As has been covered before, airport full body scanners tend to kill medical devices like this. People have had devices like these, along with pacemakers and other equipment die after being subjected to high energy bursts of EMI; which is exactly what airport scanners do. While the goverment claims they're phasing these out, they are still in the field -- high power portable x-ray and 'mwave' scanners that are being used at customs checkpoints, or on unsuspecting civilians on the road. And then there's those pesky aircraft carriers that carry gigawatt radar scanners that on several occasions have locked people in their cars, garages, etc., due to EMI when they were passing by.
All of this kind of unregulated and largely unmonitored technology poses a very real danger to technology like this; And with so many people having diabetes, this could mean that entire towns' worth of diabetics drop dead while the government claims "it's a mystery why everyone with implantable medical devices died after we irradiated them..."
My point is; The laboratory environment these things were designed (and approved) in is very different from the environment they're going to be used in. And there's no evidence the FDA has taken this into consideration from what's provided here. Indeed, they have a poor track record of having an impartial approval process; I do not believe that 'FDA Approved' means much more than 'Scientology Approved' these days -- but this is to be expected when the FDA's income is derived directly from the companies' whose products they approve -- companies literally pay for approval. Anywhere else, this would be a clear conflict of interest. But when it comes to the safety of our food, drugs, and medical supplies... it's business as usual.
Don't like it? Don't use their fucking product. Sell your car, sell your computers, get the fuck off of Slashdot or you're in it too.
I swear, there's one guy out here and all he does is prepare bland one-liners like this and copy-paste them after every post and then wait out the timer to do it again.
When you can be replaced by a 7 line perl script, what does that say about your contributions and general intelligence?
Okay, but there's only a very limited supply of CNN news anchors. How do you propose mass-production of these loud creatures? And how do we deal with the humanitarian problems created from widespread use?
In a nutshell: If you're well-prepared for the zombie apocalypse, odds are good that you're also well-prepared for any real disaster, so it's a nice target.
The director of the CDC has said as much: "If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack."
Suspiciously absent from the list of supplies to have on hand, however, is a ruggedized pickup truck. Medical supplies, duct tape, plastic tarps, potable water, and dry food rations were all highly valued, as was a robust preparedness plan by the federal and local governments, with a focus on organization and communication.
In fact, the truck weighs in as a convenience. A very heavy one at a time when mobility would be at a premium. In an urban area, a bicycle would achieve many of the requirements of a preparedness plan; It can provide travel of over 100 miles in a day, requires no gasoline, fuel, or electricity, and is very easy to repair. It also won't draw as much attention as a ruggedized anti-zombie truck... which let's be honest: If you have a gun, who are you going after... the bicyclist, or the guy with a truck and a lock safe containing untold goodies?
If you ask me... the truck's a liability. Lastly, what's the first rule of Zombie world? CARDIO. Your physical health is your single greatest asset... it tops the list I put in earlier by a wide margin. If you're too fat to get to the locations of any of those emergency distribution centers, you're pretty much already dead. So I guess then it's a good thing you bought a truck and a gun. Better hope you brought a really big gas tank too, because when that runs out, you are totally screwed.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here on my bike, riding around eating twinkies, because the twinkie supply will probably outlast the gas supply (now that they've started making them again), and I conveniently brought an engine which is estimated to last another 60 years without any major maintenance that can run on them...
If you are allowed to expose the sample to ridiculous temperatures and open flames, though, why expensive lasers rather than boring (and mature and relatively cheap) cutting torches or thermic lances?
Possibly because focused light energy can't become radioactive with prolonged contact with radioactive substances, whereas everything else you mentioned... does. Everything you use to handle nuclear waste materials with, itself eventually becomes nuclear waste material. I'm sure slashdot of all places will recognize a recursion problem when it sees one. Even putting a few feet between the torch and the material extends its service life before it has to be thrown in with the other waste... root square law and all that.
"We're no worse than anyone else and you can't prove otherwise"
It is perhaps fortunate then that we use different standards of evidence in the courts and in science than self-rating one's behavior. Because if we did that, we'd all be above average drivers. It's always the other guy's fault.
P.S. The lack of whales being observed in the area might be attributable to all the observers being in a boat, above the ocean, rather than in the ocean, where the whales live. And regardless, the piles of dead whales that started washing up on shore is a good indication that whatever methodology used was deeply flawed... Perhaps they were simply listening for the whales in between their exceptionally high power sonar tests... that may have already killed or incapacitated them.
So again, this is "cover my ass" commentary, not proper science. Proper science would note that corpses washed ashore in great number after, and conclude using indirect evidence, that observational methodology was flawed, then try to figure out why... not keep doing it for the next six years while continually saying ghosts and boogymen killed and then dragged the dead whales onto shore in the night, because otherwise wouldn't we have noticed them prior to us corpsifying them?
"ExxonMobil believes the panel's finding about the multi-beam echo sounder is unjustified due to the lack of certainty of information and observations recorded during the response efforts in 2008," spokesman Patrick McGinn told AFP in an email. He added that observers employed by the Madagascar government and the oil giant "were on board the vessel and did not observe any whales in the area."'"
Certainty of information: Nobody requires absolute certainty in science. In fact, even the court system, sad as it is, needs it -- it requires "beyond reasonable doubt", whereas science is similarily situated at "best model that fits the facts". Type of cognitive distortion ExxonMobile uses here: All-or-nothing thinking.
Out of date observations: It's 2013 now. By carefully hand picking your data set to be only, say, 2008, or pre-2008, you are discounting everything that came after. One supposes that an extra five years' worth of observations, we'd be able to narrow in on a cause. But let's humor them and take just 2008. In February of that year, before the incident in question, the US courts found there was enough evidence that high energy sonar was killing whales to ask the military to reduce its use in naval operations.
Impartial observers: Let me sum this one up real easy -- "Managment finds no problem with the management." The government was paid a lot of money to go along with Exxon, and employees of Exxon I think we can safely say aren't impartial observers. So one of the most basic things required for proper fact gathering went right out the window. This is, in effect, an admission that ExxonMobile has no valid data points from which to draw any conclusions whatsoever. It is, from a scientific perspective, pure speculation. "We're not wrong because, er, we saw ourselves doing nothing wrong." Okay... what about everyone else? "We didn't ask them."
I only have one rule: Don't have rules. All they do is trip you up and force you into formulaic and predictable interactions. Like for example, half-naked physicists; Because you can't be a dignified woman in NuTrek.
Pretty much, that scene signed JJ Abraham's creative death to me; All he's doing is taking a 'Fast and Furious' approach to beloved science fiction characters; Which is to say, lots of explosions, lots of smack talk, lots of testosterone... and very little in the way of intelligent, subtle, or unconventional plot or character interaction. He's the white trash of the scifi world...
I mean, what ever happened to I, Robot, or A Space Odyssey. Ender's Game (before we found out the author was a flaming anti-gay bigot; It's still a good book)? I mean, so much of science fiction has been about exploring the heights to which humanity could rise, to put our current struggles in perspective; Even Battlestar Galactica (the reimage) is a recent example of how scifi can be a stand-in proxy for current events.
When you look back on those kinds of in-depth stories, with dynamic characters being challenged about what would be moral or ethical behavior, with the JJ Abrahams approach, it's pretty clear he contributes next to nothing to the franchises he has visited so far. He's the "auto-tune'd pop star" version of the scifi director. And yet, people say "but he attracts new people to scifi!"
I suppose... in the same way Justin Bieber attracts teenagers to music. -_- Go ahead now, modbomb me for eating your sacred cow, but deep down, you know it's true: There's nothing original about his work.
. Lawmakers have raised significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information.
Would that be the same lawmakers that authorized the handling of our sensitive personal health records by people making pennies on the dollar in foreign countries... because hospitals asked them to disregard HIPPA safeguards to save a few bucks?
'Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live,' says Patrick Howard, who leads Deloitte Consulting's public sector state health care practice."
Wait, rolling out national access to one of the most complex databases ever designed, with multi-tiered access controls, and peering with tens of thousands of providers, in realtime... isn't easy? Shit, why not just hire some more 14 year old kids? They seem to know how these computer whatcha-things work. Can't be any harder than Youtubing the Facebooks.
Let's be serious for a minute -- the launch can't possibly go as badly as the Republican's last major foray into IT -- Romney's campaign. I mean, their competitor to Obama's data analytics software didn't just explode on the launchpad, it actually fired itself into the ground as it did so. So the idea that Obama might pull off another big data project while they're still trying to figure out where the off button is on the internet, is probably a bit frightening to them. And that's really all it's about. Have you seen the scare advertisements on TV? I mean, creepy guys dressed as Uncle Sam putting on lubed blue gloves and making a mockery of what is undeniably the best medicine in the world (once you're sick, that is, and as long as you can afford it)... they're going all out on this.
So yeah, big surprise they're predicting the end of life as we know it, asteroid smashing into Earth, total extinction of the human race kind of doomsday predictions over the launch. But truthfully, here's what's going to happen; It's going to work. Sortof. There's going to be spotty and random problems, many caused by humans, because whenever you launch a new, complex piece of software, the interaction of so many untrained people in an uncontrolled environment (read: "It worked fine in the lab!") is going to cause unmitigated stress and support headaches until people get used to the software... and the software gets used to them. And by used to them, I mean patched. Probably quite a bit. It's the classic support bathtub curve: High initial support costs, followed by a rapid falloff, a long period of stability, and then rising costs again as the product ages and reaches EOL.
This is IT Management 101. Nobody should be surprised when things go haywire... but it'll be haywire in the "Y2K" sort of way: A few newsworthy problems (that'll inevitably be blown well out of proportion), but mostly... it'll work. It'll be lagged, and people will be frustrated, but it'll work.
And no matter how badly it goes... it's still better than the alternative, which is for some people literally dying in place, due to a lack of access to health care. Even if it set every 20,000th's applicant on fire, it'd be better than what we have now.
Don't be ridiculous. Slashdot has covered new and interesting product developments since long before you created a SlashID. This falls well into the "News for Nerds" category. I will probably never buy this as I don't even game, yet I read it anyway. Why? Because it is interesting new technology. Period.
First, you don't know the first slashdot ID I created, or why I no longer use it. But it's a 10,000 ID. So don't zip thud on a number thinking it means something.
Second... no, it isn't interesting new technology. It's technology that's been around for the past two decades at least, wrapped up in a slightly different package. Giving an old house a new coat of paint doesn't make the house new. And as far as interesting... that's entirely subjective. I personally don't find vaporware advertisements interesting -- when they have an actual product, that I can hold, or buy, or at least get a fucking diagram to build a prototype of it, then it's interesting. Because in my world, interesting is defined as "shit I can use", not "shit someone in marketing dreamed up."
Actually BSD licensed was published before GPLv1. 4.3BSD-Tahoe was released in 1988. A full year before RMS release his first GPL program.
The BSD license allows someone to make changes and not return them to the community. The GPL created a community where contributions and advancements to various designs couldn't be taken away from the public, trivially modified, and then sold at a profit. Ergo, I stand by what I say: GPL was the first "open source" license. Though there are, admittedly, many versions of it, all of which claim to be the One True definition; Such is the nature of religion, er, I mean, programming.
Anyway, isn't the implication with "slashvertizing" that someone has posted a story to their own product? Pretty sure this was posted out of genuine interest, not financial interest.
No, a slashvertisement is a PR release that was green lighted because it was paid for. It may be 'news for nerds', but as it isn't exactly inspiring conversation and discourse beyond "ooh... shiny." it falls into the category of... probably paid for. On the other hand, if it was someone's blog showing a prototype of said controller, and a step by step teardown and some details about how to program it... that would be slashdot material.
Well, at least the old slashdot I used to know and love, before it got into the ice cream, bloated up, and started spending all its time on the couch watching TV.
Yup... and every time you go to use it, it pauses for a couple minutes while it downloads a new patch, before allowing you to play! "While you wait for your controller to be updated, please look at this webpage with a bunch of vaguely-related advertisements and a PR release by the developer." (-_-) What ever happened to just turning on the console and, you know, playing the game that worked just fine last night when you went to bed? I know, I know... it's a feature...
(oh mod points, how I miss thee, I think I had some 5 or 7 years ago, but perhaps I was dreaming)
An irony of the moderation of this site is that those who contribute the most are those least likely to be selected to grade the contributions of others, whereas those with less of a grasp on the subject matter and only casually participate, are given that ability. If you ask me, it's the single biggest reason why the overall comment quality has been on a sharp downward trajectory the past 18 months; None of the people with any passion for the subject matter are involved in the grading of it. It'd be like letting school children grade the works of shakespeare alongside their friends'... I suspect, shakespeare would do rather poorly against a bunch of 9 year olds competing for popularity points amongst their peers.
RMS has nothing to do with "open source". Sad that to this day trolls and idiots keep intentionally attributing it to him, in order to misinform. Do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
He was the principle author of the GNU GPL, the first real open source license. The entire open source movement is based on licensing; That's how open source is defined -- by licensing terms. And RMS was the first to come up with a license that captured this essential quality and formalized it. Richard Stallman wants to use the term "free software" instead of "open source", but that doesn't make me a troll for using a different term for it than he does.
A pity so many Anonymous Cowards love replying to me with a casual "STFU" and claim I know nothing, it's off topic, etc., and people believe them. Further proof of the sad, sad state slashdot has descended into... that an informed and long-time contributor to the community gets mod-bombed while the trolls get up-modded.
"One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date." So, exactly how many PDP-11's have *you* donated?...
None. GCC already supported compiling for the PDP-11. It has since March, 2002 according to the patch notes for GCC. Which, let's be honest -- getting hardware support into the compiler a mere 5 years after the line was discontinued is remarkably fast for the GNU project.
I'm still waiting for the day they include a warning when you derp a sizeof(x) into your code, when you really wanted a sizeof(*x) , something Visual Studio will happily warn me about when compiling something. Of course, gcc does what the code tells it to and reports the bytelength of a pointer variable (how useful!) without complaint, whereas Visual Studio will happily explode my system, then run screaming out of the hole with toilet paper stuck to its foot yelling "Why did you use that win32 call when, although we didn't bother putting it in the documentation, it was depreciated 8 years ago and replaced with seven other similar-sounding functions, equally badly documented and not backwards-compatable!"...
So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features, warnings, etc., but when you merely go for shooting your own foot, it instead blows your whole leg off, then drops a bomb on your head while muttering something about upgrading to the latest.NET and dll versions...
"Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed."
If someone said that today, he'd be promptly sued by SCO, dragged into dark cavernous courtrooms filled with patent trolls, accused by the government of being a terrorist, and laughed at by the mainstream community of UNIX-like OS users, such as the ones reading this post; Absent Linux, we'd all be warring over which was better -- Macintosh or Windows. Both have UNIX buried in their guts.
My point is that RMS' achievement, organizing people into a cohesive political movement loosely termed 'open source', probably couldn't happen today. It is therefore particularly important that he did so thirty years ago, before the global international business and government communities were aware of the potential impact of his activities.
There are fewer and fewer like him every year -- old schoolers who grew up with the fervent belief that the internet, computers, all this digital technology, could empower, enlighten, and educate millions. And then set about proving just that. These days... the majority of people are content to watch Youtube videos of cats, and try not to see any potential beyond immediate gratification and entertainment. It's sad that the hacker ethic has become in such short supply, even within this community. Back then, nobody would think any less of you for going off on your own to reinvent the wheel... your peers thought, at worst, that it might be good practice for you. Today, it's a face full of rage and religious views if you even suggest things may not be as good as they could be.
Doing what the fans say is not necessarily good, at least for new product design.
You're using qualifying statements here to avoid being backed into a corner you rightly deserve to be. The notion that fans are a poor resource to use when making design considerations is a slap in the face to hundreds of highly successful open source products from Apache, to Linux, to Zend PHP. Indeed, for the most part, those products were created entirely by fans, and with each iteration, become even more popular and successful.
Fans often tell you to be a derivative of some other game...
You know, I really like Ford automobiles. I like them so much, in fact, I'd like you to make them more like every non-Ford automobile.
...and/or an incremental improvement of your previous game.
Yeah... Improvements are bad. If you like a product, you should suggest ways to make it worse.
Your innovation still has to pass the fun test.
The can opener hasn't changed much in its original design since the 1850s. It wasn't fun from day one. You own one. Your friends own one. Your mother, she probably owns two or three. Perhaps we should be more specific here: When you are selling an entertainment product, then fun matters. But to expand that to encompass all innovation is a misstatement.
Developers have to put aside their ego at this point and deliver the fun as fans define it.
Okay, back up. You've spent your entire post here largely asserting that the fans are wrong and companies shouldn't listen to them. How, exactly, do you propose a company "deliver the fun as fans define it" if they aren't supposed to listen to them?
That said. Lucas Arts should have done a modernized version of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Screw innovation.;-)
The one thing you've said I can agree with; They should have updated that product line. Accordingly, they should have done it with the improvements and suggestions that the majority of the fans wanted, thus creating a better product overall. By not listening to the fans, they fucked themselves eight ways from sunday (pardon the french, but I'm still a bit bitter about the whole affair).
So essentially the same thing that happens at every large company over time with roots in creating stuff?
No. A great many large companies whose main charter is "creating stuff" manage to retain competent managers and remain responsive to competitive market pressures. They are amongst the largest and most successful companies on the planet. The ones who do not retain competent managers and are no longer responsive to competitive market pressures, we have a name for: Bankrupt.
The top 10 companies in the US, by founding year: 1. Walmart: 1962 2. Exxon Mobile: 1999 (Exxon: 1982, Mobile: 1911)* 3. Chevron: 1984* 4. Phillips 66: 1917* 5. Berkshire Hathaway: 1839 6. Apple: 1976 7. General Motors: 1908 8. General Electric: 1892 9. Valero Energy: 1980* 10. Ford Motor: 1903 -- * It is worth noting that almost all major oil companies can trace their roots back to Standard Oil. Very few oil companies have gone bankrupt since oil became a major commodity; They most usually either merge with other companies or are broken up by government regulators. Thus the 'founding' dates of these companies is not really good context for how long they've been around. On paper, they may be relatively new, but these companies typically have lineages over a hundred years back.
It seems like corporations more or less get to a point where they collapse under their own weight and cease to be able to actually do things.
At least in the United States, a curious statistic is that about 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, despite making up around 10.5% of the population. To quote Forbes; The revenue generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants of children of immigrants is greater than the GDP (gross domestic product) of every country in the world outside the U.S., except China and Japan. To me, this is smoking-hot proof that complacency kills more companies than economics; How else do you explain how some of the poorest and least-advantaged on arrival here manage, within a generation, to control some of the largest assets in this country?
In my experience, that happens right around the time accountants start micro-managing everything, and when winning "buzzword bingo" happens in every company call.
Your experience is not objective. People tend to overvalue their own personal experience, emphasize negative events, and are total and complete crap when it comes to estimating risk and probability. We have spent trillions trying to prevent terrorism, but spend very little in comparison combating drunk driving. All of this is down to cognitive biases, of which you are engaged in one right here.
At some point, companies change from being places that create stuff and can get things done, and morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen. At that point, everything you do starts to feel like a futile gesture.
Again, you're relating to your personal experience here, at the expense of objectivity. You are extrapolating from your own experiences and concluding that the entire world must run this way. And yet, if it did, civilization as we know it wouldn't exist; Economies would invariably self-destruct, having reached their use-by date, if everything tended to "morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen".
The accountants won't let anything happen, and management is more focused on covering their own asses than building anything new.
I can see you feel very jilted about how the working class is routinely exploited by the wealthy. And frankly, if you live in the United States you have good reason to feel this way; the pay difference between CEOs and entry-level w
Al Jazeera has been making quiet inroads into the "Western World" for the past 5 years. That's who CNN should be afraid of since they are both playing the same game.
"...We're getting reports in that the police may be driving down a street. Wait! Wait... another SWAT van just drove by. Now this is just speculation, but it may, may be going after the terrorists. We have a reporter on scene, let's call them and see what they have to say... ring, ring Barbara, Barbara, can you hear me? The mailbox you are trying to reach is currently full. Please try you--click Okay, Barbara isn't there. Umm, let's try Bob.. Bob, are you there? (sounds of a hurricane in a microphone, choppy speech)... Bob? Bob what can you tell us about what's going on down there?
"Police have cordoned off the area and are providing no details at this time of what is going on, Bruce. Now we're just speculating here, and as you know things can change quite a bit in a dynamic situation like this, but we think there may be two, or as many as fifty separate shooters. We have been hearing sporatic gunfire from the area."
Guys, this is the current quality of CNN reporting. Frankly, the total information control by the government, raising tarps and establishing mile-wide perimeters... creating no-fly zones over disasters that prevent anyone from knowing what's going on, etc., etc., combined with the inept reporting of our major media outlets who are content to speculate wildly on what might be going on behind the curtain, makes watching TV to get realtime information about what's going on... at best... a waste of time.
The terrorists don't exactly have a high bar to clear; Their little dinner theatre with guns and "Death to America" would be providing coverage no different than Fox News ("If Obamacare becomes law America will DIE!"), and substantively better than all the other major reporting outlets... because at least we'll be able to see something of what's going on.
Ironic, isn't it -- the very people who are trying to destroy democracy, are better at providing one of its essential nutritional requirements, than the people who claim to be protecting it: Timely information on world events.
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by dysfunction, apathy, and indecision from executives at the highest levels."
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by greed, overconfidence, and incompetence from executives at the highest levels. The fans consistently told them what they wanted, and they were consistently ignored. This isn't apathy or indecision -- that's flat out incompetence. They mismanaged SS LucasArts into a iceberg, then locked the workers below-decks and abandoned ship while the band played the Imperial March.
Julian Assange was accused of rape. Bradley Manning was outed as a transsexual. Tons of diplomatic cables were released by Wikipedia, showing that our diplomats overseas are horny toads. The list goes on. Accusing people of sexual impropriety has long been used as a means of discrediting people, or for blackmail purposes. Being gay, until recently, was a reason to disqualify someone from holding a high level security clearance in this country. Bill Clinton's fall from grace over the Monica Lewinsky affair. And how many Republicans have been caught in public restrooms doing, achem, decidedly gay things while supporting decidedly anti-gay legislation?
Any woman will tell you sex is a weapon; Only men need convincing of this. And if you read the accusations that follow leaks like this, you will tend to notice that a discussion of the person's sexual past and present come up with startling regularity, and invariably cast as deviant, abnormal, etc. Now, whether this is actually the case, or just the mental acrobatics of a sexually repressed society... I'll leave that one for the reader to figure out.
Slashdot Mirror
As has been covered before, airport full body scanners tend to kill medical devices like this. People have had devices like these, along with pacemakers and other equipment die after being subjected to high energy bursts of EMI; which is exactly what airport scanners do. While the goverment claims they're phasing these out, they are still in the field -- high power portable x-ray and 'mwave' scanners that are being used at customs checkpoints, or on unsuspecting civilians on the road. And then there's those pesky aircraft carriers that carry gigawatt radar scanners that on several occasions have locked people in their cars, garages, etc., due to EMI when they were passing by.
All of this kind of unregulated and largely unmonitored technology poses a very real danger to technology like this; And with so many people having diabetes, this could mean that entire towns' worth of diabetics drop dead while the government claims "it's a mystery why everyone with implantable medical devices died after we irradiated them..."
My point is; The laboratory environment these things were designed (and approved) in is very different from the environment they're going to be used in. And there's no evidence the FDA has taken this into consideration from what's provided here. Indeed, they have a poor track record of having an impartial approval process; I do not believe that 'FDA Approved' means much more than 'Scientology Approved' these days -- but this is to be expected when the FDA's income is derived directly from the companies' whose products they approve -- companies literally pay for approval. Anywhere else, this would be a clear conflict of interest. But when it comes to the safety of our food, drugs, and medical supplies... it's business as usual.
Don't like it? Don't use their fucking product. Sell your car, sell your computers, get the fuck off of Slashdot or you're in it too.
I swear, there's one guy out here and all he does is prepare bland one-liners like this and copy-paste them after every post and then wait out the timer to do it again.
When you can be replaced by a 7 line perl script, what does that say about your contributions and general intelligence?
We can only use overwater sonar from now on.
Okay, but there's only a very limited supply of CNN news anchors. How do you propose mass-production of these loud creatures? And how do we deal with the humanitarian problems created from widespread use?
In a nutshell: If you're well-prepared for the zombie apocalypse, odds are good that you're also well-prepared for any real disaster, so it's a nice target.
The director of the CDC has said as much: "If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack."
Suspiciously absent from the list of supplies to have on hand, however, is a ruggedized pickup truck. Medical supplies, duct tape, plastic tarps, potable water, and dry food rations were all highly valued, as was a robust preparedness plan by the federal and local governments, with a focus on organization and communication.
In fact, the truck weighs in as a convenience. A very heavy one at a time when mobility would be at a premium. In an urban area, a bicycle would achieve many of the requirements of a preparedness plan; It can provide travel of over 100 miles in a day, requires no gasoline, fuel, or electricity, and is very easy to repair. It also won't draw as much attention as a ruggedized anti-zombie truck... which let's be honest: If you have a gun, who are you going after... the bicyclist, or the guy with a truck and a lock safe containing untold goodies?
If you ask me... the truck's a liability. Lastly, what's the first rule of Zombie world? CARDIO. Your physical health is your single greatest asset... it tops the list I put in earlier by a wide margin. If you're too fat to get to the locations of any of those emergency distribution centers, you're pretty much already dead. So I guess then it's a good thing you bought a truck and a gun. Better hope you brought a really big gas tank too, because when that runs out, you are totally screwed.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here on my bike, riding around eating twinkies, because the twinkie supply will probably outlast the gas supply (now that they've started making them again), and I conveniently brought an engine which is estimated to last another 60 years without any major maintenance that can run on them...
If you are allowed to expose the sample to ridiculous temperatures and open flames, though, why expensive lasers rather than boring (and mature and relatively cheap) cutting torches or thermic lances?
Possibly because focused light energy can't become radioactive with prolonged contact with radioactive substances, whereas everything else you mentioned... does. Everything you use to handle nuclear waste materials with, itself eventually becomes nuclear waste material. I'm sure slashdot of all places will recognize a recursion problem when it sees one. Even putting a few feet between the torch and the material extends its service life before it has to be thrown in with the other waste... root square law and all that.
"We're no worse than anyone else and you can't prove otherwise"
It is perhaps fortunate then that we use different standards of evidence in the courts and in science than self-rating one's behavior. Because if we did that, we'd all be above average drivers. It's always the other guy's fault.
P.S. The lack of whales being observed in the area might be attributable to all the observers being in a boat, above the ocean, rather than in the ocean, where the whales live. And regardless, the piles of dead whales that started washing up on shore is a good indication that whatever methodology used was deeply flawed... Perhaps they were simply listening for the whales in between their exceptionally high power sonar tests... that may have already killed or incapacitated them.
So again, this is "cover my ass" commentary, not proper science. Proper science would note that corpses washed ashore in great number after, and conclude using indirect evidence, that observational methodology was flawed, then try to figure out why... not keep doing it for the next six years while continually saying ghosts and boogymen killed and then dragged the dead whales onto shore in the night, because otherwise wouldn't we have noticed them prior to us corpsifying them?
"ExxonMobil believes the panel's finding about the multi-beam echo sounder is unjustified due to the lack of certainty of information and observations recorded during the response efforts in 2008," spokesman Patrick McGinn told AFP in an email. He added that observers employed by the Madagascar government and the oil giant "were on board the vessel and did not observe any whales in the area."'"
Certainty of information: Nobody requires absolute certainty in science. In fact, even the court system, sad as it is, needs it -- it requires "beyond reasonable doubt", whereas science is similarily situated at "best model that fits the facts". Type of cognitive distortion ExxonMobile uses here: All-or-nothing thinking.
Out of date observations: It's 2013 now. By carefully hand picking your data set to be only, say, 2008, or pre-2008, you are discounting everything that came after. One supposes that an extra five years' worth of observations, we'd be able to narrow in on a cause. But let's humor them and take just 2008. In February of that year, before the incident in question, the US courts found there was enough evidence that high energy sonar was killing whales to ask the military to reduce its use in naval operations.
Impartial observers: Let me sum this one up real easy -- "Managment finds no problem with the management." The government was paid a lot of money to go along with Exxon, and employees of Exxon I think we can safely say aren't impartial observers. So one of the most basic things required for proper fact gathering went right out the window. This is, in effect, an admission that ExxonMobile has no valid data points from which to draw any conclusions whatsoever. It is, from a scientific perspective, pure speculation. "We're not wrong because, er, we saw ourselves doing nothing wrong." Okay... what about everyone else? "We didn't ask them."
Which brings me to rule #4. Have characters.
I only have one rule: Don't have rules. All they do is trip you up and force you into formulaic and predictable interactions. Like for example, half-naked physicists; Because you can't be a dignified woman in NuTrek.
Pretty much, that scene signed JJ Abraham's creative death to me; All he's doing is taking a 'Fast and Furious' approach to beloved science fiction characters; Which is to say, lots of explosions, lots of smack talk, lots of testosterone... and very little in the way of intelligent, subtle, or unconventional plot or character interaction. He's the white trash of the scifi world...
I mean, what ever happened to I, Robot, or A Space Odyssey. Ender's Game (before we found out the author was a flaming anti-gay bigot; It's still a good book)? I mean, so much of science fiction has been about exploring the heights to which humanity could rise, to put our current struggles in perspective; Even Battlestar Galactica (the reimage) is a recent example of how scifi can be a stand-in proxy for current events.
When you look back on those kinds of in-depth stories, with dynamic characters being challenged about what would be moral or ethical behavior, with the JJ Abrahams approach, it's pretty clear he contributes next to nothing to the franchises he has visited so far. He's the "auto-tune'd pop star" version of the scifi director. And yet, people say "but he attracts new people to scifi!"
I suppose... in the same way Justin Bieber attracts teenagers to music. -_- Go ahead now, modbomb me for eating your sacred cow, but deep down, you know it's true: There's nothing original about his work.
How will my iPhone possibly work if it has to be charged with a tool as common as a wall wart? Eeeww. It's 20% less cool than a Lightning cable!
Just get an adapter for your iPhone... before it becomes cool.
. Lawmakers have raised significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information.
Would that be the same lawmakers that authorized the handling of our sensitive personal health records by people making pennies on the dollar in foreign countries... because hospitals asked them to disregard HIPPA safeguards to save a few bucks?
'Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live,' says Patrick Howard, who leads Deloitte Consulting's public sector state health care practice."
Wait, rolling out national access to one of the most complex databases ever designed, with multi-tiered access controls, and peering with tens of thousands of providers, in realtime... isn't easy? Shit, why not just hire some more 14 year old kids? They seem to know how these computer whatcha-things work. Can't be any harder than Youtubing the Facebooks.
Let's be serious for a minute -- the launch can't possibly go as badly as the Republican's last major foray into IT -- Romney's campaign. I mean, their competitor to Obama's data analytics software didn't just explode on the launchpad, it actually fired itself into the ground as it did so. So the idea that Obama might pull off another big data project while they're still trying to figure out where the off button is on the internet, is probably a bit frightening to them. And that's really all it's about. Have you seen the scare advertisements on TV? I mean, creepy guys dressed as Uncle Sam putting on lubed blue gloves and making a mockery of what is undeniably the best medicine in the world (once you're sick, that is, and as long as you can afford it)... they're going all out on this.
So yeah, big surprise they're predicting the end of life as we know it, asteroid smashing into Earth, total extinction of the human race kind of doomsday predictions over the launch. But truthfully, here's what's going to happen; It's going to work. Sortof. There's going to be spotty and random problems, many caused by humans, because whenever you launch a new, complex piece of software, the interaction of so many untrained people in an uncontrolled environment (read: "It worked fine in the lab!") is going to cause unmitigated stress and support headaches until people get used to the software... and the software gets used to them. And by used to them, I mean patched. Probably quite a bit. It's the classic support bathtub curve: High initial support costs, followed by a rapid falloff, a long period of stability, and then rising costs again as the product ages and reaches EOL.
This is IT Management 101. Nobody should be surprised when things go haywire... but it'll be haywire in the "Y2K" sort of way: A few newsworthy problems (that'll inevitably be blown well out of proportion), but mostly... it'll work. It'll be lagged, and people will be frustrated, but it'll work.
And no matter how badly it goes... it's still better than the alternative, which is for some people literally dying in place, due to a lack of access to health care. Even if it set every 20,000th's applicant on fire, it'd be better than what we have now.
Don't be ridiculous. Slashdot has covered new and interesting product developments since long before you created a SlashID. This falls well into the "News for Nerds" category. I will probably never buy this as I don't even game, yet I read it anyway. Why? Because it is interesting new technology. Period.
First, you don't know the first slashdot ID I created, or why I no longer use it. But it's a 10,000 ID. So don't zip thud on a number thinking it means something.
Second... no, it isn't interesting new technology. It's technology that's been around for the past two decades at least, wrapped up in a slightly different package. Giving an old house a new coat of paint doesn't make the house new. And as far as interesting... that's entirely subjective. I personally don't find vaporware advertisements interesting -- when they have an actual product, that I can hold, or buy, or at least get a fucking diagram to build a prototype of it, then it's interesting. Because in my world, interesting is defined as "shit I can use", not "shit someone in marketing dreamed up."
Actually BSD licensed was published before GPLv1. 4.3BSD-Tahoe was released in 1988. A full year before RMS release his first GPL program.
The BSD license allows someone to make changes and not return them to the community. The GPL created a community where contributions and advancements to various designs couldn't be taken away from the public, trivially modified, and then sold at a profit. Ergo, I stand by what I say: GPL was the first "open source" license. Though there are, admittedly, many versions of it, all of which claim to be the One True definition; Such is the nature of religion, er, I mean, programming.
Anyway, isn't the implication with "slashvertizing" that someone has posted a story to their own product? Pretty sure this was posted out of genuine interest, not financial interest.
No, a slashvertisement is a PR release that was green lighted because it was paid for. It may be 'news for nerds', but as it isn't exactly inspiring conversation and discourse beyond "ooh... shiny." it falls into the category of... probably paid for. On the other hand, if it was someone's blog showing a prototype of said controller, and a step by step teardown and some details about how to program it... that would be slashdot material.
Well, at least the old slashdot I used to know and love, before it got into the ice cream, bloated up, and started spending all its time on the couch watching TV.
Yup... and every time you go to use it, it pauses for a couple minutes while it downloads a new patch, before allowing you to play! "While you wait for your controller to be updated, please look at this webpage with a bunch of vaguely-related advertisements and a PR release by the developer." (-_-) What ever happened to just turning on the console and, you know, playing the game that worked just fine last night when you went to bed? I know, I know... it's a feature...
(oh mod points, how I miss thee, I think I had some 5 or 7 years ago, but perhaps I was dreaming)
An irony of the moderation of this site is that those who contribute the most are those least likely to be selected to grade the contributions of others, whereas those with less of a grasp on the subject matter and only casually participate, are given that ability. If you ask me, it's the single biggest reason why the overall comment quality has been on a sharp downward trajectory the past 18 months; None of the people with any passion for the subject matter are involved in the grading of it. It'd be like letting school children grade the works of shakespeare alongside their friends'... I suspect, shakespeare would do rather poorly against a bunch of 9 year olds competing for popularity points amongst their peers.
RMS has nothing to do with "open source". Sad that to this day trolls and idiots keep intentionally attributing it to him, in order to misinform. Do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
He was the principle author of the GNU GPL, the first real open source license. The entire open source movement is based on licensing; That's how open source is defined -- by licensing terms. And RMS was the first to come up with a license that captured this essential quality and formalized it. Richard Stallman wants to use the term "free software" instead of "open source", but that doesn't make me a troll for using a different term for it than he does.
A pity so many Anonymous Cowards love replying to me with a casual "STFU" and claim I know nothing, it's off topic, etc., and people believe them. Further proof of the sad, sad state slashdot has descended into... that an informed and long-time contributor to the community gets mod-bombed while the trolls get up-modded.
"One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date." So, exactly how many PDP-11's have *you* donated?...
None. GCC already supported compiling for the PDP-11. It has since March, 2002 according to the patch notes for GCC. Which, let's be honest -- getting hardware support into the compiler a mere 5 years after the line was discontinued is remarkably fast for the GNU project.
I'm still waiting for the day they include a warning when you derp a sizeof(x) into your code, when you really wanted a sizeof(*x) , something Visual Studio will happily warn me about when compiling something. Of course, gcc does what the code tells it to and reports the bytelength of a pointer variable (how useful!) without complaint, whereas Visual Studio will happily explode my system, then run screaming out of the hole with toilet paper stuck to its foot yelling "Why did you use that win32 call when, although we didn't bother putting it in the documentation, it was depreciated 8 years ago and replaced with seven other similar-sounding functions, equally badly documented and not backwards-compatable!" ...
So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features, warnings, etc., but when you merely go for shooting your own foot, it instead blows your whole leg off, then drops a bomb on your head while muttering something about upgrading to the latest .NET and dll versions...
"Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed."
If someone said that today, he'd be promptly sued by SCO, dragged into dark cavernous courtrooms filled with patent trolls, accused by the government of being a terrorist, and laughed at by the mainstream community of UNIX-like OS users, such as the ones reading this post; Absent Linux, we'd all be warring over which was better -- Macintosh or Windows. Both have UNIX buried in their guts.
My point is that RMS' achievement, organizing people into a cohesive political movement loosely termed 'open source', probably couldn't happen today. It is therefore particularly important that he did so thirty years ago, before the global international business and government communities were aware of the potential impact of his activities.
There are fewer and fewer like him every year -- old schoolers who grew up with the fervent belief that the internet, computers, all this digital technology, could empower, enlighten, and educate millions. And then set about proving just that. These days... the majority of people are content to watch Youtube videos of cats, and try not to see any potential beyond immediate gratification and entertainment. It's sad that the hacker ethic has become in such short supply, even within this community. Back then, nobody would think any less of you for going off on your own to reinvent the wheel... your peers thought, at worst, that it might be good practice for you. Today, it's a face full of rage and religious views if you even suggest things may not be as good as they could be.
Doing what the fans say is not necessarily good, at least for new product design.
You're using qualifying statements here to avoid being backed into a corner you rightly deserve to be. The notion that fans are a poor resource to use when making design considerations is a slap in the face to hundreds of highly successful open source products from Apache, to Linux, to Zend PHP. Indeed, for the most part, those products were created entirely by fans, and with each iteration, become even more popular and successful.
Fans often tell you to be a derivative of some other game...
You know, I really like Ford automobiles. I like them so much, in fact, I'd like you to make them more like every non-Ford automobile.
...and/or an incremental improvement of your previous game.
Yeah... Improvements are bad. If you like a product, you should suggest ways to make it worse.
Your innovation still has to pass the fun test.
The can opener hasn't changed much in its original design since the 1850s. It wasn't fun from day one. You own one. Your friends own one. Your mother, she probably owns two or three. Perhaps we should be more specific here: When you are selling an entertainment product, then fun matters. But to expand that to encompass all innovation is a misstatement.
Developers have to put aside their ego at this point and deliver the fun as fans define it.
Okay, back up. You've spent your entire post here largely asserting that the fans are wrong and companies shouldn't listen to them. How, exactly, do you propose a company "deliver the fun as fans define it" if they aren't supposed to listen to them?
That said. Lucas Arts should have done a modernized version of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Screw innovation. ;-)
The one thing you've said I can agree with; They should have updated that product line. Accordingly, they should have done it with the improvements and suggestions that the majority of the fans wanted, thus creating a better product overall. By not listening to the fans, they fucked themselves eight ways from sunday (pardon the french, but I'm still a bit bitter about the whole affair).
So essentially the same thing that happens at every large company over time with roots in creating stuff?
No. A great many large companies whose main charter is "creating stuff" manage to retain competent managers and remain responsive to competitive market pressures. They are amongst the largest and most successful companies on the planet. The ones who do not retain competent managers and are no longer responsive to competitive market pressures, we have a name for: Bankrupt.
The top 10 companies in the US, by founding year:
1. Walmart: 1962
2. Exxon Mobile: 1999 (Exxon: 1982, Mobile: 1911)*
3. Chevron: 1984*
4. Phillips 66: 1917*
5. Berkshire Hathaway: 1839
6. Apple: 1976
7. General Motors: 1908
8. General Electric: 1892
9. Valero Energy: 1980*
10. Ford Motor: 1903
--
* It is worth noting that almost all major oil companies can trace their roots back to Standard Oil. Very few oil companies have gone bankrupt since oil became a major commodity; They most usually either merge with other companies or are broken up by government regulators. Thus the 'founding' dates of these companies is not really good context for how long they've been around. On paper, they may be relatively new, but these companies typically have lineages over a hundred years back.
It seems like corporations more or less get to a point where they collapse under their own weight and cease to be able to actually do things.
At least in the United States, a curious statistic is that about 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, despite making up around 10.5% of the population. To quote Forbes; The revenue generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants of children of immigrants is greater than the GDP (gross domestic product) of every country in the world outside the U.S., except China and Japan. To me, this is smoking-hot proof that complacency kills more companies than economics; How else do you explain how some of the poorest and least-advantaged on arrival here manage, within a generation, to control some of the largest assets in this country?
In my experience, that happens right around the time accountants start micro-managing everything, and when winning "buzzword bingo" happens in every company call.
Your experience is not objective. People tend to overvalue their own personal experience, emphasize negative events, and are total and complete crap when it comes to estimating risk and probability. We have spent trillions trying to prevent terrorism, but spend very little in comparison combating drunk driving. All of this is down to cognitive biases, of which you are engaged in one right here.
At some point, companies change from being places that create stuff and can get things done, and morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen. At that point, everything you do starts to feel like a futile gesture.
Again, you're relating to your personal experience here, at the expense of objectivity. You are extrapolating from your own experiences and concluding that the entire world must run this way. And yet, if it did, civilization as we know it wouldn't exist; Economies would invariably self-destruct, having reached their use-by date, if everything tended to "morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen".
The accountants won't let anything happen, and management is more focused on covering their own asses than building anything new.
I can see you feel very jilted about how the working class is routinely exploited by the wealthy. And frankly, if you live in the United States you have good reason to feel this way; the pay difference between CEOs and entry-level w
Al Jazeera has been making quiet inroads into the "Western World" for the past 5 years. That's who CNN should be afraid of since they are both playing the same game.
"...We're getting reports in that the police may be driving down a street. Wait! Wait... another SWAT van just drove by. Now this is just speculation, but it may, may be going after the terrorists. We have a reporter on scene, let's call them and see what they have to say... ring, ring Barbara, Barbara, can you hear me? The mailbox you are trying to reach is currently full. Please try you--click Okay, Barbara isn't there. Umm, let's try Bob.. Bob, are you there? (sounds of a hurricane in a microphone, choppy speech)... Bob? Bob what can you tell us about what's going on down there?
"Police have cordoned off the area and are providing no details at this time of what is going on, Bruce. Now we're just speculating here, and as you know things can change quite a bit in a dynamic situation like this, but we think there may be two, or as many as fifty separate shooters. We have been hearing sporatic gunfire from the area."
Guys, this is the current quality of CNN reporting. Frankly, the total information control by the government, raising tarps and establishing mile-wide perimeters... creating no-fly zones over disasters that prevent anyone from knowing what's going on, etc., etc., combined with the inept reporting of our major media outlets who are content to speculate wildly on what might be going on behind the curtain, makes watching TV to get realtime information about what's going on... at best... a waste of time.
The terrorists don't exactly have a high bar to clear; Their little dinner theatre with guns and "Death to America" would be providing coverage no different than Fox News ("If Obamacare becomes law America will DIE!"), and substantively better than all the other major reporting outlets... because at least we'll be able to see something of what's going on.
Ironic, isn't it -- the very people who are trying to destroy democracy, are better at providing one of its essential nutritional requirements, than the people who claim to be protecting it: Timely information on world events.
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by dysfunction, apathy, and indecision from executives at the highest levels."
LucasArts was a company paralyzed by greed, overconfidence, and incompetence from executives at the highest levels. The fans consistently told them what they wanted, and they were consistently ignored. This isn't apathy or indecision -- that's flat out incompetence. They mismanaged SS LucasArts into a iceberg, then locked the workers below-decks and abandoned ship while the band played the Imperial March.
It's paywalled. How about coming over to the dark side, Luke?
Are you so sure?
Julian Assange was accused of rape. Bradley Manning was outed as a transsexual. Tons of diplomatic cables were released by Wikipedia, showing that our diplomats overseas are horny toads. The list goes on. Accusing people of sexual impropriety has long been used as a means of discrediting people, or for blackmail purposes. Being gay, until recently, was a reason to disqualify someone from holding a high level security clearance in this country. Bill Clinton's fall from grace over the Monica Lewinsky affair. And how many Republicans have been caught in public restrooms doing, achem, decidedly gay things while supporting decidedly anti-gay legislation?
Any woman will tell you sex is a weapon; Only men need convincing of this. And if you read the accusations that follow leaks like this, you will tend to notice that a discussion of the person's sexual past and present come up with startling regularity, and invariably cast as deviant, abnormal, etc. Now, whether this is actually the case, or just the mental acrobatics of a sexually repressed society... I'll leave that one for the reader to figure out.