Um... For me, the Xbox360, ds, psp, and Wii are also time wasters. They are what I play when I have nothing to do. And books- those are time wasters. I only read them when I don't have something better to do.
What are you trying to say? That a 50-hour game for PS3 isn't a time waster? That 'serious' games must eat at least 8 hours of your day before you acknowledge their greatness?
I just thought I'd point out that ammo does store pretty well- at least as well as glass bottles of volatile fluid. I regularly fire pre-ww2 surplus ammunition without issues.
Ammunition, especially.22lr,.30-06,.223, and other common hunting calibers will always be a good investment. If I could send a letter to myself but 10 years earlier, one of the first sentences would be "Buy ammo!" (along with apple and google stock, of course). I could have more than doubled my money buying and selling ammo if I had know prices would skyrocket when they did.
When worst comes to worst, you can make your own gunpowder, cast your own bullets, and make your own guns. In a military conflict, however, the people with brass-cased ammunition will beat the muskets.
I know how antibodies work, I was saying that your cure (expose everybody, many die) is worse than the problem (hardly anyone is exposed, hardly anyone dies).
There are enough killer bugs out there to cause a doomsday scenario and it hasn't happened yet. It might, or it might not, but it would be just stupid to tell my kids not to wash their hands in order to "toughen them up". The flu is not like chicken pox where exposure leads to a lifetime of immunity. You get the flu this year, and your chances of getting it next year don't change. So if you expose everyone to this swine flu, a bunch of people die, we're all miserable, and in 12 months a new strain comes out that our antibodies are not prepared for, and the cycle repeats. Or we can quarantine sick travellers, use hand sanitizer, and stay home from work when we're sick.
Any illness will cause fatalities. Swine flu does kill people. Exposing all of us might "build character" and it might make us resistant to the next strain (but probably not). And it will kill people.
So you can ask us to be less careful about contamination, but when your kid dies on a respirator, will it be any comfort that our immune systems are somehow stronger because of it?
Look- Nothing has changed about us or about the flu in general since the early parts of the 20th century when flu epidemics killed hundreds of thousands. Our careful contamination avoidance, handwashing, hygiene, etc mean that these strains of flu DON'T knock us on our collective asses. You might as well complain that clothes make us prone to bad weather or that being rich makes you prone to being poor. Our lack of sickness is a sign of GOOD health, not poor as I believe you meant.
If one of your children had been born with a screenable disorder that made their life a living hell, do you think they'd appreciate your 'hands-off' approach? So that you can feel good about being such a holistic parent while your child needs a colostomy bag and will never, ever, enter society or live a life full of love and light?
I'm sure you and your healthy children are happy as can be with the decision you made. By enjoying the 'gamble' of finding out what kind of child you will get, you are reducing your children to the level of possessions or at least pets. I'm sure you would love your children if they had CF or MD or epilepsy or down's syndrome or any number or things... The question is, would your child love you as much once they were old enough to realize that you could have done something to stop their pain before they were born?
The net benefit of computer control is rendered moot when the plane crashes headlong into a grove of trees at the end of the runway that a human would have avoided by either pulling up or throttling up.
Remember that humans are more willing to accept senseless deaths caused by pilots than deaths caused by computers. It will be a long time before people trust their lives to computers on an emotional level. And yes, that takes into account drivers' ignorance of all the computers that make their cars work.
The safest vehicle in the world will have empty seats until you make it LOOK safe. That's just part of the business.
>>How much do military pilots make? Do you feel unsafe with them?
Military pilots' salary after 10 years' service is more than I can probably hope to make even after a lifetime of service as an enlisted member. A pilot's retirement is more than I make working active duty with over 7 years' service.
e.g., a ltCol with 10 years of service will make over $76,000/yr in base pay alone. Add to that per diems, flight pay, hazard pay, combat pay and family separation pay (when applicable), and numerous other benefits like free school, medical, dental, etc and you're talking about a second car.
Autopilots crash airplanes. Pilots crash airplanes.
This should be a discussion on the merits of pilot, computer, and pilot+computer systems. TFS was flamebait but the question is a good one.
After so many release notes, apple advertisements, microsoft advertisements, and ludicrous space towers, it's nice to have a really interesting philosophical discussion on slashdot. So far it's consisted of people ranting about tfs.
"It's not a design flaw -- it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information."
That is very much open to debate and it's an interesting question. Yes, the rest of the post is flamebait. That shouldn't detract from what could have been a very interesting discussion instead of where this thread is headed.
Oh come on, you could have made a good joke like "Why are Boeing pilots so battle-tested in the first place?" or "Airbus pilots can't become battle-tested because every failure is fatal."
I'm sorry, I didn't think TFS actually presented one side as better than the other. Maybe it's because I work in aerospace and take more things as given than you, but to me tfs raised a very interesting philosophical question. The summary even says that it's not a design flaw- it's a philosophical divide.
I know several people who HATE flying because- even though they understand intellectually that flying is much safer than driving- the idea of falling to earth, out of control, with many seconds or even minutes to be aware of the terrible situation is much worse than feeling able to control their path in a car.
I myself feel like I've outgrown that feeling. I've literally entrusted my life to other people so many times that when I get on a plane the idea of dying or crashing doesn't even cross my mind. It is a conscious flipping of a mental switch: I am not in control. This plane is being flown by someone who also does not want to die and that person knows what they're doing.
And on the other hand I've read enough after-action briefs of computer glitches crashing planes that I don't entirely trust computers to fly. Yes, they have faster response times, yes they can look out for the airplane better than a human. Usually. Usually, they can do those things better than a human. Why WOULDN'T you allow a human into that chain of control? If the computer is going nose down into a mountain because of a frozen AOA probe, the pilot should just sit there and start praying? If the computer starts shutting down engines because of faulty fuel indicators, the pilot should just sit back and say, "Hey, we took off 45 minutes ago with 5000 gallons of fuel and barring an open fuel cap, there's no way we're actually out, but whatever, I'll accept a cold death in the north atlantic if it saves the engines from a potential flameout"?
Here's where I sit: Computers should fly planes. Humans should solve problems. Computers are not perfect; if they were, we wouldn't need IT or pilots or astronauts or mathematicians. Someday when AI is improved and flight control computers absolutely do not cause stupid accidents, then I'll allow and empty cockpit.
What I propose is a compromise, just like the american company, and it has nothing to do with john wayne or ayn rand or any other stupid emotionally-weighted crap.
Hi, my name is ben, and it's my job to keep people from dying in airplanes, and I'm in favor of pilot intervention to avert crisis.
I think a person taken from 200 years ago or more would be more amazed by driving. Flying is neat, but they know birds can do it and they've seen leaves falling slowly from trees, etc.
Imagine that your first experience with the present age was a ride through, say, albuquerque at around 5 pm, followed by a high speed dash across the desert once you passed the city limit.
Maybe I'm just biased because of the memories of the effects of certain psychotropics while being a passenger in a speeding car.
>>Apple either responds with a lawsuit or iTunes patch
The thing is, old iPods will always be supported. There is nothing fancy about what Palm is doing here- it's just two bytes that represent "Apple" during the handshake. These are the same two bytes throughout the iPod line, and changing them would mean either: a hack workaround which changed the handshake but that still allowed both new and old, which would allow the Pre to work; or updating iTunes and all the devices to show a new handshake which would take about 10 seconds to patch on the Pre.
The second scenario would entail a lot of negative PR for Apple without really changing the playing field. After the so-called "brick patch' that "broke" Jailbroken iPhones, I don't think Apple would try that tactic again.
How is this a plus for the Pre? It uses iTunes through this hack. Because of this hack, Pre users can now USE iTunes instead of something else.
The Pre hack *expands* the iTunes user base. How is this a win for people who don't like iTunes? It sounds like your 'win' would apply if Palm found a way to play itms content in another program, but that is not the case here. You could say that it's nice to be able to play your itms content on a non-apple device, but that's been possible for a while.
Well, not really. There is a purpose to have a password being longer than 15 characters that involves how windows stores the hash, and I won't get into it. Knowing why it works makes it no easier to compromise.
If you search for CAMS/IMDS, you'll come across all kinds of bitching and moaning about this security policy. You want to hear about degraded security? All the people in my backshop share the same password which is written on a postit on the monitor. They got sick of wasting man-hours trying to come up with new strict passwords all the time.
Hell, the password that accesses all my personnel and financial info is only 7 characters. And it's more secure because I don't write it down.
Maybe it was a map of where they stored all the secret over-unity motors and prototypes of 100-MPG, 200 horsepower engines that they are trying to keep hidden.
My guess? They got tired of employees wasting ink printing out highway maps of the eastern seaboard so they called in the professionals.
I hate to say it, but no, not really. My podunk base in podunk, minnesota applies the same security and cryptography. For example one of our systems that contains NO secret information, NO C&C abilities, and NO administrative rights requires an *18 character* password that must be changed monthly. One each: letter, upper case letter, number, special character, no words, nothing similar to your last 6 passwords etc. And this is behind our secure two-factor login system and on a secure network. And yet, when the base upgraded to fiber, it was done by 3 guys working out of a rented U-Haul truck. Watched it with my own eyes.
I did the same thing, kind of. My old apartment sat next to an intersection in the rental part of town. Every red light meant that I had to endure thumping bass or blasting car ads- and after a while I began to notice that a large percentage of the annoying cars were listening to the same pop rock station.
So I put together a basic FM transmitter and amplifier (And I did a good job- no hum, nice sound, didn't overheat). I was pretty proud of myself. So proud that I tuned it to the pop rock station, plugged it into my laptop, played an Ill Mitch playlist on repeat, and retired to the window to read a book and watch traffic during red lights. The best part was knowing which song was playing by what I could hear blasting in from the cars. I also experimented with Tom Waits's "Kommienezuspadt", the theme from Golden Girls, and various atonal stereo reverberations that I made in Audacity. Looking back, I should have just transmitted a steady 15Hz tone overlayed with a 12kHz tone. Or maybe just a steady 220 bpm 808 drum beat. With a banjo strumming from the left channel. Or maybe stick a microphone out my window to set up a feedback loop. Hell, I really missed some good opportunities.
Gentle, introspective, intelligent people do not join the police force; even if a few do join, they will not fit in and they will not have real power.
That's not meant as a slam against any of my friends who are police officers- it's just that they all lack one of the above characteristics. The kind of person that most slashdotters seem to want as police would probably never even consider joining the force. Need proof? How many slashdotters are signing up?
For the record, where I live there was still snow on the ground 2 or 3 weeks ago. I drive primarily on rural roads, not in the city. I drive a truck because I have to haul construction materials around. My old Geo Prizm just wasn't cutting it anymore. If I did ride a bike to work everyday, I would need to add about an hour to my commute. Working overtime and remodeling a house make that impossible right now.
I don't think we were talking about the same things. It's ok.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... For me, the Xbox360, ds, psp, and Wii are also time wasters. They are what I play when I have nothing to do. And books- those are time wasters. I only read them when I don't have something better to do.
What are you trying to say? That a 50-hour game for PS3 isn't a time waster? That 'serious' games must eat at least 8 hours of your day before you acknowledge their greatness?
-b
I just thought I'd point out that ammo does store pretty well- at least as well as glass bottles of volatile fluid. I regularly fire pre-ww2 surplus ammunition without issues.
Ammunition, especially .22lr, .30-06, .223, and other common hunting calibers will always be a good investment. If I could send a letter to myself but 10 years earlier, one of the first sentences would be "Buy ammo!" (along with apple and google stock, of course). I could have more than doubled my money buying and selling ammo if I had know prices would skyrocket when they did.
When worst comes to worst, you can make your own gunpowder, cast your own bullets, and make your own guns. In a military conflict, however, the people with brass-cased ammunition will beat the muskets.
-b
I know how antibodies work, I was saying that your cure (expose everybody, many die) is worse than the problem (hardly anyone is exposed, hardly anyone dies).
There are enough killer bugs out there to cause a doomsday scenario and it hasn't happened yet. It might, or it might not, but it would be just stupid to tell my kids not to wash their hands in order to "toughen them up". The flu is not like chicken pox where exposure leads to a lifetime of immunity. You get the flu this year, and your chances of getting it next year don't change. So if you expose everyone to this swine flu, a bunch of people die, we're all miserable, and in 12 months a new strain comes out that our antibodies are not prepared for, and the cycle repeats. Or we can quarantine sick travellers, use hand sanitizer, and stay home from work when we're sick.
-b
Any illness will cause fatalities. Swine flu does kill people. Exposing all of us might "build character" and it might make us resistant to the next strain (but probably not). And it will kill people.
So you can ask us to be less careful about contamination, but when your kid dies on a respirator, will it be any comfort that our immune systems are somehow stronger because of it?
Look- Nothing has changed about us or about the flu in general since the early parts of the 20th century when flu epidemics killed hundreds of thousands. Our careful contamination avoidance, handwashing, hygiene, etc mean that these strains of flu DON'T knock us on our collective asses. You might as well complain that clothes make us prone to bad weather or that being rich makes you prone to being poor. Our lack of sickness is a sign of GOOD health, not poor as I believe you meant.
-b
If one of your children had been born with a screenable disorder that made their life a living hell, do you think they'd appreciate your 'hands-off' approach? So that you can feel good about being such a holistic parent while your child needs a colostomy bag and will never, ever, enter society or live a life full of love and light?
I'm sure you and your healthy children are happy as can be with the decision you made. By enjoying the 'gamble' of finding out what kind of child you will get, you are reducing your children to the level of possessions or at least pets. I'm sure you would love your children if they had CF or MD or epilepsy or down's syndrome or any number or things... The question is, would your child love you as much once they were old enough to realize that you could have done something to stop their pain before they were born?
-b
The net benefit of computer control is rendered moot when the plane crashes headlong into a grove of trees at the end of the runway that a human would have avoided by either pulling up or throttling up.
Remember that humans are more willing to accept senseless deaths caused by pilots than deaths caused by computers. It will be a long time before people trust their lives to computers on an emotional level. And yes, that takes into account drivers' ignorance of all the computers that make their cars work.
The safest vehicle in the world will have empty seats until you make it LOOK safe. That's just part of the business.
-b
>>How much do military pilots make? Do you feel unsafe with them?
Military pilots' salary after 10 years' service is more than I can probably hope to make even after a lifetime of service as an enlisted member. A pilot's retirement is more than I make working active duty with over 7 years' service.
e.g., a ltCol with 10 years of service will make over $76,000/yr in base pay alone. Add to that per diems, flight pay, hazard pay, combat pay and family separation pay (when applicable), and numerous other benefits like free school, medical, dental, etc and you're talking about a second car.
-b
Autopilots crash airplanes. Pilots crash airplanes.
This should be a discussion on the merits of pilot, computer, and pilot+computer systems. TFS was flamebait but the question is a good one.
After so many release notes, apple advertisements, microsoft advertisements, and ludicrous space towers, it's nice to have a really interesting philosophical discussion on slashdot. So far it's consisted of people ranting about tfs.
-b
IMO, the most important part of tfs was:
"It's not a design flaw -- it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information."
That is very much open to debate and it's an interesting question. Yes, the rest of the post is flamebait. That shouldn't detract from what could have been a very interesting discussion instead of where this thread is headed.
-b
Oh come on, you could have made a good joke like "Why are Boeing pilots so battle-tested in the first place?" or "Airbus pilots can't become battle-tested because every failure is fatal."
Or something. Try again!
-b
I'm sorry, I didn't think TFS actually presented one side as better than the other. Maybe it's because I work in aerospace and take more things as given than you, but to me tfs raised a very interesting philosophical question. The summary even says that it's not a design flaw- it's a philosophical divide.
I know several people who HATE flying because- even though they understand intellectually that flying is much safer than driving- the idea of falling to earth, out of control, with many seconds or even minutes to be aware of the terrible situation is much worse than feeling able to control their path in a car.
I myself feel like I've outgrown that feeling. I've literally entrusted my life to other people so many times that when I get on a plane the idea of dying or crashing doesn't even cross my mind. It is a conscious flipping of a mental switch: I am not in control. This plane is being flown by someone who also does not want to die and that person knows what they're doing.
And on the other hand I've read enough after-action briefs of computer glitches crashing planes that I don't entirely trust computers to fly. Yes, they have faster response times, yes they can look out for the airplane better than a human. Usually. Usually, they can do those things better than a human. Why WOULDN'T you allow a human into that chain of control? If the computer is going nose down into a mountain because of a frozen AOA probe, the pilot should just sit there and start praying? If the computer starts shutting down engines because of faulty fuel indicators, the pilot should just sit back and say, "Hey, we took off 45 minutes ago with 5000 gallons of fuel and barring an open fuel cap, there's no way we're actually out, but whatever, I'll accept a cold death in the north atlantic if it saves the engines from a potential flameout"?
Here's where I sit: Computers should fly planes. Humans should solve problems. Computers are not perfect; if they were, we wouldn't need IT or pilots or astronauts or mathematicians. Someday when AI is improved and flight control computers absolutely do not cause stupid accidents, then I'll allow and empty cockpit.
What I propose is a compromise, just like the american company, and it has nothing to do with john wayne or ayn rand or any other stupid emotionally-weighted crap.
Hi, my name is ben, and it's my job to keep people from dying in airplanes, and I'm in favor of pilot intervention to avert crisis.
Any typos were the computer's fault ;)
-b
I think a person taken from 200 years ago or more would be more amazed by driving. Flying is neat, but they know birds can do it and they've seen leaves falling slowly from trees, etc.
Imagine that your first experience with the present age was a ride through, say, albuquerque at around 5 pm, followed by a high speed dash across the desert once you passed the city limit.
Maybe I'm just biased because of the memories of the effects of certain psychotropics while being a passenger in a speeding car.
-b
>>Apple either responds with a lawsuit or iTunes patch
The thing is, old iPods will always be supported. There is nothing fancy about what Palm is doing here- it's just two bytes that represent "Apple" during the handshake. These are the same two bytes throughout the iPod line, and changing them would mean either: a hack workaround which changed the handshake but that still allowed both new and old, which would allow the Pre to work; or updating iTunes and all the devices to show a new handshake which would take about 10 seconds to patch on the Pre.
The second scenario would entail a lot of negative PR for Apple without really changing the playing field. After the so-called "brick patch' that "broke" Jailbroken iPhones, I don't think Apple would try that tactic again.
-b
How is this a plus for the Pre? It uses iTunes through this hack. Because of this hack, Pre users can now USE iTunes instead of something else.
The Pre hack *expands* the iTunes user base. How is this a win for people who don't like iTunes? It sounds like your 'win' would apply if Palm found a way to play itms content in another program, but that is not the case here. You could say that it's nice to be able to play your itms content on a non-apple device, but that's been possible for a while.
-b
I thought it sounded like a rapper: FifCen's younger brother, TwenCen.
-b
Appliance bulbs are excepted from the ban, among many others.
-b
Well, not really. There is a purpose to have a password being longer than 15 characters that involves how windows stores the hash, and I won't get into it. Knowing why it works makes it no easier to compromise.
If you search for CAMS/IMDS, you'll come across all kinds of bitching and moaning about this security policy. You want to hear about degraded security? All the people in my backshop share the same password which is written on a postit on the monitor. They got sick of wasting man-hours trying to come up with new strict passwords all the time.
Hell, the password that accesses all my personnel and financial info is only 7 characters. And it's more secure because I don't write it down.
-b
Maybe it was a map of where they stored all the secret over-unity motors and prototypes of 100-MPG, 200 horsepower engines that they are trying to keep hidden.
My guess? They got tired of employees wasting ink printing out highway maps of the eastern seaboard so they called in the professionals.
-b
I hate to say it, but no, not really. My podunk base in podunk, minnesota applies the same security and cryptography. For example one of our systems that contains NO secret information, NO C&C abilities, and NO administrative rights requires an *18 character* password that must be changed monthly. One each: letter, upper case letter, number, special character, no words, nothing similar to your last 6 passwords etc. And this is behind our secure two-factor login system and on a secure network. And yet, when the base upgraded to fiber, it was done by 3 guys working out of a rented U-Haul truck. Watched it with my own eyes.
This is just the gov't doing what it does best.
-b
I did the same thing, kind of. My old apartment sat next to an intersection in the rental part of town. Every red light meant that I had to endure thumping bass or blasting car ads- and after a while I began to notice that a large percentage of the annoying cars were listening to the same pop rock station.
So I put together a basic FM transmitter and amplifier (And I did a good job- no hum, nice sound, didn't overheat). I was pretty proud of myself. So proud that I tuned it to the pop rock station, plugged it into my laptop, played an Ill Mitch playlist on repeat, and retired to the window to read a book and watch traffic during red lights. The best part was knowing which song was playing by what I could hear blasting in from the cars. I also experimented with Tom Waits's "Kommienezuspadt", the theme from Golden Girls, and various atonal stereo reverberations that I made in Audacity. Looking back, I should have just transmitted a steady 15Hz tone overlayed with a 12kHz tone. Or maybe just a steady 220 bpm 808 drum beat. With a banjo strumming from the left channel. Or maybe stick a microphone out my window to set up a feedback loop. Hell, I really missed some good opportunities.
Those were the days.
>>USB is the result of a business decision, not because it was superior technology to FireWire.
That and it is considerably cheaper to implement since you don't need a 1394 controller at each end of the connection.
-b
Gentle, introspective, intelligent people do not join the police force; even if a few do join, they will not fit in and they will not have real power.
That's not meant as a slam against any of my friends who are police officers- it's just that they all lack one of the above characteristics. The kind of person that most slashdotters seem to want as police would probably never even consider joining the force. Need proof? How many slashdotters are signing up?
-b
If a crime involves interstate travel, it typically falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Not sure what their policy on GPS tracking is.
-b
Being tailed isn't the only way to get a speeding ticket- helicopters, cameras, speed traps, etc.
-b
For the record, where I live there was still snow on the ground 2 or 3 weeks ago. I drive primarily on rural roads, not in the city. I drive a truck because I have to haul construction materials around. My old Geo Prizm just wasn't cutting it anymore. If I did ride a bike to work everyday, I would need to add about an hour to my commute. Working overtime and remodeling a house make that impossible right now.
I don't think we were talking about the same things. It's ok.
-b