I've never heard of this book, or any other cures for alcoholism. I don't know any alcoholics, nor do I have any particular concern for them. But I know that whenever someone comes out and claims to have a cure that the man is trying to keep down, it's likely to be a load of crap.
But hey, if you believe in that, I have a carburetor for sale that'll give your car 200 mpg.
As I recall, there were lots of perfectly normal infected people, just trying to live their lives, while the one uninfected guy ran around butchering them. So I guess what you're saying is we should administer the drug to everyone, just to be safe?
I think you'd find that far more than 5% of the world's geeks are American. You don't find all that many nerds living in third-world poverty, but that is where you find the vast majority of people.
The point of the article is that for purely mechanical reasons big dogs can't interbreed with small dogs. From the definition of species - i.e. able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are a different species.
But the sperm from one could fertilize the eggs of another. The fact that the mechanics don't work out is like claiming that neutering your pet makes it a new species.
A simple example......it used to be you could stop at a gas station and a couple of guys would come out, fill up your car, check your oil/water and clean your windshield. They didn't need a BA in business. What are these guys supposed to do now?
Nope. Green, green with a yellow stripe, and uninsulated are ground. White and gray are neutral (except in Europe, where it's blue). Any other color is hot.
Now, that's in AC systems. DC is a bit different, in that black can be neutral in systems that don't use negative voltage. Since undergrad labs frequently use such systems, people get the idea that black is ground. It's not.
...you let undergrads lose in a lab. A friend of mine was nearly electrocuted because one of her undergrads took it upon himself to do some wiring, and "grounded" the black wire to the body of a vacuum chamber. Little did he know that the "red is power, black is ground" convention that he learned in his intro to EE course doesn't apply to AC circuits.
And that's just one of countless examples I've seen. Undergrads, and even many grad students, don't really know what they're doing half the time. That'd be fine, but the dangerous thing is that they think they do. If the guy in my previous example had taken a moment to ask, "Hey, which of these is ground?" then there would never have been a problem.
Short of keeping an eye on all of them at all times, there's not much you can do. And since the people who would do the watching are probably first or second year grad students themselves, it might not even do you much good.
You must have forgotten where you are. This is Slashdot. His post advocates piracy AND bashes MS. How could he not get +5? If he had advocated the murder of CEO's and their families as a justifiable response, he probably would have gotten +6.
Is there a corollary to Godwin's Law for comparing people to Bush? 'Cause finding malware on a Windows computer is a hell of a lot more likely than finding WMDs in Iraq.
According to a friend of mine who is working on Orion, they desperately need someone to go in there in clean out the bureaucracy. Any change to the design, no matter how small, has to clear dozens of bureaucrats, which have hung on to the organization like leeches for decades.
Major changes have become downright impossible. The original plan for Orion was a completely new design that offered several aerodynamic improvements, but the bureaucrats threw it out, because it was too big a change from the old tried-and-true designs.
While there is certainly something to be said for playing it safe and sticking with known-good technology, the bureaucracy keeps NASA from making any revolutionary leaps forward.
So yes, NASA's future will be nice and consistent, barring major changes by the new admin. But it will be a nice, consistent decay into irrelevancy. If Bolden shakes things up a bit, then NASA might be able to start making the huge leaps that it was once known for. I wouldn't count on it though.
This is not self-replication, it's self-assembly. These nanostructures will need a *very* specific set of pieces to all be placed in the same spot, under very specific conditions, in order to assemble. It will never happen without our direct intervention. Remember, because this is self-assembly, not self-replication, it does not require an instance of the structure to already exist. If it were going to happen out of control, it already would have.
Eventually. In the short term, they'd cost hundreds of millions to migrate to. If you know anything about finances, then you know that if the upfront costs of a program exceed the yearly savings by a factor greater than or equal to the reciprocal of the ROI you could get elsewhere, then that program is simply not worth implementing.
(If you know a bit more, you also realize that you have to take into account the fact that prices of different things go up at different rates, but realistically MS isn't going to price themselves out of business. If anything, they'll lower prices as FOSS becomes more of a threat.)
Put simply, the cost of changing to a fully FOSS system *can* make it the more expensive choice, even when it's free.
And they made it very difficult to assign keystrokes...I used to easily map a shortcut for "Paste Unformatted." Had to record a VB macro to do it in 2K7.
Not to nitpick, but it's trivially easy to assign hotkeys. The problem is that there is no pre-existing "Paste Unformatted" command - a problem which existed in Office '03 as well.
If someone standing in the middle of a crowd of civilians fires at you, you don't return fire. The fact that they're morally abhorrent for using innocent people as a shield doesn't absolve you of killing those innocents.
Why do people worry more about a humorous scene from Robocop than the atrocities committed by real, human soldiers in every single war? I'd love to have an army that is literally incapable of raping and looting. That'd be a fantastic step forward for civilization.
And as another plus, it would eventually mean that the only effective armies would be those run by nations. No more violent rebellion! Sure, rebellions have had good effects on occasion (e.g. the American revolution), but nowadays, they tend to end up like the Congo, or the Sudan, or Sri Lanka. In other words, hundreds of thousands of innocent people get raped, tortured, and murdered. It's possible to effect real change in a society without armies of rebels roving the countryside (e.g. Gandhi in India, Mandela in South Africa). An end to warlords would be a great step forward for the world.
Sadly, your humble, kindly engineers will just build and maintain the thing. It'll be a committee of politico-military-management-morons that decide what instructions the thing is given.:-(
So the same people that decide the rules of engagement for the soldiers right now. Only with robots, they can't kill without permission. Sounds perfect to me. Or at least, as perfect as you can get while still having war in the first place.
Yeah, clearly the right thing to do is send good ole fashioned humans over there to fight. No way that could ever go wrong./sarcasm
Robots can be made not have feelings of vengeance or anger. Which means they won't go murdering civilians. They will do what robots always do, which is to say, EXACTLY what they are told to. If they kill civilians, it's due to human error, not because it's "evil".
Let's say a battle happens near your town. People are going to be shot, and die, and you (a civilian) could be one of them. Would you rather have that decision made by:
A) A team of highly-trained emotionally-detached engineers, working for years to ensure minimal casualties.
or
B) A team of stressed-out twenty-somethings who just watched their best friends get blown to pieces by your next-door neighbor, and have to make a snap judgment about whether you're going to do the same to them.
It really does help clarify just how big the sun is, in a way numbers can't. That something as big as the space shuttle looks so tiny against the sun, even though it is hundreds of thousands of times closer... it's amazing to actually see.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable, new idea. It's not "changing color of email text"... it's automatically understanding the meaning of the colors and adjusting them appropriately for each recipient.
Why is it that so many people on Slashdot seem to think that all patents are bad?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't sue your potential customers. It's not a good way to improve your public relations.
I've never heard of this book, or any other cures for alcoholism. I don't know any alcoholics, nor do I have any particular concern for them. But I know that whenever someone comes out and claims to have a cure that the man is trying to keep down, it's likely to be a load of crap.
But hey, if you believe in that, I have a carburetor for sale that'll give your car 200 mpg.
As I recall, there were lots of perfectly normal infected people, just trying to live their lives, while the one uninfected guy ran around butchering them. So I guess what you're saying is we should administer the drug to everyone, just to be safe?
I think you'd find that far more than 5% of the world's geeks are American. You don't find all that many nerds living in third-world poverty, but that is where you find the vast majority of people.
Only if it's a desktop. You're not gonna build your own netbook and have it be of any respectable quality.
The point of the article is that for purely mechanical reasons big dogs can't interbreed with small dogs. From the definition of species - i.e. able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are a different species.
But the sperm from one could fertilize the eggs of another. The fact that the mechanics don't work out is like claiming that neutering your pet makes it a new species.
Tamper and proof are not contradictory terms. It's not an oxymoron. A grade schooler could tell you that.
A simple example......it used to be you could stop at a gas station and a couple of guys would come out, fill up your car, check your oil/water and clean your windshield. They didn't need a BA in business. What are these guys supposed to do now?
Live in New Jersey?
Nope. Green, green with a yellow stripe, and uninsulated are ground. White and gray are neutral (except in Europe, where it's blue). Any other color is hot.
Now, that's in AC systems. DC is a bit different, in that black can be neutral in systems that don't use negative voltage. Since undergrad labs frequently use such systems, people get the idea that black is ground. It's not.
...you let undergrads lose in a lab. A friend of mine was nearly electrocuted because one of her undergrads took it upon himself to do some wiring, and "grounded" the black wire to the body of a vacuum chamber. Little did he know that the "red is power, black is ground" convention that he learned in his intro to EE course doesn't apply to AC circuits.
And that's just one of countless examples I've seen. Undergrads, and even many grad students, don't really know what they're doing half the time. That'd be fine, but the dangerous thing is that they think they do. If the guy in my previous example had taken a moment to ask, "Hey, which of these is ground?" then there would never have been a problem.
Short of keeping an eye on all of them at all times, there's not much you can do. And since the people who would do the watching are probably first or second year grad students themselves, it might not even do you much good.
You must have forgotten where you are. This is Slashdot. His post advocates piracy AND bashes MS. How could he not get +5? If he had advocated the murder of CEO's and their families as a justifiable response, he probably would have gotten +6.
Is there a corollary to Godwin's Law for comparing people to Bush? 'Cause finding malware on a Windows computer is a hell of a lot more likely than finding WMDs in Iraq.
According to a friend of mine who is working on Orion, they desperately need someone to go in there in clean out the bureaucracy. Any change to the design, no matter how small, has to clear dozens of bureaucrats, which have hung on to the organization like leeches for decades.
Major changes have become downright impossible. The original plan for Orion was a completely new design that offered several aerodynamic improvements, but the bureaucrats threw it out, because it was too big a change from the old tried-and-true designs.
While there is certainly something to be said for playing it safe and sticking with known-good technology, the bureaucracy keeps NASA from making any revolutionary leaps forward.
So yes, NASA's future will be nice and consistent, barring major changes by the new admin. But it will be a nice, consistent decay into irrelevancy. If Bolden shakes things up a bit, then NASA might be able to start making the huge leaps that it was once known for. I wouldn't count on it though.
No, that's self-replication. If we teach our nanobots to make more nanobots out of whatever is laying around, then we're screwed.
This is not self-replication, it's self-assembly. These nanostructures will need a *very* specific set of pieces to all be placed in the same spot, under very specific conditions, in order to assemble. It will never happen without our direct intervention. Remember, because this is self-assembly, not self-replication, it does not require an instance of the structure to already exist. If it were going to happen out of control, it already would have.
Eventually. In the short term, they'd cost hundreds of millions to migrate to. If you know anything about finances, then you know that if the upfront costs of a program exceed the yearly savings by a factor greater than or equal to the reciprocal of the ROI you could get elsewhere, then that program is simply not worth implementing.
(If you know a bit more, you also realize that you have to take into account the fact that prices of different things go up at different rates, but realistically MS isn't going to price themselves out of business. If anything, they'll lower prices as FOSS becomes more of a threat.)
Put simply, the cost of changing to a fully FOSS system *can* make it the more expensive choice, even when it's free.
And they made it very difficult to assign keystrokes...I used to easily map a shortcut for "Paste Unformatted." Had to record a VB macro to do it in 2K7.
Not to nitpick, but it's trivially easy to assign hotkeys. The problem is that there is no pre-existing "Paste Unformatted" command - a problem which existed in Office '03 as well.
It's not meant as a cautionary tale... it's the 1980s equivalent of an "epic fail" joke.
If someone standing in the middle of a crowd of civilians fires at you, you don't return fire. The fact that they're morally abhorrent for using innocent people as a shield doesn't absolve you of killing those innocents.
Why do people worry more about a humorous scene from Robocop than the atrocities committed by real, human soldiers in every single war? I'd love to have an army that is literally incapable of raping and looting. That'd be a fantastic step forward for civilization.
And as another plus, it would eventually mean that the only effective armies would be those run by nations. No more violent rebellion! Sure, rebellions have had good effects on occasion (e.g. the American revolution), but nowadays, they tend to end up like the Congo, or the Sudan, or Sri Lanka. In other words, hundreds of thousands of innocent people get raped, tortured, and murdered. It's possible to effect real change in a society without armies of rebels roving the countryside (e.g. Gandhi in India, Mandela in South Africa). An end to warlords would be a great step forward for the world.
Kill 'em all. Let the scrapyard sort it out.
FTFY.
Sadly, your humble, kindly engineers will just build and maintain the thing. It'll be a committee of politico-military-management-morons that decide what instructions the thing is given. :-(
So the same people that decide the rules of engagement for the soldiers right now. Only with robots, they can't kill without permission. Sounds perfect to me. Or at least, as perfect as you can get while still having war in the first place.
Yeah, clearly the right thing to do is send good ole fashioned humans over there to fight. No way that could ever go wrong. /sarcasm
Robots can be made not have feelings of vengeance or anger. Which means they won't go murdering civilians. They will do what robots always do, which is to say, EXACTLY what they are told to. If they kill civilians, it's due to human error, not because it's "evil".
Let's say a battle happens near your town. People are going to be shot, and die, and you (a civilian) could be one of them. Would you rather have that decision made by:
A) A team of highly-trained emotionally-detached engineers, working for years to ensure minimal casualties.
or
B) A team of stressed-out twenty-somethings who just watched their best friends get blown to pieces by your next-door neighbor, and have to make a snap judgment about whether you're going to do the same to them.
It really does help clarify just how big the sun is, in a way numbers can't. That something as big as the space shuttle looks so tiny against the sun, even though it is hundreds of thousands of times closer... it's amazing to actually see.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable, new idea. It's not "changing color of email text"... it's automatically understanding the meaning of the colors and adjusting them appropriately for each recipient.
Why is it that so many people on Slashdot seem to think that all patents are bad?