In many jurisdictions, you become a sex offender simply by peeing in a back alley in the dark after the bars close.
I find that ridiculous. If you're not flashing anyone and clearly trying to hide your genitals (and most of "the act") from view while peeing (whether by facing a wall, or hiding in the bushes) why the heck should you be regarded as a sex offender? Anyone imagining sexual stuff because of this is being perverted. Fine such offenders for littering, illegal dumping of unprocessed human waste or something similar.
As for redefining pedophile terminology, teenagers consensually having sex or "molesting" each other are pedophiles and rapists in the eyes of many laws too.
I personally think teenagers and young children would be more mentally scarred by being "indecently exposed" to the entire Government Apparatus than if someone flashed them. And if you jail a 16 year old girl's 20 year old boyfriend for 10 years, who is creating the most damage? Who is harming the girl more?
Those reasonable people are stupid then. How long does it take to reload? How many of those shooters were stopped _because_ they were reloading? Cho reloaded many times, and Holmes switched to different guns.
Better regulation is a good idea but outlawing high capacity magazines isn't going to fix the problem. And just seems like "bread" being thrown by politicians to pacify the stupid mobs calling for action.
If you have unstable people around and they can get guns, you'll continue to have these shootings. If enough US people think easy access to guns and ammo is worth the cost of these lives then so be it. From what I see crazy people kill more people with cars.
The problem with patents is the people approving a patent have little incentive to disapprove it and it's not always easy for them to know whether one broad vague claim made in legalese is an obvious patent or not.
I personally would be happy if utility patents were abolished (not drug)- broad ideas are easy, it's the hundreds or even thousands of teensy weensy details that are hard. So is getting the buy-in and marketing right. Most modern patents are so broad they don't actually significantly reduce the work required by competitors - what's written in the patent won't help them that much.
How then to encourage innovation? Create Prizes for Innovation. It is easier in hindsight to figure out whether something is innovative, and you can reward inventors who are far ahead of their time, whose work helps bring "the future" earlier to the masses, but is so advanced that by the time it hits the masses the patents would have expired. In contrast our current system rewards "inventors" who come up with stupid obvious "one-click" crap.
The Prizes can come in two classes with many categories in each class. One class of prizes are awarded by "Experts in the Field" and another class of prizes are awarded by "Members of the Public".
As for design patents, yes Apple got the "rounded rectangle" one but perhaps design patents can still provide more benefit than harm.
It does depend on how bad things are in your area. Quite often there's not much damage and flooding in an area but the grid power is out because of severe damage elsewhere.
The areas that are badly hit by the disaster (earthquake, hurricane etc) might have many busted solar panels too.
Look around you, just imagine the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, etc workers are robots.
How well is it working out now for the US people competing against these "robots"? How well will it work out in the near future? And how well will it work out when cheaper and more advanced robots arrive?
If you think it's going to be fine, that's great. Not really my concern - after all I'm a cheap worker/"robot" in a 3rd world country. FWIW seems I can read, spell and write better than many of the US slashdotters here. I suspect I even think better than a fair number of them...
Seems to me that many people including academics when doing their "rational" calculations do not take into account that people do not live forever.
If you're a poor, minimally educated person with no connections but wanted to be "lottery winner rich" (100+ million ) what are the odds of you achieving that in your lifetime by the normal means - e.g. starting a business etc? I can tell you I've seen plenty of decent businesses fail, and too often I have no idea why they fail. The owner runs out of money and has to go back to working for someone else to rebuild more capital so that he can try again or hopefully not be too poor when he is too old to work.
When your business takes off, you can go write a book about how you did it. But have you ever seen what those successful people say? One says keep at it, don't give up. Another says, know when to quit. One says focus on one thing, another says start 7 businesses and one will succeed. Go figure.
So I don't think the odds are that great either. Yes your odds of becoming rich by starting businesses are still probably better than winning the lottery, but buying a lottery ticket is a lot less work and stress. So factoring all that in, it doesn't seem that stupid to me.
Lastly it is quite rational to buy many lottery tickets when the jackpot is really huge (accumulates due to no one winning). There was a company that actually went around doing that.
Frames per second graphs will be showing numbers that are AVERAGED over one second. So the minimum number still might not reflect how crappy the rendering is.
To take an extreme example, you could have a card that does 120 FPS by drawing 119 frames in 1 millisecond and the last frame in 999 milliseconds.
Then you have a card that does 50FPS by drawing each and every frame in 20 milliseconds. The 50FPS card will appear smoother, whereas the 120FPS card will look like a slideshow.
This extreme case doesn't happen in practice since it'll look too obvious, but as the article shows, something milder but still detectable (even to humans) is happening with the radeon cards.
Furthermore many game benchmarks may have a part where most cards perform badly - so you get a single digit FPS for that section. Since most cards perform badly for that, that's ignored and so the minimum FPS number becomes useless.
Whereas the article's latency vs percentile graph is more useful.
There's a difference between measuring milliseconds per frame and frames per second. With the former your minimum resolution is one frame. With the latter your minimum resolution is one second.
Because of that even the minimum FPS rate doesn't necessarily tell you how jerky or smooth the rendering is - since it's averaged out over one second.
Taken to the extreme it could be rendering 119 frames in 1 millisecond and get stuck on one frame for 999 milliseconds, look like a frigging slide show but still show up as 120FPS. Whereas that sort of thing will stick out like a sore thumb on a milliseconds per frame graph. Hence measuring milliseconds per frame is better.
The extreme case shouldn't happen in practice, but as the article shows (and from personal experience) the max/high latency stuff does happen. I've personally experienced this on my old ATI and Nvidia cards - my Nvidia 9800GT was slower but smoother than my current Radeon. I went ATI because the Nvidia cards were dying too often (they had a manufacturing/process issue back then). But my next card is probably going to be Nvidia. Even with Guild Wars 1 my ATI card can feel annoyingly "rough" when turning in the game - you see the FPS stay high but it's rough to the eyes if you get 60 fps by getting a few frames fast then a very short pause then a few frames fast then pause repeat ad nauseum.
On a related note it's good to see that at least some benchmark sites are also starting to take latency/consistency into account for stuff like SSDs. A maximum latency that is too high and occurs too often will result in worse user experience, even if the overall throughput is high, and even for storage/drives.
That's misleading and unfair. You're using a black/white ("Name me one") measurement for the moral act and a "shades of grey" ( (easily justify) for the immoral acts.
After all using your very misleading reasoning you could also say religion is better than atheism by posing the question: "name me one immoral act performed by a religious person that could not have been performed by an atheist", and then saying "religion discourages critical thinking in a way that can easily justify more moral acts". Or just swap the atheism and religion objects/terms around in your remarks.
If you were really fair, rational and objective then what you would do is a statistical scientific study and survey of the harm vs benefit of various belief systems, per capita and total. You would define harm and benefit the way you wish as part of the study - so everyone knows what you mean.
So far I have seen no evidence that atheists would be better for the world. Only rhetoric. From what I see, the atheists are just as capable of irrational, noncritical thinking, and capable of doing just as many evil acts whether directly or through their followers.
You can claim Stalin's followers were worshipping him or the state and it was like a religion, but in that case it just means you'll never get rid of religion.
Fanatical Atheists[0] like to claim that religion is the source for most of the evils but people will kill each other over sport teams, gang membership, tribal affiliation, etc. In the absence of religion they'll still be killing each other for some reason. There have been many genocides in recent times that weren't committed because of religion, but because of tribe (hutu vs tutsi) or some other belief (Stalin, Mao).
It is pretty stupid to try to get rid of religions without measuring which ones are better/worse and then designing and providing a superior substitute[1]. Without scientific measurement how would you know your substitute is superior? Go by faith?
[0] Go ask the real rational atheists about Fanatical Atheists like Dawkins etc, they are just another bunch of religious nutters.
[1] Many atheists will claim atheism is not a religion, if so it is not a substitute. The masses will just find something else, or someone will give/force it to them. Like it or not, most people need a "Greater Group" to belong to and "A Cause/Purpose". You think those PETA fanatics and Apple cultists aren't behaving in religious ways?
You don't have to power your stuff from the mains while you create your recording. You'll have your own unique hum, but they won't be able to match that with anything - especially if you get rid of the stuff after that.
You could also create your recording purely digitally- no microphones - then there would be no hum except what you choose to artificially add. For example you could record just the hum at a completely different period to throw them off, then to that you add a vocaloid or other voice synthesis stuff. If you're going to do bad stuff you might as well not use your real voice in the recording.
The issue with video is- video stuff might record the hum as part of the video signal (noise in the video). So if you're going to show your kidnapped captive in video it might be tricky to get rid of the hum.
IMO even if "cold fusion" isn't fusion it might be worth researching as a new type of battery. The way the mainstream scientists reacted to it wasn't very scientific;).
Same goes for other stuff - just because it doesn't produce more energy than you put in doesn't mean it's useless. Plenty of people are looking for better batteries.
It's fun? Solitaire is boring, and worse after a while.
I modified Ultima 3 so that I could control the ship's fireball and follow/"fly" behind it.
Modified Wings of Fury (Apple IIGS/IIe) so that I could change the projectiles I fire to different types on demand even in flight! e.g. press a key and flying rockets turn to torpedoes or bombs.
All this hack shows is that Windows 8 is not very locked down - just like previous versions of Windows. Whose responsibility is it for securing such stuff? Microsoft or the App authors? Microsoft has to be careful when locking stuff down or there'll be mutters of "anti-trust".
Many not adopting Vista didn't stop the economy. Heck I'd say not adopting it is more likely to have helped the economy Vista being so crap when it was launched. So same goes for not adopting Windows 8.
And did the US go bankrupt or into full anarchy when one of these presidents where killed? No, so why spend so much money protecting a single guy who can be easily replaced?
It's not very democratic to let one bullet cancel 60 million votes, just because you think the president's post is not important or worth protecting. Allegedly millions of US voters voted for the president. So letting some random guy easily nullify those votes seems rather disrespectful to those voters.
9% of the US presidents died for job related reasons - people shot them. The cost of security is not their fault. It's actually not mainly their fault that people kill them or try to.
What do you want them to do? Hole up in a bunker for the entire presidential term?
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In many jurisdictions, you become a sex offender simply by peeing in a back alley in the dark after the bars close.
I find that ridiculous. If you're not flashing anyone and clearly trying to hide your genitals (and most of "the act") from view while peeing (whether by facing a wall, or hiding in the bushes) why the heck should you be regarded as a sex offender? Anyone imagining sexual stuff because of this is being perverted. Fine such offenders for littering, illegal dumping of unprocessed human waste or something similar.
As for redefining pedophile terminology, teenagers consensually having sex or "molesting" each other are pedophiles and rapists in the eyes of many laws too.
I personally think teenagers and young children would be more mentally scarred by being "indecently exposed" to the entire Government Apparatus than if someone flashed them. And if you jail a 16 year old girl's 20 year old boyfriend for 10 years, who is creating the most damage? Who is harming the girl more?
Those reasonable people are stupid then. How long does it take to reload? How many of those shooters were stopped _because_ they were reloading? Cho reloaded many times, and Holmes switched to different guns.
Better regulation is a good idea but outlawing high capacity magazines isn't going to fix the problem. And just seems like "bread" being thrown by politicians to pacify the stupid mobs calling for action.
If you have unstable people around and they can get guns, you'll continue to have these shootings. If enough US people think easy access to guns and ammo is worth the cost of these lives then so be it. From what I see crazy people kill more people with cars.
The US cops kill more people each year. How many killings are unjustified? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States_2011
The problem with patents is the people approving a patent have little incentive to disapprove it and it's not always easy for them to know whether one broad vague claim made in legalese is an obvious patent or not.
I personally would be happy if utility patents were abolished (not drug)- broad ideas are easy, it's the hundreds or even thousands of teensy weensy details that are hard. So is getting the buy-in and marketing right. Most modern patents are so broad they don't actually significantly reduce the work required by competitors - what's written in the patent won't help them that much.
How then to encourage innovation? Create Prizes for Innovation. It is easier in hindsight to figure out whether something is innovative, and you can reward inventors who are far ahead of their time, whose work helps bring "the future" earlier to the masses, but is so advanced that by the time it hits the masses the patents would have expired. In contrast our current system rewards "inventors" who come up with stupid obvious "one-click" crap.
The Prizes can come in two classes with many categories in each class. One class of prizes are awarded by "Experts in the Field" and another class of prizes are awarded by "Members of the Public".
As for design patents, yes Apple got the "rounded rectangle" one but perhaps design patents can still provide more benefit than harm.
Maybe the house uses 500W and the grow room uses 7000W? ;)
Seriously though, start an electric oven or clothes dryer and that 7000W figure doesn't look so big.
I'm not sure it ever gets warm enough to require air conditioning wherever he is in Michigan.
It does depend on how bad things are in your area. Quite often there's not much damage and flooding in an area but the grid power is out because of severe damage elsewhere.
The areas that are badly hit by the disaster (earthquake, hurricane etc) might have many busted solar panels too.
Maybe the fibre will be paid for by legalized and taxed weed.
The moderators screwed up. Should be +5 redundant.
Look around you, just imagine the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, etc workers are robots.
How well is it working out now for the US people competing against these "robots"? How well will it work out in the near future? And how well will it work out when cheaper and more advanced robots arrive?
If you think it's going to be fine, that's great. Not really my concern - after all I'm a cheap worker/"robot" in a 3rd world country. FWIW seems I can read, spell and write better than many of the US slashdotters here. I suspect I even think better than a fair number of them...
Seems to me that many people including academics when doing their "rational" calculations do not take into account that people do not live forever.
If you're a poor, minimally educated person with no connections but wanted to be "lottery winner rich" (100+ million ) what are the odds of you achieving that in your lifetime by the normal means - e.g. starting a business etc? I can tell you I've seen plenty of decent businesses fail, and too often I have no idea why they fail. The owner runs out of money and has to go back to working for someone else to rebuild more capital so that he can try again or hopefully not be too poor when he is too old to work.
When your business takes off, you can go write a book about how you did it. But have you ever seen what those successful people say? One says keep at it, don't give up. Another says, know when to quit. One says focus on one thing, another says start 7 businesses and one will succeed. Go figure.
So I don't think the odds are that great either. Yes your odds of becoming rich by starting businesses are still probably better than winning the lottery, but buying a lottery ticket is a lot less work and stress. So factoring all that in, it doesn't seem that stupid to me.
Lastly it is quite rational to buy many lottery tickets when the jackpot is really huge (accumulates due to no one winning). There was a company that actually went around doing that.
Why is it illegal to export iphones that you pay for while legal for corporations to export profits so that they don't pay tax?
Because the corporations make more money that way that's why.
That's not the same as milliseconds per frame.
Frames per second graphs will be showing numbers that are AVERAGED over one second. So the minimum number still might not reflect how crappy the rendering is.
To take an extreme example, you could have a card that does 120 FPS by drawing 119 frames in 1 millisecond and the last frame in 999 milliseconds.
Then you have a card that does 50FPS by drawing each and every frame in 20 milliseconds. The 50FPS card will appear smoother, whereas the 120FPS card will look like a slideshow.
This extreme case doesn't happen in practice since it'll look too obvious, but as the article shows, something milder but still detectable (even to humans) is happening with the radeon cards.
Furthermore many game benchmarks may have a part where most cards perform badly - so you get a single digit FPS for that section. Since most cards perform badly for that, that's ignored and so the minimum FPS number becomes useless.
Whereas the article's latency vs percentile graph is more useful.
There's a difference between measuring milliseconds per frame and frames per second.
With the former your minimum resolution is one frame.
With the latter your minimum resolution is one second.
Because of that even the minimum FPS rate doesn't necessarily tell you how jerky or smooth the rendering is - since it's averaged out over one second.
Taken to the extreme it could be rendering 119 frames in 1 millisecond and get stuck on one frame for 999 milliseconds, look like a frigging slide show but still show up as 120FPS. Whereas that sort of thing will stick out like a sore thumb on a milliseconds per frame graph. Hence measuring milliseconds per frame is better.
The extreme case shouldn't happen in practice, but as the article shows (and from personal experience) the max/high latency stuff does happen. I've personally experienced this on my old ATI and Nvidia cards - my Nvidia 9800GT was slower but smoother than my current Radeon. I went ATI because the Nvidia cards were dying too often (they had a manufacturing/process issue back then). But my next card is probably going to be Nvidia. Even with Guild Wars 1 my ATI card can feel annoyingly "rough" when turning in the game - you see the FPS stay high but it's rough to the eyes if you get 60 fps by getting a few frames fast then a very short pause then a few frames fast then pause repeat ad nauseum.
On a related note it's good to see that at least some benchmark sites are also starting to take latency/consistency into account for stuff like SSDs. A maximum latency that is too high and occurs too often will result in worse user experience, even if the overall throughput is high, and even for storage/drives.
You don't have to power your lights from the mains either.
As for microphones please read the rest of my post.
That's misleading and unfair. You're using a black/white ("Name me one") measurement for the moral act and a "shades of grey" ( (easily justify) for the immoral acts.
After all using your very misleading reasoning you could also say religion is better than atheism by posing the question: "name me one immoral act performed by a religious person that could not have been performed by an atheist", and then saying "religion discourages critical thinking in a way that can easily justify more moral acts". Or just swap the atheism and religion objects/terms around in your remarks.
If you were really fair, rational and objective then what you would do is a statistical scientific study and survey of the harm vs benefit of various belief systems, per capita and total. You would define harm and benefit the way you wish as part of the study - so everyone knows what you mean.
So far I have seen no evidence that atheists would be better for the world. Only rhetoric. From what I see, the atheists are just as capable of irrational, noncritical thinking, and capable of doing just as many evil acts whether directly or through their followers.
You can claim Stalin's followers were worshipping him or the state and it was like a religion, but in that case it just means you'll never get rid of religion.
Fanatical Atheists[0] like to claim that religion is the source for most of the evils but people will kill each other over sport teams, gang membership, tribal affiliation, etc. In the absence of religion they'll still be killing each other for some reason. There have been many genocides in recent times that weren't committed because of religion, but because of tribe (hutu vs tutsi) or some other belief (Stalin, Mao).
It is pretty stupid to try to get rid of religions without measuring which ones are better/worse and then designing and providing a superior substitute[1]. Without scientific measurement how would you know your substitute is superior? Go by faith?
[0] Go ask the real rational atheists about Fanatical Atheists like Dawkins etc, they are just another bunch of religious nutters.
[1] Many atheists will claim atheism is not a religion, if so it is not a substitute. The masses will just find something else, or someone will give/force it to them. Like it or not, most people need a "Greater Group" to belong to and "A Cause/Purpose". You think those PETA fanatics and Apple cultists aren't behaving in religious ways?
Yahoo uses Bing.
Altavista uses Yahoo.
Metacrawler uses Yahoo, Google and Yandex.
Dogpile uses Yahoo, Google and Yandex.
DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo but allegedly also does some other stuff.
it might be tricky to get rid of the hum.
Unless as I said you cut off the mains and power everything off something else.
I suspect this tech might also be used to fake evidence against people they "know" are guilty.
You don't have to power your stuff from the mains while you create your recording. You'll have your own unique hum, but they won't be able to match that with anything - especially if you get rid of the stuff after that.
You could also create your recording purely digitally- no microphones - then there would be no hum except what you choose to artificially add. For example you could record just the hum at a completely different period to throw them off, then to that you add a vocaloid or other voice synthesis stuff. If you're going to do bad stuff you might as well not use your real voice in the recording.
The issue with video is- video stuff might record the hum as part of the video signal (noise in the video). So if you're going to show your kidnapped captive in video it might be tricky to get rid of the hum.
The Navy also did some stuff on cold fusion: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/03/navy-scientists/
IMO even if "cold fusion" isn't fusion it might be worth researching as a new type of battery. The way the mainstream scientists reacted to it wasn't very scientific ;).
Same goes for other stuff - just because it doesn't produce more energy than you put in doesn't mean it's useless. Plenty of people are looking for better batteries.
If you get infinite storage, do you have to pay infinite taxes?
Could assume it to max out at bandwidth * 1 year payable per year. ;)
Include/embed a funny picture/video in addition to the malware payload and people will even spread the link for you.
It's fun? Solitaire is boring, and worse after a while.
I modified Ultima 3 so that I could control the ship's fireball and follow/"fly" behind it.
Modified Wings of Fury (Apple IIGS/IIe) so that I could change the projectiles I fire to different types on demand even in flight! e.g. press a key and flying rockets turn to torpedoes or bombs.
All this hack shows is that Windows 8 is not very locked down - just like previous versions of Windows. Whose responsibility is it for securing such stuff? Microsoft or the App authors? Microsoft has to be careful when locking stuff down or there'll be mutters of "anti-trust".
UDP port 53 or port 500 are often unblocked.
UDP port 53 might be redirected to a local server in many places though.
Many not adopting Vista didn't stop the economy. Heck I'd say not adopting it is more likely to have helped the economy Vista being so crap when it was launched. So same goes for not adopting Windows 8.
Broken windows don't really help the economy.
And did the US go bankrupt or into full anarchy when one of these presidents where killed? No, so why spend so much money protecting a single guy who can be easily replaced?
It's not very democratic to let one bullet cancel 60 million votes, just because you think the president's post is not important or worth protecting. Allegedly millions of US voters voted for the president. So letting some random guy easily nullify those votes seems rather disrespectful to those voters.
9% of the US presidents died for job related reasons - people shot them. The cost of security is not their fault. It's actually not mainly their fault that people kill them or try to.
What do you want them to do? Hole up in a bunker for the entire presidential term?