Just to clarify, if the cats are not dead, they clearly can't be in Hell, ergo their existence in Hell depends upon observing them.
And by "until you observe Hell", I meant "you" generally, not you specifically. I have no way to know whether you personally will or will not observe Hell, for precisely the same reason that I do not know if the cat is dead.
Actually, I thought there either will or won't be cats in Hell, and that the existence of said cats will not in fact occur or fail to occur until you observe Hell. On the other hand, one could argue the same for the existence or lack of existence of Hell itself, which is a rather interesting twist. Perhaps Heaven and Hell are some sort of quantum states, the superposition of which the universe exists in simultaneously. Or perhaps I should just stop posting random thoughts late at night.
Politicians telling Scientists how to do science, what could possibly go wrong.
I dislike politicians as much as the next guy, but that's really not fair. The politicians aren't telling the rocket engineers how to engineer the next ship. They're producing a set of basic guiding principles for the design process so that they get a design that meets their requirements and does so with a minimum of cost overruns (maybe). It's more like management telling software engineers that they need to pay attention to security or spend this release cycle focusing on performance. They aren't telling software engineers how to write specific lines of code (and shouldn't, because they aren't programmers), but rather they are giving the software engineers an overarching plan that their code needs to fit into.
As for me, I'm disappointed that they're considering reuse of the SSMEs and the ET. The ET has been a train wreck through the entire history of the program, having caused damage to orbiters on more occasions than I can count. The SSMEs are, I'm told, relatively hard to manufacture, and despite being "reusable", they still get rebuilt every fourth time they fire the thing (which is still better than the early ones, which IIRC were rebuilt *every* time they fired them). Imagine if you had to rebuild your car's engine that often.... If you have to rebuild them that often, I really have to wonder if you're saving enough compared with cheaper disposable designs to make it worth it. *shrugs*
Eh. You only need to track one axis of motion (horizontal position of the pupil), so I suspect you could come up with something much simpler that would do the job. For example, you might have a row of individually detected photocells across the top edge of the frame and a focused (microlensed?) IR array along the bottom edge. Take the moving average of each cell over a fraction of a second, and find the center of the dark part. Might or might not give precise enough measurement, but it would be worth a try.
How hard is pupil tracking? I mean cameras do it for focusing these days. It can't be that much harder to do it twice. Once you have the position of both pupils, determine how crossed the person's eyes are, and when it exceeds a preset threshold, switch to close focusing. That would be much, much better than either of the above schemes because it wouldn't require the user to pay attention to the glasses.
Similarly, why only use half the glasses? As far as comfort goes, it's easiest to read with your eyes pointing straight forward, not looking down as far as you can. If you can do it for half the lens, it should cost negligibly more to do it for the whole lens.
It's a neat idea in principle, but I'd wait for revision 2.0.
I think it's rather like predicting earthquakes. If each week a different person says there's going to be a big one, statistically speaking, eventually one of them will be right.:-)
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them...
It's unclear where the line between advocacy and conspiracy is drawn, but I sure wouldn't want to find out. Even in the best case, it's rebellion/insurrection and advocating overthrow.
Either way, their actions should render them ineligible to hold office.
This was an assassination, asshole. Education about gun safety had nothing to do with it.
Indeed. This is what happens when you have prominent candidates for major political office throwing ad hominem attacks at their opponents, telling people the world will end unless they win, and advocating violent insurrection if they don't win. At least three Tea Party candidates advocated actions like what happened today:
It's inevitable. If your rhetoric involves implying that violent acts are an acceptable means of political pressure, some percentage of people will believe your bulls**t, and eventually, somebody will take it too far. It's okay to disagree. It's not okay to act like these Tea Party idiots acted in this election season. When you act that way, events like those of today are what you get.
If there is any justice in the world, the three political candidates above will be arrested promptly and charged with treason.
I think your notion of some sort of proportional representation based on knowledge wouldn't work. It won't work until people are taught to be critical thinkers, and taught to evaluate sources. Take most cable news shows for example. Even when they "defer to the expert", half the time the expert is a quack.
Sadly, this is very true. All the more reason for important issues to be the subject of discussion, with multiple experts posing different viewpoints. Sure, there's always the danger that the folks will defer to the wrong "expert", but at least with more diverse representation, there would be some prayer of having actual experts who are members of Congress to help steer things in the right direction.
As it stands now, you have experts in the law and experts in business, and that's about it. Thus, the only perspectives that get adequately represented and evaluated are those of businesses and lawyers. That's not healthy.:-)
BTW regarding the lack of true representation -- per last time I saw stats, roughly 90% of Dems were lawyers and journalists, compared to about 50% of Reps.
Yes, but the remaining Republicans are highly biased towards wealthy businesspeople. Either way, neither party is particularly representative of the population as a whole.
True, not all environments are suited to voice entry. However, with the exception of the cubicle farm example, most of those environments are places where you only work occasionally. A touch screen could provide a "good enough" replacement for a keyboard in those situations.
Thus, the combination of touch screens with perfect voice recognition would dramatically cut into the use of keyboards, unlike touch screens alone, which really won't (or at least shouldn't).
Any decent e-tailer has a password system which eliminates the problem you describe.
What? No, they don't. With the exception of Amazon (which requires you to reenter your CC info if you ship to a new address), I can't think of a single e-tailer that I would rate as even "barely competent" when it comes to security. They store credit card info for future orders, allow you to ship to new addresses, a few of them require the address be listed with the CC company, but most don't because it's too much overhead.
For the most part, they just assume that there will be a little bit of fraud, and they let the credit card companies eat the cost of that fraud.
Nonsense. That is *exactly* what will emerge.
Nonsense. There's no reason for such things if the system is done properly. A proper Internet ID should consist of a PK crypto pair generated by your computer, signed by an authority after you provide information for it. There could be dozens of authorities, and there would be no good reason for them to keep any record of you other than your login information for that site so that you can log back in later and have them sign a new key or revoke an old one. The key is under your control, the cert is under your control. There's no reason for the signing authority to keep a copy of either.
Besides, the identity certificate itself contains enough information to uniquely identify you. What would be the point of keeping a database of those identity certificates?
If you're that good with computers, you can probably also figure out a way to conceal your identity while laundering the money. You know, like doing your funds transfers with VISA gift cards, paying for a Mailboxes, Etc. postal box with cash, using it for a month, then moving on to a different location.
Then there would be enough money left to spend an even greater proportion on healthcare, which after all is a fundamental indicator of the advancement of your society (and in which regard the US is a laughing stock amongst other industrialized countries).
Not really. A society in an ideal state of advancement should spend almost nothing on health care. If your society is truly advanced, people should rarely get sick, which should mean that almost all of your health costs are either emergency care (for accidental injuries) or preventive care. Spending more money than anyone else does not inherently result in better care.
Spending larger and larger portions of your budget on health care is indicative of serious problems---specifically, an inefficient health care system that burns money on huge salaries for the people at the top coupled with a population that has serious health issues (widespread obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.).
Oh, and there's also the price gouging by drug makers and medical equipment manufacturers. That certainly doesn't help. Nor does our tort system, which results in utterly absurd medical malpractice insurance costs. Nor does our medical education system, which results in doctors with absurdly large medical school debts that they have to pay off.
In short, there are so many things wrong with our health care system that it's almost hard to know where to begin. The escalating costs are not indicative of better care, but rather of a fundamentally broken system that spends way, way more than it should for what we get out of it. One could argue that high costs of medical research and development are indicative of an advanced society. High treatment costs, however, are generally indicative of the exact opposite.
Once the alternative of "big government" is even bigger business, I'd rather be under hand of an elected body that at least needs to pretend to act in the public interest, than a corp that only acts in self-interest.
There are alternatives to direct government control that can provide the same benefits without the drawbacks. For example, the government could create and provide initial funding for nonprofit organizations to build new hospitals and run them. Similarly, the government could create a nationwide nonprofit insurance company to compete with private insurers and could provide vouchers for the poor.
Neither of these is likely, of course, because the Republicans would cry "big government" and "unfair competition", along with most of the Blue Dog Democrats.
Seeing jobs for people as a "wasteful use of human resources" is one of the symptoms of why the rise of transnational corporations is destroying so many societies. Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
Sure, there's always a tension between the desire to make more profit and the need to hire enough people to do the job. The point is that meter readers are about as low as you can get on the jobs totem pole. They need to have a driver's license. They need to be able to read numbers. They almost certainly don't get paid well. Alternatively, without those folks doing that unnecessary job that can be trivially automated, you could instead hire people to do more useful jobs---you know, like providing customer service jobs in the U.S. instead of outsourcing them to India. It might even work out to about the same number of jobs when you put a pencil to it. More to the point, those jobs are much more useful as far as customer service goes than driving around to read a number off of a meter.
Put another way, instead of hiring one mayor, you could hire ten sanitation workers. This is not a useful trade in either direction because you need a mayor, but you don't need two of them. But if you don't have money for both, it's probably better to have the mayor and ten fewer sanitation workers than to have ten more sanitation workers with no one at the rudder.
Now you could argue that they are unlikely to actually use that money to provide more jobs, and will instead just absorb that as profit, but the next time they ask for a rate increase, the PUC is going to say, "Yeah, but you already got a windfall from all those layoffs," at which point that money will end up back in the hands of customers, some of which will get spent, which will in turn create jobs. Either way, although it's not purely a zero sum game, it does resemble it in many ways. Wasting money on employees whose job function is no longer relevant isn't really helping the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Fin. I Just won't us thm anymor.
Yeah, I looked to see if they had. If they had, I would have, but alas...
*Tap, tappity, tap, tap, tap*
There. Now it links to this story as a citation.
Hey, it works for right-wing media.
Veto it.
Unless you're on iOS, in which case it is. (Assuming that's HFS+ under there, of course. For all I know, it might be a giant mbox file....)
Just to clarify, if the cats are not dead, they clearly can't be in Hell, ergo their existence in Hell depends upon observing them.
And by "until you observe Hell", I meant "you" generally, not you specifically. I have no way to know whether you personally will or will not observe Hell, for precisely the same reason that I do not know if the cat is dead.
Actually, I thought there either will or won't be cats in Hell, and that the existence of said cats will not in fact occur or fail to occur until you observe Hell. On the other hand, one could argue the same for the existence or lack of existence of Hell itself, which is a rather interesting twist. Perhaps Heaven and Hell are some sort of quantum states, the superposition of which the universe exists in simultaneously. Or perhaps I should just stop posting random thoughts late at night.
I dislike politicians as much as the next guy, but that's really not fair. The politicians aren't telling the rocket engineers how to engineer the next ship. They're producing a set of basic guiding principles for the design process so that they get a design that meets their requirements and does so with a minimum of cost overruns (maybe). It's more like management telling software engineers that they need to pay attention to security or spend this release cycle focusing on performance. They aren't telling software engineers how to write specific lines of code (and shouldn't, because they aren't programmers), but rather they are giving the software engineers an overarching plan that their code needs to fit into.
As for me, I'm disappointed that they're considering reuse of the SSMEs and the ET. The ET has been a train wreck through the entire history of the program, having caused damage to orbiters on more occasions than I can count. The SSMEs are, I'm told, relatively hard to manufacture, and despite being "reusable", they still get rebuilt every fourth time they fire the thing (which is still better than the early ones, which IIRC were rebuilt *every* time they fired them). Imagine if you had to rebuild your car's engine that often.... If you have to rebuild them that often, I really have to wonder if you're saving enough compared with cheaper disposable designs to make it worth it. *shrugs*
I was replying to a post that listed those.
Eh. You only need to track one axis of motion (horizontal position of the pupil), so I suspect you could come up with something much simpler that would do the job. For example, you might have a row of individually detected photocells across the top edge of the frame and a focused (microlensed?) IR array along the bottom edge. Take the moving average of each cell over a fraction of a second, and find the center of the dark part. Might or might not give precise enough measurement, but it would be worth a try.
How hard is pupil tracking? I mean cameras do it for focusing these days. It can't be that much harder to do it twice. Once you have the position of both pupils, determine how crossed the person's eyes are, and when it exceeds a preset threshold, switch to close focusing. That would be much, much better than either of the above schemes because it wouldn't require the user to pay attention to the glasses.
Similarly, why only use half the glasses? As far as comfort goes, it's easiest to read with your eyes pointing straight forward, not looking down as far as you can. If you can do it for half the lens, it should cost negligibly more to do it for the whole lens.
It's a neat idea in principle, but I'd wait for revision 2.0.
I forgot:
ImageWriter II
LaserWriter IIf
LaserWriter IIg
LaserWriter IINT
LaserWriter IINTX
LaserWriter IISC
You forgot:
Enhanced //e //e
The grey enhanced
Mac II
Mac IIfx
Mac IIsi
Mac IIcx
Mac IIci
Mac LC II
CompUSA?
I think it's rather like predicting earthquakes. If each week a different person says there's going to be a big one, statistically speaking, eventually one of them will be right. :-)
It's unclear where the line between advocacy and conspiracy is drawn, but I sure wouldn't want to find out. Even in the best case, it's rebellion/insurrection and advocating overthrow.
Either way, their actions should render them ineligible to hold office.
Indeed. This is what happens when you have prominent candidates for major political office throwing ad hominem attacks at their opponents, telling people the world will end unless they win, and advocating violent insurrection if they don't win. At least three Tea Party candidates advocated actions like what happened today:
It's inevitable. If your rhetoric involves implying that violent acts are an acceptable means of political pressure, some percentage of people will believe your bulls**t, and eventually, somebody will take it too far. It's okay to disagree. It's not okay to act like these Tea Party idiots acted in this election season. When you act that way, events like those of today are what you get.
If there is any justice in the world, the three political candidates above will be arrested promptly and charged with treason.
Sadly, this is very true. All the more reason for important issues to be the subject of discussion, with multiple experts posing different viewpoints. Sure, there's always the danger that the folks will defer to the wrong "expert", but at least with more diverse representation, there would be some prayer of having actual experts who are members of Congress to help steer things in the right direction.
As it stands now, you have experts in the law and experts in business, and that's about it. Thus, the only perspectives that get adequately represented and evaluated are those of businesses and lawyers. That's not healthy. :-)
Yes, but the remaining Republicans are highly biased towards wealthy businesspeople. Either way, neither party is particularly representative of the population as a whole.
True, not all environments are suited to voice entry. However, with the exception of the cubicle farm example, most of those environments are places where you only work occasionally. A touch screen could provide a "good enough" replacement for a keyboard in those situations.
Thus, the combination of touch screens with perfect voice recognition would dramatically cut into the use of keyboards, unlike touch screens alone, which really won't (or at least shouldn't).
What? No, they don't. With the exception of Amazon (which requires you to reenter your CC info if you ship to a new address), I can't think of a single e-tailer that I would rate as even "barely competent" when it comes to security. They store credit card info for future orders, allow you to ship to new addresses, a few of them require the address be listed with the CC company, but most don't because it's too much overhead.
For the most part, they just assume that there will be a little bit of fraud, and they let the credit card companies eat the cost of that fraud.
Nonsense. There's no reason for such things if the system is done properly. A proper Internet ID should consist of a PK crypto pair generated by your computer, signed by an authority after you provide information for it. There could be dozens of authorities, and there would be no good reason for them to keep any record of you other than your login information for that site so that you can log back in later and have them sign a new key or revoke an old one. The key is under your control, the cert is under your control. There's no reason for the signing authority to keep a copy of either.
Besides, the identity certificate itself contains enough information to uniquely identify you. What would be the point of keeping a database of those identity certificates?
If you're that good with computers, you can probably also figure out a way to conceal your identity while laundering the money. You know, like doing your funds transfers with VISA gift cards, paying for a Mailboxes, Etc. postal box with cash, using it for a month, then moving on to a different location.
Not really. A society in an ideal state of advancement should spend almost nothing on health care. If your society is truly advanced, people should rarely get sick, which should mean that almost all of your health costs are either emergency care (for accidental injuries) or preventive care. Spending more money than anyone else does not inherently result in better care.
Spending larger and larger portions of your budget on health care is indicative of serious problems---specifically, an inefficient health care system that burns money on huge salaries for the people at the top coupled with a population that has serious health issues (widespread obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.).
Oh, and there's also the price gouging by drug makers and medical equipment manufacturers. That certainly doesn't help. Nor does our tort system, which results in utterly absurd medical malpractice insurance costs. Nor does our medical education system, which results in doctors with absurdly large medical school debts that they have to pay off.
In short, there are so many things wrong with our health care system that it's almost hard to know where to begin. The escalating costs are not indicative of better care, but rather of a fundamentally broken system that spends way, way more than it should for what we get out of it. One could argue that high costs of medical research and development are indicative of an advanced society. High treatment costs, however, are generally indicative of the exact opposite.
There are alternatives to direct government control that can provide the same benefits without the drawbacks. For example, the government could create and provide initial funding for nonprofit organizations to build new hospitals and run them. Similarly, the government could create a nationwide nonprofit insurance company to compete with private insurers and could provide vouchers for the poor.
Neither of these is likely, of course, because the Republicans would cry "big government" and "unfair competition", along with most of the Blue Dog Democrats.
Sure, there's always a tension between the desire to make more profit and the need to hire enough people to do the job. The point is that meter readers are about as low as you can get on the jobs totem pole. They need to have a driver's license. They need to be able to read numbers. They almost certainly don't get paid well. Alternatively, without those folks doing that unnecessary job that can be trivially automated, you could instead hire people to do more useful jobs---you know, like providing customer service jobs in the U.S. instead of outsourcing them to India. It might even work out to about the same number of jobs when you put a pencil to it. More to the point, those jobs are much more useful as far as customer service goes than driving around to read a number off of a meter.
Put another way, instead of hiring one mayor, you could hire ten sanitation workers. This is not a useful trade in either direction because you need a mayor, but you don't need two of them. But if you don't have money for both, it's probably better to have the mayor and ten fewer sanitation workers than to have ten more sanitation workers with no one at the rudder.
Now you could argue that they are unlikely to actually use that money to provide more jobs, and will instead just absorb that as profit, but the next time they ask for a rate increase, the PUC is going to say, "Yeah, but you already got a windfall from all those layoffs," at which point that money will end up back in the hands of customers, some of which will get spent, which will in turn create jobs. Either way, although it's not purely a zero sum game, it does resemble it in many ways. Wasting money on employees whose job function is no longer relevant isn't really helping the economy.