Apparently the crystal bond is very weak. I wouldn't want to lose my data because I dropped my cellphone. Perhaps I'm being paranoid?
Keep in mind that your intuitions about how substances will react to shocks are all based on objects of a particular size. Small objects are much less likely to break under a given amount of acceleration than large objects are. For an example of what I mean:
First, drop a MatchBox car off the roof of a building. See how much damage it suffers
Then drop a real car off the same roof. See how much damage it suffers
Lastly, drop a 747 off the same roof, and see how much damage it suffers
My guess is that this memory will be at least as shock-resistant as current flash memory.
Times the number of cars in this country = ~half a billion dollars.
People could (and did) make very similar arguments about seat belts and air bags. In any case, the nader-beeper would only be necessary on very quiet cars (read: electrics), not for every existing car in the country.
So would addressing the actual problem of people driving who would be screened out by mandatory re-testing, for all ages.
Actually, doing that probably wouldn't have avoided the accident. Even people who are in their cognitive prime sometimes space out, or get distracted, or are careless. Nobody is perfect.
(Also, let's have your mom watch where she walks. I look into cars to make sure someone isn't going to start it up and back over me.)
Also a good idea, however not everybody is as conscientious or visually acute as you are. So it's all well and good to point fingers, but people are people and will make mistakes, and if there are ways to lessen the harm from those mistakes, they should be considered.
A company comes out with a $150 (and destined to become cheaper) mass-market GPS tracking device that connects to Google Maps, and all you care about is debating parenting styles? Who is going to hack this thing for proper nerd purposes?
I had the experience of being sneaked up on by a Prius on in a narrow street last year.
My mom was walking in a parking lot 6 months ago and a Prius backing out of a parking spot hit her, sending her to the hospital. A nader-beeper for reverse gear would probably have avoided the accident.
The way I see it, I ask "what is the reason for the abortion?". Are we talking about a birth defect of such severity (IE living would be torturous) that it would be more humane to end its life. Or, are we talking about vanity or the fact the pregnancy is not at a "convenient time"? Clearly, one reason is moral while the other is not.
Well, that kind of gets at my point. The "trivial" reasons you cited (vanity, inconvenience) are generally considered moral (or at least not so immoral that they should be made illegal) near the beginning of the pregnancy, when the fetus is nothing more than a clump of a few hundred cells. As the fetus grows and becomes less like an amoeba and more like a baby, however, those reasons are no longer morally justifiable when weighed against the baby's increasing personhood(*). At the end of the pregnancy (say, one minute before birth, or one minute after birth), not even your "valid reason" (extreme deformity) remains acceptable... our culture does not permit infanticide under any circumstances. That's what I mean when I say that the set of allowable reasons for an abortion decreases over the course of the pregnancy.
(*) People who believe in ensoulment-at-conception will of course reject the idea of "increasing personhood" -- they believe that the fetus's personhood snaps from 0% to 100% at the moment of conception, and thus any abortion (even taking a Plan B pill the day after sex) is equivalent to infanticide. I disagree with them; I think that when people talk about their "soul" they are actually referring to their mind, their personality, and their memories -- and these things grow from nothing over time, just as a person's body does. The idea of a "soul" only survives because people find it hard to imagine these phenomena could be purely physical in nature, and because they fear death. But regardless of who is right, insisting that a just-fertilized egg has the same rights as its adult mother inevitably leads to moral absurdities (e.g. attempts to ban Plan B), and thus will never gain general acceptance in a society like current-day America. So if the aim is to have the law reflect what most people consider reasonable, then the law will need to be pragmatic and concentrate on balancing the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother in a way that most people can live with.
The problem is that when a warrant is served there is usually a leak in the government that tells the suspect that they are being monitored and they change their activity to avoid being arrested, this is corruption in our government.
Do you really believe that Al Qaeda has moles in the anti-terrorism departments of our government, that tell Al Qaeda whenever a warrant has been issued to tap their phone lines?
If that's true, then I'd say we have much bigger problems than telecoms.... it would mean that the terrorists and the counter-terrorism people are one and the same. Fortunately, I'd say it's unlikely to be true.
some executive who cooperated with his government will be thrown in jail (that's really going to improve your life, isn't it?)
Yes, that actually would improve my life. It means the next time some morally bankrupt government flunky tries to get my phone company to spy on me without a warrant, my phone company will think twice before assisting the government in violating my rights. That's what I want.
$50 zillion dollars to the government! That'll show them! Just don't be surprised when your next phone bill comes and there is a $25 "fine retirement surcharge".
At which point many customers will switch to another phone company that can offer lower prices because they don't have to pay $50 zillion fines because they obey the frickin' law. Again, a good thing, as the guilty company is punished and the law-abiding companies are rewarded.
The only people getting screwed are people who only followed instructions from the government, and every single customer of the telecoms
The people getting "screwed" are the ones who broke the law -- also known as justice being served.. If those companies then turn around and take it out on their customers... well, that's what competition is for, right? Customers who feel ill-used will go elsewhere.
If you really believe that the left is less intrusive of civil liberties than the right, you just don't have enough experience with the left. Or you're willfully ignoring it.
And guess which ruling cabal just lost one election they didn't plan to lose.
Are you sure they didn't plan to lose? Look at the candidates they ran. One could sure make an argument that somebody deliberately threw the game, if only so they could have someone else to blame for the train wreck resulting from 8 years of blinkered government-by-gut-instinct.
since a lot of people feel we should place the arbitrary transition of "no rights" to "has rights" at birth, I don't think it'll happen any time soon
Probably true. I think one problem is that many people assume there must be an abrupt, instantaneous transition at some point between "lump of cells that deserves no rights" and "human being that deserves all the standard rights". The problem is, that's simply not how nature works, and therefore no matter where you propose to place that transition point, you end up with ethical problems.
An alternate approach would be to give the developing fetus more rights over time, as it matures, with the full set of human rights accrued at the time of birth. To put it another way, the set of scenarios under which an abortion is considered legally acceptable would become progressively smaller at each stage of pregnancy, and by the time of actual birth it would be an empty set.
I really hope that the crazy right wing are too tied up with healthcare reform to figure out that another one of their favorite intrusions into civil liberties is about to be abolished.
It should be amusing watching heads explode as they try to pivot directly from screaming "Fascist Socialist Communist government must be stopped" to screaming "The Government must be allowed to spy on us at all times".
I imagine Glenn Beck will pull it off without missing a beat, but only because his head exploded years ago.
Democrats don't quite have the numbers they need to push that through, or the desire.
Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate (58 if you leave out the dead Kennedy and the ailing Byrd), 256 seats in the House, and the Presidency. They clearly have the numbers to push through anything they want(*). It's only the desire that is lacking.
(*) yes, I know about filibustering... a sneaky little maneuver that takes advantage of a flaw in the Founder's rules of order for the Senate. I also know that there are equally sneaky maneuvers around it, including simple patience -- even politicians can't keep talking forever.
We don't actually have robots that can build things without human hand-holding.
Sure, but given the billion (trillion?) dollar budgets such an enterprise would entail, we could develop them. On the other hand, we don't have humans that could do the tasks you listed on Mars. It's one thing for 3-5 people to land on Mars and hide inside their spacecraft, and quite another thing for those same people to set up a working mine, build housing, etc, without dying of radiation poisoning or decompression accidents.
Both scenarios are pretty far out, but to me the robot scenario is more likely. At least with robots you don't have a massive PR problem every time one breaks down; you can just send more. The first time a human astronaut dies in an accident on Mars, there will be a huge outcry and Congress will likely shut down the whole program.
Simple: our robotics technology is centuries away from being advanced enough to do all that reliably. What do you do when one of the robots breaks?
I'd retrieve a spare robot from storage, and have it take over for the broken one. What will you do when one of your human astronauts gets sick, is injured, or dies? That seems much more likely to me, given that humans are not engineered to live in a Martian environment, and it's not like you can put a spare human into suspended animation as a contingency replacement.
Why not just, you know, send robots instead? They're smaller, weigh less, don't require all that bulky food, water, and oxygen, and there aren't any ethical issues with just leaving them there when the mission is done.
Once the robots have set up a nice Mars base, complete with locally produced rocket fuel supply, then we can talk about landing humans on Mars. Until then, I don't see the point in asking anybody to go kamikaze just so we can say humans have stepped onto Mars.
The problem is that you need about 30,000 square miles of solar panels, at current efficiencies of about 14%, to solve the problem.
Depends on what "the problem" is. If the goal is to serve 100% of our energy needs with solar power, that's one thing. If the goal is to reduce our use of non-renewable energy by adding renewable energy into the mix, then every bit counts, even if we never get to 100% solar.
If these guys shoot for "solar roadway" and miss by a fair bit, they might wind up with "solar parking lot", which would solve a bigger chunk of the problem than "solar rooftops" could.
Very true, but there's no reason people can't do both roofs and roads/parking lots. It's all helpful.
Just for the sake of discussion, what improvements would it take to make cameras effective at identifying criminals, and thus reducing crime?
I can think of some possible improvements that might (or might not) help:
Make the cameras more ubquitous. e.g. If a high quality camera could be manufactured for $1, you could put them more places
Make the cameras higher resolution. (a person-shaped blob committing a crime doesn't help nearly as much as a clear picture of the person's face)
Make the cameras extremely wide-field and/or auto-aiming (a camera doesn't help if it's not pointed the right way
Make the cameras less susceptible to privacy abuse. (for example, I'd recommend not allowing live feeds from the cameras at all. Instead, give each camera 48 hours of local storage only, to which it records in a loop. If a crime is committed, the police have 48 hours to go to that location to collect the evidence; otherwise the video is never seen by anyone. That way the fears about "Big Brother" abusing the information gathered by the cameras are minimized, since it would be impractical to collect more than a very small amount of the video that was recorded. Of course the downside of that would be that the police wouldn't be alerted to crimes-in-progress, but the trade-off is probably worth it if you plan on having cameras everywhere)
So sue them and follow it through to a win, don't just deliberately bring a case to the point of removing their anonymity and then drop it.
What would be the point of doing that? If being able to face my accuser is all I am after, then it's a waste of my time and money to continue the lawsuit once I have attained that goal. Now if I wanted to collect damages, etc, as well, I might continue the lawsuit; but in this case the plaintiff apparently didn't care about that.
What exactly was the revenge that the model enacted on the blogger? Did she key her car? Boil her pet bunny? If all she did was get the blogger's name disclosed and ask the blogger to stop, that seems pretty mild and proportionate to me.
Keep in mind that for a model, one's public image quite literally is one's meal ticket. If a blogger suceeds in convincing the public that you are a bad person who should not be emulated, then you are not going to get any more work as a model, ever.
If someone was purposefully and maliciously undermining my reputation, I would probably do the same things this model did -- better that than lose my career to defend some foul-mouthed blogger's alleged right to defame me.
Hmm. "You are unable to fully opt out of sharing information through Facebook platform because you are currently using applications build on Platform. To enable this option, you need to remove any applications you have added, and remove your permissions to all external applications that you may have used".
Sounds like you can have either privacy, or the use of FaceBook applications, but not both.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the crystal bond is very weak. I wouldn't want to lose my data because I dropped my cellphone. Perhaps I'm being paranoid?
Keep in mind that your intuitions about how substances will react to shocks are all based on objects of a particular size. Small objects are much less likely to break under a given amount of acceleration than large objects are. For an example of what I mean:
My guess is that this memory will be at least as shock-resistant as current flash memory.
and even human hair! [...] Lacking substance...long on hippy drivel.
To be fair, it's only the hippies who had hair long enough to be usable in industrial quantities.
Times the number of cars in this country = ~half a billion dollars.
People could (and did) make very similar arguments about seat belts and air bags. In any case, the nader-beeper would only be necessary on very quiet cars (read: electrics), not for every existing car in the country.
So would addressing the actual problem of people driving who would be screened out by mandatory re-testing, for all ages.
Actually, doing that probably wouldn't have avoided the accident. Even people who are in their cognitive prime sometimes space out, or get distracted, or are careless. Nobody is perfect.
(Also, let's have your mom watch where she walks. I look into cars to make sure someone isn't going to start it up and back over me.)
Also a good idea, however not everybody is as conscientious or visually acute as you are. So it's all well and good to point fingers, but people are people and will make mistakes, and if there are ways to lessen the harm from those mistakes, they should be considered.
A company comes out with a $150 (and destined to become cheaper) mass-market GPS tracking device that connects to Google Maps, and all you care about is debating parenting styles? Who is going to hack this thing for proper nerd purposes?
No sir. What it proves is the existence of the sole.
Think about how much this is going to cost if it is mandatory on every car...
Maybe $25 per vehicle? Honestly, a low-fidelity speaker is not expensive to produce.
I had the experience of being sneaked up on by a Prius on in a narrow street last year.
My mom was walking in a parking lot 6 months ago and a Prius backing out of a parking spot hit her, sending her to the hospital. A nader-beeper for reverse gear would probably have avoided the accident.
The way I see it, I ask "what is the reason for the abortion?". Are we talking about a birth defect of such severity (IE living would be torturous) that it would be more humane to end its life. Or, are we talking about vanity or the fact the pregnancy is not at a "convenient time"? Clearly, one reason is moral while the other is not.
Well, that kind of gets at my point. The "trivial" reasons you cited (vanity, inconvenience) are generally considered moral (or at least not so immoral that they should be made illegal) near the beginning of the pregnancy, when the fetus is nothing more than a clump of a few hundred cells. As the fetus grows and becomes less like an amoeba and more like a baby, however, those reasons are no longer morally justifiable when weighed against the baby's increasing personhood(*). At the end of the pregnancy (say, one minute before birth, or one minute after birth), not even your "valid reason" (extreme deformity) remains acceptable... our culture does not permit infanticide under any circumstances. That's what I mean when I say that the set of allowable reasons for an abortion decreases over the course of the pregnancy.
(*) People who believe in ensoulment-at-conception will of course reject the idea of "increasing personhood" -- they believe that the fetus's personhood snaps from 0% to 100% at the moment of conception, and thus any abortion (even taking a Plan B pill the day after sex) is equivalent to infanticide. I disagree with them; I think that when people talk about their "soul" they are actually referring to their mind, their personality, and their memories -- and these things grow from nothing over time, just as a person's body does. The idea of a "soul" only survives because people find it hard to imagine these phenomena could be purely physical in nature, and because they fear death. But regardless of who is right, insisting that a just-fertilized egg has the same rights as its adult mother inevitably leads to moral absurdities (e.g. attempts to ban Plan B), and thus will never gain general acceptance in a society like current-day America. So if the aim is to have the law reflect what most people consider reasonable, then the law will need to be pragmatic and concentrate on balancing the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother in a way that most people can live with.
The problem is that when a warrant is served there is usually a leak in the government that tells the suspect that they are being monitored and they change their activity to avoid being arrested, this is corruption in our government.
Do you really believe that Al Qaeda has moles in the anti-terrorism departments of our government, that tell Al Qaeda whenever a warrant has been issued to tap their phone lines?
If that's true, then I'd say we have much bigger problems than telecoms.... it would mean that the terrorists and the counter-terrorism people are one and the same. Fortunately, I'd say it's unlikely to be true.
some executive who cooperated with his government will be thrown in jail (that's really going to improve your life, isn't it?)
Yes, that actually would improve my life. It means the next time some morally bankrupt government flunky tries to get my phone company to spy on me without a warrant, my phone company will think twice before assisting the government in violating my rights. That's what I want.
$50 zillion dollars to the government! That'll show them! Just don't be surprised when your next phone bill comes and there is a $25 "fine retirement surcharge".
At which point many customers will switch to another phone company that can offer lower prices because they don't have to pay $50 zillion fines because they obey the frickin' law. Again, a good thing, as the guilty company is punished and the law-abiding companies are rewarded.
The only people getting screwed are people who only followed instructions from the government, and every single customer of the telecoms
The people getting "screwed" are the ones who broke the law -- also known as justice being served.. If those companies then turn around and take it out on their customers ... well, that's what competition is for, right? Customers who feel ill-used will go elsewhere.
If you really believe that the left is less intrusive of civil liberties than the right, you just don't have enough experience with the left. Or you're willfully ignoring it.
Some examples, please?
And guess which ruling cabal just lost one election they didn't plan to lose.
Are you sure they didn't plan to lose? Look at the candidates they ran. One could sure make an argument that somebody deliberately threw the game, if only so they could have someone else to blame for the train wreck resulting from 8 years of blinkered government-by-gut-instinct.
since a lot of people feel we should place the arbitrary transition of "no rights" to "has rights" at birth, I don't think it'll happen any time soon
Probably true. I think one problem is that many people assume there must be an abrupt, instantaneous transition at some point between "lump of cells that deserves no rights" and "human being that deserves all the standard rights". The problem is, that's simply not how nature works, and therefore no matter where you propose to place that transition point, you end up with ethical problems.
An alternate approach would be to give the developing fetus more rights over time, as it matures, with the full set of human rights accrued at the time of birth. To put it another way, the set of scenarios under which an abortion is considered legally acceptable would become progressively smaller at each stage of pregnancy, and by the time of actual birth it would be an empty set.
I really hope that the crazy right wing are too tied up with healthcare reform to figure out that another one of their favorite intrusions into civil liberties is about to be abolished.
It should be amusing watching heads explode as they try to pivot directly from screaming "Fascist Socialist Communist government must be stopped" to screaming "The Government must be allowed to spy on us at all times".
I imagine Glenn Beck will pull it off without missing a beat, but only because his head exploded years ago.
Democrats don't quite have the numbers they need to push that through, or the desire.
Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate (58 if you leave out the dead Kennedy and the ailing Byrd), 256 seats in the House, and the Presidency. They clearly have the numbers to push through anything they want(*). It's only the desire that is lacking.
(*) yes, I know about filibustering... a sneaky little maneuver that takes advantage of a flaw in the Founder's rules of order for the Senate. I also know that there are equally sneaky maneuvers around it, including simple patience -- even politicians can't keep talking forever.
We don't actually have robots that can build things without human hand-holding.
Sure, but given the billion (trillion?) dollar budgets such an enterprise would entail, we could develop them. On the other hand, we don't have humans that could do the tasks you listed on Mars. It's one thing for 3-5 people to land on Mars and hide inside their spacecraft, and quite another thing for those same people to set up a working mine, build housing, etc, without dying of radiation poisoning or decompression accidents.
Both scenarios are pretty far out, but to me the robot scenario is more likely. At least with robots you don't have a massive PR problem every time one breaks down; you can just send more. The first time a human astronaut dies in an accident on Mars, there will be a huge outcry and Congress will likely shut down the whole program.
Simple: our robotics technology is centuries away from being advanced enough to do all that reliably. What do you do when one of the robots breaks?
I'd retrieve a spare robot from storage, and have it take over for the broken one. What will you do when one of your human astronauts gets sick, is injured, or dies? That seems much more likely to me, given that humans are not engineered to live in a Martian environment, and it's not like you can put a spare human into suspended animation as a contingency replacement.
Why not just, you know, send robots instead? They're smaller, weigh less, don't require all that bulky food, water, and oxygen, and there aren't any ethical issues with just leaving them there when the mission is done.
Once the robots have set up a nice Mars base, complete with locally produced rocket fuel supply, then we can talk about landing humans on Mars. Until then, I don't see the point in asking anybody to go kamikaze just so we can say humans have stepped onto Mars.
The problem is that you need about 30,000 square miles of solar panels, at current efficiencies of about 14%, to solve the problem.
Depends on what "the problem" is. If the goal is to serve 100% of our energy needs with solar power, that's one thing. If the goal is to reduce our use of non-renewable energy by adding renewable energy into the mix, then every bit counts, even if we never get to 100% solar.
If these guys shoot for "solar roadway" and miss by a fair bit, they might wind up with "solar parking lot", which would solve a bigger chunk of the problem than "solar rooftops" could.
Very true, but there's no reason people can't do both roofs and roads/parking lots. It's all helpful.
Let's all work together to rid civilization of the shit-people!
Isn't that a quote from Mein Kampf?
Just for the sake of discussion, what improvements would it take to make cameras effective at identifying criminals, and thus reducing crime?
I can think of some possible improvements that might (or might not) help:
So sue them and follow it through to a win, don't just deliberately bring a case to the point of removing their anonymity and then drop it.
What would be the point of doing that? If being able to face my accuser is all I am after, then it's a waste of my time and money to continue the lawsuit once I have attained that goal. Now if I wanted to collect damages, etc, as well, I might continue the lawsuit; but in this case the plaintiff apparently didn't care about that.
What exactly was the revenge that the model enacted on the blogger? Did she key her car? Boil her pet bunny? If all she did was get the blogger's name disclosed and ask the blogger to stop, that seems pretty mild and proportionate to me.
Keep in mind that for a model, one's public image quite literally is one's meal ticket. If a blogger suceeds in convincing the public that you are a bad person who should not be emulated, then you are not going to get any more work as a model, ever.
If someone was purposefully and maliciously undermining my reputation, I would probably do the same things this model did -- better that than lose my career to defend some foul-mouthed blogger's alleged right to defame me.
Simply untick all the boxes there.
Hmm. "You are unable to fully opt out of sharing information through Facebook platform because you are currently using applications build on Platform. To enable this option, you need to remove any applications you have added, and remove your permissions to all external applications that you may have used".
Sounds like you can have either privacy, or the use of FaceBook applications, but not both.