I was accused of being too pessimistic, so I went and read a little about the subject. The most interesting thing I found was a book by Julie Norem called "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking".
She puts forward a case that optimism/pessimism is a result of how your personality reacts to stress. Optimists tend to ignore the things that could go wrong, so they don't get stressed in the first place, and are therefore happier people. When bad things do go wrong, optimists tend to relate it to external causes. On the other hand, pessimists are pessimists because they have a tendency to be anxious. They immediately foresee the risks of each situation (due to their personality, not a conscious decision) and therefore they map out alternatives to each bad outcome until they've relieved their stress by feeling confident that, no matter what happens, they have a plan for every eventuality. When things still go wrong, pessimists tend to ask themselves what they could have done differently to avoid the bad outcome (internalizing it).
When an optimist and a pessimist face a situation together, the pessimist causes stress in the optimist by pointing out what could go wrong. The optimist causes stress in the pessimist by refusing to make contingency plans.
Once I realized all this, I was able to continue making contingency plans to keep my own stress under control, but I am now more careful about voicing my internal thought process around people who I know are optimists.
Canada never separated from Britain entirely. It gained self-governance in 1867 when the British North America Act was passed in the British parliament, and rewrote its own constitution in 1982. Queen Elizabeth II is still Canada's official head of state. At least for a little while longer.
There's a company in Ottawa that's working on cellulose ethanol as well. The company is Iogen Corporation. They have information on the process too. I first heard about them when I was at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas event, and there was a guest speaker from Iogen who talked about the similarities between ethanol production and brewing (i.e. some of the industry knowledge is transferrable).
That was my first thought. The point of Street View isn't to take pictures of people anyway, they just happen to be in the way.
That's an interesting idea. If they're just in the way, then all Google has to do is run enough passes up and down the street. A computer could then compare the images and only use parts of the image that remain static from pass to pass. If they can't seem to find a static image for a given location (like a water fountain, animatronic sign, etc.) then you flag that for identification by a human, or you just blur that part out. You'd obviously be able to tell where the image had been spliced together (due to different lighting, etc.) but it could work. Goodness knows google has the computing power to do it.
The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced. Worse (more intrusive) actually, since RAM must be slowed to be recorded. RAM is as ephemeral as air.
I disagree. The correct "meat space" equivalent would be that you have to produce the telephone number that you wrote down for your wife on the whiteboard by the phone (i.e. all notes on the whiteboard must be transcribed to a more permanent media because once recorded on the white board, they are technically documents). I use phone number as an example because it's similar to an IP address.
To go along the lines you're describing, I happen to use VoIP at my house for phone service and all conversations exist in RAM at some point (at least in my router or on the telephone adapter). Could I be required to log all the data because it technically exists as a document when it's in RAM? I have caller ID and the incoming caller's number certainly exists in RAM at some point - could that be subpoena'd?
I'm surprised they make a mushroom head pb guard. The whole idea of a red mushroom head is to make it highly visible and easy to push (e.g. when one hand is caught in the machinery and you're groping wildly with the other hand to hit the e-stop). I have been working with such things for 6 years now and have never seen a use for one. But leave it to Allen-Bradley to make some part that only 3 people will buy in a year, then charge you $100 for the privilege.:)
my guess is, it started getting called 'intelligent software' when it started to have more 'if' 'ands' and 'buts', because this new level of complexity made previous software 'simple' by contrast.
I would assume that sophisticated game AI algorithms wouldn't use boolean logic as much as some kind of "fuzzy" logic. That is, it would take into account the number, strength and proximity of known enemies, adding up to some "threat level", compare that to its own "capability level" which includes things like health, available firepower, proximity of friendlies, etc., then applies a "personality factor" which makes that unit more or less agressive, etc. All that is fed into a function that decides the next move.
While humans have many advantages, when you're talking about combat, most soldiers react based on their training because there isn't a lot of time to think. Therefore it may be able to create AI that follows the same basic "twitch" style of gameplay as a human if you tried hard. The difference would come after the encounter when a human reflects on the game and adapts their gameplay, whereas the AI would act virtually the same every time.
The same idea applies to the salaried individual if you realize that you can still use your spare time to make more money in your field of expertise. I, for instance, am salaried, but sometimes I do some on-the-side work (with my employer's permission) and can set billing rates considerably higher than what I'm making per hour. Of course, I have to pay taxes, etc. But the opportunity for the salaried banker to go out and make more money with his spare time than the good he's doing by ladelling stew is still there. Maybe he could do peoples taxes, give investment advice, write for a financial periodical, etc.
I had to sign one (like most people)
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
I had to sign an NDA for my current job, but did quite a bit of research before agreeing. The HR person trying to get me to sign it said, "these aren't enforceable in a court anyway." So I asked, "why do I have to sign it then?" I dug around and determined that most companies won't bother trying to enforce it unless it's a blatant threat to their business. Even then, the court will enforce a time limitation (the one I signed was limited to 1 year after leaving). Even so, as a citizen, I have a right to pursue employment in my chosen career path so if the NDA violates this *constitutional* right, it gets trumped by the constitution. Therefore, I negotiated an additional clause be added that specifically said that the NDA could not prevent me from obtaining employment in my field in the area of the country I've chosen to live. I figure that protects me well enough.
Also, while lawyers never seem to be reasonable people, the executives of companies typically are if you cultivate some mutual respect. Show that you care about protecting their interests but that you're also concerned about your own rights, and they will most likely be reasonable.
Also, make sure you don't leave on bad terms. When I left my last job, it was on good terms even though I went to a competitor. I made sure to respect my old employers' interests when at the new job, and that proves my integrity to the new employer.
If you're interviewing at a company that doesn't "get it", then you should probably keep looking. There are good companies out there with rational people at the helm.
That's pretty dumb, in my opinion. That's like saying, "Should trespassers be held liable for trespassing when the property owners only put a sign up saying "No Trespassing" but refuse to fence their property?"
"Sure officer, I walk across that old lady's back yard every day on my way to school, but at first she wasn't even locking the gate, and when she did put a lock on it, all I had to do was lift the gate off the hinges. It's obvious she's not taking responsibility for keeping people out of her back yard."
That sounds ridiculous but at our old house, students would cut through our back yard from time to time, and once they left the gate open, we got home and let the dog out the back door, and the next thing you know the dog's roaming around the front yard. If my dog had been hit by a car, I would be well within my rights to hold the person who left the gate open accountable (morally anyway).
College is a weird time when I can remember having odd ideas about liability. Well, I was wrong, and so is anyone who doesn't take responsibility for their actions. Leaving my front door unlocked does NOT make it OK to enter my house without permission. In fact the cops will agree with me.
It's quite possible that most people who search for "travel agency" online don't want to see "Dick and Jane's Travel, Fargo, ND" when they're in Phoenix, AZ. They probably want Travelocity, etc. If I want to find a small Mom and Pop type place because I want that type of boutique shop, I either look in the Yellow Pages or do some other kind of local search. Google is for searching the whole internet and finding the *most* relevant site to your search terms.
If you read about creating a successful website (without using bad practices), it's about writing *good* content, determining a target audience, then figuring out what search terms a person who wants to read your stuff would be using and making sure that the keywords, title, and first paragraph, etc., contain those terms. Mom and Pop places can certainly do that.
It's page rank (incoming links) that kills "local" sites. If you want your site to be considered highly relevant for "widgets" then you need *lots* of sites from around the internet to link to your site with the keyword "widgets". If you're a Mom & Pop place and you're only relevant to local people, then only local sites are liable to link to you. To fix this, Google is trying to integrate a Google local search into their maps.google.com page, so you can do a geographic search. But they can't do this for all sites unless pages identify their geographic co-ordinates, if applicable (see GeoTagging).
From what I understand of the book "Blue Ocean Strategy", this is what Nintendo did to position themselves back on top of the gaming market. Instead of playing in the same "Red Ocean" as the PS3 and Xbox360, they decided to create a different market niche which hadn't been developed (i.e. older gamers, less hard core gamers, even people who hadn't gamed before). They realized they could target this niche with a lower price point and could give up the fancy graphics if they concentrated on simple fun games. The Wii is the result. It means that they have little, if any, competition in their target market, which means they don't really have to compete on price - they can charge enough to make the product profitable, and the customers will pay because there's nothing quite the same to compare it against.
You give the people too much credit. Keeping up with the Joneses will take care of adoption of HD-DVD. People who shop at Walmart are just the kind of people who care about looking rich at any cost.
This depends a lot on the website. On facebook you can choose who can see your profile, so in my case only my friends can see it. Other people can see my name, a picture (I seem to be the only one with a picture of me without alcohol in the shot) and can see who my friends are. However, on my profile, I put all my contact information so my old school friends can contact me if they want to.
I'm Canadian, BTW. Yes, you're probably quite accurate in this description, and there is an election looming (it can come any time the Prime Minister thinks he has enough support to win, and they're teetering on the edge of a majority in the polls).
However, there was also a recent article in a popular magazine in Canada (MacLean's) that was talking about how the internet has contributed to a rise in child porn due to the anonymity and the sense they get that there are others out there like them. The article was well written and presented some disturbing statistics that made me glad I don't have kids yet.
It certainly made me wonder if there's anything we can do. If the stats are accurate, a sizeable percentage of the victims are abused by family members, even parents. It also functions like an addiction and there doesn't appear to be a cure. Someone who wasn't aware of the benefits that freedom of speech on the internet gives us would probably suggest regulating it to at least stop the incentive to share pictures (therefore slowing down the production of the material). This MP is obviously a person who doesn't value freedom of speech, and it's not a problem confined to any one country, I assure you. I worked in the US long enough to know there are lots of pro-nanny state people there too.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that we are failing to protect the rights of these children. I absolutely believe that the people perpetrating the crime need to bear full responsibility here, but the issue is different when children are involved, simply because they don't know their rights. I can accept that an abused spouse needs to have the bravery to step forward and tell the police about it, and then I think they should expect the police to do something about it. An adult in a relationship like this can be expected to take that much responsibility on themselves.
However, a 6 year old is in a different position. It's quite possible that the only people who would be in a position to explain their rights to them are the ones abusing them. We consider a child to be virtuous if they accept what their parents say out of respect for their authority. In a normal household, children need to accept what their parents say and do even if it's something they don't like or agree with. But we're saying that there's this line that adults can cross and children should be automatically aware of where this line is drawn. We have no effective communication channel to educate children of their rights. After all, can you imagine a public service announcement during Sesame Street that tried to educate children about what inappropriate touching is? There would be an outcry. But when I was young, I remember these PSA's with that kid from Webster talking about this, but as a kid, I didn't know what he was talking about because they were trying to keep it politically correct, which made it useless.
The whole thing is quite frustrating. Both parents and kids need equal rights. We can't have a nanny state, but we can't just dismiss it as some "think of the children" rhetoric because we've all been on the internet and we know what's out there. It's a problem.
True, but back to the original article, unless you made income in the game that was more than the monthly fee you're paying, you'd never have to pay any tax.
Also, since the value of your "money" in game isn't in actual dollars, you wouldn't be taxed on it until you "realized" the profit, meaning sell your character or account, or sell your "gold" for real money. If you never sell anything in exchange for cash, you never realize a profit. It's the same as if you own stocks and the stock price goes up. You don't pay taxes on the capital gains until you actually sell the stock. It works the same with art, etc. (AFAIK).
You lost the same freedoms that non-drinkers lost during prohibition. Just because you're not excercising all your freedoms doesn't mean you haven't lost any. The US government now has the ability to imprison you *without evidence*. The administration (not just this one but any one in the future) can call up the CIA/FBI, tell them that they have reason to believe you are a terrorist and you will be put in jail with no access to a lawyer, no phone call, no trial, nothing. You will stay there indefinitely.
Now, I'm sure Bush is the most moral person on the planet, so HE would never do that, but you've now opened the door for *some* future administrator to claim that one of his more radical political opponents is a terrorist and that political rival will disappear, effectively becoming a political prisoner, just like Mandela was in South Africa. Only nobody will know where this person even went.
With that kind of power, it's inevitable that some day the US will become a place where people are afraid to openly criticize their government.
I have to agree with you. I would suggest a half-way approach: give this gear only to the squad leader, or perhaps the IC and 2IC. Let the troops focus on their job, but give the person leading more situational awareness so he can make better command decisions.
I think what you are is called a libertarian. A libertarian supports both individual social freedoms and economic freedoms and wants to limit governments' roles to national defense (military), personal/property protection (police) and enforcement of contracts (civil).
Since the people with the means tend not to reproduce as much, and the people without the means tend to breed like rabbits, I would have to say, YES, that would be an improvement. I think modern society is selectively breeding out successful people.
First of all, this guy is way behind the times. Secondly, FPGAs are significantly more expensive than ASICs. Third, their performance is slower. What he's suggesting is akin to building all new homes out of lego in case we change our minds about the design after it's delivered. Nobody would go for it because we live in the Walmart society now, where price is the only motivating factor in purchases. Nobody wants to have to download a patch to their brand new widget either, just because the vendor couldn't take the time to debug it before shipping (not that we don't have the same situation with firmware revisions even today).
I'm trying to relate this to television advertising and I'm having a hard time with it. On Google if you type in Xbox as a search and one of the sponsored links is to sell you PS3's, to me that's no different than if you watch a gaming show that reviews the new Xbox and the advertisements during the show include ads for the PS3. The advertisers want to target people who might be interested in their product.
Now, if the top sponsored link was for some home-built gaming rig called an X-boxx, that tried to pass itself off as the real thing, then I'd call that trademark infringement, which Microsoft would already have the legal right to defend. As long as the search results are still there and can't be hijacked, it's up to the advertisers to try and place their ads in front of the most receptive audience possible.
It wouldn't matter, tiny black holes go away on their own.
According to the math and our UNTESTED theories of how black holes behave, we THINK they probably go away due to Hawking radiation. Now before someone attempts to do this in the vicinity of our solar system, I think it should be put up for a little public debate on whether or not it's absolutely necessary.
I suggest we wait to hear from an alien civilization who has tried it first.
Slashdot Mirror
I was accused of being too pessimistic, so I went and read a little about the subject. The most interesting thing I found was a book by Julie Norem called "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking".
She puts forward a case that optimism/pessimism is a result of how your personality reacts to stress. Optimists tend to ignore the things that could go wrong, so they don't get stressed in the first place, and are therefore happier people. When bad things do go wrong, optimists tend to relate it to external causes. On the other hand, pessimists are pessimists because they have a tendency to be anxious. They immediately foresee the risks of each situation (due to their personality, not a conscious decision) and therefore they map out alternatives to each bad outcome until they've relieved their stress by feeling confident that, no matter what happens, they have a plan for every eventuality. When things still go wrong, pessimists tend to ask themselves what they could have done differently to avoid the bad outcome (internalizing it).
When an optimist and a pessimist face a situation together, the pessimist causes stress in the optimist by pointing out what could go wrong. The optimist causes stress in the pessimist by refusing to make contingency plans.
Once I realized all this, I was able to continue making contingency plans to keep my own stress under control, but I am now more careful about voicing my internal thought process around people who I know are optimists.
Canada never separated from Britain entirely. It gained self-governance in 1867 when the British North America Act was passed in the British parliament, and rewrote its own constitution in 1982. Queen Elizabeth II is still Canada's official head of state. At least for a little while longer.
There's a company in Ottawa that's working on cellulose ethanol as well. The company is Iogen Corporation. They have information on the process too. I first heard about them when I was at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas event, and there was a guest speaker from Iogen who talked about the similarities between ethanol production and brewing (i.e. some of the industry knowledge is transferrable).
That was my first thought. The point of Street View isn't to take pictures of people anyway, they just happen to be in the way.
That's an interesting idea. If they're just in the way, then all Google has to do is run enough passes up and down the street. A computer could then compare the images and only use parts of the image that remain static from pass to pass. If they can't seem to find a static image for a given location (like a water fountain, animatronic sign, etc.) then you flag that for identification by a human, or you just blur that part out. You'd obviously be able to tell where the image had been spliced together (due to different lighting, etc.) but it could work. Goodness knows google has the computing power to do it.
The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced. Worse (more intrusive) actually, since RAM must be slowed to be recorded. RAM is as ephemeral as air.
:)
I disagree. The correct "meat space" equivalent would be that you have to produce the telephone number that you wrote down for your wife on the whiteboard by the phone (i.e. all notes on the whiteboard must be transcribed to a more permanent media because once recorded on the white board, they are technically documents). I use phone number as an example because it's similar to an IP address.
To go along the lines you're describing, I happen to use VoIP at my house for phone service and all conversations exist in RAM at some point (at least in my router or on the telephone adapter). Could I be required to log all the data because it technically exists as a document when it's in RAM? I have caller ID and the incoming caller's number certainly exists in RAM at some point - could that be subpoena'd?
That's food for thought.
I'm surprised they make a mushroom head pb guard. The whole idea of a red mushroom head is to make it highly visible and easy to push (e.g. when one hand is caught in the machinery and you're groping wildly with the other hand to hit the e-stop). I have been working with such things for 6 years now and have never seen a use for one. But leave it to Allen-Bradley to make some part that only 3 people will buy in a year, then charge you $100 for the privilege. :)
my guess is, it started getting called 'intelligent software' when it started to have more 'if' 'ands' and 'buts', because this new level of complexity made previous software 'simple' by contrast.
I would assume that sophisticated game AI algorithms wouldn't use boolean logic as much as some kind of "fuzzy" logic. That is, it would take into account the number, strength and proximity of known enemies, adding up to some "threat level", compare that to its own "capability level" which includes things like health, available firepower, proximity of friendlies, etc., then applies a "personality factor" which makes that unit more or less agressive, etc. All that is fed into a function that decides the next move.
While humans have many advantages, when you're talking about combat, most soldiers react based on their training because there isn't a lot of time to think. Therefore it may be able to create AI that follows the same basic "twitch" style of gameplay as a human if you tried hard. The difference would come after the encounter when a human reflects on the game and adapts their gameplay, whereas the AI would act virtually the same every time.
The same idea applies to the salaried individual if you realize that you can still use your spare time to make more money in your field of expertise. I, for instance, am salaried, but sometimes I do some on-the-side work (with my employer's permission) and can set billing rates considerably higher than what I'm making per hour. Of course, I have to pay taxes, etc. But the opportunity for the salaried banker to go out and make more money with his spare time than the good he's doing by ladelling stew is still there. Maybe he could do peoples taxes, give investment advice, write for a financial periodical, etc.
I had to sign an NDA for my current job, but did quite a bit of research before agreeing. The HR person trying to get me to sign it said, "these aren't enforceable in a court anyway." So I asked, "why do I have to sign it then?" I dug around and determined that most companies won't bother trying to enforce it unless it's a blatant threat to their business. Even then, the court will enforce a time limitation (the one I signed was limited to 1 year after leaving). Even so, as a citizen, I have a right to pursue employment in my chosen career path so if the NDA violates this *constitutional* right, it gets trumped by the constitution. Therefore, I negotiated an additional clause be added that specifically said that the NDA could not prevent me from obtaining employment in my field in the area of the country I've chosen to live. I figure that protects me well enough.
Also, while lawyers never seem to be reasonable people, the executives of companies typically are if you cultivate some mutual respect. Show that you care about protecting their interests but that you're also concerned about your own rights, and they will most likely be reasonable.
Also, make sure you don't leave on bad terms. When I left my last job, it was on good terms even though I went to a competitor. I made sure to respect my old employers' interests when at the new job, and that proves my integrity to the new employer.
If you're interviewing at a company that doesn't "get it", then you should probably keep looking. There are good companies out there with rational people at the helm.
That's pretty dumb, in my opinion. That's like saying, "Should trespassers be held liable for trespassing when the property owners only put a sign up saying "No Trespassing" but refuse to fence their property?"
"Sure officer, I walk across that old lady's back yard every day on my way to school, but at first she wasn't even locking the gate, and when she did put a lock on it, all I had to do was lift the gate off the hinges. It's obvious she's not taking responsibility for keeping people out of her back yard."
That sounds ridiculous but at our old house, students would cut through our back yard from time to time, and once they left the gate open, we got home and let the dog out the back door, and the next thing you know the dog's roaming around the front yard. If my dog had been hit by a car, I would be well within my rights to hold the person who left the gate open accountable (morally anyway).
College is a weird time when I can remember having odd ideas about liability. Well, I was wrong, and so is anyone who doesn't take responsibility for their actions. Leaving my front door unlocked does NOT make it OK to enter my house without permission. In fact the cops will agree with me.
It's quite possible that most people who search for "travel agency" online don't want to see "Dick and Jane's Travel, Fargo, ND" when they're in Phoenix, AZ. They probably want Travelocity, etc. If I want to find a small Mom and Pop type place because I want that type of boutique shop, I either look in the Yellow Pages or do some other kind of local search. Google is for searching the whole internet and finding the *most* relevant site to your search terms.
If you read about creating a successful website (without using bad practices), it's about writing *good* content, determining a target audience, then figuring out what search terms a person who wants to read your stuff would be using and making sure that the keywords, title, and first paragraph, etc., contain those terms. Mom and Pop places can certainly do that.
It's page rank (incoming links) that kills "local" sites. If you want your site to be considered highly relevant for "widgets" then you need *lots* of sites from around the internet to link to your site with the keyword "widgets". If you're a Mom & Pop place and you're only relevant to local people, then only local sites are liable to link to you. To fix this, Google is trying to integrate a Google local search into their maps.google.com page, so you can do a geographic search. But they can't do this for all sites unless pages identify their geographic co-ordinates, if applicable (see GeoTagging).
From what I understand of the book "Blue Ocean Strategy", this is what Nintendo did to position themselves back on top of the gaming market. Instead of playing in the same "Red Ocean" as the PS3 and Xbox360, they decided to create a different market niche which hadn't been developed (i.e. older gamers, less hard core gamers, even people who hadn't gamed before). They realized they could target this niche with a lower price point and could give up the fancy graphics if they concentrated on simple fun games. The Wii is the result. It means that they have little, if any, competition in their target market, which means they don't really have to compete on price - they can charge enough to make the product profitable, and the customers will pay because there's nothing quite the same to compare it against.
That's why the Wii is beating Sony and Microsoft.
You give the people too much credit. Keeping up with the Joneses will take care of adoption of HD-DVD. People who shop at Walmart are just the kind of people who care about looking rich at any cost.
s/Walmart/Costco/g
This depends a lot on the website. On facebook you can choose who can see your profile, so in my case only my friends can see it. Other people can see my name, a picture (I seem to be the only one with a picture of me without alcohol in the shot) and can see who my friends are. However, on my profile, I put all my contact information so my old school friends can contact me if they want to.
I'm Canadian, BTW. Yes, you're probably quite accurate in this description, and there is an election looming (it can come any time the Prime Minister thinks he has enough support to win, and they're teetering on the edge of a majority in the polls).
However, there was also a recent article in a popular magazine in Canada (MacLean's) that was talking about how the internet has contributed to a rise in child porn due to the anonymity and the sense they get that there are others out there like them. The article was well written and presented some disturbing statistics that made me glad I don't have kids yet.
It certainly made me wonder if there's anything we can do. If the stats are accurate, a sizeable percentage of the victims are abused by family members, even parents. It also functions like an addiction and there doesn't appear to be a cure. Someone who wasn't aware of the benefits that freedom of speech on the internet gives us would probably suggest regulating it to at least stop the incentive to share pictures (therefore slowing down the production of the material). This MP is obviously a person who doesn't value freedom of speech, and it's not a problem confined to any one country, I assure you. I worked in the US long enough to know there are lots of pro-nanny state people there too.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that we are failing to protect the rights of these children. I absolutely believe that the people perpetrating the crime need to bear full responsibility here, but the issue is different when children are involved, simply because they don't know their rights. I can accept that an abused spouse needs to have the bravery to step forward and tell the police about it, and then I think they should expect the police to do something about it. An adult in a relationship like this can be expected to take that much responsibility on themselves.
However, a 6 year old is in a different position. It's quite possible that the only people who would be in a position to explain their rights to them are the ones abusing them. We consider a child to be virtuous if they accept what their parents say out of respect for their authority. In a normal household, children need to accept what their parents say and do even if it's something they don't like or agree with. But we're saying that there's this line that adults can cross and children should be automatically aware of where this line is drawn. We have no effective communication channel to educate children of their rights. After all, can you imagine a public service announcement during Sesame Street that tried to educate children about what inappropriate touching is? There would be an outcry. But when I was young, I remember these PSA's with that kid from Webster talking about this, but as a kid, I didn't know what he was talking about because they were trying to keep it politically correct, which made it useless.
The whole thing is quite frustrating. Both parents and kids need equal rights. We can't have a nanny state, but we can't just dismiss it as some "think of the children" rhetoric because we've all been on the internet and we know what's out there. It's a problem.
Sorry for straying off topic.
True, but back to the original article, unless you made income in the game that was more than the monthly fee you're paying, you'd never have to pay any tax.
Also, since the value of your "money" in game isn't in actual dollars, you wouldn't be taxed on it until you "realized" the profit, meaning sell your character or account, or sell your "gold" for real money. If you never sell anything in exchange for cash, you never realize a profit. It's the same as if you own stocks and the stock price goes up. You don't pay taxes on the capital gains until you actually sell the stock. It works the same with art, etc. (AFAIK).
You lost the same freedoms that non-drinkers lost during prohibition. Just because you're not excercising all your freedoms doesn't mean you haven't lost any. The US government now has the ability to imprison you *without evidence*. The administration (not just this one but any one in the future) can call up the CIA/FBI, tell them that they have reason to believe you are a terrorist and you will be put in jail with no access to a lawyer, no phone call, no trial, nothing. You will stay there indefinitely.
Now, I'm sure Bush is the most moral person on the planet, so HE would never do that, but you've now opened the door for *some* future administrator to claim that one of his more radical political opponents is a terrorist and that political rival will disappear, effectively becoming a political prisoner, just like Mandela was in South Africa. Only nobody will know where this person even went.
With that kind of power, it's inevitable that some day the US will become a place where people are afraid to openly criticize their government.
I have to agree with you. I would suggest a half-way approach: give this gear only to the squad leader, or perhaps the IC and 2IC. Let the troops focus on their job, but give the person leading more situational awareness so he can make better command decisions.
Where I work they develop ASICs for spaceflight so they only build a relative handful, and it doesn't amortize out as well.
I thought we were talking about consumer level devices here, sold in the quantities of 100,000 plus.
I think what you are is called a libertarian. A libertarian supports both individual social freedoms and economic freedoms and wants to limit governments' roles to national defense (military), personal/property protection (police) and enforcement of contracts (civil).
Since the people with the means tend not to reproduce as much, and the people without the means tend to breed like rabbits, I would have to say, YES, that would be an improvement. I think modern society is selectively breeding out successful people.
First of all, this guy is way behind the times. Secondly, FPGAs are significantly more expensive than ASICs. Third, their performance is slower. What he's suggesting is akin to building all new homes out of lego in case we change our minds about the design after it's delivered. Nobody would go for it because we live in the Walmart society now, where price is the only motivating factor in purchases. Nobody wants to have to download a patch to their brand new widget either, just because the vendor couldn't take the time to debug it before shipping (not that we don't have the same situation with firmware revisions even today).
I'm trying to relate this to television advertising and I'm having a hard time with it. On Google if you type in Xbox as a search and one of the sponsored links is to sell you PS3's, to me that's no different than if you watch a gaming show that reviews the new Xbox and the advertisements during the show include ads for the PS3. The advertisers want to target people who might be interested in their product.
Now, if the top sponsored link was for some home-built gaming rig called an X-boxx, that tried to pass itself off as the real thing, then I'd call that trademark infringement, which Microsoft would already have the legal right to defend. As long as the search results are still there and can't be hijacked, it's up to the advertisers to try and place their ads in front of the most receptive audience possible.
So, it seems to me that the Utah law is wrong.
I imagine it's probably because ethanol is a renewable fuel that we have tons of and actually contributes to the combustion with less emissions.
It wouldn't matter, tiny black holes go away on their own.
According to the math and our UNTESTED theories of how black holes behave, we THINK they probably go away due to Hawking radiation. Now before someone attempts to do this in the vicinity of our solar system, I think it should be put up for a little public debate on whether or not it's absolutely necessary.
I suggest we wait to hear from an alien civilization who has tried it first.