> If your against animal testing (not a particularly republican standpoint), you should decline virtually all medication.
Much traditional chinese medicine/treatment has been tested on humans for centuries or even longer;).
Seriously, some of it actually works in dealing with the symptoms, but might cause other problems...
For example, researchers found that a popular herb for reducing infant jaundice actually worked for reducing the jaundice, but could actually cause problems:
"Bilirubin-protein titration studies with the horse radish peroxidase method have shown that the herb is highly effective in displacing bilirubin from its protein binding. Free bilirubin is liberated in this process and this could increase the risk of brain damage in jaundiced infants. "
So I'm sure many of those traditional medicines/treatments actually have an effect and aren't just placebos. It would be good to test the "promising" ones to see what they actually do and whether the results are desirable:).
In my personal view, it's actually a good thing if people treat human embryos specially even if they're "just a bunch of cells".
You're going to have to draw an arbitrary line where a bunch of cells becomes human. No matter where you draw that arbitrary line it'll be stupid, but not drawing the line is even more stupid. Erring on the safe side is a good way of symbolically saying that "human life is special".
Most human societies have agreed that human life is special. So even if some idiot takes a GPS, wanders in the wilderness, makes emergency calls about water tasting salty, we still save him when he finally actually gets in trouble if we humanly can (we may fine him, but we still save him).
Why is special casing human life important? Even if you're an atheist, consider these: 1) Many of the psychopaths in power think they are special and everyone else isn't, so they will be very happy if they don't have to keep up the pretense that all humans are special, and people just have the same rights as some chicken in a poultry farm, or a single cell in a test tube. 2) If we fool ourselves well enough, we might even fool the future transhumans/posthumans or AIs for a few years or even decades. So they treat human life as important too, at least for a while (maybe long enough):).
Of course we better treat the transhumans/posthumans/AI well. Hence I do have some reservations about certain branches of AI research. We already have nonhuman intelligent/sentient creatures - they're in the pet shop etc. If we can't treat animals well, I don't think we should create AIs only to enslave and mistreat them similarly. Especially when some AI researchers are in the habit of just "chucking things together" without really understanding what is going on... Same goes for the human-animal hybrids people are researching on, I personally think that's not a good idea, unless you want to do away with the idea that human life is special and the big implications of it. Do we think society is ready to decide at which point a human-animal hybrid is human (and thus has the special rights and privileges of a human). How about a human-machine hybrid, or a human-animal-machine hybrid? I personally don't think so. Most of us are eating animals and enjoying it too much (and some thriving even e.g. those who eat fish vs those who don't).
Yes the research might help, but consider the predicted percentages of "help" vs the long term implications if you do it now vs later. It might actually be better to just leave some stuff for later. There are so many other areas where more research and researchers can help, without these issues.
Must this be done now? Why not do something else instead? I guess I regularly answer this incorrectly - that's why I'm on slashdot so often;).
Wow and I thought US politics was like US pro-wrestling (two wrestlers, two sides, one commentator per side, each side supports its wrestler no matter what). Looks like I was wrong.
At least in US pro-wrestling they actually take a chair from outside the ring (even if it's a stage prop) and smack someone with it. Rather than a wimpy fake "agree to chair"[1] somebody, they take the trouble to make a half-decent show of the whole thing.
[1] I hear in nerdland Microsoft they even use real chairs (and it's not just a token ring either).
How so? MIT have allegedly already figured out how to collect oil to burn it.
You could use a Stirling or Ericsson cycle engine or others. The heat sink is the ocean.
They claim to only need 100 watts of electrical power, and they're willing to have 2 square metres of PV panels.
There's about 37 megajoules of energy in one litre of crude oil. Assuming your engine has a 10% efficiency from oil to electricity, you need to burn 0.027 millilitres per second. 0.027 millilitres per second for one month is only 71 litres.
If you assume a 5% efficiency, double that figure. The robot needs to gather 142 litres per month just to power itself. If their robot can't gather more than 142 litres of oil in one month I think they might as well forget it - the amount of oil spilled in the recent gulf spill is in the order of millions of litres.
They said they only need 5000 robots to clean the spill up in one month, so I assume they are doing magnitudes better than 142 litres per month.
BP's initial estimate of the spill rate was 5000 barrels (795000 litres) leaked per day. Later that went up to 30000 barrels per day (more than 4 million litres per day).
If you're worried about headbutts, use an infrared laser then - stuff from 400-1400nm can get to the retina, and visible spectrum is 390-750nm. And people also conveniently sell 1-1.5 watt laser pointers in the 800-1400 nm range: http://www.amazing1.com/laser_pointers.htm
I doubt the blink reflex works for infrared lasers.
The people with digital cameras or video cameras might detect your laser (see for yourself with an infrared remote control).
Heh, I just searched for "trailer hitch" on google, even clicked on the sponsored link (went to alibaba). So far I still get ads for hotels from agoda.com on wunderground. I had to use google chrome to see the ads. Normally I use firefox + adblock plus and don't see any ads.
Isn't that a lot of oil to burn? If we don't actually mind burning oil you could power the robots with some/all of the oil they collect instead of using solar power.
Next thing you need is an electronic sensor that can smell and taste oil in the air and water. Then working as a swarm they can find oil spills, move to them autonomously and consume them.
> Sure, its easy to purchase a gun, but to shoot it with accuracy? To stop a mob of people from taking you down?
I think I could easily permanently blind dozens (or more) of people with a high powered handheld laser, and I can do this from a fair distance (100+ metres). I think there are many cases where you have hundreds or thousands of people looking at the same spot...
You can buy these lasers online. They make no noise and are easily concealed. By the time people see the beam, it's too late. Most people would have to look at you to successfully gun you down. And if they look at you, you might be able to blind them first (for closer range stuff you could carry a gun too, or have the laser divergence adjustable).
While it's not the same as shooting dozens of people, I suspect many people would rather be shot in the arm/leg and even lose a limb than be permanently blinded, assuming they survive either scenario.
Actually having a process, following it AND documenting it (which is part of ISO9000) is good even if it's not the best process.
It's like doing science- if you do X things consistently, you reduce the number of variables, then it's easier to figure out which is better when you compare it against something. After all if you just saw a scientific research paper with just the results and claims, with no description of the process and how things were allegedly done, the results are near useless and you don't care how smart that person supposedly is.
The point many companies and bosses miss is you're then supposed to improve/replace the process if it's not good. You're not supposed to be slaves to the process. The process is supposed to serve the company not the other way round.
> can handle a thousand requests a second (including db lookups on the same low-end hardware),
I remember a more than a decade ago stuff like Apache could only do 500-600 hits per sec for static pages.
In comparison, I wrote a number of servers (dhcp, http etc) in perl in my previous job and performance wasn't an issue. Thank goodness for AMD and Intel:). The "db lookups/writes" part can often be the bottleneck because the hard drives slow stuff down more than stuff like perl/python does.
Doing stuff the "right way" often matters more - I actually replaced a badly written C++ service (to be fair the prev developer might have written it in a rush) with one in perl. Availability and performance went up a lot, so much so that even the call center boss noticed fewer complaints etc and asked me what I did. My team and I were actually supposed to work on the next system (a rewrite from scratch), and just do maintenance on the old code. But the old stuff was so crap and causing the support staff so much grief. They were also about to split an important site into two because a single server wasn't handling the load, which I thought was ridiculous. So I figured what the heck, and stuck my neck out to fix a few things. They didn't have to split that site in the end:).
I daresay many people here read faster than most people talk and comprehend speech.
Presentations are good for people who have little idea of the subject material. They are also good if entertaining your audience is part of the requirement. People who know about the subject material are fine getting it in formats similar to research "papers, manuals, "errata" or similar.
Perhaps the Generals don't need to know the details. But the details are often important. Why does a bunch of important people have to waste time getting schedules synchronized and sitting down for some powerpoint presentation? If the information is important enough can't they just get in their email so that they can go over it thoroughly, and then call/instant message the relevant people if they have questions?
Whatever it is, I think they are doing things wrong, even their "practice for war" is a sham (more about supporting the military industrial complex than actually winning wars?): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq
Looking at what is happening in Afghanistan[1] I think the US military should have seriously learned from what Lt Gen Riper did (and the bigger picture implications).
As long as you have the constraint that genocide is unacceptable you get diminishing returns from being able to kill more and more people, or destroy more and more with a single weapon. In fact it is counterproductive when you start having too much "collateral damage".
So figuring out who to kill for maximum effect is what you need to do, and getting your version of what happened out to the rest of the population is important.
It's usually just a matter of how familiar you are with the units.
I've no probs with kg, and grams. 1kg is about how much 1 litre of water weighs, and I'm fairly familiar with that. Chocolate bars here typically come in 100g and 250g weights, so 120g is not a prob:).
100 metres is easy for me to visualize too. That said I'm still better at visualizing 1 foot vs 1 metre - because there are plenty of 1 foot / 30 cm rulers, whereas 1 metre tends to be too long for that:).
But stuff like gallons and mpg just make me wonder "UK or US gallon?".
> With the best will in the world, it can all go sideways when you type in the wrong window.
And how sure are you that people handling the production systems won't do that? In the end, someone still has to handle those systems.
I've seen nondevelopers in charge of production machines use "!" on production machines with rather bad consequences.
So to me it's the wrong question. It's not "Should Developers should have access to Production". The correct question is "who is careful and competent enough to be allowed access to important production systems?".
Yes most developers aren't careful and competent enough to administer critical systems, but most people aren't either. Do the bosses and customers really care?
In some ways it's disgusting and hypocritical though. By intentionally uploading their stuff to Youtube they either:
a) clearly believe that it can actually make them money instead of billions of losses (like they always cry about). b) doing dubious form of entrapment that might even be illegal.
Or maybe even both...
I believe Google won that judgement, but apparently had to spend USD100 million. That's a lot of wasted money.
quote:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
I can see reasons why that scene was cut though. In the terminator universe there would probably be pics of the first terminator, so using the same likeness would not be so plausible.
But maybe they should have just left it in anyway...:).
Slashdot Mirror
They did have wheels before the Europeans arrived: http://www.mcguinnessonline.com/wheel/
> If your against animal testing (not a particularly republican standpoint), you should decline virtually all medication.
Much traditional chinese medicine/treatment has been tested on humans for centuries or even longer ;).
Seriously, some of it actually works in dealing with the symptoms, but might cause other problems...
For example, researchers found that a popular herb for reducing infant jaundice actually worked for reducing the jaundice, but could actually cause problems:
"Bilirubin-protein titration studies with the horse radish peroxidase method have shown that the herb is highly effective in displacing bilirubin from its protein binding. Free bilirubin is liberated in this process and this could increase the risk of brain damage in jaundiced infants. "
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8373675
So I'm sure many of those traditional medicines/treatments actually have an effect and aren't just placebos. It would be good to test the "promising" ones to see what they actually do and whether the results are desirable :).
In my personal view, it's actually a good thing if people treat human embryos specially even if they're "just a bunch of cells".
:).
;).
You're going to have to draw an arbitrary line where a bunch of cells becomes human. No matter where you draw that arbitrary line it'll be stupid, but not drawing the line is even more stupid. Erring on the safe side is a good way of symbolically saying that "human life is special".
Most human societies have agreed that human life is special. So even if some idiot takes a GPS, wanders in the wilderness, makes emergency calls about water tasting salty, we still save him when he finally actually gets in trouble if we humanly can (we may fine him, but we still save him).
Why is special casing human life important? Even if you're an atheist, consider these:
1) Many of the psychopaths in power think they are special and everyone else isn't, so they will be very happy if they don't have to keep up the pretense that all humans are special, and people just have the same rights as some chicken in a poultry farm, or a single cell in a test tube.
2) If we fool ourselves well enough, we might even fool the future transhumans/posthumans or AIs for a few years or even decades. So they treat human life as important too, at least for a while (maybe long enough)
Of course we better treat the transhumans/posthumans/AI well. Hence I do have some reservations about certain branches of AI research. We already have nonhuman intelligent/sentient creatures - they're in the pet shop etc. If we can't treat animals well, I don't think we should create AIs only to enslave and mistreat them similarly. Especially when some AI researchers are in the habit of just "chucking things together" without really understanding what is going on... Same goes for the human-animal hybrids people are researching on, I personally think that's not a good idea, unless you want to do away with the idea that human life is special and the big implications of it. Do we think society is ready to decide at which point a human-animal hybrid is human (and thus has the special rights and privileges of a human). How about a human-machine hybrid, or a human-animal-machine hybrid? I personally don't think so. Most of us are eating animals and enjoying it too much (and some thriving even e.g. those who eat fish vs those who don't).
Yes the research might help, but consider the predicted percentages of "help" vs the long term implications if you do it now vs later. It might actually be better to just leave some stuff for later. There are so many other areas where more research and researchers can help, without these issues.
Must this be done now? Why not do something else instead? I guess I regularly answer this incorrectly - that's why I'm on slashdot so often
> I admin to being a Christian
You're an admin? Careful, the atheists bite here...
Wow and I thought US politics was like US pro-wrestling (two wrestlers, two sides, one commentator per side, each side supports its wrestler no matter what). Looks like I was wrong.
At least in US pro-wrestling they actually take a chair from outside the ring (even if it's a stage prop) and smack someone with it. Rather than a wimpy fake "agree to chair"[1] somebody, they take the trouble to make a half-decent show of the whole thing.
[1] I hear in nerdland Microsoft they even use real chairs (and it's not just a token ring either).
> Burning oil is more complicated.
How so? MIT have allegedly already figured out how to collect oil to burn it.
You could use a Stirling or Ericsson cycle engine or others. The heat sink is the ocean.
They claim to only need 100 watts of electrical power, and they're willing to have 2 square metres of PV panels.
There's about 37 megajoules of energy in one litre of crude oil. Assuming your engine has a 10% efficiency from oil to electricity, you need to burn 0.027 millilitres per second. 0.027 millilitres per second for one month is only 71 litres.
If you assume a 5% efficiency, double that figure. The robot needs to gather 142 litres per month just to power itself. If their robot can't gather more than 142 litres of oil in one month I think they might as well forget it - the amount of oil spilled in the recent gulf spill is in the order of millions of litres.
They said they only need 5000 robots to clean the spill up in one month, so I assume they are doing magnitudes better than 142 litres per month.
BP's initial estimate of the spill rate was 5000 barrels (795000 litres) leaked per day. Later that went up to 30000 barrels per day (more than 4 million litres per day).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Volume_and_extent_of_oil_spill
If you're worried about headbutts, use an infrared laser then - stuff from 400-1400nm can get to the retina, and visible spectrum is 390-750nm. And people also conveniently sell 1-1.5 watt laser pointers in the 800-1400 nm range: http://www.amazing1.com/laser_pointers.htm
I doubt the blink reflex works for infrared lasers.
The people with digital cameras or video cameras might detect your laser (see for yourself with an infrared remote control).
Anyway, maybe they can treat some laser eye damage, with light! http://www.warp-heals.com/pdf/DARPA_Soldier_Self_Care.pdf
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA445026
Heh, I just searched for "trailer hitch" on google, even clicked on the sponsored link (went to alibaba). So far I still get ads for hotels from agoda.com on wunderground. I had to use google chrome to see the ads. Normally I use firefox + adblock plus and don't see any ads.
;).
Not tempted to turn on ads all the time
> However, the "code" was nothing but an XML document
;).
Ah but XML looks a bit like Lisp with uglier braces.
Sometimes it seems like many Java (and other) programs are just Lisp interpreters that run huge XML "configuration files"
He's just trying to blow his own horn.
And take the wind out of Apple's sales.
Just panning it slowly across a crowd could be good enough.
From the specs of one of the lasers:
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html
You can get a spot that's about 16cm in diameter at about 200 metres which can cause damage after 250 milliseconds of exposure.
Given this example, I'm sure it is not difficult to build a hand-held laser that's better suited for mass blinding.
Isn't that a lot of oil to burn? If we don't actually mind burning oil you could power the robots with some/all of the oil they collect instead of using solar power.
Next thing you need is an electronic sensor that can smell and taste oil in the air and water. Then working as a swarm they can find oil spills, move to them autonomously and consume them.
> Sure, its easy to purchase a gun, but to shoot it with accuracy? To stop a mob of people from taking you down?
I think I could easily permanently blind dozens (or more) of people with a high powered handheld laser, and I can do this from a fair distance (100+ metres). I think there are many cases where you have hundreds or thousands of people looking at the same spot...
You can buy these lasers online. They make no noise and are easily concealed. By the time people see the beam, it's too late. Most people would have to look at you to successfully gun you down. And if they look at you, you might be able to blind them first (for closer range stuff you could carry a gun too, or have the laser divergence adjustable).
While it's not the same as shooting dozens of people, I suspect many people would rather be shot in the arm/leg and even lose a limb than be permanently blinded, assuming they survive either scenario.
Doubt these vans will help much in this scenario.
Yeah Tree Style Tabs is great. I haven't tried TMP though, what do you find useful about it?
Actually having a process, following it AND documenting it (which is part of ISO9000) is good even if it's not the best process.
It's like doing science- if you do X things consistently, you reduce the number of variables, then it's easier to figure out which is better when you compare it against something. After all if you just saw a scientific research paper with just the results and claims, with no description of the process and how things were allegedly done, the results are near useless and you don't care how smart that person supposedly is.
The point many companies and bosses miss is you're then supposed to improve/replace the process if it's not good. You're not supposed to be slaves to the process. The process is supposed to serve the company not the other way round.
> can handle a thousand requests a second (including db lookups on the same low-end hardware),
:). The "db lookups/writes" part can often be the bottleneck because the hard drives slow stuff down more than stuff like perl/python does.
:).
I remember a more than a decade ago stuff like Apache could only do 500-600 hits per sec for static pages.
In comparison, I wrote a number of servers (dhcp, http etc) in perl in my previous job and performance wasn't an issue. Thank goodness for AMD and Intel
Doing stuff the "right way" often matters more - I actually replaced a badly written C++ service (to be fair the prev developer might have written it in a rush) with one in perl. Availability and performance went up a lot, so much so that even the call center boss noticed fewer complaints etc and asked me what I did. My team and I were actually supposed to work on the next system (a rewrite from scratch), and just do maintenance on the old code. But the old stuff was so crap and causing the support staff so much grief. They were also about to split an important site into two because a single server wasn't handling the load, which I thought was ridiculous. So I figured what the heck, and stuck my neck out to fix a few things. They didn't have to split that site in the end
I daresay many people here read faster than most people talk and comprehend speech.
Presentations are good for people who have little idea of the subject material. They are also good if entertaining your audience is part of the requirement. People who know about the subject material are fine getting it in formats similar to research "papers, manuals, "errata" or similar.
Perhaps the Generals don't need to know the details. But the details are often important. Why does a bunch of important people have to waste time getting schedules synchronized and sitting down for some powerpoint presentation? If the information is important enough can't they just get in their email so that they can go over it thoroughly, and then call/instant message the relevant people if they have questions?
Whatever it is, I think they are doing things wrong, even their "practice for war" is a sham (more about supporting the military industrial complex than actually winning wars?): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq
Looking at what is happening in Afghanistan[1] I think the US military should have seriously learned from what Lt Gen Riper did (and the bigger picture implications).
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/18/analysis.afghanistan.shadow.governors/index.html
As long as you have the constraint that genocide is unacceptable you get diminishing returns from being able to kill more and more people, or destroy more and more with a single weapon. In fact it is counterproductive when you start having too much "collateral damage".
So figuring out who to kill for maximum effect is what you need to do, and getting your version of what happened out to the rest of the population is important.
Depending on the details, zero might be a correct answer too.
It's usually just a matter of how familiar you are with the units.
:).
:).
I've no probs with kg, and grams. 1kg is about how much 1 litre of water weighs, and I'm fairly familiar with that. Chocolate bars here typically come in 100g and 250g weights, so 120g is not a prob
100 metres is easy for me to visualize too. That said I'm still better at visualizing 1 foot vs 1 metre - because there are plenty of 1 foot / 30 cm rulers, whereas 1 metre tends to be too long for that
But stuff like gallons and mpg just make me wonder "UK or US gallon?".
Yeah Shai-Hulud's been around for a while.
> With the best will in the world, it can all go sideways when you type in the wrong window.
And how sure are you that people handling the production systems won't do that? In the end, someone still has to handle those systems.
I've seen nondevelopers in charge of production machines use "!" on production machines with rather bad consequences.
So to me it's the wrong question. It's not "Should Developers should have access to Production". The correct question is "who is careful and competent enough to be allowed access to important production systems?".
Yes most developers aren't careful and competent enough to administer critical systems, but most people aren't either. Do the bosses and customers really care?
In some ways it's disgusting and hypocritical though. By intentionally uploading their stuff to Youtube they either:
a) clearly believe that it can actually make them money instead of billions of losses (like they always cry about).
b) doing dubious form of entrapment that might even be illegal.
Or maybe even both...
I believe Google won that judgement, but apparently had to spend USD100 million. That's a lot of wasted money.
What if it was intentionally uploaded by the copyright holders themselves, or by those they authorized to do so?
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-viacom-wanted-to-buy-youtube-uploaded-its-own-clips/32061
quote:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
I can see reasons why that scene was cut though. In the terminator universe there would probably be pics of the first terminator, so using the same likeness would not be so plausible.
:).
But maybe they should have just left it in anyway...
Heh if I were a high school teacher and had students that silly, I'd give them facebook quizzes to answer as homework/punishment...
And they'd have to like it!