What with three wireless hubs, an RFID scanner, and half-a-dozen Bluetooth devices always on, I'm pretty sure I'm already casting EMF shadows on my walls.
User satisfaction with software is inversely proportional to how much work they must do - how many separate actions they must take - to accomplish something.
I.e., competently designed software obsoletes the user, making user acceptance testing extraneous.
You overlook the ability of our corporate and political leaders to grow the American market for free desktop operating systems. Free anything, in fact.
The beauty is that ability to put the warhead on target at any significant distance remains impossible.
Putting a warhead onto a specific location is an exercise in time and the three dimensions of physical space.
One of our corporations will readily sell (and have sold) any government an advanced pick'n'place robot if the price is right, the units of measure of which can be scaled up to terrestrial distances to handle the 3-d exercise that a land target on the rotating earth represents (or, perhaps, an orbiting satellite).
I will ignore GPS; one would like to think that those satellites are taken off-line the very instant a launch is detected. However, a minor modification of an open source program like Motion in combination with one of the freely available sets of terrestrial satellite photos will yield you a decent target acquisition system for cruise missiles.
I in no way advocate thermonuclear war; I merely - and pragmatically - point out that the logistics are not as difficult as people would like think.
Or so I suspect/expect. They call it dual-use technology for a reason.
Having highly efficient mirrors might be very useful, if the beards in the Middle East continue to eagerly pursue their path to self-immolation.
Burning radioactive oil wouldn't be so good, but lining the resultant wasteland of friable radioactive glass with mirrors and then transmitting the non-radioactive electricity out would return the region to usefulness for humanity.
(Before you flame, observe both that "beards" applies to all branches of the followers of Abraham and that the compulsion to use nuclear weapons - to send humanity on a one-way trip - has more to do with insanity than religion.
I wonder; as some start playing around with using quantum entanglement to create a not, do the string theorists start worrying about their jerking a knot in the universe(s?).
Since this subject is coming up just as a push is on to privatize space travel - that is, to make space travel somebody's profit center - this sudden antipathy towards risk aversion is far more likely to be cost aversion in reality.
If you eliminate the redundant systems that help protect human life, then you eliminate a whole lot of costs - and your break even point comes much sooner, even if you break a lot of humans along the way.
Given the number of libraries that are dying - at least in this area - from the on-going damage from a certain Party's (whose name I will not mention lest I solve the energy crisis single-handedly by generating flame) policies I hesitate to attack anything that promises to provide access to books...
I figure American expats who don't want to be teased by their German neighbors will buy the generators to power their hidden refrigerators full of Budweiser, Coors, and Miller beer...
But once everybody has to pay health care premiums to the private insurance corporations you just know they'll whomp on "obese" people. They're - Baucus and "the Gang of Six" - already looking at charging smokers more, and charging people who are 60 (just about when their income goes into decline with retirement) five times as much as somebody who is 20.
So we'll end up without any fat to fill the jugs for the people who can afford to buy the life-extending treatments that will come on-line with ready access to stem cells...
Oh, wait - those people will just pay other people to get fat! A new twist on the meaning of "fat farms"!
...so much so that places like/., which quite often provide original thinking upon a variety of subjects to anybody cunning enough to use a web crawler, should think about including "any derivative works originating from ideas or opinions expressed within the contents of this website constitute prior art and are covered by the GNU GPL" (or some such, while bearing in mind that IANAL).
One of you geniuses may unknowingly and casually toss out a feasible idea. It would burn you, to see somebody turn that into a profit-making machine, wouldn't it?
lollll....you'll know when you do it, though; a squad of lawyers will show up on your doorstep with a $1 bill, a quitclaim agreement, and a host of delightful comments upon the hazards of a lifetime spent in courtrooms - particularly when considered in light of your...unfortunate...financial circumstances and how the latter affects your ability to retain good legal representation...
This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees.
Anybody who has worked for a bureaucracy - corporate or government, of late - is familiar with the big whiz-bang project that is poorly thought out and only implemented half-assed, but the the project's "champions" claim success and are subsequently promoted up to another level where their incompetence is only more dangerous - yet their income is far higher.
Leaving the grunts to either make it work, or to permit it to die a quiet, ignominious death from disuse and decay. So common, is it, that the art of pitching projects makes it onto the curriculum in some "hire" education institutions - here and abroad.
Once a bureaucracy starts to function only through interwoven webs created by "networking" and the belief that "one hand washes the other", it is time to sell their stock. (Or treasuries, as the case may be.)
The implementation of Criminal and Civil Restrictions on Religious Vilification.
Don't think you can do that in a rational world unless you prohibit religions from claiming that they are the one true religion, or that some other religion has gone astray, or that a specific form of behavior contradicts specific religious tents and so is vile, and so on and so forth.
Religions survive by vilifyingother religions, belief systems, and/or any human behavior that they disagree with.
With ever more data available, ever larger data sets must be moved over the 'net. Should this pressure to redefine what is broadband in order to slice and dice more profit out of the pipe succeed, some cost-constrained hobbyist, student, or interested scientist or engineer in the U.S. who suspects something interesting that may yield something tangible exists in a large dataset may be forced to give up because - under the artificial speed constraints that they face - it would take forever to get the data down to where he or she can manipulate it...and the U.S. loses out.
Seriously: How will the U.S. compete, when in the U.S. the greed of individuals and private entities is allowed to supersede the national interest while other nations do not have that handicap?
So if you take a cylindrical object like a missile, mirror its surface, and rotate the object in flight...why, I betcha your laser's energy requirements go right up given the diffusion of the beam over more surface area. And I wonder what the net effect would be if that missile's nose cone emitted a gas or vapor stream to further diffuse the beam...or just used an ablation shield designed to burn off and emit a diffusing/reflecting stream of particles...
Sure, we'll spout R&D...and then we'll pump a bunch of kids into the educational system by somehow making education affordable again, and we'll begin to see initial results...
And right about then "corporate America" will again start using phrases like "Oh, they're just technical!" to justify ignoring those whose sense of logic cannot countenance the bogus corporate plan...
Even as Hollywood (or, more likely, Bollywood by then) is unleashing another wave of movies that belittles "nerds" and "geeks" and shows 'em getting pushed around by the "cool" clique in a totally fictitious high school...
And "corporate America" will offshore the first wave of new engineers' jobs - primarily because personal spacecraft have become the hot thing for CEOs and they need to cut costs to boost their own compensation...
And our kids will add the stigma of being a "nerd"/"geek" to the lack of job security, and see that the MBAs are diverting all of America's money flow to themselves, and the flow of new talent into the hard sciences educational system disappears 'cuz everybody wants to be an MBA and get rich (and the classes are easier, too!), and we will end up...
Right back here. Again.
Not going to be able to move America forward again until leadership returns to its old definition, and "success" is not defined by who gets the most money. The latter is particularly dangerous, because you end up with the "leadership" that we have now: People whose senses of morality, ethics, honor, and patriotism comes to a screeching halt right at the edge of their wallets.
Corporate America doesn't care if America dies - as long as they accumulate more wealth.
Maybe I should have added that the moves the British Empire made were dictated by "business interests" - to provide yet another example of what happens when bad policy doesn't go out the window fast enough?
Slashdot Mirror
What with three wireless hubs, an RFID scanner, and half-a-dozen Bluetooth devices always on, I'm pretty sure I'm already casting EMF shadows on my walls.
Been seeing some really big spiders, too...
Is anyone else wondering if your underwear will be lead shielded?
I'm a little more worried about my underwear being off-hook sometime after I've consumed a burrito.
Note to self: Include sarcasm delimiters.
Think that process hasn't begun? See http://www.idearover.com/, for one.
User satisfaction with software is inversely proportional to how much work they must do - how many separate actions they must take - to accomplish something. I.e., competently designed software obsoletes the user, making user acceptance testing extraneous.
You overlook the ability of our corporate and political leaders to grow the American market for free desktop operating systems. Free anything, in fact.
They're fishing for a price point? Quick, everybody make a comment to the effect that such a drive is only worth about $10...
The beauty is that ability to put the warhead on target at any significant distance remains impossible.
Putting a warhead onto a specific location is an exercise in time and the three dimensions of physical space.
One of our corporations will readily sell (and have sold) any government an advanced pick'n'place robot if the price is right, the units of measure of which can be scaled up to terrestrial distances to handle the 3-d exercise that a land target on the rotating earth represents (or, perhaps, an orbiting satellite).
I will ignore GPS; one would like to think that those satellites are taken off-line the very instant a launch is detected. However, a minor modification of an open source program like Motion in combination with one of the freely available sets of terrestrial satellite photos will yield you a decent target acquisition system for cruise missiles.
I in no way advocate thermonuclear war; I merely - and pragmatically - point out that the logistics are not as difficult as people would like think.
Or so I suspect/expect. They call it dual-use technology for a reason.
Having highly efficient mirrors might be very useful, if the beards in the Middle East continue to eagerly pursue their path to self-immolation.
Burning radioactive oil wouldn't be so good, but lining the resultant wasteland of friable radioactive glass with mirrors and then transmitting the non-radioactive electricity out would return the region to usefulness for humanity.
(Before you flame, observe both that "beards" applies to all branches of the followers of Abraham and that the compulsion to use nuclear weapons - to send humanity on a one-way trip - has more to do with insanity than religion.
I am, in fact, just being pragmatic.)
I wonder; as some start playing around with using quantum entanglement to create a not, do the string theorists start worrying about their jerking a knot in the universe(s?).
Since this subject is coming up just as a push is on to privatize space travel - that is, to make space travel somebody's profit center - this sudden antipathy towards risk aversion is far more likely to be cost aversion in reality.
If you eliminate the redundant systems that help protect human life, then you eliminate a whole lot of costs - and your break even point comes much sooner, even if you break a lot of humans along the way.
Given the number of libraries that are dying - at least in this area - from the on-going damage from a certain Party's (whose name I will not mention lest I solve the energy crisis single-handedly by generating flame) policies I hesitate to attack anything that promises to provide access to books...
I figure American expats who don't want to be teased by their German neighbors will buy the generators to power their hidden refrigerators full of Budweiser, Coors, and Miller beer...
But once everybody has to pay health care premiums to the private insurance corporations you just know they'll whomp on "obese" people. They're - Baucus and "the Gang of Six" - already looking at charging smokers more, and charging people who are 60 (just about when their income goes into decline with retirement) five times as much as somebody who is 20.
So we'll end up without any fat to fill the jugs for the people who can afford to buy the life-extending treatments that will come on-line with ready access to stem cells...
Oh, wait - those people will just pay other people to get fat! A new twist on the meaning of "fat farms"!
...to hypothetically sell the patent, and the hypothetical buyer.
If he'll take hypothetical money, I may be interested...hypothetically.
...so much so that places like /., which quite often provide original thinking upon a variety of subjects to anybody cunning enough to use a web crawler, should think about including "any derivative works originating from ideas or opinions expressed within the contents of this website constitute prior art and are covered by the GNU GPL" (or some such, while bearing in mind that IANAL).
One of you geniuses may unknowingly and casually toss out a feasible idea. It would burn you, to see somebody turn that into a profit-making machine, wouldn't it?
lollll....you'll know when you do it, though; a squad of lawyers will show up on your doorstep with a $1 bill, a quitclaim agreement, and a host of delightful comments upon the hazards of a lifetime spent in courtrooms - particularly when considered in light of your...unfortunate...financial circumstances and how the latter affects your ability to retain good legal representation...
Need a moderation tag for "Informative, yet sadly obvious.".
This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees.
Anybody who has worked for a bureaucracy - corporate or government, of late - is familiar with the big whiz-bang project that is poorly thought out and only implemented half-assed, but the the project's "champions" claim success and are subsequently promoted up to another level where their incompetence is only more dangerous - yet their income is far higher.
Leaving the grunts to either make it work, or to permit it to die a quiet, ignominious death from disuse and decay. So common, is it, that the art of pitching projects makes it onto the curriculum in some "hire" education institutions - here and abroad.
Once a bureaucracy starts to function only through interwoven webs created by "networking" and the belief that "one hand washes the other", it is time to sell their stock. (Or treasuries, as the case may be.)
The implementation of Criminal and Civil Restrictions on Religious Vilification.
Don't think you can do that in a rational world unless you prohibit religions from claiming that they are the one true religion, or that some other religion has gone astray, or that a specific form of behavior contradicts specific religious tents and so is vile, and so on and so forth.
Religions survive by vilifying other religions, belief systems, and/or any human behavior that they disagree with.
Well, I've got a number of dual- and quadcores, all with at least four gig of memory...and all of those browsers are pokie.
I don't understand it; I even aggregate two 300-baud modems to give them a bigger pipe outta my basement...
...and inventiveness is constrained by greed.
With ever more data available, ever larger data sets must be moved over the 'net. Should this pressure to redefine what is broadband in order to slice and dice more profit out of the pipe succeed, some cost-constrained hobbyist, student, or interested scientist or engineer in the U.S. who suspects something interesting that may yield something tangible exists in a large dataset may be forced to give up because - under the artificial speed constraints that they face - it would take forever to get the data down to where he or she can manipulate it...and the U.S. loses out.
Seriously: How will the U.S. compete, when in the U.S. the greed of individuals and private entities is allowed to supersede the national interest while other nations do not have that handicap?
So if you take a cylindrical object like a missile, mirror its surface, and rotate the object in flight...why, I betcha your laser's energy requirements go right up given the diffusion of the beam over more surface area. And I wonder what the net effect would be if that missile's nose cone emitted a gas or vapor stream to further diffuse the beam...or just used an ablation shield designed to burn off and emit a diffusing/reflecting stream of particles...
Ain't weapons races fun?
If this story is any indication, SF isn't even a democracy anymore; it is a dictatorial oligarchy.
Sure, we'll spout R&D...and then we'll pump a bunch of kids into the educational system by somehow making education affordable again, and we'll begin to see initial results...
And right about then "corporate America" will again start using phrases like "Oh, they're just technical!" to justify ignoring those whose sense of logic cannot countenance the bogus corporate plan...
Even as Hollywood (or, more likely, Bollywood by then) is unleashing another wave of movies that belittles "nerds" and "geeks" and shows 'em getting pushed around by the "cool" clique in a totally fictitious high school...
And "corporate America" will offshore the first wave of new engineers' jobs - primarily because personal spacecraft have become the hot thing for CEOs and they need to cut costs to boost their own compensation...
And our kids will add the stigma of being a "nerd"/"geek" to the lack of job security, and see that the MBAs are diverting all of America's money flow to themselves, and the flow of new talent into the hard sciences educational system disappears 'cuz everybody wants to be an MBA and get rich (and the classes are easier, too!), and we will end up...
Right back here. Again.
Not going to be able to move America forward again until leadership returns to its old definition, and "success" is not defined by who gets the most money. The latter is particularly dangerous, because you end up with the "leadership" that we have now: People whose senses of morality, ethics, honor, and patriotism comes to a screeching halt right at the edge of their wallets.
Corporate America doesn't care if America dies - as long as they accumulate more wealth.
Maybe I should have added that the moves the British Empire made were dictated by "business interests" - to provide yet another example of what happens when bad policy doesn't go out the window fast enough?