I mean seriously -- if we think our technology and culture is okay for the entire planet, why should we stop here? On the contrary-- it's not fair to assume that our technology and culture is okay for the entire planet. According to Wikipedia, Roddenberry built his conception of the Prime Directive based on his belief that Christian missionaries were unduly interfering in primitive cultures. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_directive#Variation_and_Origin ]
The negative effects of contact with primitive cultures is well-documented, with the development of "cargo cults" and the like [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult ]. Certainly there are benefits for the culture (AIDS prevention and clean water in Africa, as well as the OLPC program come readily to mind) but past experience raises some issues.
I think the real question should be if we need a Prime Directive for Earth itself, not whether we should disregard any possible interactions with extraterrestrial cultures.
While I admire your high regard for the common sense of the common man, I'd be willing to bet that the most egregious infractions of good security sense are those perpetrated by people who don't know any better, rather than those who willfully disregard the risks. I've seen friends of mine--students among the brightest in the nation, no less--check their bank account balance on a public terminal connected to open Wi-Fi in a hotel lobby, and then shut the browser window and walk away--no logout, no cleared cookies or browser history, nothing.
On the other hand, people who are cavalier about their private information end up being the ones who suffer the consequences. Let's hear it for a little poetic justice, neh?
I was thinking along those same lines. Security failures leading to information leaks are all too common nowadays; from the WSJ blog:
Only 36% said that their business suffered such a security breach â" although 2% suffered 10 or more. The bad news is that the average severity of breaches continues to rise: IT pros said that the breaches they suffered in 2007 were more than twice as severe as the ones in 2005. http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/17/bad-security-is-not-all-your-fault/?mod=WSJBlog
People flip out when their email is stolen; talk of identity theft starts when Social Security and credit card numbers are involved. How bad would a DNA database security breach be? That all depends on how the attacker chose to interpret the data-- or, more importantly, the attacker's highest bidder.
If it's just dangerous gases to worry about (??), why not use suction to draw them away?
From Wikipedia:
"Volatile organic compounds (VOC), organic acids, and combustion products are the principal emissions from coffee processing... including alcohols, aldehydes, organic acids, and nitrogen and sulfur compounds. Because roasters are typically natural gas-fired, carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions result from fuel combustion."
I can only imagine it would be better to consolidate the emission control systems for roasting and subsequent de-gassing, rather than have separate systems for the roaster and the bean storage.
I'm no organic chemist, but the byproducts listed above sound poisonous at high levels. Regardless of the safety risk, however, I can only imagine that coffee snobs would frown upon their gourmet beans mingling with random aromatic hydrocarbons and sulfur compounds-- these don't sound too appetizing, regardless of the health risk.
I'd imagine that messing with the cooling process would subsequently mess with the nature of the oils and byproducts formed, again altering the flavor. Further research would be needed to support this claim.
And now for a shameless endorsement: I bought an Aerobie (R) Aeropress to accomodate my coffee needs in close living quarters (read: frat house). To date, it is the quickest, cleanest, simplest coffee apparatus I've ever used, and produces a sweet--yes, literally sweet-- and aromatic espresso/latte/Americano that surpasses the local Seattle's Best or Starbucks by a mile. It's cheap and available from multiple sources, and I recommend that every coffee fanatic here tries one before investing in a more expensive coffee/espresso rig--especially a walk-in one.
I remember that! I've just spent the last semester studying the properties of materials affecting conductivity, and my main conclusion has been... copper is pretty darn good for the price. Sure, there are some fancy things you can do like doping it with silver and the like, but the addition of most things will actually raise the resistivity of the alloy. For good hi-fi, all you need is pure copper, and I'd be very surprised if Monster has a patent on that.
By the way, this isn't the first time Monster Cables has used frivolous lawsuits to their advantage-- they also have a habit of suing anyone with the word "Monster" in their name:
From the MERL company site: "MERL's mission--our assignment from MELCO--is two fold:
1. To generate highly significant intellectual property (papers, patents and prototypes) in areas of importance to MELCO.
2. To locate organizations within MELCO that can benefit from this technology and through close partnership with them, significantly impact MELCO's business." [www.merl.com/company]
This is hardly the complete blueprint for a revolutionary security system; it is, however, an innovative (if limited) system of workplace monitoring that may well prove to be "highly significant intellectual property" if applied correctly.
Moreover, the need for security and the right to privacy have been at odds for years now; the fact that someone has taken the initiative to innovate towards a reasonable compromise is laudable, even if the idea didn't spring full-fledged from the head of its architect.
As with so many things, I believe Douglas Adams had something to say on the topic of "smart" climate control:
"The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had started off as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the problem that ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it had solved the problem reasonably well up to the point when someone invented air-conditioning, which solved the problem far more throbbingly. And that was all well and good provided you could stand the noise and the dribbling until someone else came up with something even sexier and smarter than air-conditioning which was called in-building climate control...
"The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were that it was thrillingly more expensive, involved a huge amount of sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far better at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people wanted to breathe than mere people did.
"It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn't muck up the sophisticated calculations which the system was making on their behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed shut." [Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless"]
In the age of cheap and ubiquitous computing power, it's easy to forget one critical thing: human judgment is actually pretty good for figuring out what humans want; just because we -can- default to a computer doesn't mean we should.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see how big of an explosion this thing could render in Crysis, a la this video: http://www.wegame.com/watch/Crysis_Physic_5000_Car_Explosion/
5000 cars? 10,000? Could it render the entire island nation going up in flames at a high framerate? These are the questions that keep me up at night.
The negative effects of contact with primitive cultures is well-documented, with the development of "cargo cults" and the like [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult ]. Certainly there are benefits for the culture (AIDS prevention and clean water in Africa, as well as the OLPC program come readily to mind) but past experience raises some issues.
I think the real question should be if we need a Prime Directive for Earth itself, not whether we should disregard any possible interactions with extraterrestrial cultures.
While I admire your high regard for the common sense of the common man, I'd be willing to bet that the most egregious infractions of good security sense are those perpetrated by people who don't know any better, rather than those who willfully disregard the risks. I've seen friends of mine--students among the brightest in the nation, no less--check their bank account balance on a public terminal connected to open Wi-Fi in a hotel lobby, and then shut the browser window and walk away--no logout, no cleared cookies or browser history, nothing.
On the other hand, people who are cavalier about their private information end up being the ones who suffer the consequences. Let's hear it for a little poetic justice, neh?
People flip out when their email is stolen; talk of identity theft starts when Social Security and credit card numbers are involved. How bad would a DNA database security breach be? That all depends on how the attacker chose to interpret the data-- or, more importantly, the attacker's highest bidder.
If it's just dangerous gases to worry about (??), why not use suction to draw them away?
From Wikipedia:"Volatile organic compounds (VOC), organic acids, and combustion products are the principal emissions from coffee processing... including alcohols, aldehydes, organic acids, and nitrogen and sulfur compounds. Because roasters are typically natural gas-fired, carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions result from fuel combustion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_roasting#Emissions_and_control
I can only imagine it would be better to consolidate the emission control systems for roasting and subsequent de-gassing, rather than have separate systems for the roaster and the bean storage.
I'm no organic chemist, but the byproducts listed above sound poisonous at high levels. Regardless of the safety risk, however, I can only imagine that coffee snobs would frown upon their gourmet beans mingling with random aromatic hydrocarbons and sulfur compounds-- these don't sound too appetizing, regardless of the health risk.
I'd imagine that messing with the cooling process would subsequently mess with the nature of the oils and byproducts formed, again altering the flavor. Further research would be needed to support this claim.
And now for a shameless endorsement: I bought an Aerobie (R) Aeropress to accomodate my coffee needs in close living quarters (read: frat house). To date, it is the quickest, cleanest, simplest coffee apparatus I've ever used, and produces a sweet--yes, literally sweet-- and aromatic espresso/latte/Americano that surpasses the local Seattle's Best or Starbucks by a mile. It's cheap and available from multiple sources, and I recommend that every coffee fanatic here tries one before investing in a more expensive coffee/espresso rig--especially a walk-in one.
I remember that! I've just spent the last semester studying the properties of materials affecting conductivity, and my main conclusion has been... copper is pretty darn good for the price. Sure, there are some fancy things you can do like doping it with silver and the like, but the addition of most things will actually raise the resistivity of the alloy. For good hi-fi, all you need is pure copper, and I'd be very surprised if Monster has a patent on that.
By the way, this isn't the first time Monster Cables has used frivolous lawsuits to their advantage-- they also have a habit of suing anyone with the word "Monster" in their name:
http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/HallOfShame/MonsterCable/MonsterCable.shtml
From the MERL company site:
"MERL's mission--our assignment from MELCO--is two fold:
1. To generate highly significant intellectual property (papers, patents and prototypes) in areas of importance to MELCO.
2. To locate organizations within MELCO that can benefit from this technology and through close partnership with them, significantly impact MELCO's business." [www.merl.com/company]
This is hardly the complete blueprint for a revolutionary security system; it is, however, an innovative (if limited) system of workplace monitoring that may well prove to be "highly significant intellectual property" if applied correctly.
Moreover, the need for security and the right to privacy have been at odds for years now; the fact that someone has taken the initiative to innovate towards a reasonable compromise is laudable, even if the idea didn't spring full-fledged from the head of its architect.
As with so many things, I believe Douglas Adams had something to say on the topic of "smart" climate control:
"The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had started off as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the problem that ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it had solved the problem reasonably well up to the point when someone invented air-conditioning, which solved the problem far more throbbingly. And that was all well and good provided you could stand the noise and the dribbling until someone else came up with something even sexier and smarter than air-conditioning which was called in-building climate control...
"The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were that it was thrillingly more expensive, involved a huge amount of sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far better at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people wanted to breathe than mere people did.
"It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn't muck up the sophisticated calculations which the system was making on their behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed shut." [Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless"]
In the age of cheap and ubiquitous computing power, it's easy to forget one critical thing: human judgment is actually pretty good for figuring out what humans want; just because we -can- default to a computer doesn't mean we should.