I normally take the middle path and only use generic and robust techniques for the core of an application.
For my commercial, professional applications that means Windows, C#, and.NET (WPF.) Why?
Locally executed applications are faster.
I can naturally support all kinds of workflow, from a gaming scenario to a form-based input. To do that in browser I'd need more JavaScript code.
I can do all kinds of data validation in real time (when you press a key on the keyboard) that would be a pain to do in JS over the net on a remote server.
There is no dependency on the browser. The only dependencies of the software are.NET itself, and they are versioned.
The presentation is consistent.
There is no web server to install and maintain, and there are no web applications either. Deployment of my software is done with ClickOnce.
There are no scalability issues; in my case, the only limit is the SQL server; it can be scaled up far more than my software would ever need.
The Internet link is always optional.
I can read and write files without any worry about permissions, outside of what the host OS provides. Settings are stored locally, and users can have several sets, and the settings can be backed up and restored. That is important when there are many settings and when new installations need to be quickly customized for a new employee.
Cross-platform operation is not required in my case. Linux is used by 0% of my audience, and that is not going to change until Mentor Graphics, SolidWorks and Autodesk have their essential software ported to Linux. I'm not holding my breath for that because they use way too many Windows-only technologies.
If you can program in C and don't like it, you can change it to your liking. Nearly impossible with closed source.
This is true only in theory. Modern software (that is not Hello, World) is too complicated and requires considerable investment of time to start making safe changes. A casual user, even if he is familiar with C/C++, will never break through the wall of library dependencies, special compilation environments and other black magic before he even gets to change one line of code. All software on my computers, except my own software, came in binaries, and I can't be bothered to change anything even if I have the sources. It's just too hard, and the benefit is too small.
There's no god-given right to overtake. If you can't overtake safely and legally, just don't.
I'm sure the delivery truck driver will be happy to do just that. Since he will be late he will have to work overtime. But that's OK as long as some dudes on $5,000 bikes have a good time exercising on a public road.
In Japan bikes are and always have been used in huge numbers, and on the streets of Tokyo pedestrians outnumber bikes, which outnumber cars...
Japan is famous for its ultra-high density of population in cities. In the USA you need to take a train to travel between two adjacent stores in the same mall.
If there are bike lanes...then sure, they have their place, but if not...we shouldn't allow vehicles on roads that cannot keep up with the normal speeds of said road.
There are other problems with bicycles on roads. Here is my list.
As you said, bicycles are slower. This creates a dangerous difference in speed.
As you said, bicyclists often use a work area of thousands of people as their personal gym. This does not make truck drivers and other people happy when they need the road to earn their daily bread but they are blocked at each turn by egotistic narcissists on custom, expensive bikes.
Bicycles are often unstable because the rider is pedaling so hard that the whole bike waves left and right.
The physical exertion makes the rider less receptive to the environment around him.
The need to keep the bike stable limits the ability of the rider to look around.
Most bikes have no mirrors.
Cars drive in dedicated lanes. This ensures their proper separation. Bicycles are in whatever gaps remain - this puts them way too close to cars.
Bicycles riding in the right lane with parked cars risk to be doored. At the same time as they swerve around parked cars they unexpectedly put themselves in path of other cars who use the same lane.
Bicycles are less visible.
Bicycles are less likely to stop, and they are more difficult to resume movement.
Bicycles are required to be on the right, except for the left turn they are required to cross all lanes of traffic. I don't do that even in a car. I do it one lane at a time. But bicycles are not allowed to stay in middle lanes; nor they are safe there.
In case of collision of two cars the car drivers are annoyed. In case of collision with a bike the bike rider is often dead.
Many roads have signs "Share the road" but are not wide enough to actually do so. Some roads tell you to share, but to do so you have to cross the double yellow line and risk a head-on collision with an oncoming car. The bike rider will be totally innocent if you kill yourself and the people in the other car.
And one more thing from that poll was that only 11% of respondents selected "None".
Them be the lawyers. Why would anyone confess to violation of laws?
If the lane isn't wide enough for motor vehicles to safely pass the bicycle, the cyclist should "take the lane" for his own safety.
Please advise how a car driver can overtake a bicycle on this road. Note the width of the single lane and the solid double yellow line in the center. You can't see the depth of the ravine on the left, but trust me - it's deep enough. This road does not allow for legal passing for most of its length, and it is infested with bicycles on weekends. Since this is an uphill road, bicyclists are moving up like turtles, and if you want to go around them you have to break the law and cross the center divider. Since the road is twisting, these lines there are for a reason.
Great, so we only have to deal with tens of thousands of people with brain injuries until everyone is adjusted.
In my younger days I rode a bicycle pretty much anywhere. Bicycle helmets were neither required then nor known. I fell a few times, as you'd expect, but that was largely on paths in a forest where roots can jump at you completely unexpectedly. Not even one fall resulted in me hitting my head. A helmet would be useless. Furthermore, riding in summer in a helmet, with all that physical work, could have resulted in heat stroke - and that would be far worse.
When I upgraded to a motorcycle I used a helmet. I had to wear one because it was not just a good idea, it was a necessity at that speed. I have a few scratches on that helmet; all of them come from the stucco on the wall between the elevator and the garage.
I don't have a bicycle now. I have a bicycle helmet somewhere. But I wouldn't want to mess with it. Helmets are a big problem - you don't want to carry them with you, and you don't want to leave them outside. Right now I solved this by driving a car. I can't use a bicycle here, in the hills, because I live way too high for me to climb on a bicycle. But if I were to live in the valley I'd like to own a bike and use it now and then.
How does Traynor's "genius" I.T. friend get an IP address from...Facebook (wtf??)
You publish an interesting link that points at your own server. Your stalker will inevitably visit. But I have no idea how to tell him apart from another 100,000 visitors and search bots.
And how does he use that without a court order issued to an ISP to track it to a physical address?
That is a good question. My own IP address geolocates to the city where my ISP has their HQ - that is not even close to where I live. The ISP won't tell anyone, I hope, unless presented with a sufficiently valid, legal request.
Conveniently Traynor doesn't prosecute so there is no real record of this actually happening
This is possible if Traynor is a meek, soft guy who cannot stand for what is dear to him - his family. By all indications, the whole story points in this direction. Any normal, red-blooded guy would sue the bastard into oblivion. Anything else would be just a slap on the wrist, enabling the stalker to continue his "games" with other people. He will only be more careful. His downfall was that he was stalking someone he knew. If only he was threatening an old lady in another town, nobody would ever find out. Even in this case the stalker could have said "No, it wasn't me, I don't know - but I had a virus on my computer a while ago, mayhaps that was it." The evil bastard got excellent training on this one, and the victim shook his hand and walked away.
After the very first drop off of a message and ashes at his doorstep Traynor NEVER puts up a cam so he never sees the OTHER TWO drop offs of messages on his doorstep? W.T.F.?
That's another item to prove that Mr. Traynor is a weak, technophobic person who just got lost when faced with true evil. The police was useless; they didn't even give him an advice like you did. Stuff the house with cameras, announce to the world that you are leaving on vacation - and you will attract the stalker to the house, sure bet.
It must be said, though, that Mr. Traynor is not alone in his dependence on "someone else" to solve his safety and security problems. In UK any other approach is worse than the threat. Maybe even setting up a camera will violate someone's rights. Most people in his shoes (about 100%) would be first scared. This is normal - we don't face crime every day. The question is only in what they do after they come to their senses - who they talk to (police, lawyers, private investigators, gun dealers, etc.) and what proactive measures they take. This guy did exactly nothing of value. In the SHTF situation he and his family would be among the first to go.
Linus Torvalds just dropped several notches in my book for not looking up the source.
I'm sure Anonymous Coward was never in Linus's book to begin with.
Besides, how would a thorough researcher sustain a friendly talk among close friends? "Hey, AC, you heard that $team won yesterday, what do you think?" -- "Listen, guys, I can't say a word about that for about three days, until I personally review all the tapes and read all the articles. I may need to visit the stadium and look around too." Wouldn't that style be a tad boring for an idle chat?
You can celebrate the freedom without celebrating each usage of that freedom.
By simple reasoning you then start celebrating a freedom that has no usage whatsoever. For example, you can say again and again that the USA is the most free country in the world, or that it has the lowest taxes and the best business climate. It's very convenient when people learn a dogma without any proof of its validity today. That's why a freedom must be exercised, and only those exercises should be celebrated - and failures to exercise a freedom must be noted and counter-celebrated. Otherwise you will end up with First Amendment Zones, and the only allowed freedom of speech will be the freedom to wholeheartedly agree with the powerful of this world - and only when it's convenient for them.
If not, what test have these other, stupid, religions passed which makes them not-stupid but my one stupid?
There is only one usable test: acceptance by adherents of that religion. This is, IIRC, how at least one "religion," in one (UK) or a couple of countries, crossed the barrier between a movie and the real life (Jedi.)
Of course if a hundred million people hit their hands with a hammer every morning it does not validate their beliefs. It only validates the religion itself as a set of rituals and ways to think. The rituals themselves may be useless, and the ways to think may be wrong. IMO, all religions are like that (useless) because there is a better proof of existence of UFOs piloted by Chupacabras than of miracles. Modern religions are more like a club of Anonymous Alcoholics, where people come and tell stories to each other. It just makes them feel better - and therefore it works for them - regardless of how true those stories really are. Cartoons and fairy tales for children are rarely factual, but they are useful nevertheless.
Teacher:... ok and let's now try to see how the video works, pull up the software code.
It is impossible even if the video driver is open source. I spent plenty of time controlling hardware. First, you must have detailed knowledge about specifics of operation of this hardware. It may be hundreds of pages long, with schematic drawings, flow control diagrams, and such. Most of it will be incomprehensible to a novice. It's hard to read even if you are an experienced engineer. Then you must have the code of the driver. Driver is not your garden variety "Hello, World" - it can be written, or just understood, only after the student is already familiar with userspace programming. The trouble is that the driver does not have an identifiable path of execution; it is a collection of subroutines that can be called by different threads, running on different CPU cores, on different IRQLs, and each subroutine does its own special thing. Driver code is cluttered with semaphores, spinlocks, kernel calls (esp. in Windows) and so on. It is very hard to read. Nobody in his right mind would want to teach on that even if both the h/w user's guide and the software sources are available.
There are many good educational projects. In the video department you can build a VGA controller in the FPGA and then you can write a simple application that operates it. Teaching does not mean going into gory details of spinlocks from day zero. But skipping on those on a modern CPU will just cause crashes. Educational assignments have to be carefully constructed so that they teach exactly what is needed, and skip details that are not relevant today. I'm sure when you learned to drive a car it was not done on a NASCAR racetrack in the middle of a race.
access via the mouth, esophagus and stomach, and then through the stomach wall.
Option 1: the surgery is done via a camera, through the mouth, esophagus and stomach, and then through the stomach wall. Sutures will be also done by remote control - but they have to be secure enough to survive the acid of the stomach, and you better pray that they don't leak because that's bad news.
Option 2: the surgery is done via a cut in the stomach wall; the surgeon has all the tools and all the visibility in the world. Your mouth and esophagus are not going to be scratched. Sutures on the stomach wall are trivial, it's easy to see them, and if they fail they won't kill you, and they can be easily repaired.
Which one I would choose, I wonder? Is there a surgeon on/. that would volunteer a professional opinion?
It would leak out during the race. Probably that would be an undesirable outcome.
Re:Sounds like old days in USA where workers faced
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Riot Breaks Out At Foxconn
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The biggest problem is that at this level of assembly you have to account for variations in parts. Just try to use a robot to snap a clamshell. A human will apply the right amount of force where it is needed, and he will immediately see if something goes wrong. The vast majority of consumer electronics is not designed for easy assembly; they are designed for low cost, and as result half of the assembly is on glue, another half is snaps, and yet another half is all sorts of tiny special screws. You have to keep fragile flex connectors plugged correctly, you have to check that no wires are sticking out, you have to make sure that all 17 pieces of the puzzle are in before you put the last one on top.
Robots are very good with pick and place because these operations require minimal feedback. Once your activity starts depending on the feedback the first thing you need to develop is fingers with a good number of pressure sensors and with fine motors that can drive those fingers just like human hands do. Those robots will cost you more than the peanuts that a Chinese worker costs you today. There are only a few experimental fingers that are getting close to what is needed.
It's certainly possible to design for robotic FA&T, just as through hole PCBs were replaced with surface mounted parts. However this will impact the end product. It will be hard to make enclosures that look like solid pieces of material, with no seams or with no obvious means to open and close them. You would have to give up on technologies that only humans can do efficiently (like mating of small connectors.) You would want the assembly to consist of very few basic moves, with blind mates for all parts and with easy means to check that the mating is complete.
I don't want to sound like automation of the final assembly is impossible. I only want to mention that it is not a simple replacement of the worker with a robot.
On top of that, imagine that 1000 factory owners own all factories in the country and they need no workers. Owners still want money to pay for the raw materials, for the investments into robots, and for their wear and replacement, and for taxes, and for their own profits. Who is going to come up with the money to buy their goods if hardly anyone in the whole country is employed? The current thinking centers around the government becoming the center of ownership of robotic factories and of distribution of their products. IMO, this only changes one boss for another boss; even worse, you can never leave the new boss.
I actually assumed that it would result in even more tracking..... "What's this guy want to hide...."
I'm sure there is a lot of business potential in tracking a basement-dwelling geek who is paranoid about privacy and is well educated to make such tracking difficult. Perhaps after only a few years you will be able to show him one ad of a spare T-shirt. You would have to encode it in base 26 and make it into a challenge. Not that the geek in question has any use for the second T-shirt...
By continuing to use a product you will validate Ubuntu's belief that ads are OK and the users want them. This will give them incentive to insert more unwanted stuff into the next release.
I'm running 10.04.4 on the server currently. If Canonical does not mend its ways that would be the last install of Ubuntu that I made, no question about that. Since geeks comprise at least 100% of Ubuntu users, and since most geeks are militant about ads and spyware, I suspect that Canonical will soon find their product unclaimed by users.
Because, after all, it's profitable to import 42 metric tonnes of poppy seeds, at a market price of around $190,000 ($4600/tonne [beckleyfoundation.org]), in order to extract 390 grams of morphine (based on the 0.00069% content according to the article).
The seeds will not be destroyed. You separate the seeds and sell them. Whatever remains you put into processing and additionally get whatever you can.
Of course this process makes no profit if the drug content is so low. IMO, the prosecutor is just throwing the book at the uncooperative expert. Let's wait three days and see what the other judge says. Even in Russia you cannot jail someone with no excuse - however flimsy and laughable it may be. But once the bad excuse is out it can be attacked. If there is no political will to imprison her (and I don't see any here) she will walk, and may even be a bit richer in the end.
It is very important to know who commits those crimes. In the USA most crimes are committed by unemployed and unemployable outcasts who largely come from ruins of black families. Significant number of crimes is committed by illegal immigrants from Central America. We can discuss why those groups exist - who is responsible for destruction of black families, who is responsible for attracting criminals (and non-criminals) from Latin America, and what to do about it. But for the moment it is sufficient to say that the high crime rate in the USA is caused by high proportion of criminals. If UK and AU have fewer criminals then they have fewer crimes. Perhaps those countries are doing a better job in education, for example?
Note also that the US-MX border acts as an osmotic filter. Criminals from Central America *want* to come to the USA because this gives them many advantages. They are invisible here; the territory is so large that they can create their own gangs; the local police does not speak their language. And finally, "that's where the money is" - there are far more targets for robbery, theft and extortion than in Guatemala. As result you end up with more criminals in the USA.
It is amazing how hard some people work, trying to accuse guns of crimes that humans commit.
Surely you don't believe the US is significantly culturally different from Canada, UK, Scandinavia or Australia? Of course there are some differences. There are differences amongst different regions within the US. One of the major things they have in common though is their love of guns.
I am familiar with several of those cultures and I know what I speak of. The US culture is the most violent, with guns or without. It is on par with Afghan culture, or Somalia's, in terms of violence. Your average, modern European can't hold a candle to that. If you deny that Canadian culture is more peaceful than US culture... I suggest that you visit both countries and see for yourself.
Someone gets robbed, and their natural response is "I need an assault rifle".
You make it sound like a "court" (whatever that is) can wave its hand and order things like executions and censorship.
The court cannot punish you until you are convicted. However the court can order measures that are aimed at protecting the peace or at protecting the participants of the process. For example, a slasher can be placed under arrest; a mandatory medical evaluation may be ordered; the witness may be placed in protective custody; all participants may be instructed to forgo their right to free speech for a while (a gag order;) and so on.
Judges are supposed to be humans who do things to maintain law and order among their electors. This gives them a lot of authority that is minimally constrained but maximally questioned (you can appeal to higher courts.) Judge is supposed to understand the problem, the victim and the perpetrator, and order whatever actions are necessary in every specific case. Otherwise we would not need judges; a computer would do.
I personally know several people whose homes were invaded, and I have far more stories from direct witnesses (such as from neighbors.) I don't know what FBI has to say about crimes that fall under authority of states, but there are other words to that effect:
According to a United States Department of Justice report: 38% of assaults & 60% of rapes occur during home invasions. 1 of every 5 homes will experience a break-in or home invasion. That's over 2,000,000 homes! According to Statistics Canada, there has been an average of 289,200 home invasions annually over the last 5 years. Statistically, there are over 8,000 home invasions per day in North America. According to Statistics U.S.A., there was an average of 3,600,000 home invasions annually between 1994 and 2000.
In fact you are most likely be victimized by someone you know than a complete stranger.
That is irrelevant, unless you prefer a stranger to victimize you instead of someone you know.
Unfortunately in a lot of cases, the bad guy was the one with the gun.
You are undermining your own case. If what you said is true then we need to issue a gun to everyone.
Also, your scary story doesn't take into account the lower crime rates of other western countries that do have restrictions on gun ownership.
It's better to compare apples vs. other apples. Sure, there may be less crime in Japan, armed and unarmed. But you need to have Japanese people to realize that difference. Crimes are committed by people - not by territories, not by machines. This means that comparisons are valid only within the same society - and even that is not detailed enough. Statistics among gangbangers will tell you that they all own weapons illegally, all commit crimes with them, and are likely to be killed by their accomplices. Statistics among 90 y/o grannies will tell you that some of them own legal weapons, are very unlikely to commit crimes with them, and they will use those weapons to protect themselves and their families.
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I normally take the middle path and only use generic and robust techniques for the core of an application.
For my commercial, professional applications that means Windows, C#, and .NET (WPF.) Why?
Cross-platform operation is not required in my case. Linux is used by 0% of my audience, and that is not going to change until Mentor Graphics, SolidWorks and Autodesk have their essential software ported to Linux. I'm not holding my breath for that because they use way too many Windows-only technologies.
Just hit the Win key or click the bottom left corner of your screen and start typing (exactly the same as Windows 7 in that regard).
To start uTorrent you have type "torrent" and not "utorrent". The latter does not work. How is this natural?
If you can program in C and don't like it, you can change it to your liking. Nearly impossible with closed source.
This is true only in theory. Modern software (that is not Hello, World) is too complicated and requires considerable investment of time to start making safe changes. A casual user, even if he is familiar with C/C++, will never break through the wall of library dependencies, special compilation environments and other black magic before he even gets to change one line of code. All software on my computers, except my own software, came in binaries, and I can't be bothered to change anything even if I have the sources. It's just too hard, and the benefit is too small.
There's no god-given right to overtake. If you can't overtake safely and legally, just don't.
I'm sure the delivery truck driver will be happy to do just that. Since he will be late he will have to work overtime. But that's OK as long as some dudes on $5,000 bikes have a good time exercising on a public road.
I assume it must be possible. Or does traffic move at 5-6 miles per hour the entire weekend?
It is not legally possible. Everyone just breaks the law. Except myself, that is :-)
In Japan bikes are and always have been used in huge numbers, and on the streets of Tokyo pedestrians outnumber bikes, which outnumber cars...
Japan is famous for its ultra-high density of population in cities. In the USA you need to take a train to travel between two adjacent stores in the same mall.
If there are bike lanes...then sure, they have their place, but if not...we shouldn't allow vehicles on roads that cannot keep up with the normal speeds of said road.
There are other problems with bicycles on roads. Here is my list.
I'm sure I missed a few items.
And one more thing from that poll was that only 11% of respondents selected "None".
Them be the lawyers. Why would anyone confess to violation of laws?
If the lane isn't wide enough for motor vehicles to safely pass the bicycle, the cyclist should "take the lane" for his own safety.
Please advise how a car driver can overtake a bicycle on this road. Note the width of the single lane and the solid double yellow line in the center. You can't see the depth of the ravine on the left, but trust me - it's deep enough. This road does not allow for legal passing for most of its length, and it is infested with bicycles on weekends. Since this is an uphill road, bicyclists are moving up like turtles, and if you want to go around them you have to break the law and cross the center divider. Since the road is twisting, these lines there are for a reason.
Great, so we only have to deal with tens of thousands of people with brain injuries until everyone is adjusted.
In my younger days I rode a bicycle pretty much anywhere. Bicycle helmets were neither required then nor known. I fell a few times, as you'd expect, but that was largely on paths in a forest where roots can jump at you completely unexpectedly. Not even one fall resulted in me hitting my head. A helmet would be useless. Furthermore, riding in summer in a helmet, with all that physical work, could have resulted in heat stroke - and that would be far worse.
When I upgraded to a motorcycle I used a helmet. I had to wear one because it was not just a good idea, it was a necessity at that speed. I have a few scratches on that helmet; all of them come from the stucco on the wall between the elevator and the garage.
I don't have a bicycle now. I have a bicycle helmet somewhere. But I wouldn't want to mess with it. Helmets are a big problem - you don't want to carry them with you, and you don't want to leave them outside. Right now I solved this by driving a car. I can't use a bicycle here, in the hills, because I live way too high for me to climb on a bicycle. But if I were to live in the valley I'd like to own a bike and use it now and then.
How does Traynor's "genius" I.T. friend get an IP address from ...Facebook (wtf??)
You publish an interesting link that points at your own server. Your stalker will inevitably visit. But I have no idea how to tell him apart from another 100,000 visitors and search bots.
And how does he use that without a court order issued to an ISP to track it to a physical address?
That is a good question. My own IP address geolocates to the city where my ISP has their HQ - that is not even close to where I live. The ISP won't tell anyone, I hope, unless presented with a sufficiently valid, legal request.
Conveniently Traynor doesn't prosecute so there is no real record of this actually happening
This is possible if Traynor is a meek, soft guy who cannot stand for what is dear to him - his family. By all indications, the whole story points in this direction. Any normal, red-blooded guy would sue the bastard into oblivion. Anything else would be just a slap on the wrist, enabling the stalker to continue his "games" with other people. He will only be more careful. His downfall was that he was stalking someone he knew. If only he was threatening an old lady in another town, nobody would ever find out. Even in this case the stalker could have said "No, it wasn't me, I don't know - but I had a virus on my computer a while ago, mayhaps that was it." The evil bastard got excellent training on this one, and the victim shook his hand and walked away.
After the very first drop off of a message and ashes at his doorstep Traynor NEVER puts up a cam so he never sees the OTHER TWO drop offs of messages on his doorstep? W.T.F.?
That's another item to prove that Mr. Traynor is a weak, technophobic person who just got lost when faced with true evil. The police was useless; they didn't even give him an advice like you did. Stuff the house with cameras, announce to the world that you are leaving on vacation - and you will attract the stalker to the house, sure bet.
It must be said, though, that Mr. Traynor is not alone in his dependence on "someone else" to solve his safety and security problems. In UK any other approach is worse than the threat. Maybe even setting up a camera will violate someone's rights. Most people in his shoes (about 100%) would be first scared. This is normal - we don't face crime every day. The question is only in what they do after they come to their senses - who they talk to (police, lawyers, private investigators, gun dealers, etc.) and what proactive measures they take. This guy did exactly nothing of value. In the SHTF situation he and his family would be among the first to go.
Linus Torvalds just dropped several notches in my book for not looking up the source.
I'm sure Anonymous Coward was never in Linus's book to begin with.
Besides, how would a thorough researcher sustain a friendly talk among close friends? "Hey, AC, you heard that $team won yesterday, what do you think?" -- "Listen, guys, I can't say a word about that for about three days, until I personally review all the tapes and read all the articles. I may need to visit the stadium and look around too." Wouldn't that style be a tad boring for an idle chat?
You can celebrate the freedom without celebrating each usage of that freedom.
By simple reasoning you then start celebrating a freedom that has no usage whatsoever. For example, you can say again and again that the USA is the most free country in the world, or that it has the lowest taxes and the best business climate. It's very convenient when people learn a dogma without any proof of its validity today. That's why a freedom must be exercised, and only those exercises should be celebrated - and failures to exercise a freedom must be noted and counter-celebrated. Otherwise you will end up with First Amendment Zones, and the only allowed freedom of speech will be the freedom to wholeheartedly agree with the powerful of this world - and only when it's convenient for them.
If not, what test have these other, stupid, religions passed which makes them not-stupid but my one stupid?
There is only one usable test: acceptance by adherents of that religion. This is, IIRC, how at least one "religion," in one (UK) or a couple of countries, crossed the barrier between a movie and the real life (Jedi.)
Of course if a hundred million people hit their hands with a hammer every morning it does not validate their beliefs. It only validates the religion itself as a set of rituals and ways to think. The rituals themselves may be useless, and the ways to think may be wrong. IMO, all religions are like that (useless) because there is a better proof of existence of UFOs piloted by Chupacabras than of miracles. Modern religions are more like a club of Anonymous Alcoholics, where people come and tell stories to each other. It just makes them feel better - and therefore it works for them - regardless of how true those stories really are. Cartoons and fairy tales for children are rarely factual, but they are useful nevertheless.
Teacher: ... ok and let's now try to see how the video works, pull up the software code.
It is impossible even if the video driver is open source. I spent plenty of time controlling hardware. First, you must have detailed knowledge about specifics of operation of this hardware. It may be hundreds of pages long, with schematic drawings, flow control diagrams, and such. Most of it will be incomprehensible to a novice. It's hard to read even if you are an experienced engineer. Then you must have the code of the driver. Driver is not your garden variety "Hello, World" - it can be written, or just understood, only after the student is already familiar with userspace programming. The trouble is that the driver does not have an identifiable path of execution; it is a collection of subroutines that can be called by different threads, running on different CPU cores, on different IRQLs, and each subroutine does its own special thing. Driver code is cluttered with semaphores, spinlocks, kernel calls (esp. in Windows) and so on. It is very hard to read. Nobody in his right mind would want to teach on that even if both the h/w user's guide and the software sources are available.
There are many good educational projects. In the video department you can build a VGA controller in the FPGA and then you can write a simple application that operates it. Teaching does not mean going into gory details of spinlocks from day zero. But skipping on those on a modern CPU will just cause crashes. Educational assignments have to be carefully constructed so that they teach exactly what is needed, and skip details that are not relevant today. I'm sure when you learned to drive a car it was not done on a NASCAR racetrack in the middle of a race.
access via the mouth, esophagus and stomach, and then through the stomach wall.
Option 1: the surgery is done via a camera, through the mouth, esophagus and stomach, and then through the stomach wall. Sutures will be also done by remote control - but they have to be secure enough to survive the acid of the stomach, and you better pray that they don't leak because that's bad news.
Option 2: the surgery is done via a cut in the stomach wall; the surgeon has all the tools and all the visibility in the world. Your mouth and esophagus are not going to be scratched. Sutures on the stomach wall are trivial, it's easy to see them, and if they fail they won't kill you, and they can be easily repaired.
Which one I would choose, I wonder? Is there a surgeon on /. that would volunteer a professional opinion?
It would leak out during the race. Probably that would be an undesirable outcome.
The biggest problem is that at this level of assembly you have to account for variations in parts. Just try to use a robot to snap a clamshell. A human will apply the right amount of force where it is needed, and he will immediately see if something goes wrong. The vast majority of consumer electronics is not designed for easy assembly; they are designed for low cost, and as result half of the assembly is on glue, another half is snaps, and yet another half is all sorts of tiny special screws. You have to keep fragile flex connectors plugged correctly, you have to check that no wires are sticking out, you have to make sure that all 17 pieces of the puzzle are in before you put the last one on top.
Robots are very good with pick and place because these operations require minimal feedback. Once your activity starts depending on the feedback the first thing you need to develop is fingers with a good number of pressure sensors and with fine motors that can drive those fingers just like human hands do. Those robots will cost you more than the peanuts that a Chinese worker costs you today. There are only a few experimental fingers that are getting close to what is needed.
It's certainly possible to design for robotic FA&T, just as through hole PCBs were replaced with surface mounted parts. However this will impact the end product. It will be hard to make enclosures that look like solid pieces of material, with no seams or with no obvious means to open and close them. You would have to give up on technologies that only humans can do efficiently (like mating of small connectors.) You would want the assembly to consist of very few basic moves, with blind mates for all parts and with easy means to check that the mating is complete.
I don't want to sound like automation of the final assembly is impossible. I only want to mention that it is not a simple replacement of the worker with a robot.
On top of that, imagine that 1000 factory owners own all factories in the country and they need no workers. Owners still want money to pay for the raw materials, for the investments into robots, and for their wear and replacement, and for taxes, and for their own profits. Who is going to come up with the money to buy their goods if hardly anyone in the whole country is employed? The current thinking centers around the government becoming the center of ownership of robotic factories and of distribution of their products. IMO, this only changes one boss for another boss; even worse, you can never leave the new boss.
I actually assumed that it would result in even more tracking..... "What's this guy want to hide...."
I'm sure there is a lot of business potential in tracking a basement-dwelling geek who is paranoid about privacy and is well educated to make such tracking difficult. Perhaps after only a few years you will be able to show him one ad of a spare T-shirt. You would have to encode it in base 26 and make it into a challenge. Not that the geek in question has any use for the second T-shirt...
By continuing to use a product you will validate Ubuntu's belief that ads are OK and the users want them. This will give them incentive to insert more unwanted stuff into the next release.
I'm running 10.04.4 on the server currently. If Canonical does not mend its ways that would be the last install of Ubuntu that I made, no question about that. Since geeks comprise at least 100% of Ubuntu users, and since most geeks are militant about ads and spyware, I suspect that Canonical will soon find their product unclaimed by users.
Because, after all, it's profitable to import 42 metric tonnes of poppy seeds, at a market price of around $190,000 ($4600/tonne [beckleyfoundation.org]), in order to extract 390 grams of morphine (based on the 0.00069% content according to the article).
The seeds will not be destroyed. You separate the seeds and sell them. Whatever remains you put into processing and additionally get whatever you can.
Of course this process makes no profit if the drug content is so low. IMO, the prosecutor is just throwing the book at the uncooperative expert. Let's wait three days and see what the other judge says. Even in Russia you cannot jail someone with no excuse - however flimsy and laughable it may be. But once the bad excuse is out it can be attacked. If there is no political will to imprison her (and I don't see any here) she will walk, and may even be a bit richer in the end.
You can always set up your own social network and register as its first and last user.
It is very important to know who commits those crimes. In the USA most crimes are committed by unemployed and unemployable outcasts who largely come from ruins of black families. Significant number of crimes is committed by illegal immigrants from Central America. We can discuss why those groups exist - who is responsible for destruction of black families, who is responsible for attracting criminals (and non-criminals) from Latin America, and what to do about it. But for the moment it is sufficient to say that the high crime rate in the USA is caused by high proportion of criminals. If UK and AU have fewer criminals then they have fewer crimes. Perhaps those countries are doing a better job in education, for example?
Note also that the US-MX border acts as an osmotic filter. Criminals from Central America *want* to come to the USA because this gives them many advantages. They are invisible here; the territory is so large that they can create their own gangs; the local police does not speak their language. And finally, "that's where the money is" - there are far more targets for robbery, theft and extortion than in Guatemala. As result you end up with more criminals in the USA.
It is amazing how hard some people work, trying to accuse guns of crimes that humans commit.
Surely you don't believe the US is significantly culturally different from Canada, UK, Scandinavia or Australia? Of course there are some differences. There are differences amongst different regions within the US. One of the major things they have in common though is their love of guns.
I am familiar with several of those cultures and I know what I speak of. The US culture is the most violent, with guns or without. It is on par with Afghan culture, or Somalia's, in terms of violence. Your average, modern European can't hold a candle to that. If you deny that Canadian culture is more peaceful than US culture... I suggest that you visit both countries and see for yourself.
Someone gets robbed, and their natural response is "I need an assault rifle".
A strawman. Not even a good one.
You make it sound like a "court" (whatever that is) can wave its hand and order things like executions and censorship.
The court cannot punish you until you are convicted. However the court can order measures that are aimed at protecting the peace or at protecting the participants of the process. For example, a slasher can be placed under arrest; a mandatory medical evaluation may be ordered; the witness may be placed in protective custody; all participants may be instructed to forgo their right to free speech for a while (a gag order;) and so on.
Judges are supposed to be humans who do things to maintain law and order among their electors. This gives them a lot of authority that is minimally constrained but maximally questioned (you can appeal to higher courts.) Judge is supposed to understand the problem, the victim and the perpetrator, and order whatever actions are necessary in every specific case. Otherwise we would not need judges; a computer would do.
I personally know several people whose homes were invaded, and I have far more stories from direct witnesses (such as from neighbors.) I don't know what FBI has to say about crimes that fall under authority of states, but there are other words to that effect:
According to a United States Department of Justice report: 38% of assaults & 60% of rapes occur during home invasions. 1 of every 5 homes will experience a break-in or home invasion. That's over 2,000,000 homes! According to Statistics Canada, there has been an average of 289,200 home invasions annually over the last 5 years. Statistically, there are over 8,000 home invasions per day in North America. According to Statistics U.S.A., there was an average of 3,600,000 home invasions annually between 1994 and 2000.
In fact you are most likely be victimized by someone you know than a complete stranger.
That is irrelevant, unless you prefer a stranger to victimize you instead of someone you know.
Unfortunately in a lot of cases, the bad guy was the one with the gun.
You are undermining your own case. If what you said is true then we need to issue a gun to everyone.
Also, your scary story doesn't take into account the lower crime rates of other western countries that do have restrictions on gun ownership.
It's better to compare apples vs. other apples. Sure, there may be less crime in Japan, armed and unarmed. But you need to have Japanese people to realize that difference. Crimes are committed by people - not by territories, not by machines. This means that comparisons are valid only within the same society - and even that is not detailed enough. Statistics among gangbangers will tell you that they all own weapons illegally, all commit crimes with them, and are likely to be killed by their accomplices. Statistics among 90 y/o grannies will tell you that some of them own legal weapons, are very unlikely to commit crimes with them, and they will use those weapons to protect themselves and their families.