You cannot even begin to accurately gauge calories burned merely from the available data of movement, gender, age, height and weight. I've seen some heart rate monitor watches that allow you to enter your VO2Max (the measurement of how much oxygen your blood can transport) into it to increase the accuracy, but even then there are still broad assumptions made, making the calories burned a highly inaccurate number. Some of you may be familiar with treadmills, elliptical cross-trainers, and other equipment at your local gym that purport to tell you how many calories you burned while using them; they are so grossly inaccurate as to be utterly useless, and worse, report their inaccurate guesses way on the high side, to keep you motivated to use their machine, thinking you're doing much better at burning off excess fat than you really are. This "technology" from Nike has to be at least as bad at guessing calories burned than even the treadmill at the gym, likely worse. Now, realizing this, you come to understand that all you're doing by wearing this is allowing your activity to be tracked. I assume there is a website you upload the data to? All it needs now is a GPS receiver's data, and you have fairly complete tracking of your activities, 24 hours a day; for arguments' sake, we'll say that your smartphone, which most people have attached to them like an appendage, has a GPS receiver you can't turn off (which in most cases you can't). Why would you do this voluntarily? As described in the featured article someone has already had their life affected in a negative way by this device. My advice to anyone who owns this device right now is to destroy it immediately.
The Internet, since DARPA handed it over to the general public, has been developed by private corporations, not governments, who are the Johnny-come-latelys to this game. If the U.N. gets too uppity about wanting to control/censor/ruin the internet, what's going to stop the core companies from just pulling out and starting an entirely different Internet? Without all the companies that provide the backbone bandwidth all the way down to the last-mile ISP's, there wouldn't BE an internet.
Why can't these things be from the top down?
I don't make very much money. Why do I (and people like me) have to be the ones who foot the bill for this kind of idea? If some group of people want internet to be free for everyone, then they should lobby the government and the ISPs, not private citizens!
Seem unlikely? Remember we're talking about a country that has vending machine for schoolgirl panties. You could use an image of Godzilla in the ads for it.
With XP and 7 (and I suspect Vista, but who cares about that?) you can turn off all the useless "bling" and make it into a usable, no-nonsense OS. With 8, you just plain can't do that, it goes out of it's way more than ever before to treat the user like an idiot child, hide important and powerful things from you (if they weren't removed completely, that is) and generally make it as dumbed-down as possible, making it really annoying to anyone who isn't the lowest-common-denominator user. Big difference.
Microsoft wants to shove Windows 8 (The Playskool OS) down everyone's throat, so they'll phase out Windows 7 as soon as they think they can get away with doing so. Step 1 in that process is not issuing a Service Pack 2.
You'd think wrong. Because there is so much money involved, bean-counters and profiteers are the ones that end up calling the shots, and when the engineers and programmers that actually know what they're doing complain too much they get fired so more pliable people can be employed instead.
By the way the company I was working for? Went out of business, because they fucked up so much. They also ruined many lives.
I used to work for an ophthalamic ultrasound company. You'd think that doctors, having all those years of college and medical school, would know better than to browse the internet on a medical device, or know enough to ensure that the USB flash drive they're carrying around and using to transfer images from one ultrasound to their computer is free of malware, but the sad reality is they're not, and while I can't speak for other devices manufactured by other companies, ours couldn't run antivirus and still run the ultrasound application effectively, so it was essentially wide-open to malicious software.
We seem to be living in a world where people seem to think that you can only be perfect, or completely suck, at any given skill or subject, and that if you're not perfect then you should give it up entirely. I think this is a destructive attitude. Knowing even what little I know about kids and their attitudes, I think it more likely that his son isn't even really applying himself to the subject of chemistry, which is also an attitude that is destructive. His son will have many years to study subjects he "feels" is better suited to his temperament; for right now he needs to learn the personal discipline to apply himself to things he doesn't necessarily like; after all, he's likely going to end up having to do tasks he doesn't like for people he works for that he doesn't necessarily like either, should we send the message to him that it's OK to quit a job just because there are parts of it you don't like doing?
Even with careful planning and management, wouldn't a completely wirelessly-networked datacenter be more of a target to hacking? Even with a high level of encryption, which would add to network overhead?
There will be lawsuits over this, and perhaps it will be declared unconstitutional, but regardless of the path it takes, this and things like it will be nullified. Selling tobacco and using tobacco products is not illegal, and an employer can't dictate what amounts to a lifestyle choice. Personally I'd prefer that people voluntarily didn't smoke, just as I'd prefer people voluntarily didn't allow themselves to become obese and generally unfit, but dictating how people can live is a slippery slope at best.
Really, you have to admit that for something purely theoretical with a high likelyhood of never being proven at all, "imprecise at best" is a moot statement -- at best.:-)
Yes, however: in some cases (as is the case here) it was clearly inadvisable (to put it mildly!) to be a dirtbag in this particular way. Trolling the entire Muslim world? Damned stupid. And destructive. I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there is still such a thing as having some taste, and having some common sense. Clearly this guy has, at the very least, poor judgement, and perhaps poor impulse control, and while I'm not going to lay 100% of the blame on him for the violence in the Middle East due to his ill-advised (and poorly produced, from what I hear) video, he certainly is guilty of being the catalyst. Various extremist organizations over there are certainly looking for an excuse to be violent, and he handed them one on a silver platter. One might even wonder if it was done on purpose for that reason.
-LFTR could kill the coal and the oil well business. so...
Wah. Coal and oil aren't going to last forever, or much longer for that matter. Wouldn't it be nice, for once, if humans would actually change something before it became a life-or-death situation?
I keep hearing about thorium reactors. What I've read of it seems to indicate it'd be much safer and cheaper to operate than what we've been using. I really haven't read about any downside to these. Anyone care to fill me in on why we aren't using them?
I used to work for an ophthalamic ultrasound company. The hardware itself doesn't need to be expensive if you want basic functionality; it can be done in a USB-attachable box and run on any Windows machine. What makes devices like this expensive is the FDA (and it's equivalent agencies in non-U.S. countries) and all the extensive testing that needs to be done before they'll approve the device for sale. For ophthalamic ultrasound, I believe it cost something on the order of $50000US to perform all the testing that the FDA required before it could be legally sold. Other countries would require their own testing. All of this ends up driving the cost up. Of course the mere fact that it's a medical device means that the manufacturers jack the price up to make a gigantic profit off it, because doctors don't have much choice of where to buy their equipment, too.
So what's the alternative, smart guy? Open the flood gates, let the stream of sewage (ads) in all the time? What's your genius solution? I want to hear it. Or are you one of those "people" who say "give up, you can't fight it"?
I'm 100% with you on this, and I'm here to say that because too many people are going to mod you down and/or flame you for daring to say it. Too many people don't understand that privacy is valuable and should be protected, and that corporations and governments don't give a rat's ass about any of that and only care about controlling people's lives and making profit off of them. It's a dangerous trend that may not be able to be reversed in our lifetime, if at all, but that doesn't mean that we should stop fighting against it.
Or Open Office. Or just keep using the old version of Office I'm currently using. This whole "subscription" idea makes about as much sense as the old DivX idea: Great for Micro$oft, bad for everyone else.
In real life? Not as likely as you wish it was, and the inverse square law fully applies. I just don't see this as anything other than a sales gimmick. People should be glad that most things can be charged via USB these days instead of being forced to use proprietary chargers.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot even begin to accurately gauge calories burned merely from the available data of movement, gender, age, height and weight. I've seen some heart rate monitor watches that allow you to enter your VO2Max (the measurement of how much oxygen your blood can transport) into it to increase the accuracy, but even then there are still broad assumptions made, making the calories burned a highly inaccurate number. Some of you may be familiar with treadmills, elliptical cross-trainers, and other equipment at your local gym that purport to tell you how many calories you burned while using them; they are so grossly inaccurate as to be utterly useless, and worse, report their inaccurate guesses way on the high side, to keep you motivated to use their machine, thinking you're doing much better at burning off excess fat than you really are. This "technology" from Nike has to be at least as bad at guessing calories burned than even the treadmill at the gym, likely worse. Now, realizing this, you come to understand that all you're doing by wearing this is allowing your activity to be tracked. I assume there is a website you upload the data to? All it needs now is a GPS receiver's data, and you have fairly complete tracking of your activities, 24 hours a day; for arguments' sake, we'll say that your smartphone, which most people have attached to them like an appendage, has a GPS receiver you can't turn off (which in most cases you can't). Why would you do this voluntarily? As described in the featured article someone has already had their life affected in a negative way by this device. My advice to anyone who owns this device right now is to destroy it immediately.
I have a better idea than that: Don't buy a TV with this technology, and don't waste your money on an Xbox, either.
The Internet, since DARPA handed it over to the general public, has been developed by private corporations, not governments, who are the Johnny-come-latelys to this game. If the U.N. gets too uppity about wanting to control/censor/ruin the internet, what's going to stop the core companies from just pulling out and starting an entirely different Internet? Without all the companies that provide the backbone bandwidth all the way down to the last-mile ISP's, there wouldn't BE an internet.
Why can't these things be from the top down?
I don't make very much money. Why do I (and people like me) have to be the ones who foot the bill for this kind of idea?
If some group of people want internet to be free for everyone, then they should lobby the government and the ISPs, not private citizens!
Seem unlikely? Remember we're talking about a country that has vending machine for schoolgirl panties. You could use an image of Godzilla in the ads for it.
With XP and 7 (and I suspect Vista, but who cares about that?) you can turn off all the useless "bling" and make it into a usable, no-nonsense OS. With 8, you just plain can't do that, it goes out of it's way more than ever before to treat the user like an idiot child, hide important and powerful things from you (if they weren't removed completely, that is) and generally make it as dumbed-down as possible, making it really annoying to anyone who isn't the lowest-common-denominator user. Big difference.
Microsoft wants to shove Windows 8 (The Playskool OS) down everyone's throat, so they'll phase out Windows 7 as soon as they think they can get away with doing so. Step 1 in that process is not issuing a Service Pack 2.
You'd think wrong. Because there is so much money involved, bean-counters and profiteers are the ones that end up calling the shots, and when the engineers and programmers that actually know what they're doing complain too much they get fired so more pliable people can be employed instead.
By the way the company I was working for? Went out of business, because they fucked up so much. They also ruined many lives.
I used to work for an ophthalamic ultrasound company. You'd think that doctors, having all those years of college and medical school, would know better than to browse the internet on a medical device, or know enough to ensure that the USB flash drive they're carrying around and using to transfer images from one ultrasound to their computer is free of malware, but the sad reality is they're not, and while I can't speak for other devices manufactured by other companies, ours couldn't run antivirus and still run the ultrasound application effectively, so it was essentially wide-open to malicious software.
We seem to be living in a world where people seem to think that you can only be perfect, or completely suck, at any given skill or subject, and that if you're not perfect then you should give it up entirely. I think this is a destructive attitude. Knowing even what little I know about kids and their attitudes, I think it more likely that his son isn't even really applying himself to the subject of chemistry, which is also an attitude that is destructive. His son will have many years to study subjects he "feels" is better suited to his temperament; for right now he needs to learn the personal discipline to apply himself to things he doesn't necessarily like; after all, he's likely going to end up having to do tasks he doesn't like for people he works for that he doesn't necessarily like either, should we send the message to him that it's OK to quit a job just because there are parts of it you don't like doing?
Even with careful planning and management, wouldn't a completely wirelessly-networked datacenter be more of a target to hacking? Even with a high level of encryption, which would add to network overhead?
Why are you still using Facebook?
There will be lawsuits over this, and perhaps it will be declared unconstitutional, but regardless of the path it takes, this and things like it will be nullified. Selling tobacco and using tobacco products is not illegal, and an employer can't dictate what amounts to a lifestyle choice. Personally I'd prefer that people voluntarily didn't smoke, just as I'd prefer people voluntarily didn't allow themselves to become obese and generally unfit, but dictating how people can live is a slippery slope at best.
This is imprecise at best.
Really, you have to admit that for something purely theoretical with a high likelyhood of never being proven at all, "imprecise at best" is a moot statement -- at best. :-)
Correction: There is no space and time that we can determine with any certainty outside our physical universe.
Not illegal to be a dirtbag
Yes, however: in some cases (as is the case here) it was clearly inadvisable (to put it mildly!) to be a dirtbag in this particular way. Trolling the entire Muslim world? Damned stupid. And destructive.
I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there is still such a thing as having some taste, and having some common sense. Clearly this guy has, at the very least, poor judgement, and perhaps poor impulse control, and while I'm not going to lay 100% of the blame on him for the violence in the Middle East due to his ill-advised (and poorly produced, from what I hear) video, he certainly is guilty of being the catalyst. Various extremist organizations over there are certainly looking for an excuse to be violent, and he handed them one on a silver platter. One might even wonder if it was done on purpose for that reason.
-LFTR could kill the coal and the oil well business. so...
Wah.
Coal and oil aren't going to last forever, or much longer for that matter. Wouldn't it be nice, for once, if humans would actually change something before it became a life-or-death situation?
Been using it on several machines. Can't say I've had any problems with it.
I keep hearing about thorium reactors. What I've read of it seems to indicate it'd be much safer and cheaper to operate than what we've been using. I really haven't read about any downside to these. Anyone care to fill me in on why we aren't using them?
I used to work for an ophthalamic ultrasound company. The hardware itself doesn't need to be expensive if you want basic functionality; it can be done in a USB-attachable box and run on any Windows machine. What makes devices like this expensive is the FDA (and it's equivalent agencies in non-U.S. countries) and all the extensive testing that needs to be done before they'll approve the device for sale. For ophthalamic ultrasound, I believe it cost something on the order of $50000US to perform all the testing that the FDA required before it could be legally sold. Other countries would require their own testing. All of this ends up driving the cost up. Of course the mere fact that it's a medical device means that the manufacturers jack the price up to make a gigantic profit off it, because doctors don't have much choice of where to buy their equipment, too.
So what's the alternative, smart guy? Open the flood gates, let the stream of sewage (ads) in all the time? What's your genius solution? I want to hear it. Or are you one of those "people" who say "give up, you can't fight it"?
I'm 100% with you on this, and I'm here to say that because too many people are going to mod you down and/or flame you for daring to say it. Too many people don't understand that privacy is valuable and should be protected, and that corporations and governments don't give a rat's ass about any of that and only care about controlling people's lives and making profit off of them. It's a dangerous trend that may not be able to be reversed in our lifetime, if at all, but that doesn't mean that we should stop fighting against it.
"No."
I'll either keep using the old version of Office I already have, or turn to free open-source alternatives. Micro$oft can go pound sand.
Or Open Office. Or just keep using the old version of Office I'm currently using. This whole "subscription" idea makes about as much sense as the old DivX idea: Great for Micro$oft, bad for everyone else.
..at a close distance
In real life? Not as likely as you wish it was, and the inverse square law fully applies. I just don't see this as anything other than a sales gimmick. People should be glad that most things can be charged via USB these days instead of being forced to use proprietary chargers.