Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of. Hated as Vista is, it still has more market share than OSX and Linux combined. Their profits improved by $8 billion from 2007-2008, even with the meltdown during the second half of 2008.
You might be able to argue that it's marketing and social inertia, but they are not fail.
The reason that vaccines are mandated is very simple, herd immunity. Herd immunity is what lets people that can't get the vaccines (like your friend who is allergic) live their life without serious fear of catching these deadly diseases. Yes, vaccines carry some non-trivial amount of danger, but science has verified that the danger to the individual is outweighed by the danger of society losing herd immunity.
What people don't realize is that it only takes 10-15% of the population being unvaccinated to cause a major outbreak. Once that happens, it is much more likely for a disease to mutate and be able to attack even those that are vaccinated. That's why the government mandates vaccines, and since the government is mandating vaccines. It makes sense for the government to pay out when vaccines hurt people when the government is the one that made the decision, not the manufacturers.
The plan only goes into effect if enough other states enact similar plans. In other words, it only goes into effect if the election will be decided based on the national popular vote. If that happened, it would remove the concept of swing states since you would no longer have winner take all in those states. Presidential candidates would have to campaign based on where they felt their message would change the most minds, instead of where it would change the 1% needed to carry the swing states. Depending on the candidate and the message, that could lead to the real battlegrounds being places that are all but ignored currently.
As many people have said, it would practically garauntee that third parties will never rise to power. On the other hand, that isn't very likely with our current system either.
You are absolutely free to voice or write an opinion. You are even absolutely free to voice or write an absolute falsehood. But, if you write a falsehood that harms another person, you are responsible for that harm; that is what slander/libel laws are about.
Imagine that there was an amendment that says "Americans have the right to throw bricks". If you throw a brick through some one's window, you'll still have to pay for it. If you throw a brick at some one's head and kill them, you will be charged with manslaughter.
Just because you can throw bricks, doesn't mean you can cause harm to others and escape punishment. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean you can say anything you want and avoid the consequences.
Your brain also isn't 'programmed' to move a pointer around a computer screen, but if you implant electrodes in the brain and try it you can teach your brain to do so.
That was the big breakthrough with brain-computer interfaces, you don't need to find the exact neuron that controls each muscle because there isn't one. If you get the electrode in the general area the brain will do the rest. The human brain is a massively adaptable, feedback driven, self optimizing, neural network.
And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all, that he would magically make everything better. He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election. There is no hope for them; indeed, I think they've started to rub off on him -- there are no pork or earmarks in the stimulus bill, but there are special spending projects and shovel-ready construction projects and countless other Democrat special projects that just can't wait to garner Democrat votes with government dollars.
Three weeks dude. Three weeks. Even if Obama was a 'magical savior' sent to fix the government, it would be good to be a little realistic. If things are the same a year from now, you've got a very valid point. Three weeks isn't nearly enough time to turn a boat the size of the US government.
The price is a bit steep. Eventually these have to come down in price?
Why would they reduce the price on something that they can't build fast enough to keep up with demand? If anything they should raise the price to reduce demand to the level they can keep up with.
What are they supposed to do? There's cheaper labor available overseas that can do the same work for less (and with a lower cost of living so the relative pay is probably much closer than most people believe). They're hemorrhaging money at the moment and moving jobs to locations with lower cost of living is a real way to save money. It sucks for those employed but that's just the facts of the situation.
Makes me glad I work for a defense contractor (can't be shipped overseas, at least not easily) in the middle of no-where (much lower cost of living than where most software development takes place). Speaking of which, why don't companies move their development to places within the US with lower cost of living? If you can save $15k per engineer simply because it costs less for housing I would think it would be worth it to large companies.
This is how I understand it, but I could be wrong.
Imagine that you have a large sting in your program. You leave your program running for a while and the OS writes this string off the the HDD to save some memory since it isn't being used anyway. When you come back and access the string, the OS automatically pulls the string back into memory and your program can start editing it again.
The same basic idea applies to... well, to everything in this OS (if I'm reading this right). If you want a new file, you create an instance of type TextFile (or whatever) and edit it however you want. It is automatically saved off to the harddrive while the OS isn't busy doing something else.
Two issues I see here are performance and stability. If someone pulls the plug on this OS while it's in the middle of writing something to the HDD that could cause major issues. If persisting data is made a higher priority the whole system will be bogged down waiting for disk IO.
Please don't talk about what Orwellian means when you clearly have never read any of his books. To say that having no bars is Orwellian is to dilute the word from it's true meaning.
In 1984, every movement of every citizen is tracked, not just in public but even in their own home. Children are bribed into spying on and turning in their parents. People are tortured for the slightest sign of dissent. Records of the past are continuously 'corrected' at the whim of the government. The nation is at constant war (which may, or may not be really happening) to keep the population in fear. Sex is stigmatized and strictly for procreation (and remember, they're constantly watching you so they'll know if you appear to enjoy it and will punish you accordingly). The very language is controlled and managed to eliminate as many words as possible, for the expressed purpose of limiting people's thoughts to what they have the words to express.
So no, having no bars is not Orwellian, even forcing people to swipe the their ID before they can drink is not 'almost Orwellian'. You could argue that it is a step in that direction, but that is a totally different statement.
Value is an entirely subjective concept and it will vary wildly from person to person. For many people, a computer with a free OS that can't run their favorite program has much less value than a computer with a paid OS that can. The same could be said for people who don't want to learn a new interface or people who don't actually want to take the time to instal their own OS.
The prints were visually inspected by the person taking them (yet another way the old fashioned solution is quicker and easier) which I suppose takes some small amount of training but really all it was was 'oh, this one's a little blurry, we'll do it again'. I'm not sure if the software further verified them or not, but I doubt it since they let me go before they were done scanning (I'd think they'd have me stick around if there was a chance of them being rejected).
It's kind of funny how much difficulty you had with machine fingerprint scanners. I recently got fingerprinted for a security clearance and it took less than a minute total, no pain involved. The method? Ink and paper which was then scanned into the system. Sometimes the high tech solution just makes things more difficult.
At first I had the same reaction that many slashdotters probably had: This is way overstepping, you are assigning a penalty to even being accused of a crime (the penalty being an invasion of privacy and a chance of being falsely accused of a crime later).
Then I thought about the fact that people are fingerprinted upon arrest, and have been for decades. When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA. If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
Finally, I thought about statistics. We always here in cases how the DNA evidence shows a 99.9% chance that the person is the guilty party. The problem is when you have a few million entries in the database, 99.9% isn't all that good. You could easily end up with a half dozen people fitting the DNA evidence in a large city. DNA analysis should be the end of a good investigation, not the starting off point.
Except that people who sign up for the armed services make a years long commitment to serving and defending their country. That meas that even if they don't agree with the current mission they made a commitment follow legal orders to the best of their abilities.
The RIAA lawyers, on the other hand, signed up to make money. They were asked to do something that 95% of people out there would identify as ethically wrong (or at least questionable) and yet they didn't walk away. They have a choice in the matter, and they made the choice to continue frivolous lawsuits against people who are often clearly not guilty of anything.
Putting these people in charge of criminal law is just going to lead to situations where people are arrested for something they didn't do, but when the police realize that they just start digging into the persons past so that something can stick, even if nothing should. Don't tell me it doesn't happen, we've seen numerous stories on/. where these situations arise, off the top of my head would be the guy with the amateur chem lab in his basement.
Well if you're going to ban all weapons that could interfere with satellites you'd better ban ICBM nukes while you're at it. Just blow one up when it's in the upper atmosphere below the satellite you want to disrupt and the EMC will neutralize the satellite instantly.
1) Where does it say that this is in any way, an opt out feature? 2) What does Prior Art have to do with anything? The article isn't 'Google patents putting dots on map' its 'Google is implementing such and such a feature'.
I'm not saying that politicians or the public should set an arbitrary number, I'm saying NASA should look at the cost/benefit analysis and pick a number that actually reflects what is achievable while being consistent with funding and our goals. Right now, the general consensus is that the goal is 'minimal' risk, which means spending enormous amounts of resources to minimize that risk.
I think the biggest thing is that NASA needs to come up with an actual number for acceptable risk, then make it clear that the public and the astronauts know and understand that number. I believe the current acceptable risk is something like 1% chance of failure and due to the non-replaceable nature of the spacecraft and astronauts that is probably a realistic target to shoot for (if we lose another shuttle it will be virtually impossible to continue our current commitments). If we move to disposable spacecraft, that number should probably be adjusted.
I know it's harsh to say that 5% risk is acceptable when we're talking about human lives, but if they know and understand the risk it is their decision to sign up for a mission. Having a goal of perfect just adds unreasonable amounts of overhead and increases costs faster than savings. Far too much time and effort is wasted in the bureaucracy of NASA, especially considering that the causes of both shuttle losses were brought up by engineers before the accidents occurred but weren't responded to at the upper levels. They need to change the way things are done to identify true risks instead of filling out a mountain of paperwork to change a few bolts out if something is broken.
Starter: Used for low-end and netbook PC's, basically enough functionality for 90% of users out there but only available with a new PC. Home Basic: Emerging markets only, probably to offer a much lower priced version in developing countries in an effort to reduce piracy (aren't we always saying that if they made things reasonably priced priracy would go down?) Home Premium: Enough functionality for 99% of people in the home environment and the cheapest way to upgrade from Vista to 7. Profesional: Enough functionality for 99% of people in the office enfironment. Ultimate/Enterprise: Really the same version with Ultimate as a retail option and Enterprise as corporate pricing. Basically a version for nerds and developers that includes everything, including the 'features' that 99.9% of users will never even know exist.
So yeah, you really only need to worry about home and professional, since the other versions are either not available at retail or quite rare (Ultimate is expected to be ~5% of the home market sales). I'm willing to bet that the average user won't even be aware that there are more than two releases. Unless of course you are an IT manager or something, but in that case you should be capable of doing the research to pick the correct version for your situation.
In all seriousness, how much processing power would it take to run a program that designs newer and better processors? I would think that 20 petaflops and a good algorithm would be able to produce a processor that is an improvement over the current generation. Then again, I know next to nothing about processor design, so I could be totally wrong.
Why would they talk to us? Presumably they're interested in intelligent life, and we're questionable there.
Seriously, we're made of meat for crying out loud! What kind of self respecting alien would want to talk to someone who communicates by flapping thier meat together?
Or, put another way, why should my porn download suffer for your Warcrack addiction?
Because, done correctly, it provides a massive improvement in service for games and voice, with a small reduction in service for downloaders.
As for them overselling, if they had to be totally honest about how much bandwidth is available to each customer, they would have to say 'Total Bandwidth / Number of Customers = Your alotted bandwidth'. It would be next to nothing, and even more meaningless than the ideal maximums that they use for advertising now. That being said, perhaps they should be forced to make that data available to prospective customers, it would certainly influence my choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of. Hated as Vista is, it still has more market share than OSX and Linux combined. Their profits improved by $8 billion from 2007-2008, even with the meltdown during the second half of 2008.
You might be able to argue that it's marketing and social inertia, but they are not fail.
The reason that vaccines are mandated is very simple, herd immunity. Herd immunity is what lets people that can't get the vaccines (like your friend who is allergic) live their life without serious fear of catching these deadly diseases. Yes, vaccines carry some non-trivial amount of danger, but science has verified that the danger to the individual is outweighed by the danger of society losing herd immunity.
What people don't realize is that it only takes 10-15% of the population being unvaccinated to cause a major outbreak. Once that happens, it is much more likely for a disease to mutate and be able to attack even those that are vaccinated. That's why the government mandates vaccines, and since the government is mandating vaccines. It makes sense for the government to pay out when vaccines hurt people when the government is the one that made the decision, not the manufacturers.
The plan only goes into effect if enough other states enact similar plans. In other words, it only goes into effect if the election will be decided based on the national popular vote. If that happened, it would remove the concept of swing states since you would no longer have winner take all in those states. Presidential candidates would have to campaign based on where they felt their message would change the most minds, instead of where it would change the 1% needed to carry the swing states. Depending on the candidate and the message, that could lead to the real battlegrounds being places that are all but ignored currently.
As many people have said, it would practically garauntee that third parties will never rise to power. On the other hand, that isn't very likely with our current system either.
You are absolutely free to voice or write an opinion. You are even absolutely free to voice or write an absolute falsehood. But, if you write a falsehood that harms another person, you are responsible for that harm; that is what slander/libel laws are about.
Imagine that there was an amendment that says "Americans have the right to throw bricks". If you throw a brick through some one's window, you'll still have to pay for it. If you throw a brick at some one's head and kill them, you will be charged with manslaughter.
Just because you can throw bricks, doesn't mean you can cause harm to others and escape punishment. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean you can say anything you want and avoid the consequences.
Your brain also isn't 'programmed' to move a pointer around a computer screen, but if you implant electrodes in the brain and try it you can teach your brain to do so.
That was the big breakthrough with brain-computer interfaces, you don't need to find the exact neuron that controls each muscle because there isn't one. If you get the electrode in the general area the brain will do the rest. The human brain is a massively adaptable, feedback driven, self optimizing, neural network.
And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all, that he would magically make everything better. He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election. There is no hope for them; indeed, I think they've started to rub off on him -- there are no pork or earmarks in the stimulus bill, but there are special spending projects and shovel-ready construction projects and countless other Democrat special projects that just can't wait to garner Democrat votes with government dollars.
Three weeks dude. Three weeks. Even if Obama was a 'magical savior' sent to fix the government, it would be good to be a little realistic. If things are the same a year from now, you've got a very valid point. Three weeks isn't nearly enough time to turn a boat the size of the US government.
even spent an hour with Charles Lindbergh, going over all the data to prove that the jumbo would not flip over or become unstable at high speeds.
Wow, a whole hour devoted to analysing the plane's stability at high speeds? If that is correct, I'm amazed the plane flew at all.
The price is a bit steep. Eventually these have to come down in price?
Why would they reduce the price on something that they can't build fast enough to keep up with demand? If anything they should raise the price to reduce demand to the level they can keep up with.
What are they supposed to do? There's cheaper labor available overseas that can do the same work for less (and with a lower cost of living so the relative pay is probably much closer than most people believe). They're hemorrhaging money at the moment and moving jobs to locations with lower cost of living is a real way to save money. It sucks for those employed but that's just the facts of the situation.
Makes me glad I work for a defense contractor (can't be shipped overseas, at least not easily) in the middle of no-where (much lower cost of living than where most software development takes place). Speaking of which, why don't companies move their development to places within the US with lower cost of living? If you can save $15k per engineer simply because it costs less for housing I would think it would be worth it to large companies.
This is how I understand it, but I could be wrong.
Imagine that you have a large sting in your program. You leave your program running for a while and the OS writes this string off the the HDD to save some memory since it isn't being used anyway. When you come back and access the string, the OS automatically pulls the string back into memory and your program can start editing it again.
The same basic idea applies to... well, to everything in this OS (if I'm reading this right). If you want a new file, you create an instance of type TextFile (or whatever) and edit it however you want. It is automatically saved off to the harddrive while the OS isn't busy doing something else.
Two issues I see here are performance and stability. If someone pulls the plug on this OS while it's in the middle of writing something to the HDD that could cause major issues. If persisting data is made a higher priority the whole system will be bogged down waiting for disk IO.
Please don't talk about what Orwellian means when you clearly have never read any of his books. To say that having no bars is Orwellian is to dilute the word from it's true meaning.
In 1984, every movement of every citizen is tracked, not just in public but even in their own home. Children are bribed into spying on and turning in their parents. People are tortured for the slightest sign of dissent. Records of the past are continuously 'corrected' at the whim of the government. The nation is at constant war (which may, or may not be really happening) to keep the population in fear. Sex is stigmatized and strictly for procreation (and remember, they're constantly watching you so they'll know if you appear to enjoy it and will punish you accordingly). The very language is controlled and managed to eliminate as many words as possible, for the expressed purpose of limiting people's thoughts to what they have the words to express.
So no, having no bars is not Orwellian, even forcing people to swipe the their ID before they can drink is not 'almost Orwellian'. You could argue that it is a step in that direction, but that is a totally different statement.
Value is an entirely subjective concept and it will vary wildly from person to person. For many people, a computer with a free OS that can't run their favorite program has much less value than a computer with a paid OS that can. The same could be said for people who don't want to learn a new interface or people who don't actually want to take the time to instal their own OS.
The prints were visually inspected by the person taking them (yet another way the old fashioned solution is quicker and easier) which I suppose takes some small amount of training but really all it was was 'oh, this one's a little blurry, we'll do it again'. I'm not sure if the software further verified them or not, but I doubt it since they let me go before they were done scanning (I'd think they'd have me stick around if there was a chance of them being rejected).
It's kind of funny how much difficulty you had with machine fingerprint scanners. I recently got fingerprinted for a security clearance and it took less than a minute total, no pain involved. The method? Ink and paper which was then scanned into the system. Sometimes the high tech solution just makes things more difficult.
At first I had the same reaction that many slashdotters probably had: This is way overstepping, you are assigning a penalty to even being accused of a crime (the penalty being an invasion of privacy and a chance of being falsely accused of a crime later).
Then I thought about the fact that people are fingerprinted upon arrest, and have been for decades. When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA. If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
Finally, I thought about statistics. We always here in cases how the DNA evidence shows a 99.9% chance that the person is the guilty party. The problem is when you have a few million entries in the database, 99.9% isn't all that good. You could easily end up with a half dozen people fitting the DNA evidence in a large city. DNA analysis should be the end of a good investigation, not the starting off point.
Except that people who sign up for the armed services make a years long commitment to serving and defending their country. That meas that even if they don't agree with the current mission they made a commitment follow legal orders to the best of their abilities.
The RIAA lawyers, on the other hand, signed up to make money. They were asked to do something that 95% of people out there would identify as ethically wrong (or at least questionable) and yet they didn't walk away. They have a choice in the matter, and they made the choice to continue frivolous lawsuits against people who are often clearly not guilty of anything.
Putting these people in charge of criminal law is just going to lead to situations where people are arrested for something they didn't do, but when the police realize that they just start digging into the persons past so that something can stick, even if nothing should. Don't tell me it doesn't happen, we've seen numerous stories on /. where these situations arise, off the top of my head would be the guy with the amateur chem lab in his basement.
Company creates abusive and unenforceable EULA, News at 11!
Well if you're going to ban all weapons that could interfere with satellites you'd better ban ICBM nukes while you're at it. Just blow one up when it's in the upper atmosphere below the satellite you want to disrupt and the EMC will neutralize the satellite instantly.
1) Where does it say that this is in any way, an opt out feature?
2) What does Prior Art have to do with anything? The article isn't 'Google patents putting dots on map' its 'Google is implementing such and such a feature'.
I'm not saying that politicians or the public should set an arbitrary number, I'm saying NASA should look at the cost/benefit analysis and pick a number that actually reflects what is achievable while being consistent with funding and our goals. Right now, the general consensus is that the goal is 'minimal' risk, which means spending enormous amounts of resources to minimize that risk.
I think the biggest thing is that NASA needs to come up with an actual number for acceptable risk, then make it clear that the public and the astronauts know and understand that number. I believe the current acceptable risk is something like 1% chance of failure and due to the non-replaceable nature of the spacecraft and astronauts that is probably a realistic target to shoot for (if we lose another shuttle it will be virtually impossible to continue our current commitments). If we move to disposable spacecraft, that number should probably be adjusted.
I know it's harsh to say that 5% risk is acceptable when we're talking about human lives, but if they know and understand the risk it is their decision to sign up for a mission. Having a goal of perfect just adds unreasonable amounts of overhead and increases costs faster than savings. Far too much time and effort is wasted in the bureaucracy of NASA, especially considering that the causes of both shuttle losses were brought up by engineers before the accidents occurred but weren't responded to at the upper levels. They need to change the way things are done to identify true risks instead of filling out a mountain of paperwork to change a few bolts out if something is broken.
Not quite. Here's what I got out of it:
Starter: Used for low-end and netbook PC's, basically enough functionality for 90% of users out there but only available with a new PC.
Home Basic: Emerging markets only, probably to offer a much lower priced version in developing countries in an effort to reduce piracy (aren't we always saying that if they made things reasonably priced priracy would go down?)
Home Premium: Enough functionality for 99% of people in the home environment and the cheapest way to upgrade from Vista to 7.
Profesional: Enough functionality for 99% of people in the office enfironment.
Ultimate/Enterprise: Really the same version with Ultimate as a retail option and Enterprise as corporate pricing. Basically a version for nerds and developers that includes everything, including the 'features' that 99.9% of users will never even know exist.
So yeah, you really only need to worry about home and professional, since the other versions are either not available at retail or quite rare (Ultimate is expected to be ~5% of the home market sales). I'm willing to bet that the average user won't even be aware that there are more than two releases. Unless of course you are an IT manager or something, but in that case you should be capable of doing the research to pick the correct version for your situation.
In all seriousness, how much processing power would it take to run a program that designs newer and better processors? I would think that 20 petaflops and a good algorithm would be able to produce a processor that is an improvement over the current generation. Then again, I know next to nothing about processor design, so I could be totally wrong.
Why would they talk to us? Presumably they're interested in intelligent life, and we're questionable there.
Seriously, we're made of meat for crying out loud! What kind of self respecting alien would want to talk to someone who communicates by flapping thier meat together?
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html/
One of my favorite Sci-Fi short stories.
Or, put another way, why should my porn download suffer for your Warcrack addiction?
Because, done correctly, it provides a massive improvement in service for games and voice, with a small reduction in service for downloaders.
As for them overselling, if they had to be totally honest about how much bandwidth is available to each customer, they would have to say 'Total Bandwidth / Number of Customers = Your alotted bandwidth'. It would be next to nothing, and even more meaningless than the ideal maximums that they use for advertising now. That being said, perhaps they should be forced to make that data available to prospective customers, it would certainly influence my choice.