That's like saying that Amazon doesn't make computers or game consoles so why do they sell video games? They can make money on software sales if their store offers things that the Android app store does not; things like content filters, price filters, a decent popularity ranking system, maybe even lower prices.
Yep, and if the government had stepped forward and tried to remove the Taliban from the game you might have a point. Freedom of expression means that the government can't send you to jail if it doesn't like what you're saying, it doesn't mean that other people can't dislike what you have to say and it sure as hell does mean that those people have the right to state their opinion on the matter in public. How you respond to their opinion is of course your choice.
How is that a problem? If I'm watching violent action movie I will have adjusted the volume to the level that is comfortable to me. If I'm watching a drama with no loud noises whatsoever, I will have... adjusted the volume to the level that is comfortable to me. See, that's the point; I don't want to be pitched Oxyclean at levels that cause permanent hearing damage just because I have the volume turned up hear a quiet show. It isn't that hard to take the average level from the past five minutes, and make the average level of the commercial be the same, you could easily make some software to do it and I refuse to believe TV stations don't have software that manages their commercials already.
Learning what genes do what isn't Gattaca-ish, it's scientific progress. Gattaca-ish only occurs when you start to say that only people with certain genes can do certain jobs. And really, even in the movie the job in question was space ship pilot for crying out loud. You can bet your ass that astronauts today get screened in every way possible, up to and including analyzing their family histories (which is really just very primitive genetic screening when you get down to it), and they aren't even responsible for hundreds of civilian lives as the pilots in the movie were.
There are legitimate safety and regulatory reasons for limiting the import of overseas drugs, it's possible that these reasons do not warrant the increased cost for many patients, but that doesn't change the fact that the reasons exist. The same argument can't be made for movies, music, and video games so I would argue that since their current actions have a logical basis and the slippery slope does not, the slippery slope is far worse.
Science would die without the people that popularize it; Hawking, Dawkins, Sagan, Asimov, etc. Normal people don't really care that the LHC might find the Higgs Boson, especially younger people who might be just starting to take an interest in science and technology. Without good science fiction, good popular science books, and lots of media attention there would be next to no new scientists and engineers in a generation. Besides, it's not like Hawking hasn't ever publishednewresearch, just to name a few.
That's a list of the apps they studied, not a list of the apps which they found to be leaking private information. What I, and I suspect others are looking for is a table with the following headers: App Name, Publisher, Permissions, Leaked Information, version number.
So... Taken with a high definition camera, beamed 400,000 km, received in Australia, displayed on a low resolution screen, recorded with a camera pointed at said screen, sent around the world to the US, saved on reel to reel tapes, dubbed from reel to reel to VHS, digitized and uploaded to a computer, digitally enhanced, and then made available to the world on the internet. And even ignoring the fact that every step of the process could only ever remove information, it's still probably one of the most important and historically interesting videos humanity has ever created.
Well, until someone in office has the vision to budget for the development of a non-chemical launch technology space travel isn't going to become routine anyway. Even massive funding into a new rocket isn't going to be the kind of game changer that you're looking for, we need a launch loop, space elevator, laser rocket, or at the very least a nuclear rocket to finish the jump to being a truly spaceworthy species.
So does this bill include a realistic budget to actually accomplish these goals or is it just "oh yeah, we support NASA 100%" political pandering? Last version of the bill I read about included keeping the shuttle program going with no additional launches and no additional funding, just moving money from some other NASA program and pay people who won't be doing any real work.
Hey, it could also be cobaltite stones (man did that ever piss me off the first time I hit it, could not figure out why I couldn't smelt it down for the life of me).
Wow, I just realized what a brilliant move this is on the part of the betting house. The fools who bet for it happening just aren't going to win, the fools who bet against it happening... well, take their stake, put it in a CD for 12 months, then give them their 1% winnings, while you keep the other 2% for yourself.
It's not really their fault, this isn't "Oh no, we're all going to die!" (that was, of course how the media sold it to their readers), the real press release was "Hurray, our new telescope works!".
An enterprise app would need more features than a blog, just because a free CMS can offer the basic features more simply (for the average blog user especially) than asp.net doesn't mean that the free CMS can offer advanced features as well as asp.net. Obligatory car analogy: If the only place you drive your 14 passenger van is a quarter mile to work and back (alone) then it makes sense to replace it with a Smartcar, that doesn't mean that a Smartcar is capable of doing everything a 14 passenger van is capable of doing or that a Smartcar is the best choice for everyone.
What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).
In the model of Hawking radiation you're thinking of a pair is produced, a particle and an anti-particle. The anti-particle gets sucked back into the black hole (thus reducing the black hole's mass) while particle escapes in the form of Hawking radiation. As someone has pointed out in a few other comments, there are probably models that explain the phenomenon better than the virtual particle model, but if my layman's knowledge of physics has taught me anything it's that one phenomenon can have several (very, very nearly) accurate models that explain it.
There are many different definitions of irony, and many people have a pet definition that they think is the 'right' one. Hell, even the oft made fun of Alanis Morissette song has at least a few scenarios that fall under one of the definitions or another. An outcome of events contrary to what was, expected; there is an irony to winning the lottery (and being set for life) and then dying a day later. There's also the definition: as if in mockery of the fitness or rightness of things. A death row pardon two minutes after the execution? Yes, I'd say that's a mockery of the way things should be. Now, a lot of the other scenarios in the song are most definitely not ironic, but there are a few that are.
Only two choices. Either they have the technology and cultural stability to make a multi-thousand year journey in an arkship or they have the AI to create a self repairing, self directing, maybe even self reproducing probe (and all of those take quite a bit of problem analysis and creativity). Either way, they should have the patience and ability to wait around a few centuries or even millenia to learn all about our culture, politics, and languages. The former would actually be more mind blowing in my opinion; could you imagine putting humans on a hollowed out asteroid for 50k years and expecting them to be alive at the end of it? The idea of an intelligent machine is much less interesting to me than a race that can live in a tiny enclosed space with limited resources for thousands of years without killing each other in the process.
Besides, I dispute that our UAVs wouldn't be able to determine who is the leader, because the systems that comprise our UAVs includes several humans in the loop. Everyone from the pilot to the intelligence analyst to the commanding officer would review the images for clues. It stands to reason that any completely autonomous UAV (which ours are not) would need to have a similar level of intelligence and problem solving abilities.
Even that is pretty minimal (but yes, I'm sure it is present). They have a 2 meter increase in height when you go into the terminal station, so it converts most of your speed into potential energy, which is then used by the next person to get started. If you're going too slow to make it up the 2 meter incline, there's a conveyor system that will help pull you up.
Honestly, after looking at that project, I have to ask, "Why the hell wouldn't I just walk to my destination? Or ride my bike?"
On firm, flat ground, a 70kg man requires about 100 watts to walk at 5km/h. The power required to move a Shweeb along a rail at 20km/h is only 33 watts. We rest our case!
33W is nothing, you could do 33W in a business suit for 20 minutes and not break a sweat. This efficiency also ties into the passing problem, since the top speed is limited to 25km/h for safety reasons and 25km/h can easily be reached with considerably less effort than walking the main lines should always be moving at top speed. There are apparently bumpers on the front and back of each bubble that make hitting even a stationary bubble at that speed safe and comfortable, at which point people behind can push a slower rider along at the max speed with little increase in effort (since two bubbles pushed up against one another are very aerodynamically efficient).
All in all, I'd say that the system is remarkably more practical than it appears at first glance. My initial reaction was the same as everyone else's, but looking at their faq it's seems they've thought through the issues quite well. Don't know if you'll ever see one constructed in your home town, but I could definitely see scenic routes being quite popular in some areas.
It's pretty simple really, imagine you wrote out a check to pay off your house (say something large, like $60k) and got your title free and clear but the check was never cashed. Can you imagine how much of a pain in the ass it is to balance your checkbook and keep track of your finances? How long would you leave the money sit in your checking account (just waiting for someone to steal your bank information)? Now imagine that instead of a single $60k check it was thousands of $5-$10 checks that you were trying to keep track of. And then imagine that an estimated 20% never get cashed at all, in a few years you could have hundreds of thousands of dollars in liabilities with no way of knowing the actual risk of them being cashed out. I absolutely don't blame companies for putting reasonable expiration dates on gift cards, and I think that perhaps they should be required to extend the date at the customer's request. It's really no different that putting 'Void after 60 days' on a payroll check.
Well, it's like Google rolling out Gigabit broadband. They know that it's not going to work right now, the technology isn't there yet to do it in a way that is profitable. But they are very curious about how people will respond to such an offer, how they use a net connection with such high download speeds, and what kinds of web services they can plan to bring to bear when the technology does make it cost effective.
Similarly, this is the direction that the Mozilla team thinks that mobile phone technology is going (I'll leave the argument about whether they are right and wrong for another post). So, if the phone of the future has multiple projectors, head tracking, in air gestures, multitouch, voice activation, keyboard and mouse integration, etc... what kinds of products and services make sense on such a device? How do those new technologies change the way people use their phones, and how can software writers capitalize on them?
I was going to respond similarly, but I assumed (hoped?) that I was just suffering from a case of sarcasm-doesn't-translate-over-the-internet-syndrome and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Knowing my luck when it comes to these things I was probably wrong and he was dead serious.
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That's like saying that Amazon doesn't make computers or game consoles so why do they sell video games? They can make money on software sales if their store offers things that the Android app store does not; things like content filters, price filters, a decent popularity ranking system, maybe even lower prices.
Yep, and if the government had stepped forward and tried to remove the Taliban from the game you might have a point. Freedom of expression means that the government can't send you to jail if it doesn't like what you're saying, it doesn't mean that other people can't dislike what you have to say and it sure as hell does mean that those people have the right to state their opinion on the matter in public. How you respond to their opinion is of course your choice.
How is that a problem? If I'm watching violent action movie I will have adjusted the volume to the level that is comfortable to me. If I'm watching a drama with no loud noises whatsoever, I will have... adjusted the volume to the level that is comfortable to me. See, that's the point; I don't want to be pitched Oxyclean at levels that cause permanent hearing damage just because I have the volume turned up hear a quiet show. It isn't that hard to take the average level from the past five minutes, and make the average level of the commercial be the same, you could easily make some software to do it and I refuse to believe TV stations don't have software that manages their commercials already.
Learning what genes do what isn't Gattaca-ish, it's scientific progress. Gattaca-ish only occurs when you start to say that only people with certain genes can do certain jobs. And really, even in the movie the job in question was space ship pilot for crying out loud. You can bet your ass that astronauts today get screened in every way possible, up to and including analyzing their family histories (which is really just very primitive genetic screening when you get down to it), and they aren't even responsible for hundreds of civilian lives as the pilots in the movie were.
There are legitimate safety and regulatory reasons for limiting the import of overseas drugs, it's possible that these reasons do not warrant the increased cost for many patients, but that doesn't change the fact that the reasons exist. The same argument can't be made for movies, music, and video games so I would argue that since their current actions have a logical basis and the slippery slope does not, the slippery slope is far worse.
Science would die without the people that popularize it; Hawking, Dawkins, Sagan, Asimov, etc. Normal people don't really care that the LHC might find the Higgs Boson, especially younger people who might be just starting to take an interest in science and technology. Without good science fiction, good popular science books, and lots of media attention there would be next to no new scientists and engineers in a generation. Besides, it's not like Hawking hasn't ever published new research, just to name a few.
That's a list of the apps they studied, not a list of the apps which they found to be leaking private information. What I, and I suspect others are looking for is a table with the following headers: App Name, Publisher, Permissions, Leaked Information, version number.
So... Taken with a high definition camera, beamed 400,000 km, received in Australia, displayed on a low resolution screen, recorded with a camera pointed at said screen, sent around the world to the US, saved on reel to reel tapes, dubbed from reel to reel to VHS, digitized and uploaded to a computer, digitally enhanced, and then made available to the world on the internet. And even ignoring the fact that every step of the process could only ever remove information, it's still probably one of the most important and historically interesting videos humanity has ever created.
Nasa gets less that 1% of the budget, while Medicare, Social Security and Welfare get 57%, Defense gets 19% and the interest on the debt is 5%.
Do you see the problem here?
Is it that we don't have anything budgeted to actually pay down the debt?
Well, until someone in office has the vision to budget for the development of a non-chemical launch technology space travel isn't going to become routine anyway. Even massive funding into a new rocket isn't going to be the kind of game changer that you're looking for, we need a launch loop, space elevator, laser rocket, or at the very least a nuclear rocket to finish the jump to being a truly spaceworthy species.
So does this bill include a realistic budget to actually accomplish these goals or is it just "oh yeah, we support NASA 100%" political pandering? Last version of the bill I read about included keeping the shuttle program going with no additional launches and no additional funding, just moving money from some other NASA program and pay people who won't be doing any real work.
Hey, it could also be cobaltite stones (man did that ever piss me off the first time I hit it, could not figure out why I couldn't smelt it down for the life of me).
Wow, I just realized what a brilliant move this is on the part of the betting house. The fools who bet for it happening just aren't going to win, the fools who bet against it happening... well, take their stake, put it in a CD for 12 months, then give them their 1% winnings, while you keep the other 2% for yourself.
It's not really their fault, this isn't "Oh no, we're all going to die!" (that was, of course how the media sold it to their readers), the real press release was "Hurray, our new telescope works!".
An enterprise app would need more features than a blog, just because a free CMS can offer the basic features more simply (for the average blog user especially) than asp.net doesn't mean that the free CMS can offer advanced features as well as asp.net. Obligatory car analogy: If the only place you drive your 14 passenger van is a quarter mile to work and back (alone) then it makes sense to replace it with a Smartcar, that doesn't mean that a Smartcar is capable of doing everything a 14 passenger van is capable of doing or that a Smartcar is the best choice for everyone.
What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).
In the model of Hawking radiation you're thinking of a pair is produced, a particle and an anti-particle. The anti-particle gets sucked back into the black hole (thus reducing the black hole's mass) while particle escapes in the form of Hawking radiation. As someone has pointed out in a few other comments, there are probably models that explain the phenomenon better than the virtual particle model, but if my layman's knowledge of physics has taught me anything it's that one phenomenon can have several (very, very nearly) accurate models that explain it.
There are many different definitions of irony, and many people have a pet definition that they think is the 'right' one. Hell, even the oft made fun of Alanis Morissette song has at least a few scenarios that fall under one of the definitions or another. An outcome of events contrary to what was, expected; there is an irony to winning the lottery (and being set for life) and then dying a day later. There's also the definition: as if in mockery of the fitness or rightness of things. A death row pardon two minutes after the execution? Yes, I'd say that's a mockery of the way things should be. Now, a lot of the other scenarios in the song are most definitely not ironic, but there are a few that are.
Only two choices. Either they have the technology and cultural stability to make a multi-thousand year journey in an arkship or they have the AI to create a self repairing, self directing, maybe even self reproducing probe (and all of those take quite a bit of problem analysis and creativity). Either way, they should have the patience and ability to wait around a few centuries or even millenia to learn all about our culture, politics, and languages. The former would actually be more mind blowing in my opinion; could you imagine putting humans on a hollowed out asteroid for 50k years and expecting them to be alive at the end of it? The idea of an intelligent machine is much less interesting to me than a race that can live in a tiny enclosed space with limited resources for thousands of years without killing each other in the process.
Besides, I dispute that our UAVs wouldn't be able to determine who is the leader, because the systems that comprise our UAVs includes several humans in the loop. Everyone from the pilot to the intelligence analyst to the commanding officer would review the images for clues. It stands to reason that any completely autonomous UAV (which ours are not) would need to have a similar level of intelligence and problem solving abilities.
Even that is pretty minimal (but yes, I'm sure it is present). They have a 2 meter increase in height when you go into the terminal station, so it converts most of your speed into potential energy, which is then used by the next person to get started. If you're going too slow to make it up the 2 meter incline, there's a conveyor system that will help pull you up.
You should read their faq,
Honestly, after looking at that project, I have to ask, "Why the hell wouldn't I just walk to my destination? Or ride my bike?"
On firm, flat ground, a 70kg man requires about 100 watts to walk at 5km/h. The power required to move a Shweeb along a rail at 20km/h is only 33 watts. We rest our case!
33W is nothing, you could do 33W in a business suit for 20 minutes and not break a sweat. This efficiency also ties into the passing problem, since the top speed is limited to 25km/h for safety reasons and 25km/h can easily be reached with considerably less effort than walking the main lines should always be moving at top speed. There are apparently bumpers on the front and back of each bubble that make hitting even a stationary bubble at that speed safe and comfortable, at which point people behind can push a slower rider along at the max speed with little increase in effort (since two bubbles pushed up against one another are very aerodynamically efficient).
All in all, I'd say that the system is remarkably more practical than it appears at first glance. My initial reaction was the same as everyone else's, but looking at their faq it's seems they've thought through the issues quite well. Don't know if you'll ever see one constructed in your home town, but I could definitely see scenic routes being quite popular in some areas.
It's pretty simple really, imagine you wrote out a check to pay off your house (say something large, like $60k) and got your title free and clear but the check was never cashed. Can you imagine how much of a pain in the ass it is to balance your checkbook and keep track of your finances? How long would you leave the money sit in your checking account (just waiting for someone to steal your bank information)? Now imagine that instead of a single $60k check it was thousands of $5-$10 checks that you were trying to keep track of. And then imagine that an estimated 20% never get cashed at all, in a few years you could have hundreds of thousands of dollars in liabilities with no way of knowing the actual risk of them being cashed out. I absolutely don't blame companies for putting reasonable expiration dates on gift cards, and I think that perhaps they should be required to extend the date at the customer's request. It's really no different that putting 'Void after 60 days' on a payroll check.
Well, it's like Google rolling out Gigabit broadband. They know that it's not going to work right now, the technology isn't there yet to do it in a way that is profitable. But they are very curious about how people will respond to such an offer, how they use a net connection with such high download speeds, and what kinds of web services they can plan to bring to bear when the technology does make it cost effective.
Similarly, this is the direction that the Mozilla team thinks that mobile phone technology is going (I'll leave the argument about whether they are right and wrong for another post). So, if the phone of the future has multiple projectors, head tracking, in air gestures, multitouch, voice activation, keyboard and mouse integration, etc... what kinds of products and services make sense on such a device? How do those new technologies change the way people use their phones, and how can software writers capitalize on them?
I was going to respond similarly, but I assumed (hoped?) that I was just suffering from a case of sarcasm-doesn't-translate-over-the-internet-syndrome and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Knowing my luck when it comes to these things I was probably wrong and he was dead serious.
And don't forget the Bomber Gap. Or the Doomsday Gap. Or the Mineshaft Gap!