Considering the amount of trouble you're in if you forget to take something with you from an aeroplane, I'm surprised he's willing to go public with that information.
We all know that only terrorists intent on blowing up a plane would ever leave anything behind on one, so... why hasn't he been sent off to Gitmo?
I don't have numbers (does anybody?), but I'd guess the chances of lasting harm from being hit with an expandable baton are significantly higher than from being hit with a taser.
Until such time comes where every use of force is documented, we won't know.
It's easy to do with handguns as they make a lot of noise. And if you have to account for all the ammunition you were given at the start of the shift, it comes naturally. Same could be done with the tasers - they are after all single use only. Make it a requirement to fill out a report along the lines of use of guns, and I suspect the usage will fall amongst the police force.
This won't be the case amongst private security contractors, but if you make it a requirement to notify the police every time you've used one and make it a requirement that hospitals and doctors report their wounds like they must do with gunshot wounds and we might get closer to the real numbers.
Those two things are about as equal as hand grenades and crash helmets. One is a weapon, the other is a safety device.
Or let's look at it another way: Seatbelts are heavily regulated, must meet certain requirements and there are fines in place if you don't use them like you're supposed to Tasers are... well... they seem to be about as heavily regulated as the use of a billy club.
I may speculate about his parentage. I may suggest that he engage in behaviors of questionable anatomical feasibly
I would love to see that used literally:
Officer: "Do you know why I pulled you over?" Driver: "I suspect you engage in behaviours of questionable anatomical feasibility and want my help?" Officer: "What did you say?" Driver: "I speculated about your parentage."
Any time a suspect does not comply with the officers direction, it is a life or death situation. Period.
Saying "Period." after a sentence seems to be some sort of shorthand for "please don't question that bit; it's a little shaky". If an unarmed shoplifter is running from police, and is asked to stop, and doesn't, why is it life or death situation? Should he be tasered (which, after all, carries the risk of fatal complications)? If this had happened before the use of tasers, should he have been shot?
Just as interesting, what if the person in question is unable to understand what (s)he's being asked to do? I.e. deaf or doesn't speak the language.
Or if someone were to ask John McCain to put his hands high above his head. He's not able to do that - should he be tasered?
What if the officer in question asked someone with cerebral palsy to not move?
As you said, there are waaaay too many ways this can go wrong. Shoot first is a really bad idea.
No, this is a special kind of quantum memory. The data is still there, it's only the storage mechanism that is annihilated, so you'll want to stand well clear of it.
I have seen it done with such perfection that I had to be up close to the screen to see the pixels overlap. That was with four projectors, but still using a computer controlled feedback system. They demonstrated how it worked by nudging all four projectors, and it took about 90 seconds for them to realign properly.
As for my eyesight... I'm -3.5 bordering on -3.75 on both eyes, my right eye has a very slight astigmatism, but with contact lenses I have close to 20/12 vision. In fact the only thing wrong with my eyesight is that I need lenses or glasses, otherwise it'd be better than average.
All the other idiots who got rid of their nukes and now do nice green things like burn lignite to make power (yes Denmark I'm looking at you).
I don't see why you're looking at Denmark. They've never had any commercial nuclear reactors and the only experimental one in Risø was shut down a few years ago.
Now, is it stupid that they are using that much coal power? Yes, that it is, but on the other hand they are also one of the leading nations when it comes to adopting renewable energy sources, like wind power, although the growth of windmill farms pretty much died when the current government came into office.
The best solution to these issues is:
* ban foreign nationals from attending our schools
I'll refrain from labelling you, but with regards to that one, what will that accomplish?
There are two ways to attend a US college if you're an EU student: 1) Pay the same tuition as any US student does 2) Be an exchange student
The exchange student programs are usually made in such a way, that if School A gets one student from School B, School B must accept one student from School A.
One of the reasons the US became a leader in quite a lot of technological fields was by... *gasp*... opening its borders for foreign students and experts. One of the reasons so many US colleges and universities are amongst the best in the world, is that they too attract the best and the brightest - and wouldn't you know it, quite a few of those are not from the US.
What you're advocating with that particular suggestion is cutting off the blood flow and oxygen to the universities. And guess where most of the innovations comes from?
But sure, go ahead. Close down access to US colleges and universities for non-US students. That'll just make the other colleges and universities around the world better.
Nitpick: The EU has 27 members. If you include statistics from the new members like Bulgaria and Romania who battle corruption and organized crime, then you can get to a "average" as high as the US.
I realise it has 27 members. I pointed out that certain member countries were missing from that list.
However, Bulgaria is part of the statistics. As are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. These five countries are the only ones with a higher homicide rate than the US in those two years.
Now, the reason I want to compare the US with the entire EU, is that otherwise you're just picking your data points. If you were to leave out places those five former east block nations, then you might as well leave out the hot zones in the US as well.
What I would like to see is up to date statistics from say 2007, as the data in the list I linked to are a decade old. Being included into the EU may have done good things for the Baltic countries.
The argument for copyright is that in exchange for that right, society will get the works as public domain at a later time.
This is merely holding it in escrow. We are merely holding the items for safe keeping until such a time arises, that the copyright protections are no longer valid.
The only reason to fight against an escrow that costs you nothing, is if you have anything but pure intentions.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
They aren't entirely comparable as they are very different culturally, and comprised of nations that have recently had wars fought on their own soil, come out from under the boot of military dictatorships or have had relative peace for a few hundred years. And you need to piece together the EU numbers yourself. Even better, that list doesn't contain all EU members either.
It seems there are no available combined statistics for the EU, which I find rather sad and slightly disturbing, considering the amount of pressure for even tougher weapon laws. Denmark is currently in an uproar because a 19-year-old kid has been sentenced to the mandatory 7 days in prison for having two box cutters in the front door of his car, when he was picking up a friend from a club.
Best I could come up with was simply averaging across the 14 available EU member countries and I came up with this: [Firearm homicide rate];[Non firearm homicide rate];[total] (all per 100,000) between 1998 and 2000. USA - [2.97];[1.58];[4.55] EU - [0.85];[3.73];[4.58]
Austria, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Romania, Sweden aren't listed. I'm also missing a country but I can't figure out which one.
It should be noted that while none of the listed EU countries have a higher firearm rate than the US, five countries have higer homicide rates (highest was 12.3/100,000).
And while Eurostat does have some info, it doesn't seem to allow you to separate whether or not firearms were involved.
Generally speaking firearms doesn't stop people getting killed. It just means they'll be killed in a different way. At least that's what the '98 to '00 statistics seem to say.
But finding usable data on non-homicide crimes that (doesn't) involve guns is going to be even trickier.
It might be able to detect that you've covered the lens with paint, but would it be able to tell if you hung a picture of the empty area in front of it?
The Windozers will race to post XKCD 619 on every Linux-related storyWell, first I misread your post as talking about http://xkcd.com/629/ and wondered what the hell you had been smoking.
But are you claiming that http://xkcd.com/619/ is somehow a completely silly point?
Actually one of the most fun things I've tried with an FPS was writing a very simple program that would move the mouse five pixels in a random direction 20 times a second.
It starts out as insanely annoying, especially on the desktop, but after a few minutes in the game, you end up finding it a lot more challenging than normal. Coop becomes even more fun when you're running in formations because you might accidentally shoot your friends. Or miss them when you're actually trying to frag them in revenge.
The DDR3 SO-DIMM is designed for a variety of maximum component widths and maximum lengths, refer to the applicable raw card for exact componet size allowed. Components used in DDR3 SO-DIMMs are also limited to a maximum height (as shown in dimension "A" of MO-207) of 1.35 mm. [page 19]
You now have an absolute minimum size of 2,701.35 mm^3 (1.35 mm x 30 mm x 66.7 mm), or 675.3375 mm^3/GB. This is a very very idealized minimum by the way.
An Intel 2½" drive is 49,266.28 mm^3 (100.4 mm x 7 mm x 70.1 mm) and currently maxes out at 160 GB leaving you with 307.91425 mm^3/GB. That's 46% of the space that would be needed for DDR3 RAM. Add to that that Intel's 2nd generation SSDs are only using one side of the PCB, and you can expect the storage space requirements to be halved.
Then there's the fact that the SSDs are directly replaceable. In other words, they don't need to rebuild the computer, buy super special boards or anything like that - you can replace a harddrive with an SSD without having to spec out a new supercomputer.
In the end, if you wanted to replace the system with something that could provide 1 TB of RAM per node, they would need a VERY expensive system. Even with 8 GB modules, you would need to somehow fit 128 of them onto a board. I'd really love to see the mother- and daughter-boards involved with that.
In the end it doesn't just come down to raw price or speed of the storage device (RAM vs SSD vs HDD vs tape), but also all the other factors involved, such as space, power, heat and the stuff you need to use it (i.e. a brand new super computer that can support 1 TB RAM/node vs 48 GB at the moment.
Or to use a really bad car analogy, some company has found out that using a BMW M5 Touring Estate gives them faster deliveries than using a Ford Transit. Now you're suggesting that they should be delivering stuff via aeroplanes. Yes, it's much faster, but you need a brand new transportation structure built up around this, which you also need to factor into your cost assessments.
[OpenOffice is] still not even terribly compatible [with MS Office] as documents don't always flow the same when viewed or printed with either platform.
The same can be said for Microsoft Office, where there are instances where it isn't even compatible in different languages!
Not sure if they've fixed this in the newest version of Excel, but having operations translated into different languages (i.e. SUM(A1:A9) being SUMMA(A1:A9)) is really really stupid unless every single version does a behind the scenes translation into a common one. This certainly wasn't the case previously, which makes any kind of regionalized language version useless when you're working with people in other countries.
I, for one, had a lot of fun translating a German source spreadsheet into English, Danish and Swedish at one point. Especially fun when you don't have access to the English, German and Swedish language versions to test it on. Add to that the loads of fun involved when no one can seem to agree one which version they should be using, and you're in for a treat!
Whomever came up with the idea that it'd be a good idea to translate function names in the UI and not ensure that the back end could understand other languages needs to be hung from a flagpole by their nose hairs.
I don't know if this is also the case in OpenOffice.org (I suspect it might be, as I seem to recall having to use Danish function names at one point), and if that's the case they ALSO need to be flogged for that insane idea.
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Considering the amount of trouble you're in if you forget to take something with you from an aeroplane, I'm surprised he's willing to go public with that information.
We all know that only terrorists intent on blowing up a plane would ever leave anything behind on one, so ... why hasn't he been sent off to Gitmo?
By that definition the steering wheel is a weapon. And the brakes. And your shoes.
Until such time comes where every use of force is documented, we won't know.
It's easy to do with handguns as they make a lot of noise. And if you have to account for all the ammunition you were given at the start of the shift, it comes naturally. Same could be done with the tasers - they are after all single use only. Make it a requirement to fill out a report along the lines of use of guns, and I suspect the usage will fall amongst the police force.
This won't be the case amongst private security contractors, but if you make it a requirement to notify the police every time you've used one and make it a requirement that hospitals and doctors report their wounds like they must do with gunshot wounds and we might get closer to the real numbers.
Those two things are about as equal as hand grenades and crash helmets. One is a weapon, the other is a safety device.
Or let's look at it another way: ... well ... they seem to be about as heavily regulated as the use of a billy club.
Seatbelts are heavily regulated, must meet certain requirements and there are fines in place if you don't use them like you're supposed to
Tasers are
I would love to see that used literally:
Officer: "Do you know why I pulled you over?"
Driver: "I suspect you engage in behaviours of questionable anatomical feasibility and want my help?"
Officer: "What did you say?"
Driver: "I speculated about your parentage."
Just as interesting, what if the person in question is unable to understand what (s)he's being asked to do? I.e. deaf or doesn't speak the language.
Or if someone were to ask John McCain to put his hands high above his head. He's not able to do that - should he be tasered?
What if the officer in question asked someone with cerebral palsy to not move?
As you said, there are waaaay too many ways this can go wrong. Shoot first is a really bad idea.
No, this is a special kind of quantum memory. The data is still there, it's only the storage mechanism that is annihilated, so you'll want to stand well clear of it.
I have seen it done with such perfection that I had to be up close to the screen to see the pixels overlap. That was with four projectors, but still using a computer controlled feedback system. They demonstrated how it worked by nudging all four projectors, and it took about 90 seconds for them to realign properly.
As for my eyesight ... I'm -3.5 bordering on -3.75 on both eyes, my right eye has a very slight astigmatism, but with contact lenses I have close to 20/12 vision. In fact the only thing wrong with my eyesight is that I need lenses or glasses, otherwise it'd be better than average.
Well, with a few projectors, a camera and some smart software, you could have it all auto adjust perfectly with no discernible lines.
I for one, could easily see the fun in having six 1080p projectors lighting up the screen
Yeah, but when's the last time you heard of anyone being charged with possession of a blunt force weapon when they beat someone up with their fists?
I have a few cellphones, the oldest being five years old and all of them are equipped with recorder functionality.
So ... can you now be arrested and charged for possessing a cellphone outside your own private home?
I don't see why you're looking at Denmark. They've never had any commercial nuclear reactors and the only experimental one in Risø was shut down a few years ago.
Now, is it stupid that they are using that much coal power? Yes, that it is, but on the other hand they are also one of the leading nations when it comes to adopting renewable energy sources, like wind power, although the growth of windmill farms pretty much died when the current government came into office.
I'll refrain from labelling you, but with regards to that one, what will that accomplish?
There are two ways to attend a US college if you're an EU student:
1) Pay the same tuition as any US student does
2) Be an exchange student
The exchange student programs are usually made in such a way, that if School A gets one student from School B, School B must accept one student from School A.
One of the reasons the US became a leader in quite a lot of technological fields was by ... *gasp* ... opening its borders for foreign students and experts. One of the reasons so many US colleges and universities are amongst the best in the world, is that they too attract the best and the brightest - and wouldn't you know it, quite a few of those are not from the US.
What you're advocating with that particular suggestion is cutting off the blood flow and oxygen to the universities. And guess where most of the innovations comes from?
But sure, go ahead. Close down access to US colleges and universities for non-US students. That'll just make the other colleges and universities around the world better.
I realise it has 27 members. I pointed out that certain member countries were missing from that list.
However, Bulgaria is part of the statistics. As are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. These five countries are the only ones with a higher homicide rate than the US in those two years.
Now, the reason I want to compare the US with the entire EU, is that otherwise you're just picking your data points. If you were to leave out places those five former east block nations, then you might as well leave out the hot zones in the US as well.
What I would like to see is up to date statistics from say 2007, as the data in the list I linked to are a decade old. Being included into the EU may have done good things for the Baltic countries.
The argument for copyright is that in exchange for that right, society will get the works as public domain at a later time.
This is merely holding it in escrow. We are merely holding the items for safe keeping until such a time arises, that the copyright protections are no longer valid.
The only reason to fight against an escrow that costs you nothing, is if you have anything but pure intentions.
I made a really long-winded comment about it previously.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
Well, try comparing the US with the EU and look at firearm related deaths per 100,000
They aren't entirely comparable as they are very different culturally, and comprised of nations that have recently had wars fought on their own soil, come out from under the boot of military dictatorships or have had relative peace for a few hundred years. And you need to piece together the EU numbers yourself. Even better, that list doesn't contain all EU members either.
It seems there are no available combined statistics for the EU, which I find rather sad and slightly disturbing, considering the amount of pressure for even tougher weapon laws. Denmark is currently in an uproar because a 19-year-old kid has been sentenced to the mandatory 7 days in prison for having two box cutters in the front door of his car, when he was picking up a friend from a club.
Best I could come up with was simply averaging across the 14 available EU member countries and I came up with this:
[Firearm homicide rate];[Non firearm homicide rate];[total] (all per 100,000) between 1998 and 2000.
USA - [2.97];[1.58];[4.55]
EU - [0.85];[3.73];[4.58]
Austria, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Romania, Sweden aren't listed. I'm also missing a country but I can't figure out which one.
It should be noted that while none of the listed EU countries have a higher firearm rate than the US, five countries have higer homicide rates (highest was 12.3/100,000).
And while Eurostat does have some info, it doesn't seem to allow you to separate whether or not firearms were involved.
Generally speaking firearms doesn't stop people getting killed. It just means they'll be killed in a different way. At least that's what the '98 to '00 statistics seem to say.
But finding usable data on non-homicide crimes that (doesn't) involve guns is going to be even trickier.
It might be able to detect that you've covered the lens with paint, but would it be able to tell if you hung a picture of the empty area in front of it?
I am looking forward to the day when furniture is treated the same way.
Pay per use, pay to have others use them, pay to move it to a different room ...
No you're not!
Everybody knows that Dr. Sheldon Cooper is Batman!
Actually one of the most fun things I've tried with an FPS was writing a very simple program that would move the mouse five pixels in a random direction 20 times a second.
It starts out as insanely annoying, especially on the desktop, but after a few minutes in the game, you end up finding it a lot more challenging than normal. Coop becomes even more fun when you're running in formations because you might accidentally shoot your friends. Or miss them when you're actually trying to frag them in revenge.
Space requirements.
Biggest DDR3 SO-DIMM modules I could find were 4 GB. They are 30 mm x 66.7 mm and the standard allows for
You now have an absolute minimum size of 2,701.35 mm^3 (1.35 mm x 30 mm x 66.7 mm), or 675.3375 mm^3/GB. This is a very very idealized minimum by the way.
An Intel 2½" drive is 49,266.28 mm^3 (100.4 mm x 7 mm x 70.1 mm) and currently maxes out at 160 GB leaving you with 307.91425 mm^3/GB. That's 46% of the space that would be needed for DDR3 RAM. Add to that that Intel's 2nd generation SSDs are only using one side of the PCB, and you can expect the storage space requirements to be halved.
Then there's the fact that the SSDs are directly replaceable. In other words, they don't need to rebuild the computer, buy super special boards or anything like that - you can replace a harddrive with an SSD without having to spec out a new supercomputer.
In the end, if you wanted to replace the system with something that could provide 1 TB of RAM per node, they would need a VERY expensive system. Even with 8 GB modules, you would need to somehow fit 128 of them onto a board. I'd really love to see the mother- and daughter-boards involved with that.
In the end it doesn't just come down to raw price or speed of the storage device (RAM vs SSD vs HDD vs tape), but also all the other factors involved, such as space, power, heat and the stuff you need to use it (i.e. a brand new super computer that can support 1 TB RAM/node vs 48 GB at the moment.
Or to use a really bad car analogy, some company has found out that using a BMW M5 Touring Estate gives them faster deliveries than using a Ford Transit. Now you're suggesting that they should be delivering stuff via aeroplanes. Yes, it's much faster, but you need a brand new transportation structure built up around this, which you also need to factor into your cost assessments.
The same can be said for Microsoft Office, where there are instances where it isn't even compatible in different languages!
Not sure if they've fixed this in the newest version of Excel, but having operations translated into different languages (i.e. SUM(A1:A9) being SUMMA(A1:A9)) is really really stupid unless every single version does a behind the scenes translation into a common one. This certainly wasn't the case previously, which makes any kind of regionalized language version useless when you're working with people in other countries.
I, for one, had a lot of fun translating a German source spreadsheet into English, Danish and Swedish at one point. Especially fun when you don't have access to the English, German and Swedish language versions to test it on. Add to that the loads of fun involved when no one can seem to agree one which version they should be using, and you're in for a treat!
Whomever came up with the idea that it'd be a good idea to translate function names in the UI and not ensure that the back end could understand other languages needs to be hung from a flagpole by their nose hairs.
I don't know if this is also the case in OpenOffice.org (I suspect it might be, as I seem to recall having to use Danish function names at one point), and if that's the case they ALSO need to be flogged for that insane idea.
Without health maintenance organizations no one would ever be able to maintain their health ... right?