very small holes that could conceivably be created will dissipate in billionths of billionths of nanosecond. It's also way too small to even hit, much less "swallow" anything.
So rest easily, even if we manage to cook up some black holes, they're not quite the monsters their big brothers are. Only evidence you'll have about it ever being there is a small cloud of particles as it bursts apart.
Err. What?
Since when have you needed a flat surface for building a straight _tunnel_ (that word ought to give some hints), you realize these things are built underground, right? No need to follow the curvature of surface.
Yes, it's not a transparent metal, but I'd say that calling it "Transparent Aluminum" would be within reason.
No it would not be within reason. Aluminum is a metal and that's it.
And as you stated, it's Al2O3, it has more another element in it than aluminum, and neither does it have any of the properties that everyone associates with aluminum. Wouldn't it be more "within reason" to call it "Transparent Solid Oxygen"?
Do you also tend to call rust red iron and water liquid hydrogen? All just as reasonable... let's just forget what the stuff is made of and call it what it is, we all know chemical properties of molecules often do not resemble those of their participating atoms at all, and naming like that suggest that they do.
Is it because civil engineers are that good
We were talking about common sense, right? What makes you think lacking common sense would make you bad at designing bridges?
Designing huge-ass metal things that weight zillions of tons is absolutely not within the bounds of common sense, which - as noted in the name - deals with common things within human experience and scale. Same probably holds true for ASIC design...
Designing a bridge using common sense instead of scientific sense would probably lead to craploads of falling bridges. Which means... engineers lacking common sense or at least trying to apply it into their work is a good thing.
OK, your patient has some wacky theories. But you're an idiot if you just dismiss them because they're not in your textbook.
He's even bigger idiot if he starts treating something as if it's physical just because of those wacky theories, even if he's already tested her and knows that it is not the case.
A perfectly sane person can think themselves into all kinds of immunological difficulties.
And that perfectly sane person still happens to have a mental condition, untreatable by a physician, which means he needs to forward her to a psychiatrist for there to be any hope for cure, but you can't have that, it's "stereotyping you as a wacko", right? What the hell should doctor do if NOT guide the patient to a professional who is trained to deal with that kind of illness? Order her to an insulation room for all the eternity because nothing ever will possibly cure her from an allergy that only exists in her mind?
It's possible to adapt to tolerate an allergen, but it's kind of hard to believe that from lactose intolerance, since it's not an allergy.
Lactose intolerance is genetic. If you're missing a mutation that produces lactase enzyme, no amount of milk drinking can change that.
Nevertheless, I too was diagnosed as a kid with lactose intolerance, and am nevertheless able to withstand more or less milk (though it's kind of hard to say, since I mostly drink milk with coffee and caffeine can lead to same symptoms, especially slight diarrhea), which seems kind of contradictory. Perhaps we build tolerance to the bacteria that actually break up the lactose, or some byproducts of their digestion..
I hear this one a lot. I don't have any statistics on cost of making a game to hand, so I'll have to put my point another way.
Which, if course immediately screws the argument. The cost is an important part of the function.
For example, you can also derive hundreds of hours of entertainment from a simple $1 pack of cards, should it cost thousands, despite the fact that making one costs just about nothing?
4. Ah, like Valve are doing with Steam? I really don't see how that's better than making the disk uncopyable (I don't want to _have_ to be connected to the Internet to play multiplayer games across my LAN).
You CAN'T make the disk uncopyable (well, at least without making it unreadable as well, which would be kind of pointless). Someone will crack it, no matter how intrusive and offensive copy protections you throw on it, StarForce is no exception.
And usually cd-keys for multiplayer have only been checked when you're actually playing in the 'net, and LAN games should be fine. It's probably the only "anti-pirate" method of all they've used to date that has actually WORKED.
They're not treating you like a criminal. Does the museum treat you like a criminal because it has an alarm on its multi-million dollar exhibit? Of course not.
If they implant a bug in you and send a team to shadow you home to make sure you didn't steal anything even though there's no reason to assume you did? OF COURSE THEY DO!
I did read it.
...
IMHO, it still encourages bad writing, it doesn't matter if it detectable or not, if stupid webmonkey foo knows broken feature bar is now working in another browser, then s/he's more likely to use it without testing.
Assuming stupid webmonkeys know Mozilla featureset is probably vastly overestimating the intelligence of quite a few in that lot, but
Nor does it probably actually help with anything, if someone is stupid enough to blindly use that, there are probably other equally stupid, non-supported things on that site as well.
Undetected document.all support has been added to Mozilla (Good for some dumb IE-only sites)
Okay. Since when have Mozilla folks started to work around IE brokenness, and why?
I know many folks whine that there should be more this kind of features, but it sounds like a slippery slope, not to mention encourages writing MORE bad DHTML instead of fixing the existing.
I'd love to know what the point is in a "personal firewall" - seriously.
There are lots of points.
Rather than running hundreds of services you don't need and then blocking them, it would be far better to have a unified way of telling all services which interface to bind to - to the end user this would appear like a firewall configurator anyway.
And the biggest one of them is this: THE SYSTEM YOU DESCRIBE DOESN'T EXIST, and probably never will. It's not even possible to close all ports opened by braindead services on something like Windows, much less have a "unified interface" for them - and yes, those services do sometimes include ones that you DO need, that have useful local properties so you can't shut them down completely, which leaves blocking as only alternative.
Are you suggesting all the Windows users should just sit with all the bindings open to the 'net while waiting for MS to create that, might be even ready in ten years or so, and even after that, they can't force all the third party software makers to interface with the "unified interface"? Don't give me any crap about switching to a "working" system either, I use Linux but 95% of people don't, and any amount of bitching on Slashdot won't magically change that at this very second.
Yelling about whoever is guilty having a responsibility for fixing things won't make that fix come any closer either, in the meanwhile, we do have a need and point for workarounds.
And yes, some people really do use even "personal" (which definition you handily didn't provide) firewalls to only allow traffic from certain networks, etc.
No idea about XP, but 2000 netstat does not have -o option, it just prints the same usage notice it does with any invalid parameter if you try to feed it that.
I don't know much about flash memory technology or the reliability associated with it. I don't give a hoot how fast it is. If it's solid state (no moving parts) and can guarantee me it won't one day decide to utterly destroy itself, I'm sold.
Total self-destruction of whole chip at once probably isn't very likely, but it WILL wear out with time.
A block of flash can only take so many write-cycles before it's done with. It might last for a long time if you'll use it in WORM fashion, but if you're planning on replacing typical desktop hard drive with flash, it'll probably be dead long before the HD would be.
Price is the universal differentiator, though. A USB drive is still relatively expensive, whereas I can buy a floppy drive for ~$8.00
...for a straberry poptart (maybe cinnamon sugar, depends on the store).
Double that and you'll almost get 128MB USB keydrive, throw in another ten bucks/EUR and count the size doubled. No need to shell out for the poptart, whatever it may be and whatever it may cost.
I really don't know what that is, how much it costs, and probably don't want to know either, but 100 pack of floppies would seem to cost about $14 based on quick pricewatch check.
$20 for 128MB USB vs. $22 "144MB" for floppies (count on half of those cheap-ass floppies being broken out of the box, however) doesn't really sound too big a bargain for the floppies, relative or no.
Especially if you count your time and data worth absolutely anything, you'll be swapping those things for quite a while after I'm gone with that USB thingy, not to even mention cursing when you'll need to do that second time after they break.
It's be much more funny if fusion actually produced water as a waste product.
Fuel Cells do however, maybe you could post your old joke there next time the matter comes up, which should be every few weeks.
Yes, anti piracy schemes get cracked, but cars also get broken into, you wouldnt see Ford selling cars without a doorlock. They are there to slow down the casual pirates, not the hardcore people.
You think Ford would bother including doorlocks any more if it only took ONE breached lock and it would start a shockwave that would open all the Ford locks in entire world in few hours?
Because that's the way it works with software.
Exec Shield isn't the same thing as support for NX-bit, it's "no execute" protection that DOESN'T require CPU support.
So how do you suggest webmasters should've dealt with it in a way that wasn't "foolish"? By removing all pictures from the Internet?
JPEG was designed to be patent free, you can't avoid these problems even if you do know your history. There's no guarantee that some submarine won't yet hit even PNG, even though it was designed to and so far seems free of them.
Only way you can deal with it is by abolishing the stupid software patents and laws that allow their existence, and we all know how likely THAT is.