one on which web sites cannot distinguish the fact that I'm accessing it on a tablet so that I won't get any more "We're sorry, but we don't have the content rights to display this on mobile devices" messages
I get that message from some sites when I disable flash on my desktop computer. Shrug. It's their loss if I don't browse them.
had more netbook makers stuck with Linux it still would have been a hard matchup against the iPad which was a more polished Windows alternative on a small device
I have an Asus eeePC with the original Xandros Linux on it and I can't imagine what more polishing I would want. My only complaint is that Xandros repositories have only the basic essential packages, and some packages have a few dependency problems when installed from Debian repos. I have tried installing other distros on it, but Xandros works so well that it isn't worth the bother.
All in all, for the purposes that the netbook is intended for, Linux is a perfect solution. I may not be able to run autocad or photoshop on it, but who would want to do it in that hardware anyhow?
I'm waiting for an improved tablet. What I would like to see is a tablet with an attached keyboard. Let's say, a device where the tablet and keyboard are joined by a hinge, so that it can be closed while not in use.
These aren't leaps and bounds of tech, they're just leaps and bounds of people actually making use of the damned hardware since they don't have to sell their second child to pay for it.
Crowdsourcing I guess? Instead of 2-3 sterile environments trying to figure out robot vision algorithms, now a bajillion institutes and hobbyists are working on the problem
Working on *which* problem exactly?
I don't see any of those people working on artificial vision algorithms. What they are doing is using a "good enough" vision algorithm which comes bundled with the hardware to develop applications for artificial vision.
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself.
Be careful with what you want, because you may get it.
Check this graph in TFA. Notice the sharp drop in the financial sector right in the middle of the graph. See how it ends?
That's right, the biggest slump that ever happened in the financial sector ended in the biggest war ever. And that's not coincidence, when the economy goes bad people will fight for the crumbles.
And before people start blaming the free market and claiming that regulation would have avoided that, take a look at the sharp rise in the 1920s. That's no coincidence either, that big rise that preceded the big fall happened when the British government tried to hold the pound to an artificially high value.
As Wikipedia says:: "The gold standard was suspended at the outbreak of the war in 1914, with Bank of England and Treasury notes becoming legal tender. Prior to World War I, the United Kingdom had one of the world's strongest economies, holding 40% of the world's overseas investments. However, by the end of the war the country owed £850 million (£30.7 billion as of 2011).[13], mostly to the United States, with interest costing the country some 40% of all government spending. In an attempt to resume stability, a variation on the gold standard was reintroduced in 1925, under which the currency was fixed to gold at its pre-war peg, although people were only able to exchange their currency for gold bullion, rather than for coins. "
Had the Bank of England never been allowed to issue fiat money to finance WWI, and had they not been allowed to try to set an artificially high value to that money after the war, neither the Depression of the 1930s or WWII would have happened.
When they spend the money, it often trickles down to others that actually need it quite a bit.
On the contrary, football creates a trickle up economy. Where do the million$ spent in all those contracts come from?
But that's not the worse part of it. Most of the best players today come from poor countries in Africa or Latin America. When kids see those stars on TV and hear about the millions they make it looks like a great career choice.
After wasting their childhood playing hooky in the backyard soccer field, they learn that only a player in a million gets millionaire contracts, and the others are left semi-illiterate with no marketable skills.
Too bad Discovery and NatGeo aren't available in free-to-air TV, while football games are. The kids who would profit most from those channels don't have cable at home.
Alright, time for some standards: "Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it?"
Python is a fine language, except for its future.
When a language changes the fundamental way a mathematics operator works from one version to the other, you cannot invest your time working on that language.
I don't want to go carefully over all the code I ever wrote to make sure that every '/' is changed to '//' wherever I want '5/2' to mean 2 and not 2.5. I have more important things to do.
Any screwball can buy a high powered 10 meter radio and have it adapted to operate on Citizen's band - then add a kicker that puts out 1600 or more watts.
It would truly be funny to see inspectors trying to enforce copyright nonsense at a truck inspection station!
That would be easy, just check for the trucks with a 19 inch rack, plus the air conditioning units needed to cool that beast. All in all, a 1.6 kW transmitter plus support equipment would weigh over a ton and fill a room.
Not to mention the antenna, when you have over a kilowatt of RF power you need to be sure you have an efficient antenna, otherwise the power would be dissipated all over the place instead of being radiated. Consider that a typical kitchen electric oven uses that range of power, you don't want it spread at random around you.
Hint: in RF equipment "1600 watts" isn't treated as cavalierly as in audio marketing. Those are truly 1.6 kW of radiated power, not the 50 watts or so that audio equipment labeled as "1600 watts" put out.
If you have even a single drink, your reaction times go down and you're a little more likely to cause an accident.
More likely than whom? I've been playing car simulation games ever since the first force-feedback wheels were launched in the 1990s. My reflexes are probably much faster than those of the vast majority of drivers on the street. They could be impaired and I'd still drive more safely than many people who never drink.
Perhaps the law should not aim for a given alcohol content in the blood, but for the reflex times. Instead of a breathalizer, cops could carry equipment to measure reflex times or other factors that impair driving safety.
However, I have no illusion that some rational law like this could ever pass. There are fanatics who like controlling others, there are governments depending on money from tickets, there are too many people who are swayed by propaganda such as the one you mention: "drink a drop of alcohol and you become an incontrollable murderer" .
each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in
Because that specialization is beneficial to the organism. A generic organism, capable of surviving in any environment, would be less efficient in any of those environments than a specialist organism.
That's generally true for any system, living or not. For instance, the military sometimes use amphibious vehicles, which are capable of running both on water and on land. Apart from that flexibility, those vehicles have no advantage over specialized vehicles, boats and cars, that are capable only of running on water or land.
I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.
You just need two. It says so in the bible.
With this important restriction: those two must be one of each sex.
"It's not a derelict hulk scuttled in a delicate ecosystem! It's a hub for a new coral reef!"
The procedure for creating artificial reefs takes several months. The ship is carefully scrubbed clean, all toxic substances are removed before scuttling.
And I suppose male and female plugs will be the next to be attacked?
Absolutely. To call plugs "male" and "female" offends the sensitivity of the gay community, since it implies that it's not right to plug a male into another male.
Just like no person who believes in God could possibly think that an almighty, all-knowing transcendental God for whom time is meaningless could have used evolution as the means of creating life on Earth, setting first causes into motion (i.e. big bang) content with the certainty that the result will unfold as desired
Raymond Chandler had a character in his 1958 novel "Playback" say the following:
"If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the Universe at all."
For me, that says everything that needs to be said about belief in the anthropomorphic god of Christianism. Catholics even have a word for that paradox: "theodicy".
The idea of a god that is infinitely powerful, yet has a thought process similar to ours is ludicrous. Yet that idea permeates all Christian religions. Imagine this, a god that's so powerful, what does he care if we praise him or not?
Does a scientist care if ants are aware of his existence or not? Imagine the recently deceased David Rumelhart. Do you think that, when he studied artificial neural networks, his aim was to create a neural network to praise him?
When Christians say "praise the Lord", what they are doing is to create a god to their own likeness. Only an extraordinarily vain person would insist on his creatures praising him, and such person certainly wouldn't have the capability to create a universe.
If you were to build advanced green houses out in the middle of nowhere with plentiful sunlight (Nevada) you could lose very little water (high efficiency) and grow some crops year round
Back to reality now: how much would it cost to cover Nevada with glass, or whatever material you use in your greenhouses?
Greenhouses are for luxury items, an alternative to transportation from distant lands. They will not solve mass starvation problems.
TFA says "The amicus brief from the U.S. solicitor general says that the USPTO can be trusted to be the expert, over a jury".
I had always thought the correct procedure was for experts from both sides to present their opinions in court and let the jury sort it out. It seems that the US government now believes their experts are above juries, courts, and all that shit.
What matters to them is that "the preponderance standard would diminish the expected value of patents." Raising the expected value of everything seems to be the golden rule today. I have an absolute right to all the profit I expect. Sigh...
Most of the literature I've read regarding STW and STTW radar monitors the doppler shift on the return signal looking for a periodic ~3 to 6Hz signal corresponding to the typical respiration rate of humans
Doppler shift of what? To detect breathing, you would have to detect the very faint movement of the human diaphragm. Through a wall.
The best analogy I can come up with right now is this: imagine the TSA guy wearing boxing gloves while he gropes you and trying to discover if you are wearing long johns underneath your corduroy jeans.
why ALL aircraft transmissions (civilian or otherwise) aren't encrypted.... we're only talking about a few hundred tons of metal flying through the air with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
WHAT could go wrong? Let me tell you what could go wrong. There's a hundred tons of metal flying around. Its position is *secret* because some dumbfuck thought it would be better to encrypt all its transmissions.
Then comes uncle Bill in his Cessna. He doesn't know where the big passenger aircraft is, because its position is *secret*, since some dumbfuck though it necessary to encrypt all transmissions from the aircraft.
Do you begin to see now why aircraft transmissions *cannot* be encrypted?!!!
OK, I know your next argument; Imagine all aircraft transmissions are encrypted and all aircraft must have a receiver able to decode those transmissions. Only registered aircraft owners have access to the receivers, so what could possibly go wrong?
Think of the thousands of small airfields all over the world. Climb a fence, cut a padlock at night, pick a receiver. Or buy it from a salvage firm, grease some hands, whatever. It wouldn't stay secret very long (ask Sony about that).
Slashdot Mirror
one on which web sites cannot distinguish the fact that I'm accessing it on a tablet so that I won't get any more "We're sorry, but we don't have the content rights to display this on mobile devices" messages
I get that message from some sites when I disable flash on my desktop computer. Shrug. It's their loss if I don't browse them.
had more netbook makers stuck with Linux it still would have been a hard matchup against the iPad which was a more polished Windows alternative on a small device
I have an Asus eeePC with the original Xandros Linux on it and I can't imagine what more polishing I would want. My only complaint is that Xandros repositories have only the basic essential packages, and some packages have a few dependency problems when installed from Debian repos. I have tried installing other distros on it, but Xandros works so well that it isn't worth the bother.
All in all, for the purposes that the netbook is intended for, Linux is a perfect solution. I may not be able to run autocad or photoshop on it, but who would want to do it in that hardware anyhow?
I'm waiting for an improved tablet. What I would like to see is a tablet with an attached keyboard. Let's say, a device where the tablet and keyboard are joined by a hinge, so that it can be closed while not in use.
I think I'll patent that idea right now.
These aren't leaps and bounds of tech, they're just leaps and bounds of people actually making use of the damned hardware since they don't have to sell their second child to pay for it.
Crowdsourcing I guess? Instead of 2-3 sterile environments trying to figure out robot vision algorithms, now a bajillion institutes and hobbyists are working on the problem
Working on *which* problem exactly?
I don't see any of those people working on artificial vision algorithms. What they are doing is using a "good enough" vision algorithm which comes bundled with the hardware to develop applications for artificial vision.
it's amusing people think MS has no chance in the smartphone market now (same way people mocked Kinect not too long ago).
Where they the same people who mocked Zune?
Oh BTW, plenty of men go see a production of Justin Bieber/Glitter Boys, prance, and get a pedicure... ain't nothing less manly about them!
Except that the pedicure will paint their toenails pink...
I would have expected Bill Gates to have a much, much lower Slashdot number.
And I would have expected him to have posted more than one comment.
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself.
Be careful with what you want, because you may get it.
Check this graph in TFA. Notice the sharp drop in the financial sector right in the middle of the graph. See how it ends?
That's right, the biggest slump that ever happened in the financial sector ended in the biggest war ever. And that's not coincidence, when the economy goes bad people will fight for the crumbles.
And before people start blaming the free market and claiming that regulation would have avoided that, take a look at the sharp rise in the 1920s. That's no coincidence either, that big rise that preceded the big fall happened when the British government tried to hold the pound to an artificially high value.
As Wikipedia says:: "The gold standard was suspended at the outbreak of the war in 1914, with Bank of England and Treasury notes becoming legal tender. Prior to World War I, the United Kingdom had one of the world's strongest economies, holding 40% of the world's overseas investments. However, by the end of the war the country owed £850 million (£30.7 billion as of 2011).[13], mostly to the United States, with interest costing the country some 40% of all government spending. In an attempt to resume stability, a variation on the gold standard was reintroduced in 1925, under which the currency was fixed to gold at its pre-war peg, although people were only able to exchange their currency for gold bullion, rather than for coins. "
Had the Bank of England never been allowed to issue fiat money to finance WWI, and had they not been allowed to try to set an artificially high value to that money after the war, neither the Depression of the 1930s or WWII would have happened.
When they spend the money, it often trickles down to others that actually need it quite a bit.
On the contrary, football creates a trickle up economy. Where do the million$ spent in all those contracts come from?
But that's not the worse part of it. Most of the best players today come from poor countries in Africa or Latin America. When kids see those stars on TV and hear about the millions they make it looks like a great career choice.
After wasting their childhood playing hooky in the backyard soccer field, they learn that only a player in a million gets millionaire contracts, and the others are left semi-illiterate with no marketable skills.
Too bad Discovery and NatGeo aren't available in free-to-air TV, while football games are. The kids who would profit most from those channels don't have cable at home.
Alright, time for some standards: "Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it?"
Python is a fine language, except for its future.
When a language changes the fundamental way a mathematics operator works from one version to the other, you cannot invest your time working on that language.
I don't want to go carefully over all the code I ever wrote to make sure that every '/' is changed to '//' wherever I want '5/2' to mean 2 and not 2.5. I have more important things to do.
Any screwball can buy a high powered 10 meter radio and have it adapted to operate on Citizen's band - then add a kicker that puts out 1600 or more watts.
It would truly be funny to see inspectors trying to enforce copyright nonsense at a truck inspection station!
That would be easy, just check for the trucks with a 19 inch rack, plus the air conditioning units needed to cool that beast. All in all, a 1.6 kW transmitter plus support equipment would weigh over a ton and fill a room.
Not to mention the antenna, when you have over a kilowatt of RF power you need to be sure you have an efficient antenna, otherwise the power would be dissipated all over the place instead of being radiated. Consider that a typical kitchen electric oven uses that range of power, you don't want it spread at random around you.
Hint: in RF equipment "1600 watts" isn't treated as cavalierly as in audio marketing. Those are truly 1.6 kW of radiated power, not the 50 watts or so that audio equipment labeled as "1600 watts" put out.
several species can change gender if the population is thrown too far off.
Yes, I know, humans can do this, but they are not fertile after the procedure...
If you have even a single drink, your reaction times go down and you're a little more likely to cause an accident.
More likely than whom? I've been playing car simulation games ever since the first force-feedback wheels were launched in the 1990s. My reflexes are probably much faster than those of the vast majority of drivers on the street. They could be impaired and I'd still drive more safely than many people who never drink.
Perhaps the law should not aim for a given alcohol content in the blood, but for the reflex times. Instead of a breathalizer, cops could carry equipment to measure reflex times or other factors that impair driving safety.
However, I have no illusion that some rational law like this could ever pass. There are fanatics who like controlling others, there are governments depending on money from tickets, there are too many people who are swayed by propaganda such as the one you mention: "drink a drop of alcohol and you become an incontrollable murderer" .
each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in
Because that specialization is beneficial to the organism. A generic organism, capable of surviving in any environment, would be less efficient in any of those environments than a specialist organism.
That's generally true for any system, living or not. For instance, the military sometimes use amphibious vehicles, which are capable of running both on water and on land. Apart from that flexibility, those vehicles have no advantage over specialized vehicles, boats and cars, that are capable only of running on water or land.
I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.
You just need two. It says so in the bible.
With this important restriction: those two must be one of each sex.
The US Navy have run this scam a few times...
"It's not a derelict hulk scuttled in a delicate ecosystem! It's a hub for a new coral reef!"
The procedure for creating artificial reefs takes several months. The ship is carefully scrubbed clean, all toxic substances are removed before scuttling.
And I suppose male and female plugs will be the next to be attacked?
Absolutely. To call plugs "male" and "female" offends the sensitivity of the gay community, since it implies that it's not right to plug a male into another male.
I said: "The idea of a god that is infinitely powerful, yet has a thought process similar to ours is ludicrous"
You said: "It is highly presumptuous to think that we could possibly imagine what a supernatural deity would think"
Yet from the general tone I feel like you disagree with me. Strange.
Just like no person who believes in God could possibly think that an almighty, all-knowing transcendental God for whom time is meaningless could have used evolution as the means of creating life on Earth, setting first causes into motion (i.e. big bang) content with the certainty that the result will unfold as desired
Raymond Chandler had a character in his 1958 novel "Playback" say the following:
"If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the Universe at all."
For me, that says everything that needs to be said about belief in the anthropomorphic god of Christianism. Catholics even have a word for that paradox: "theodicy".
The idea of a god that is infinitely powerful, yet has a thought process similar to ours is ludicrous. Yet that idea permeates all Christian religions. Imagine this, a god that's so powerful, what does he care if we praise him or not?
Does a scientist care if ants are aware of his existence or not? Imagine the recently deceased David Rumelhart. Do you think that, when he studied artificial neural networks, his aim was to create a neural network to praise him?
When Christians say "praise the Lord", what they are doing is to create a god to their own likeness. Only an extraordinarily vain person would insist on his creatures praising him, and such person certainly wouldn't have the capability to create a universe.
I notice other subtle attempts to discredit Iranian domestically produced equipment in the US/western press
And I note totally non-subtle attempts to glorify Iran coming from many segments of US/Western press.
The reasoning seems to go like this: "I hate the US government, Iran hates the US government, therefore Iran can do nothing wrong"
If you were to build advanced green houses out in the middle of nowhere with plentiful sunlight (Nevada) you could lose very little water (high efficiency) and grow some crops year round
Back to reality now: how much would it cost to cover Nevada with glass, or whatever material you use in your greenhouses?
Greenhouses are for luxury items, an alternative to transportation from distant lands. They will not solve mass starvation problems.
TFA says "The amicus brief from the U.S. solicitor general says that the USPTO can be trusted to be the expert, over a jury".
I had always thought the correct procedure was for experts from both sides to present their opinions in court and let the jury sort it out. It seems that the US government now believes their experts are above juries, courts, and all that shit.
What matters to them is that "the preponderance standard would diminish the expected value of patents." Raising the expected value of everything seems to be the golden rule today. I have an absolute right to all the profit I expect. Sigh...
The Wikipedia article has been hijacked by their marketing dept, it's the closest things I've seen to an advertisement in Wikipedia.
Most of the literature I've read regarding STW and STTW radar monitors the doppler shift on the return signal looking for a periodic ~3 to 6Hz signal corresponding to the typical respiration rate of humans
Doppler shift of what? To detect breathing, you would have to detect the very faint movement of the human diaphragm. Through a wall.
The best analogy I can come up with right now is this: imagine the TSA guy wearing boxing gloves while he gropes you and trying to discover if you are wearing long johns underneath your corduroy jeans.
why ALL aircraft transmissions (civilian or otherwise) aren't encrypted. ... we're only talking about a few hundred tons of metal flying through the air with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
WHAT could go wrong? Let me tell you what could go wrong. There's a hundred tons of metal flying around. Its position is *secret* because some dumbfuck thought it would be better to encrypt all its transmissions.
Then comes uncle Bill in his Cessna. He doesn't know where the big passenger aircraft is, because its position is *secret*, since some dumbfuck though it necessary to encrypt all transmissions from the aircraft.
Do you begin to see now why aircraft transmissions *cannot* be encrypted?!!!
OK, I know your next argument; Imagine all aircraft transmissions are encrypted and all aircraft must have a receiver able to decode those transmissions. Only registered aircraft owners have access to the receivers, so what could possibly go wrong?
Think of the thousands of small airfields all over the world. Climb a fence, cut a padlock at night, pick a receiver. Or buy it from a salvage firm, grease some hands, whatever. It wouldn't stay secret very long (ask Sony about that).