Imagine if you change your own spark plugs and two weeks later the rear passenger wheel falls off. The manufacturer should have to show that what you did caused the problem, just like they have to with any other product. Now granted, if I try to overclock the processor to 2x its normal rate and melt the damn thing that's my own fault, but if I unlock WiFi tethering and get a row of dead pixels on my screen the two are almost certainly unrelated.
And the energy density of a chunk of Uranium is still orders of magnitude higher than any other practical fuel source. Also, it's not as if we couldn't refine and recycle the fuel and squeeze more of the energy out of it later. Today's nuclear waste storage is tomorrow's 'unlimited energy source'.
No, you don't understand. They have the high ground, they could park in high orbit or the asteroid belt or Jupiter's Trojan points, and launch a couple hundred big heavy rocks at us. End of story, end of human civilization. There is nothing anyone on the planet could do deflect a significant number of incoming asteroids, let along asteroids that have been purposefully aimed and directed at the planet.
Or indeed the Launch Loop, Skyhook, or Laser Propulsion. There are several ideas on how to get us to orbit on the cheap. Personally, I'd love to see more interest in 'Dynamic' structures like the space fountain or launch loop. I'd love to see competitions a la the space elevator competitions, something like building a dynamic bridge over a 10 meter gap that can be walked over.
According to the wiki, 150-200 randomly chosen individuals will be stable for 80 generations or more. But then, the Amish were founded with around 200 members originally, and while they are certainly still around they have much higher rates of genetic disorders (and then again, many of those 200 were probably related before they isolated themselves). It's not an easy question to answer.
Nope. This complex software (Android) has a surprisingly good security model. Carriers are installing software which ignores permissions, is not removable by the user, and creates new, serious security issues. The carriers are being evil and/or incompetent.
It's not as totally and completely insane as it sounds. Generally, people will recover from exposure to vacuum on their own if the exposure is short (less than 30s) and with surprisingly minor injuries if exposure is less than 90s. And that's without training and a warning of what's going to happen, given proper planning and equipment I suspect you could push the survival rate to the high 90%s, maybe even to two 9's.
Given the choice between burning to death in inescapable zero-g fire and an automated 15 second emergency purge, with a quick re-pressurization system, O2 masks for quicker recovery, and the ability to manage air pressure afterwards to treat the bends... personally, I'd give it a shot. The only real question mark is if the source of the fire has been taken care of. If it's an ongoing short you might find yourself in the same boat you started in, but even that could be addressed by re-pressurizing the spacecraft with nitrogen and relying on O2 masks for the crew until everything is straightened out.
A good programmer taking over work from a bad one will almost always produce negative lines of code, it's part of what makes them a good programmer. That's why most metrics ask New Lines, Modified Lines, Deleted Lines for their estimates.
Though for the record, while he bears responsibility, it's important to note that he wasn't just following orders, he was following explicit, long standing policy. Doesn't excuse, but there is more responsibility to go around than just to the officer in question.
I won't pretend that his language or his attitude are appropriate or helpful to situation but I can understand the frustration. How long can most of us talk about evolution with a creationist before we start to show how exasperating the whole argument is? How long can we talk about vaccines and autism without losing our cool a little bit? Or about the moon landings being a hoax? Or that electric fans can cause deaths in enclosed spaces.
On the one side there is a body of evidence supporting the theory that doubles every time you look at it, on the other there is... what exactly? Either the doubters chose to believe that tens of thousands of scientists are grossly incompetent or that tens of thousands of scientists are conspiring against the rest of the world.
So yeah, his language is inappropriate, but his message is spot on.
I believe in global warming, I believe mankind causes it, I believe it is a serious threat to human civilization even.
The thing is, nothing will be done until trillions have been spent building sea walls to protect the rich nation's coastal cities, irrigating the rapidly drying areas, building drainage in the rapidly flooding areas, killing mosquitoes in the new swamp lands, and any number of other band aids that you can think of.
There is simply no social or political will to cut CO2 emissions because there is simply no way to do it without reducing the perceived future quality of life for billions of people around the world (even if actual quality of life might be better than the worst case scenarios for global warming). Hell, even if we started reducing emissions today, which isn't going to happen, it would take decades to hit a point of stability where CO2 going into the atmosphere is equal to CO2 coming out, and even that may not be enough to avoid some of the worst effects.
It's simply not going to happen. If you're worried about the long term effects of global warming you'd be better spending your money on researching and developing Geo-engineering mega-projects because that is the only cost effective way you are going to prevent the worst effects. Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
Now imagine they hire a lawyer who convinces the world that they are the victims here. That they are fine, upstanding citizens who would never do anything remotely like what they're accused of. That obviously it's all a conspiracy instituted by the the guy they got into a fight with during college. And imagine that somehow the world believes them and they go out and do it again a week later. Did the lawyer assist them in robbery and capital murder? Well, legally no. But ethically many would argue yes.
You should probably look up how Groupon (and the other coupon deal sites) work. Customers purchase a coupon from the Groupon website, which is then redeemed at the retailer or restaurant. So, if the deal is "$20 worth of steak for $10", the customer pays Groupon $10, prints out the coupon, goes to the market, and redeems the coupon for $20 worth of steak.
What you can do, is tell Groupon to only sell X number of coupons. But then, that doesn't drive customers to your store the way your thinking above does. People would simply go to Groupon, see that it's sold out, and never think about it again.
Math and lotteries only don't work out if you base your math on the idea that $100,000,000 is worth 100,000,000 x $1. It is not. Above a certain number, large sums of money become "anything I want and never have to work again" which people value at much more than 100,000,000 times "a cheap cup of coffee".
My single concern is that there's lots of research that says the best thing kids can do to improve success later on in life is what is known as "undirected play" (a.k.a. recess). I doubt the play has to be physical in nature, but I suspect to see the benefits you want activities that allow kids to decide on their own (or as a group) who to play with, how to play, where to play, and what the rules are. These are not things that today's games are generally good at, ironically and especially true in the 'kids' games genres.
Re:Yes, of course they're constraining what we lea
on
Of Mice and Cancer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you judge by the article she's bucking the system by looking at naked mole rats for an explanation for why they don't get cancer. The irony is that if she succeeds in finding the explanation and isolating it out to a treatment protocol the first thing she'll do is give some mice cancer and see if the treatment works on them (ok, maybe the second if the mechanism can be disabled in the naked mole rat somehow). That isn't bucking the system, it's being at a different stage in your research; she's still forming a hypothesis as to what an effective treatment could be. Once she has that she'll move right over to the sterile, genetically identical, and above all biologically consistent lab mice and rats. Why? Because that is how you perform replicatable animal trials. If someone halfway around the world can't replicate your results your experiment isn't worth much, that's why we have millions of essentially cloned lab mice in the first place.
Yeah, except workers at the patent office have been explicitly told that it is not their job to look at prior art, that it is up to the courts to decide. This was largely in an effort to get through their enormous backlog more quickly, but any idiot could have seen that it was going to lead to abuse. Incidentally, if you're an engineer looking for a good job, I know when I graduated USPTO was recruiting heavily, they'd even put you through law school if you specialized in patent law.
It's possible that these are not the strongest patents Microsoft can bring to bear on the issue. They may just be testing the waters to see how far Barnes and Noble are willing to go with their (to Microsoft) dangerous brinksmanship.
Sure you did, it's called Occam's Razor. Which is more likely: All the planets in the solar system travel around the sun in approximately elliptical orbits OR All the planets in the solar system orbit the Earth in a complex arrangement of circles within circles within circles? Now that being said, I'm not sure that you can arbitrarily say disconnected quantum states are likely than connected ones, but allowing them to communicate would seem to posit some communications medium that we have never seen evidence of, so if I had to choose I'd say they are unable to communicate.
And besides all that, as many people have already pointed out, the claims of 'proof' have been added by the media; the actual research just says it's one or the other making no judgement as to which.
Get a big enough hammer and you can reduce the entire Wack a Mole machine to splinters. Unfortunately in this analogy the machine itself roughly translates to being the entire international community.
Which makes them better (or different) from medieval idiots... how, exactly?
It doesn't it makes them worse. People in medieval times didn't know any better and didn't have any resources to know better. Ignorance is unfortunate but understandable, willful ignorance is no acceptable.
No. Every time you got an ear infection or a sore throat you went to see the doctor right away, probably because A) you knew they'd prescribe you something and B) some scare tactics told to parents about scarlet fever or hearing loss. The doctor, to appease the prevent lawsuits, appease the parents, or in an effort to actually help should the cause be bacterial (which of the three you think should depend completely on your own level of cynicism), prescribed antibiotics.and your infection went away a week or so later. That in no way says the antibiotics were responsible.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that doctors prescribe post dated prescriptions for anti-biotics for most cases, such that the prescription can only be filled 4 days after the visit. The vast majority of infections will have started clearing up on their own in that time frame and many of the prescriptions will go completely unfilled. Patients (and their parents) get basically what they want (though doubtless many will be angry with it), fewer antibiotics will get used, and no second doctor visit required. The only downside I can see is that even more people will not finish the full course of treatment because if they fill the prescription anyway while they on already on the road to recovery they will be completely fine with many pills left to take yet.
They're just using it as a controlled environment to test out some new radar based spy satellites and possibly to test countermeasures against similar satellites orbited by other nations. The quasi-random grid layouts are the most visually striking, but I think the fighter jet surrounded by carefully positioned radar reflectors is more interesting. In theory you could mess up the image enough to camouflage your planes from satellite based radar. I could imagine the same being true for some of the qausi-grid layouts as well, they could be testing for multi-path effects or any number of other things.
The moon buggy didn't have to work for very long, and even then it had serious issues with abrasive dust. They almost had to abort the use of the buggy on one mission because the fender got snapped off, which would have caused dust to fly everywhere (duct tape saved the day though). The dust on the moon hasn't been worn into relatively smooth shapes by thousands of years of erosion. It's sharp edged, extremely fine particles that gets everywhere. The buggies wouldn't have been operational after a month of activity on the surface, let alone the years it will take to develop an infrastructure on the surface of the moon.
Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if you change your own spark plugs and two weeks later the rear passenger wheel falls off. The manufacturer should have to show that what you did caused the problem, just like they have to with any other product. Now granted, if I try to overclock the processor to 2x its normal rate and melt the damn thing that's my own fault, but if I unlock WiFi tethering and get a row of dead pixels on my screen the two are almost certainly unrelated.
And the energy density of a chunk of Uranium is still orders of magnitude higher than any other practical fuel source. Also, it's not as if we couldn't refine and recycle the fuel and squeeze more of the energy out of it later. Today's nuclear waste storage is tomorrow's 'unlimited energy source'.
No, you don't understand. They have the high ground, they could park in high orbit or the asteroid belt or Jupiter's Trojan points, and launch a couple hundred big heavy rocks at us. End of story, end of human civilization. There is nothing anyone on the planet could do deflect a significant number of incoming asteroids, let along asteroids that have been purposefully aimed and directed at the planet.
Or indeed the Launch Loop, Skyhook, or Laser Propulsion. There are several ideas on how to get us to orbit on the cheap. Personally, I'd love to see more interest in 'Dynamic' structures like the space fountain or launch loop. I'd love to see competitions a la the space elevator competitions, something like building a dynamic bridge over a 10 meter gap that can be walked over.
According to the wiki, 150-200 randomly chosen individuals will be stable for 80 generations or more. But then, the Amish were founded with around 200 members originally, and while they are certainly still around they have much higher rates of genetic disorders (and then again, many of those 200 were probably related before they isolated themselves). It's not an easy question to answer.
Nope. This complex software (Android) has a surprisingly good security model. Carriers are installing software which ignores permissions, is not removable by the user, and creates new, serious security issues. The carriers are being evil and/or incompetent.
It's not as totally and completely insane as it sounds. Generally, people will recover from exposure to vacuum on their own if the exposure is short (less than 30s) and with surprisingly minor injuries if exposure is less than 90s. And that's without training and a warning of what's going to happen, given proper planning and equipment I suspect you could push the survival rate to the high 90%s, maybe even to two 9's.
Given the choice between burning to death in inescapable zero-g fire and an automated 15 second emergency purge, with a quick re-pressurization system, O2 masks for quicker recovery, and the ability to manage air pressure afterwards to treat the bends... personally, I'd give it a shot. The only real question mark is if the source of the fire has been taken care of. If it's an ongoing short you might find yourself in the same boat you started in, but even that could be addressed by re-pressurizing the spacecraft with nitrogen and relying on O2 masks for the crew until everything is straightened out.
A good programmer taking over work from a bad one will almost always produce negative lines of code, it's part of what makes them a good programmer. That's why most metrics ask New Lines, Modified Lines, Deleted Lines for their estimates.
John Pike
Though for the record, while he bears responsibility, it's important to note that he wasn't just following orders, he was following explicit, long standing policy. Doesn't excuse, but there is more responsibility to go around than just to the officer in question.
I won't pretend that his language or his attitude are appropriate or helpful to situation but I can understand the frustration. How long can most of us talk about evolution with a creationist before we start to show how exasperating the whole argument is? How long can we talk about vaccines and autism without losing our cool a little bit? Or about the moon landings being a hoax? Or that electric fans can cause deaths in enclosed spaces.
On the one side there is a body of evidence supporting the theory that doubles every time you look at it, on the other there is... what exactly? Either the doubters chose to believe that tens of thousands of scientists are grossly incompetent or that tens of thousands of scientists are conspiring against the rest of the world.
So yeah, his language is inappropriate, but his message is spot on.
I believe in global warming, I believe mankind causes it, I believe it is a serious threat to human civilization even.
The thing is, nothing will be done until trillions have been spent building sea walls to protect the rich nation's coastal cities, irrigating the rapidly drying areas, building drainage in the rapidly flooding areas, killing mosquitoes in the new swamp lands, and any number of other band aids that you can think of.
There is simply no social or political will to cut CO2 emissions because there is simply no way to do it without reducing the perceived future quality of life for billions of people around the world (even if actual quality of life might be better than the worst case scenarios for global warming). Hell, even if we started reducing emissions today, which isn't going to happen, it would take decades to hit a point of stability where CO2 going into the atmosphere is equal to CO2 coming out, and even that may not be enough to avoid some of the worst effects.
It's simply not going to happen. If you're worried about the long term effects of global warming you'd be better spending your money on researching and developing Geo-engineering mega-projects because that is the only cost effective way you are going to prevent the worst effects. Yeah, the risks are large and the costs are non-trivial, but they are tiny compared to the costs of moving away from a fossil fuel economy at the rate that averting global warming would take.
Now imagine they hire a lawyer who convinces the world that they are the victims here. That they are fine, upstanding citizens who would never do anything remotely like what they're accused of. That obviously it's all a conspiracy instituted by the the guy they got into a fight with during college. And imagine that somehow the world believes them and they go out and do it again a week later. Did the lawyer assist them in robbery and capital murder? Well, legally no. But ethically many would argue yes.
You should probably look up how Groupon (and the other coupon deal sites) work. Customers purchase a coupon from the Groupon website, which is then redeemed at the retailer or restaurant. So, if the deal is "$20 worth of steak for $10", the customer pays Groupon $10, prints out the coupon, goes to the market, and redeems the coupon for $20 worth of steak.
What you can do, is tell Groupon to only sell X number of coupons. But then, that doesn't drive customers to your store the way your thinking above does. People would simply go to Groupon, see that it's sold out, and never think about it again.
Math and lotteries only don't work out if you base your math on the idea that $100,000,000 is worth 100,000,000 x $1. It is not. Above a certain number, large sums of money become "anything I want and never have to work again" which people value at much more than 100,000,000 times "a cheap cup of coffee".
My single concern is that there's lots of research that says the best thing kids can do to improve success later on in life is what is known as "undirected play" (a.k.a. recess). I doubt the play has to be physical in nature, but I suspect to see the benefits you want activities that allow kids to decide on their own (or as a group) who to play with, how to play, where to play, and what the rules are. These are not things that today's games are generally good at, ironically and especially true in the 'kids' games genres.
If you judge by the article she's bucking the system by looking at naked mole rats for an explanation for why they don't get cancer. The irony is that if she succeeds in finding the explanation and isolating it out to a treatment protocol the first thing she'll do is give some mice cancer and see if the treatment works on them (ok, maybe the second if the mechanism can be disabled in the naked mole rat somehow). That isn't bucking the system, it's being at a different stage in your research; she's still forming a hypothesis as to what an effective treatment could be. Once she has that she'll move right over to the sterile, genetically identical, and above all biologically consistent lab mice and rats. Why? Because that is how you perform replicatable animal trials. If someone halfway around the world can't replicate your results your experiment isn't worth much, that's why we have millions of essentially cloned lab mice in the first place.
Yeah, except workers at the patent office have been explicitly told that it is not their job to look at prior art, that it is up to the courts to decide. This was largely in an effort to get through their enormous backlog more quickly, but any idiot could have seen that it was going to lead to abuse. Incidentally, if you're an engineer looking for a good job, I know when I graduated USPTO was recruiting heavily, they'd even put you through law school if you specialized in patent law.
It's possible that these are not the strongest patents Microsoft can bring to bear on the issue. They may just be testing the waters to see how far Barnes and Noble are willing to go with their (to Microsoft) dangerous brinksmanship.
Sure you did, it's called Occam's Razor. Which is more likely: All the planets in the solar system travel around the sun in approximately elliptical orbits OR All the planets in the solar system orbit the Earth in a complex arrangement of circles within circles within circles? Now that being said, I'm not sure that you can arbitrarily say disconnected quantum states are likely than connected ones, but allowing them to communicate would seem to posit some communications medium that we have never seen evidence of, so if I had to choose I'd say they are unable to communicate.
And besides all that, as many people have already pointed out, the claims of 'proof' have been added by the media; the actual research just says it's one or the other making no judgement as to which.
Get a big enough hammer and you can reduce the entire Wack a Mole machine to splinters. Unfortunately in this analogy the machine itself roughly translates to being the entire international community.
Which makes them better (or different) from medieval idiots... how, exactly?
It doesn't it makes them worse. People in medieval times didn't know any better and didn't have any resources to know better. Ignorance is unfortunate but understandable, willful ignorance is no acceptable.
No. Every time you got an ear infection or a sore throat you went to see the doctor right away, probably because A) you knew they'd prescribe you something and B) some scare tactics told to parents about scarlet fever or hearing loss. The doctor, to appease the prevent lawsuits, appease the parents, or in an effort to actually help should the cause be bacterial (which of the three you think should depend completely on your own level of cynicism), prescribed antibiotics.and your infection went away a week or so later. That in no way says the antibiotics were responsible.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that doctors prescribe post dated prescriptions for anti-biotics for most cases, such that the prescription can only be filled 4 days after the visit. The vast majority of infections will have started clearing up on their own in that time frame and many of the prescriptions will go completely unfilled. Patients (and their parents) get basically what they want (though doubtless many will be angry with it), fewer antibiotics will get used, and no second doctor visit required. The only downside I can see is that even more people will not finish the full course of treatment because if they fill the prescription anyway while they on already on the road to recovery they will be completely fine with many pills left to take yet.
They're just using it as a controlled environment to test out some new radar based spy satellites and possibly to test countermeasures against similar satellites orbited by other nations. The quasi-random grid layouts are the most visually striking, but I think the fighter jet surrounded by carefully positioned radar reflectors is more interesting. In theory you could mess up the image enough to camouflage your planes from satellite based radar. I could imagine the same being true for some of the qausi-grid layouts as well, they could be testing for multi-path effects or any number of other things.
The moon buggy didn't have to work for very long, and even then it had serious issues with abrasive dust. They almost had to abort the use of the buggy on one mission because the fender got snapped off, which would have caused dust to fly everywhere (duct tape saved the day though). The dust on the moon hasn't been worn into relatively smooth shapes by thousands of years of erosion. It's sharp edged, extremely fine particles that gets everywhere. The buggies wouldn't have been operational after a month of activity on the surface, let alone the years it will take to develop an infrastructure on the surface of the moon.
Go under page info -> media (in Firefox) and you'll see http://chrome.angrybirds.com/fowl/gwt-voices.swf
Your example uses flash for sound effects, which are a pretty core component of a gaming experience. Care to try again?