So, it's an invasion of privacy when a machine has a safety interlock? It's an invasion of privacy that I can't run my microwave with the door open? It's an invasion of privacy that my circuit breaker cuts power if I drop a toaster in the bathtub?
No, that's absurd. Those are all safety features, and so would this be. Now, I think mandatory interlocks on all cars would be a waste of money, but acting like it's some intrusion in our lives by Big Brother is dishonest.
Repeating your strawman tripe doesn't make it true. The government isn't "regulating the packet" whatever the hell that means. The government is regulating the companies... telling them that they can't play favorites with internet traffic. There's no bureaucrat inspecting each packet as it whizzes by. They wouldn't have the funding to do that if they wanted.
I know Fox told you that government is always bad, but you really got to think for yourself. Major corporations (like News Corp!) have a vested interest in demonizing government regulation of major corporations.
An unregulated internet will quickly come to resemble cable TV. Having the FCC enforce some basic standard of net neutrality prevents that.
I wouldn't say that. Both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were attacks that shocked the US out of notion that attacks never come to our soil, and led to cruel treatment of particular ethnic groups. Both the Iraq and Vietnam wars were messy, ill-conceived, protracted fights intended to keep the bogeyman of the day out of the region. There are differences, of course, but there are also similarities.
It's a bit early to tell what the happenings in Egypt will ultimately bear resemblance to, but it shouldn't be so surprising that current events can resemble historical ones. People don't change that much, we just do the same old things with new tools.
And I'd mod you down, but doing so would make my post (and all other child posts) invisible as well. Heck, since you posted as AC, odds are no one will ever know this post was here.
Just went to Amazon, typed in my passwords using all caps, and sure enough it logged me right in. I "changed" my password to the same thing it already was, and now the issue is fixed.
This is why we need a real media, instead of following the current trend of bloggers covering news while the established media cover entertainment and punditry. Because without real reporters over there, there's no way to figure out what happened during a blackout. Local bloggers can be cut off, and when the lights come back on, who's to say what happened? Whereas disappearing a reporter for the NY Times would just invite more scrutiny.
Of course, it's all contingent on the established media putting aside their profit margins for a moment. Reporters are expensive, and don't get the ratings that star watches and manufactured controversy pull in.
I don't get why so many people on Slashdot like to harp on this. How exactly do you expect them to prove causation in a sociological study? Correlation is all they can show, and correlation can be interesting. And since they used the word "predicts" instead of "leads to", they can't even be accused of conflating the two.
The "causation is not correlation" refrain doesn't really apply here. The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it. The study seems pretty solid, and it's conclusion is believable. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine whether self-control leads to success versus "unknown factor X" leading to both self-control and success. To do that would require you to take a large sample of children, and teach self-control to some who don't have it, while also breaking the self-control of some of those who do. Not the sort of study a parent will sign their kid up for.
The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the summary. It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes. The fact that lack of self-control can lead to divorce should surprise no one.
Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come round again. That's why they're called revolutions.
- Pratchett
In all seriousness, the only reason the American Revolution worked out so well was because we had the enormous good fortune of A) having no nearby powers to take advantage and B) having technology at just the right point where we could win the war without having to deal with endless terrorist attacks afterward.
It is no longer possible for an armed rebellion to end well. Technology has seen to it that armed rebellions don't end at all.
Where does it get the power for the non-volatile write? It would have to have a battery or capacitor built in, in case of sudden loss of power. It would also need low voltage detection for the same reason. How does all of this end up affecting the cost and density? We already have non-volatile SRAM based on the same principles (warning: article sounds like it was lifted from a press release).
The reason we use DRAM as computer memory is because it's really, really cheap. If nvDRAM ends up having a significantly highly cost per byte, I doubt it'll see much use. Especially when one considers the ever-falling price point for solid-state drives.
Considering it's supported by someone who was never a politician and is no longer even working for the government, I'd say it's not going to even see Congress any time soon.
Depends. Was the item I was looking for actually in the bathroom? I'm pretty sure the GP's point is that real robots, unlike their sci-fi brethren, can only follow exact orders. They cannot, as of yet, perform anything resembling problem solving or creative thought.
Nonsense. Scientists don't go into the field for the money, because there isn't any. They make less than unskilled labor, working long hours, until they get a doctorate (late 20s at best). And even as a post doc, they make far less than what an equivalently skilled engineer would make.
The people accusing them of being dishonest are just a bunch of right-wing hacks seeking to poison the well. Claim that any scientist in a "politicized" field is inherently untrustworthy, and now you no longer need to deal with facts, because anyone who presents facts must just be a corrupt liar!
It's disgusting that supposedly smart people fall for such transparent tactics, and it will be the downfall of our society. The human race has always depended on science and technology to move forward, and now the people who keep that engine of progress running are being smeared. How long do you think we can last living in a truth-free fantasy world?
By your definition, my having a four year degree means I didn't cook my breakfast this morning, I engineered it, and I didn't take out the trash bags but performed sanitary engineering upon my domicile, yet a non degree holding ham radio guy designing and building his own equipment is not really doing electrical engineering work.
That's the most absurd strawman I've ever seen. Are you suggesting that I would say my doctor "doctored his breakfast", simply because I insist on his having a degree in his field? That's something like 4 year-old logic.
Meanwhile, your ham radio guy is the very definition of an amateur. His experience may qualify him to make radios (extremely simple circuits, btw) and antennas, but I'm sure as all hell not going to trust him to design a pacemaker. Is it really so much to ask that someone doing an important job have years of formal training first?
And as to your examples of taxi drivers and welders, I do assume that the taxi driver has a driver's license, and that the welder has also received training. Of course, the training in both cases is shorter, because it is a simpler job. It takes longer to learn to perform open heart surgery than it takes to learn to drive a car.
Counterpoint: Pixar. You know, that massively successful movie-maker that's been batting 1000 for the past fifteen years by making exclusively high-quality, imaginative family movies.
Unfortunately, it's a pain in the ass to get other materials to interface with diamond. I admit I haven't looked into it in a few years, but last I heard, diamond transistors looked like a dead end.
Here's the electronics 101 version: Transistors have three ports. Electrons flow from one (the source/emitter) to another (the drain/collector). The amount of electrons that make it across depends on the mode the transistor is in, and the mode is controlled by the voltage applied to the third port, (the gate/base). There are three modes: off, linear, and saturation. In saturation, the electrons are flowing as fast as they can and small changes in the gate voltage don't matter. In linear mode, the current is directly proportional to the gate voltage - this mode is key to analog circuits. When the transistor is off, very little current gets across (on the order of femtoamps). When they say graphene transistors can't be completely turned off, they mean the amount of current that gets through when it is off is much larger than for normal transistors. It can still be "turned off" in the sense that if you take away all of the electricity, it loses its state, so there's no particular reason that it would be useful for storage.
As the article notes, a likely use would be in combination with more traditional transistors, wherein you could take advantage of graphene's speed, and then have a silicon "boot" to turn off the circuit when it's not in use by cutting off all of the power to that block.
Re:Some weasel of a tech is now shitting his pants
on
DSL Installation Fail
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· Score: 1
Unions don't protect customers. Unions protect unions at all costs.
That is, of course, unless the customer has to work for a living, in which case he owes his health care, safety, retirement plan, reasonable hours, vacation days, sick leave, and overtime pay to unions.
Sorry; firstly, me not enabling your government by voting is my right, in fact, it is one of the rights your system gave me. Secondly, if your system is going to fall over and shit it self like this every time someone doesn't vote just right, I have news for you. The system was broken from the get go.
Fix the system not the people.
See, you're confused. You say you don't want to "enable the government by voting". That's wrong on two counts:
1) The government is just a system. It doesn't need "enabling". It just is. 2) The plutocrats and corrupt politicians that you really have a problem with don't need your vote. They win by default when you don't vote. It is by not voting that you "enable" them.
Be an apathetic coward wallowing in self-pity if you like, you have that right, but don't delude yourself into believing that it isn't that very act that is causing the problem.
How about instead of snark, you contact your senators and representative, and vote for liberals (that's liberals, not Democrats) whenever possible? There are people in government trying to block this, you know. Hell, it'd already be law if not for Senator Wyden.
People who insist that voting doesn't matter aren't just part of the problem, they're the entirety of the problem. If they all voted, we'd have more than enough votes to toss out anyone who didn't respect the people.
Step 5: Get caught by investigators Step 6: Get sued for eleventy billion dollars by competitor Step 7: Get forced into resignation by directors of your company. Step 8: Retire with a golden parachute of $50 million.
Hey, if you're in the position to make this sort of decision, you can never lose. Seriously though, you would be caught, because your competitor would insist they weren't paying the spammers, an investigation would confirm it, and eventually it would get traced to its source. Especially if you were foolhardy enough to organize the class action yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
So we should wait until people are dead, and punish the culprits, rather than try to prevent the deaths in the first place?
So, it's an invasion of privacy when a machine has a safety interlock? It's an invasion of privacy that I can't run my microwave with the door open? It's an invasion of privacy that my circuit breaker cuts power if I drop a toaster in the bathtub?
No, that's absurd. Those are all safety features, and so would this be. Now, I think mandatory interlocks on all cars would be a waste of money, but acting like it's some intrusion in our lives by Big Brother is dishonest.
Repeating your strawman tripe doesn't make it true. The government isn't "regulating the packet" whatever the hell that means. The government is regulating the companies... telling them that they can't play favorites with internet traffic. There's no bureaucrat inspecting each packet as it whizzes by. They wouldn't have the funding to do that if they wanted.
I know Fox told you that government is always bad, but you really got to think for yourself. Major corporations (like News Corp!) have a vested interest in demonizing government regulation of major corporations.
An unregulated internet will quickly come to resemble cable TV. Having the FCC enforce some basic standard of net neutrality prevents that.
I wouldn't say that. Both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were attacks that shocked the US out of notion that attacks never come to our soil, and led to cruel treatment of particular ethnic groups. Both the Iraq and Vietnam wars were messy, ill-conceived, protracted fights intended to keep the bogeyman of the day out of the region. There are differences, of course, but there are also similarities.
It's a bit early to tell what the happenings in Egypt will ultimately bear resemblance to, but it shouldn't be so surprising that current events can resemble historical ones. People don't change that much, we just do the same old things with new tools.
And I'd mod you down, but doing so would make my post (and all other child posts) invisible as well. Heck, since you posted as AC, odds are no one will ever know this post was here.
Just went to Amazon, typed in my passwords using all caps, and sure enough it logged me right in. I "changed" my password to the same thing it already was, and now the issue is fixed.
This is why we need a real media, instead of following the current trend of bloggers covering news while the established media cover entertainment and punditry. Because without real reporters over there, there's no way to figure out what happened during a blackout. Local bloggers can be cut off, and when the lights come back on, who's to say what happened? Whereas disappearing a reporter for the NY Times would just invite more scrutiny.
Of course, it's all contingent on the established media putting aside their profit margins for a moment. Reporters are expensive, and don't get the ratings that star watches and manufactured controversy pull in.
I don't get why so many people on Slashdot like to harp on this. How exactly do you expect them to prove causation in a sociological study? Correlation is all they can show, and correlation can be interesting. And since they used the word "predicts" instead of "leads to", they can't even be accused of conflating the two.
The "causation is not correlation" refrain doesn't really apply here. The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it. The study seems pretty solid, and it's conclusion is believable. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to determine whether self-control leads to success versus "unknown factor X" leading to both self-control and success. To do that would require you to take a large sample of children, and teach self-control to some who don't have it, while also breaking the self-control of some of those who do. Not the sort of study a parent will sign their kid up for.
The point is that self-control is good, and trying to instill it in a child is likely (but not guaranteed) to help them in life.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the summary. It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes. The fact that lack of self-control can lead to divorce should surprise no one.
Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come round again. That's why they're called revolutions.
- Pratchett
In all seriousness, the only reason the American Revolution worked out so well was because we had the enormous good fortune of A) having no nearby powers to take advantage and B) having technology at just the right point where we could win the war without having to deal with endless terrorist attacks afterward.
It is no longer possible for an armed rebellion to end well. Technology has seen to it that armed rebellions don't end at all.
Where does it get the power for the non-volatile write? It would have to have a battery or capacitor built in, in case of sudden loss of power. It would also need low voltage detection for the same reason. How does all of this end up affecting the cost and density? We already have non-volatile SRAM based on the same principles (warning: article sounds like it was lifted from a press release).
The reason we use DRAM as computer memory is because it's really, really cheap. If nvDRAM ends up having a significantly highly cost per byte, I doubt it'll see much use. Especially when one considers the ever-falling price point for solid-state drives.
Considering it's supported by someone who was never a politician and is no longer even working for the government, I'd say it's not going to even see Congress any time soon.
Sure there's a difference. One exists, the other is a bogeyman intended to scare the uneducated into voting against their interests.
Depends. Was the item I was looking for actually in the bathroom? I'm pretty sure the GP's point is that real robots, unlike their sci-fi brethren, can only follow exact orders. They cannot, as of yet, perform anything resembling problem solving or creative thought.
It does require "fancy" algorithms. It's just that those algorithms are well known. See: inverted pendulums.
Nonsense. Scientists don't go into the field for the money, because there isn't any. They make less than unskilled labor, working long hours, until they get a doctorate (late 20s at best). And even as a post doc, they make far less than what an equivalently skilled engineer would make.
The people accusing them of being dishonest are just a bunch of right-wing hacks seeking to poison the well. Claim that any scientist in a "politicized" field is inherently untrustworthy, and now you no longer need to deal with facts, because anyone who presents facts must just be a corrupt liar!
It's disgusting that supposedly smart people fall for such transparent tactics, and it will be the downfall of our society. The human race has always depended on science and technology to move forward, and now the people who keep that engine of progress running are being smeared. How long do you think we can last living in a truth-free fantasy world?
Except on Wall Street, you get "bonuses," each of which will equate to a couple years salary for the CompSci grad.
By your definition, my having a four year degree means I didn't cook my breakfast this morning, I engineered it, and I didn't take out the trash bags but performed sanitary engineering upon my domicile, yet a non degree holding ham radio guy designing and building his own equipment is not really doing electrical engineering work.
That's the most absurd strawman I've ever seen. Are you suggesting that I would say my doctor "doctored his breakfast", simply because I insist on his having a degree in his field? That's something like 4 year-old logic.
Meanwhile, your ham radio guy is the very definition of an amateur. His experience may qualify him to make radios (extremely simple circuits, btw) and antennas, but I'm sure as all hell not going to trust him to design a pacemaker. Is it really so much to ask that someone doing an important job have years of formal training first?
And as to your examples of taxi drivers and welders, I do assume that the taxi driver has a driver's license, and that the welder has also received training. Of course, the training in both cases is shorter, because it is a simpler job. It takes longer to learn to perform open heart surgery than it takes to learn to drive a car.
Counterpoint: Pixar. You know, that massively successful movie-maker that's been batting 1000 for the past fifteen years by making exclusively high-quality, imaginative family movies.
Unfortunately, it's a pain in the ass to get other materials to interface with diamond. I admit I haven't looked into it in a few years, but last I heard, diamond transistors looked like a dead end.
Here's the electronics 101 version: Transistors have three ports. Electrons flow from one (the source/emitter) to another (the drain/collector). The amount of electrons that make it across depends on the mode the transistor is in, and the mode is controlled by the voltage applied to the third port, (the gate/base). There are three modes: off, linear, and saturation. In saturation, the electrons are flowing as fast as they can and small changes in the gate voltage don't matter. In linear mode, the current is directly proportional to the gate voltage - this mode is key to analog circuits. When the transistor is off, very little current gets across (on the order of femtoamps). When they say graphene transistors can't be completely turned off, they mean the amount of current that gets through when it is off is much larger than for normal transistors. It can still be "turned off" in the sense that if you take away all of the electricity, it loses its state, so there's no particular reason that it would be useful for storage.
As the article notes, a likely use would be in combination with more traditional transistors, wherein you could take advantage of graphene's speed, and then have a silicon "boot" to turn off the circuit when it's not in use by cutting off all of the power to that block.
Unions don't protect customers. Unions protect unions at all costs.
That is, of course, unless the customer has to work for a living, in which case he owes his health care, safety, retirement plan, reasonable hours, vacation days, sick leave, and overtime pay to unions.
Excuse me?
Sorry; firstly, me not enabling your government by voting is my right, in fact, it is one of the rights your system gave me. Secondly, if your system is going to fall over and shit it self like this every time someone doesn't vote just right, I have news for you. The system was broken from the get go.
Fix the system not the people.
See, you're confused. You say you don't want to "enable the government by voting". That's wrong on two counts:
1) The government is just a system. It doesn't need "enabling". It just is.
2) The plutocrats and corrupt politicians that you really have a problem with don't need your vote. They win by default when you don't vote. It is by not voting that you "enable" them.
Be an apathetic coward wallowing in self-pity if you like, you have that right, but don't delude yourself into believing that it isn't that very act that is causing the problem.
How about instead of snark, you contact your senators and representative, and vote for liberals (that's liberals, not Democrats) whenever possible? There are people in government trying to block this, you know. Hell, it'd already be law if not for Senator Wyden.
People who insist that voting doesn't matter aren't just part of the problem, they're the entirety of the problem. If they all voted, we'd have more than enough votes to toss out anyone who didn't respect the people.
Step 5: Get caught by investigators
Step 6: Get sued for eleventy billion dollars by competitor
Step 7: Get forced into resignation by directors of your company.
Step 8: Retire with a golden parachute of $50 million.
Hey, if you're in the position to make this sort of decision, you can never lose. Seriously though, you would be caught, because your competitor would insist they weren't paying the spammers, an investigation would confirm it, and eventually it would get traced to its source. Especially if you were foolhardy enough to organize the class action yourself.