The first thing they will need is better batteries (or some other power source/store)
All that efficient low power electronics is nice and good. But if you're going to have a robot bee fly for more than say 15 minutes, you are going to need better batteries, or really tiny fuel cells, or a really strong wind/tornado;).
When you look at that scale we are so far behind. Bees (or even tiny fruit flies) can fly about, navigate, avoid threats, find food, gracefully deal with minor damage and not least of all they don't run out of power that quickly while doing all of that.
As for mimicking colony behaviours and developing algorithms, there's no need to build robots for that. You can do it all in computers. If you haven't managed to simulate artificial bees well in computers, having a robot bee hardly helps.
> I tend to cringe when I enter a store and notice all the employees wearing identical clothing...
Why? It's for one of the reasons you stated. Identification purposes.
It makes it easier for you to find them when you want to, or avoid them if you don't.
Similarly in a restaurant, proper uniforms reduce the odds of you trying to get other customers to fetch you a menu. Or vice versa.
That said, I find ties uncomfortable and a rather stupid idea in warm environments/climates.
I'd be glad if someone can come up with a fashion that looks decently "business like", is practical and doesn't involve ties and zillions of buttons.
Probably easier for menswear. Women's wear tend to have somewhat insane stuff like jacket/coat "pockets" that aren't pockets, or real pockets that are actually sewn shut.
What if someone gets a CA in "Elbonia" to sign some certs? The browsers don't protect you against that sort of MITM attacks. Go look at how many CAs are preinstalled in your browser. Trust all of them?
If browsers _also_ did the SSH thing where they warn you if the cert has changed from the expected I'd be happy, and the OP would be happy - on his first visit to the site, he might choose to take the risk and say "accept this", and the browser will warn him if it changes in the future.
After all, he could choose to control his risk and exposure by making his first visits via a connection that he can trust. And then subsequent visits could be at some random WiFi.
It's not 100% safe, but neither is the way the current browsers do stuff - if a CA gets tricked/hacked/bribed into signing a Microsoft or a bank cert, you are just as screwed.
Think it'll never happen? Verisign got tricked, and more recently another CA's automated system got exploited.
> > I might not be opposed to giving away 30 points to anyone that seems reasonable enough > I'm interested if you want to drop me an e-mail, and I think I can prove my identity adequately on-line, through my long history
I suspect there's a funny Nigerian spammer spoof for this (with the "all caps" and other fun stuff).
But I'm too lazy at the moment to try. Anyone willing to give it a go?
> if only they were redeemable in gold and silver as once US constitution stated...
1) Gold will not solve the problems. It does not address any of the real problems.
Can all you idiots stop thinking gold is going to somehow magically avoid those problems, there's no magic in gold. The financial problem was caused by poor/bad regulation. Heck the US federal reserve still refuses to answer good questions about where some trillions of money went. Go google for "federal reserve trillions". There's also cheating and bad regulation in the stock markets - a privileged bunch get to see stuff 30 milliseconds before the others - see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
Basing your currency on gold will not save you when there's poor regulation and corrupt people in high places. Just because the currency was backed by gold would not have stopped people from bundling risky loans into a High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund and selling it to old ladies who have a different understanding of what "High Grade" and "Enhanced" mean.
I know a guy who does some finance stuff, and he says he's not providing liquidity or any of the bullshit finance people spout to justify their existence. He says he's just transferring money from the stupid to the smart (him). He says at least he is honest about it - to a few of us at least;).
They used gold back then and the serfs still got screwed by the barons, and economies still went bust. Looks like the current batch of serfs are still too stupid to understand what is going on. And "barons" like my friend will just have you all as snacks.
2) Gold is too useful to use as currency.
Yes it is rare, and that is the big problem. If all the countries in the world started using gold as a currency, it would be too expensive to use for some stuff where it is really useful (or it would make things more expensive without good reason).
Think about it. How much gold is there to go around for the 6 billion people in the world?
Estimates of the total amount of gold available (that is already produced in reasonable purity) in the world range from to 161,000 tons to 311,000 tons. That roughly works out to about 25g to 50g of gold for each person in the world. Or 5 to 9 trillion US dollars (assuming USD1035 per troy ounce). Yearly production is only about 260 milligrams per person.
At current prices that's like saying everyone in the world has USD830 to USD1700 on average. And worse every year they only gain USD9 in net worth. But there's a lot more money, _goods_ and services out there so if you base your currency on gold, it means that 50g of gold will end up costing a lot more, more so if the world population continues to increase, or people are productive in other ways;).
Then gold will end up more expensive to use for a lot of useful things we are currently using it for, and maybe even too expensive in some cases. And for what benefit?
So it's a stupid idea ok? Except for those who have bought a lot of gold when it was cheaper and are trying to push the prices up.
But some here believe that a reasonable person would expect that most _shop_ sites, would only have positive reviews, and be useless for judging quality. It's just like all those stupid "stars" and "awards".
Who here actually gives a damn about those? But are slashdotters reasonable people[1]?:)
FWIW, I'd give far more weight to a review by a known blogger. Or even certain random bloggers. Random bloggers might be shills, but you can often tell from their blog posts and history. Some would typically be posting about food, hangovers or "their whole diary online" (can see track record over months or years), with their friends commenting from time to time, but some product/service suddenly annoys/elates them enough so they post about it.
Of course perhaps someone will one day successfully write software that can emulate 100 bloggers and their friends, and then provide an astroturfing service...
[1] Anyway that's why you have judges and "somewhat vague" laws. "Reasonable" varies and can change.
He said lots of people say they would never go for treatment that does not have placebo controlled trials. Many surgical procedures have not had placebo controlled trials. And in prominent studies, many surgical procedures have been proven to be not better than placebo.
Despite that it is clear that surgery does help many people.
For instance I'm willing to bet that limbs do not reattach themselves at rates better than typical "limb reattachment" surgical procedures.
I'm not going to volunteer to take the placebo treatment though.
I'll take placebo treatment for pain if/when it works (and in many cases it does work very well).
> I don't see a problem unless other users on the system have root access
On most linux systems if UserA launches a browser it runs as UserA, with the full privileges of UserA. And that includes the ability to read your svn passwords and ssh ID files.
It's just most attackers can't be bothered to attack linux users.
FWIW, I usually run my browsers using different users from my main account. You can do it whether you're running windows or linux.
But you can't do it if you're trying to do it with Google Chrome...
Pakistan developed nukes, has nukes and also was (is?) a sponsor of terrorism[1]. So what did the USA do to Pakistan for trying to make nukes? They seem to be such good friends today.
FWIW, before the US "WMD" bullshit, Saddam started selling oil in Euros, and after the invasion Iraq went back to selling oil in US dollars.
That's probably not the only reason the US Gov didn't like Iraq, but I'm sure that was one of the top reasons.
In 2007 Iran started selling oil in Euros too, and for even more fun in 2008 they started an oil bourse that allows trading of oil in other currencies, not just the USD.
Why is this bad for the USA? The fact is if everyone uses your currency to trade, you can create money (either directly or via soft loans) and by doing so automatically tax everyone else that uses your currency.
Think about it, the USA owes China/Japan/etc trillions of USD. If on the relevant due dates, the US Fed Reserve just loans the US Gov the money to pay China/Japan/etc back, or inflation has made the USD worth less, the "pay back with interest" does become rather easy;).
It's a bit like Zimbabwe. Mugabe (US Gov) prints money, hands some to his cronies (friends and contractors of the US Gov), and the rest of the people in Zimbabwe (the countries that hold trillions of USD) end up having to carry sacks of near worthless money around.
But when Zimbabwe prints money, the rest of the world just laughs at Zimbabwe, because the rest of the world doesn't live in Zimbabwe or use Zimbabwe's currency.
The US Gov certainly wants as many countries living in its "Zimbabwe" and using its currency. It stops becoming so easy for "US Mugabe" if more and more people stop using the US dollars and switch to something else.
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT use strict; sub bar {
my $c=shift||'';
return join(" ","Perl For Dummies", $c); } my $foo=<<"EOT"; Hey everyone, guess what...
The title of the book is "${\( bar(2))}".
Go figure. EOT print $foo;
Yes it's ugly that you can in effect interpolate functions in a huge blob of text. But it does save a lot of time compared to the printf or python way. You don't have to keep checking to see if the number of %s matches the number of things you want to interpolate, or that you've got stuff in the right order.
Or how about this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT use strict; sub foo {
my $title=shift||'Unknown';
my $startversion=shift||0;
return sub {
$startversion++;
return $title unless ($startversion>1);
return join(" ",$title,$startversion);
} } my $bar=foo("Perl For Dummies"); my $bar2=foo("Perl Cookbook"); my $t=<<"EOT"; Hey everyone, guess what...
The title of the first book in library A is "${\( &$bar())}". The title of the second one is "${\( &$bar())}".
The title of the first book in library B is: ${\( &$bar2())}. The title of the second book in library B is: ${\( &$bar2())}.
Go figure. EOT print $t;
OK most of us won't need to use that sort of thing, but who knows, you might think of a reason to use stuff like that;).
So if you ask them what they want, they may often give you useless or even incorrect answers (watch for the part about coffee).
Similarly often when you ask people something - e.g. whether they want "targeted ads" or "XYZ", they may say "No" (or "yes"). But when you rephrase the question, or provide an example, they suddenly say "Oh, that's different". To make things worse many survey questions are pretty bad.
And media headlines are worse, after all the actual survey was: "Asked if online ad vendors should deliver targeted ads by tracking customers' behavior across multiple Web sites, 86 percent of the 1,000 respondents said no."
That's quite a big difference between wanting "targeted ads" and wanting "targeted ads by tracking your behaviour".
Just because a relative or friend asks me to buy or look up something for them online doesn't mean that I suddenly want ads for similar stuff on every webpage.
At least the google search page rarely serves up irrelevant ads when I'm searching for stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Did your workplace supply the shades and earpieces too? ;)
The first thing they will need is better batteries (or some other power source/store)
;).
All that efficient low power electronics is nice and good. But if you're going to have a robot bee fly for more than say 15 minutes, you are going to need better batteries, or really tiny fuel cells, or a really strong wind/tornado
When you look at that scale we are so far behind. Bees (or even tiny fruit flies) can fly about, navigate, avoid threats, find food, gracefully deal with minor damage and not least of all they don't run out of power that quickly while doing all of that.
As for mimicking colony behaviours and developing algorithms, there's no need to build robots for that. You can do it all in computers. If you haven't managed to simulate artificial bees well in computers, having a robot bee hardly helps.
Oops I meant that's what they do, they don't often say it...
;).
You may be closer to the "executive suite" and suits than you think
> why the hell do you care what other people think? If you enjoy it, fuck everyone else.
That's what the rapists and CxOs said.
> I tend to cringe when I enter a store and notice all the employees wearing identical clothing...
Why? It's for one of the reasons you stated. Identification purposes.
It makes it easier for you to find them when you want to, or avoid them if you don't.
Similarly in a restaurant, proper uniforms reduce the odds of you trying to get other customers to fetch you a menu. Or vice versa.
That said, I find ties uncomfortable and a rather stupid idea in warm environments/climates.
I'd be glad if someone can come up with a fashion that looks decently "business like", is practical and doesn't involve ties and zillions of buttons.
Probably easier for menswear. Women's wear tend to have somewhat insane stuff like jacket/coat "pockets" that aren't pockets, or real pockets that are actually sewn shut.
If it drops to one in a million, a Mr Pratchett might say we won't survive...
Except for Rincewind and the Luggage.
Better hope she doesn't start looking at you strangely/vacantly and say "Mmmm... brainssss...".
It's not technically feasible because whenever the developers try to patch it, chairs keep intersecting their heads.
I think I covered that in 2).
What if someone gets a CA in "Elbonia" to sign some certs? The browsers don't protect you against that sort of MITM attacks. Go look at how many CAs are preinstalled in your browser. Trust all of them?
If browsers _also_ did the SSH thing where they warn you if the cert has changed from the expected I'd be happy, and the OP would be happy - on his first visit to the site, he might choose to take the risk and say "accept this", and the browser will warn him if it changes in the future.
After all, he could choose to control his risk and exposure by making his first visits via a connection that he can trust. And then subsequent visits could be at some random WiFi.
It's not 100% safe, but neither is the way the current browsers do stuff - if a CA gets tricked/hacked/bribed into signing a Microsoft or a bank cert, you are just as screwed.
Think it'll never happen? Verisign got tricked, and more recently another CA's automated system got exploited.
> > I might not be opposed to giving away 30 points to anyone that seems reasonable enough
> I'm interested if you want to drop me an e-mail, and I think I can prove my identity adequately on-line, through my long history
I suspect there's a funny Nigerian spammer spoof for this (with the "all caps" and other fun stuff).
But I'm too lazy at the moment to try. Anyone willing to give it a go?
> if only they were redeemable in gold and silver as once US constitution stated...
1) Gold will not solve the problems. It does not address any of the real problems.
Can all you idiots stop thinking gold is going to somehow magically avoid those problems, there's no magic in gold. The financial problem was caused by poor/bad regulation. Heck the US federal reserve still refuses to answer good questions about where some trillions of money went. Go google for "federal reserve trillions". There's also cheating and bad regulation in the stock markets - a privileged bunch get to see stuff 30 milliseconds before the others - see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
Basing your currency on gold will not save you when there's poor regulation and corrupt people in high places. Just because the currency was backed by gold would not have stopped people from bundling risky loans into a High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund and selling it to old ladies who have a different understanding of what "High Grade" and "Enhanced" mean.
I know a guy who does some finance stuff, and he says he's not providing liquidity or any of the bullshit finance people spout to justify their existence. He says he's just transferring money from the stupid to the smart (him). He says at least he is honest about it - to a few of us at least ;).
They used gold back then and the serfs still got screwed by the barons, and economies still went bust. Looks like the current batch of serfs are still too stupid to understand what is going on. And "barons" like my friend will just have you all as snacks.
2) Gold is too useful to use as currency.
Yes it is rare, and that is the big problem. If all the countries in the world started using gold as a currency, it would be too expensive to use for some stuff where it is really useful (or it would make things more expensive without good reason).
Think about it. How much gold is there to go around for the 6 billion people in the world?
Estimates of the total amount of gold available (that is already produced in reasonable purity) in the world range from to 161,000 tons to 311,000 tons. That roughly works out to about 25g to 50g of gold for each person in the world. Or 5 to 9 trillion US dollars (assuming USD1035 per troy ounce). Yearly production is only about 260 milligrams per person.
At current prices that's like saying everyone in the world has USD830 to USD1700 on average. And worse every year they only gain USD9 in net worth. But there's a lot more money, _goods_ and services out there so if you base your currency on gold, it means that 50g of gold will end up costing a lot more, more so if the world population continues to increase, or people are productive in other ways ;).
Then gold will end up more expensive to use for a lot of useful things we are currently using it for, and maybe even too expensive in some cases. And for what benefit?
So it's a stupid idea ok? Except for those who have bought a lot of gold when it was cheaper and are trying to push the prices up.
A hypocracy is what you get when you have a country/world ruled by hypocrites.
> There are two ways in which people can deal with one another. Money, or guns.
Spoken like a true virgin slashdotter.
> So... I take it you don't trust Mozilla?
Only up to a point. Their track record for security hasn't been very good.
Is it illegal? Don't US casinos issue casino chips? There are also places that issue coupons and tokens.
<matrix>Your mind makes it real</matrix>
But some here believe that a reasonable person would expect that most _shop_ sites, would only have positive reviews, and be useless for judging quality. It's just like all those stupid "stars" and "awards".
:)
Who here actually gives a damn about those? But are slashdotters reasonable people[1]?
FWIW, I'd give far more weight to a review by a known blogger. Or even certain random bloggers. Random bloggers might be shills, but you can often tell from their blog posts and history. Some would typically be posting about food, hangovers or "their whole diary online" (can see track record over months or years), with their friends commenting from time to time, but some product/service suddenly annoys/elates them enough so they post about it.
Of course perhaps someone will one day successfully write software that can emulate 100 bloggers and their friends, and then provide an astroturfing service...
[1] Anyway that's why you have judges and "somewhat vague" laws. "Reasonable" varies and can change.
I don't think that's what he said.
He said lots of people say they would never go for treatment that does not have placebo controlled trials. Many surgical procedures have not had placebo controlled trials. And in prominent studies, many surgical procedures have been proven to be not better than placebo.
Despite that it is clear that surgery does help many people.
For instance I'm willing to bet that limbs do not reattach themselves at rates better than typical "limb reattachment" surgical procedures.
I'm not going to volunteer to take the placebo treatment though.
I'll take placebo treatment for pain if/when it works (and in many cases it does work very well).
> Yes, he is. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
;).
[Citation needed]
In case you have memory problems, you said "RAM footprint".
;)
And I believe that's what he was addressing too.
So are you on the same page now?
Well his point is the MS stuff is about as fast if not faster than their competitors.
So are the OpenOffice people hoodwinking their users with extra junk too?
And compare Windows Live Messenger with Pidgin. Pidgin crashes/hangs regularly and is slow.
> I don't see a problem unless other users on the system have root access
On most linux systems if UserA launches a browser it runs as UserA, with the full privileges of UserA. And that includes the ability to read your svn passwords and ssh ID files.
It's just most attackers can't be bothered to attack linux users.
FWIW, I usually run my browsers using different users from my main account. You can do it whether you're running windows or linux.
But you can't do it if you're trying to do it with Google Chrome...
Pakistan developed nukes, has nukes and also was (is?) a sponsor of terrorism[1]. So what did the USA do to Pakistan for trying to make nukes? They seem to be such good friends today.
FWIW, before the US "WMD" bullshit, Saddam started selling oil in Euros, and after the invasion Iraq went back to selling oil in US dollars.
That's probably not the only reason the US Gov didn't like Iraq, but I'm sure that was one of the top reasons.
In 2007 Iran started selling oil in Euros too, and for even more fun in 2008 they started an oil bourse that allows trading of oil in other currencies, not just the USD.
Why is this bad for the USA? The fact is if everyone uses your currency to trade, you can create money (either directly or via soft loans) and by doing so automatically tax everyone else that uses your currency.
Think about it, the USA owes China/Japan/etc trillions of USD. If on the relevant due dates, the US Fed Reserve just loans the US Gov the money to pay China/Japan/etc back, or inflation has made the USD worth less, the "pay back with interest" does become rather easy ;).
It's a bit like Zimbabwe. Mugabe (US Gov) prints money, hands some to his cronies (friends and contractors of the US Gov), and the rest of the people in Zimbabwe (the countries that hold trillions of USD) end up having to carry sacks of near worthless money around.
But when Zimbabwe prints money, the rest of the world just laughs at Zimbabwe, because the rest of the world doesn't live in Zimbabwe or use Zimbabwe's currency.
The US Gov certainly wants as many countries living in its "Zimbabwe" and using its currency. It stops becoming so easy for "US Mugabe" if more and more people stop using the US dollars and switch to something else.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/5779916/Pakistani-president-Asif-Zardari-admits-creating-terrorist-groups.html
And there is yet even more:
;).
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
sub bar {
my $c=shift||'';
return join(" ","Perl For Dummies", $c);
}
my $foo=<<"EOT";
Hey everyone, guess what...
The title of the book is "${\( bar(2))}".
Go figure.
EOT
print $foo;
Yes it's ugly that you can in effect interpolate functions in a huge blob of text. But it does save a lot of time compared to the printf or python way. You don't have to keep checking to see if the number of %s matches the number of things you want to interpolate, or that you've got stuff in the right order.
Or how about this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
sub foo {
my $title=shift||'Unknown';
my $startversion=shift||0;
return sub {
$startversion++;
return $title unless ($startversion>1);
return join(" ",$title,$startversion);
}
}
my $bar=foo("Perl For Dummies");
my $bar2=foo("Perl Cookbook");
my $t=<<"EOT";
Hey everyone, guess what...
The title of the first book in library A is "${\( &$bar())}".
The title of the second one is "${\( &$bar())}".
The title of the first book in library B is: ${\( &$bar2())}.
The title of the second book in library B is: ${\( &$bar2())}.
Go figure.
EOT
print $t;
OK most of us won't need to use that sort of thing, but who knows, you might think of a reason to use stuff like that
Thing is a lot of people don't know what they want or need.
See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html
So if you ask them what they want, they may often give you useless or even incorrect answers (watch for the part about coffee).
Similarly often when you ask people something - e.g. whether they want "targeted ads" or "XYZ", they may say "No" (or "yes"). But when you rephrase the question, or provide an example, they suddenly say "Oh, that's different". To make things worse many survey questions are pretty bad.
And media headlines are worse, after all the actual survey was: "Asked if online ad vendors should deliver targeted ads by tracking customers' behavior across multiple Web sites, 86 percent of the 1,000 respondents said no."
That's quite a big difference between wanting "targeted ads" and wanting "targeted ads by tracking your behaviour".
Just because a relative or friend asks me to buy or look up something for them online doesn't mean that I suddenly want ads for similar stuff on every webpage.
At least the google search page rarely serves up irrelevant ads when I'm searching for stuff.