For the record, the bullet meant to ease the squad's conscience wasn't a blank because you can tell the difference if you're an experienced marksman. In fact I'm led to believe it was made from wax, though if you count 'Allo 'Allo is reliable (I don't) they generally use wooden ones for this purpose.
For my two penneth, given the choice I would take a bullet over any of the more "humane" methods.
Very true. As a CSR your treated like shit by the customer because of restrictive policies that keep you from doing a good job and your treated like shit by the management because you are so easily replaced they don't have to care.
When I worked for Orange I found that some customers are just dicks and that's that. Even when the policies are quite reasonable and made clear beforehand some people will simply bitch because they can't have exactly what they want. For example, I had a gentleman who wanted an upgrade in his second month. Go fish...
On the other hand there was a customer with a Mac and their own sim-free handset who wanted to tether. It said explicitly in the contract that the network wouldn't support anything we didn't sell but we were quite happy to research the issue and get them up and running. Incidentally, this was before 2.5G became available and Bluetooth was still on the drawing board.
Granted, many staff are just there to work their shift and go home but there are those who like to be challenged in their work. The trick is not to promise anything the company isn't obligated to deliver and make this very clear at the outset.
I doubt that the manufacturers knowingly design their handsets to charge customers: they don't see any benefit. It's more likely that these hotkeys are put there at the networks' request, or that it's just an honest attempt to provide a handy feature for the people who do use data. Now, not being able to reassign the key is almost certainly the former. I used to go to Carphone Warehouse for my phones because for some networks (Vodafone as I recall) you had a choice between a vanilla phone and one that's been mutilated by a company that has practically zero experience in UI design.
Do they charge for paper bills? If so, do they inform customers of changes to the contract? If they're changing the terms of the agreement without free notification then there's something fundamentally wrong there...
If it has been then the breed doesn't matter: from what I read those birds that Hollywood stars clean for publicity only live a few days anyway with all the oil they've ingested from trying to clean themselves.
Are dogs intelligent? What about insects? Or plants?
Intelligence isn't a discrete property, nor is sapience, which I think is what you actually mean. Anyway, it's called Artificial intelligence, i.e. not real, and to answer your final question I'm inclined towards the Synthetic Intelligence moniker.
You missed the point of the entire post, which was that microcontrollers like this are far more likely to be used in industrial automation than in playing games.
This latest effort strikes me as a less ambitious version of the semantic web, and we may have seen a glimpse of it in Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram's ego aside Alpha does have merit and if the state of the art can advance as far as finding context in the written word then it's a damned good start; recognising faces and locales appears comparitively simple.
Call me a cynic if you want, but I strongly doubt that people in general will manually tag and classify their photos, movies, songs etc. This doubt seems ever more justified as the rate at which we accumulate personal data increases.
The parent may be referring to our ancestry, which evolved to a point where it was better not to kill members of your own species*, but to help them instead. The Greater Good and all that.
*Except anyone outside the monkey sphere. I'm not saying I subscribe to the idea but it does seem interesting.
If it's a microcontroller I'd say it's in an appliance of some sort. Appliances don't run just any application; they just do a few jobs that are decided in advance. So if your ATM, for example, needs more than 8 hardware threads wouldn't you kludge some in software?
I'm not sure the Civ analogy really works here; if you were recreating Civ on a camcorder, knowing what chip you had to work with, you wouldn't write it in such a way that it would fail as you suggest. Or perhaps you wouldn't write it at all... you'd write an OS that could do software threads across multiple cores and just run the one that Sid brought out.
These things aren't designed to play games in my opinion, they generally just sit there unnoticed getting on with running our heating systems, our industrial automation, our alarm clocks, etc. Having 8 threads is fine and dandy but I'll bet you're more likely to see them controlling a robot with 8 limbs rather than 8 settlers.
It wasn't until I started reading SF rather than just watching Star Trek that I realised how inertial dampeners would be useful. Of course being able to absorb an impact or two without turning the occupants to jelly would be nice but if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
Laser confinement is basically weapons research (refinement of bomb codes, never going to break even in sustained fusion).
Hear, hear. I cringe when the NIF is brought up as a potential energy source. It's a bomb: it destroys most of itself every time it's fired, which is done with dozens upon dozens of lasers all firing at exactly the same instant. All credit to them - it's amazing it works at all - but the bigger you make those little fuel pellets the harder it is to replace the aforementioned blown up bits. If fusion is going to be practical I'd wager lasers will be used to start a reaction at most, not contain it.
Where are these convenient, pre-formed, barren valleys? In all of Europe? I doubt it, not everyone here has the space for solar, or enough sunshine to make it worthwhile.
It's also 8 light-minutes away and has an average power density on the order of 1 kW/m2. Who wants to cover the land in PV cells as far as the eye can see when you can build a few miniature stars with a few tonnes of superconducter and a vacuum chamber and have done with it?*
*Go Polywell! It'd be nice if Dr. B. turned out to be right.
Don't feel too bad, only 1-2 generations ago here everyone used imperial measures. Nowadays hardly anyone remembers how many thimbles there are in a hogshead. It's a good thing.
How do these rocks hoist themselves upwards from the surface and into space without the life on them being slagged by the meteorite that just smashed into them?
Well he was crassly stupid and completely fucked when he admitted he broke into the computers and found UFOs. If he would have kept his fuckin mouth shut as I am sure his lawyer was begging him to do he might not have had any problems. But he admitted his offense and is now sounding like a whiny little bitch for failing to man up and face the music.
He admitted his crime, apparently freely. That takes bollocks.
You may think that breaking into US DOD computers is minor, but Gary's just lucky he's not an Afghani who did it, or else he'd be dead now. Uncle Sam is serious about stuff like this, even if you and Gary aren't, and guess what?
How charming, Afghanis don't even get a show trial! If McKinnon is extradited you'll see him put in front of jury not of his peers that will find him guilty
Uncle Sam has a lot more clout with the Crown than you or Gary.
Oh, spare us. The Crown will not decide this man's fate: no appeal would reach this far up. The new government is halting these procedings (perhaps only temporarily) because we, the people are demanding it not because Her Majesty is having second thoughts.
Please, before you think about making another snarky comment about the political system that spawned yours bear in mind one thing: For some time, the monarch has held much of their power only on the condition that it isn't exercised.
A burglar enters through a hole in a fence, breaks a window and damages property. If we ignore the criminal side, e.g. trespassing and concentrate on the civl matter of the damaged property should a court order the defendant to pay for the fence?
Now that these vulnerabilities are known publicly the gov't has to deal with them because they're responsible for sealing them. McKinnon will no doubt end up doing hard time but paying to patch the hole he got in through? Don't take the piss.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, the bullet meant to ease the squad's conscience wasn't a blank because you can tell the difference if you're an experienced marksman. In fact I'm led to believe it was made from wax, though if you count 'Allo 'Allo is reliable (I don't) they generally use wooden ones for this purpose.
For my two penneth, given the choice I would take a bullet over any of the more "humane" methods.
(responsible in the sense of "in charge", not as in "to blame").
There's a difference?
Very true. As a CSR your treated like shit by the customer because of restrictive policies that keep you from doing a good job and your treated like shit by the management because you are so easily replaced they don't have to care.
When I worked for Orange I found that some customers are just dicks and that's that. Even when the policies are quite reasonable and made clear beforehand some people will simply bitch because they can't have exactly what they want. For example, I had a gentleman who wanted an upgrade in his second month. Go fish...
On the other hand there was a customer with a Mac and their own sim-free handset who wanted to tether. It said explicitly in the contract that the network wouldn't support anything we didn't sell but we were quite happy to research the issue and get them up and running. Incidentally, this was before 2.5G became available and Bluetooth was still on the drawing board.
Granted, many staff are just there to work their shift and go home but there are those who like to be challenged in their work. The trick is not to promise anything the company isn't obligated to deliver and make this very clear at the outset.
I doubt that the manufacturers knowingly design their handsets to charge customers: they don't see any benefit. It's more likely that these hotkeys are put there at the networks' request, or that it's just an honest attempt to provide a handy feature for the people who do use data. Now, not being able to reassign the key is almost certainly the former. I used to go to Carphone Warehouse for my phones because for some networks (Vodafone as I recall) you had a choice between a vanilla phone and one that's been mutilated by a company that has practically zero experience in UI design.
Do they charge for paper bills? If so, do they inform customers of changes to the contract? If they're changing the terms of the agreement without free notification then there's something fundamentally wrong there...
If it has been then the breed doesn't matter: from what I read those birds that Hollywood stars clean for publicity only live a few days anyway with all the oil they've ingested from trying to clean themselves.
Are dogs intelligent? What about insects? Or plants?
Intelligence isn't a discrete property, nor is sapience, which I think is what you actually mean. Anyway, it's called Artificial intelligence, i.e. not real, and to answer your final question I'm inclined towards the Synthetic Intelligence moniker.
P.S. to coin a phrase: do planes fly?
You missed the point of the entire post, which was that microcontrollers like this are far more likely to be used in industrial automation than in playing games.
This latest effort strikes me as a less ambitious version of the semantic web, and we may have seen a glimpse of it in Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram's ego aside Alpha does have merit and if the state of the art can advance as far as finding context in the written word then it's a damned good start; recognising faces and locales appears comparitively simple.
Call me a cynic if you want, but I strongly doubt that people in general will manually tag and classify their photos, movies, songs etc. This doubt seems ever more justified as the rate at which we accumulate personal data increases.
The parent may be referring to our ancestry, which evolved to a point where it was better not to kill members of your own species*, but to help them instead. The Greater Good and all that.
*Except anyone outside the monkey sphere. I'm not saying I subscribe to the idea but it does seem interesting.
If it's a microcontroller I'd say it's in an appliance of some sort. Appliances don't run just any application; they just do a few jobs that are decided in advance. So if your ATM, for example, needs more than 8 hardware threads wouldn't you kludge some in software?
I'm not sure the Civ analogy really works here; if you were recreating Civ on a camcorder, knowing what chip you had to work with, you wouldn't write it in such a way that it would fail as you suggest. Or perhaps you wouldn't write it at all... you'd write an OS that could do software threads across multiple cores and just run the one that Sid brought out.
These things aren't designed to play games in my opinion, they generally just sit there unnoticed getting on with running our heating systems, our industrial automation, our alarm clocks, etc. Having 8 threads is fine and dandy but I'll bet you're more likely to see them controlling a robot with 8 limbs rather than 8 settlers.
It wasn't until I started reading SF rather than just watching Star Trek that I realised how inertial dampeners would be useful. Of course being able to absorb an impact or two without turning the occupants to jelly would be nice but if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
Holidays on Nereid, here I come!
Laser confinement is basically weapons research (refinement of bomb codes, never going to break even in sustained fusion).
Hear, hear. I cringe when the NIF is brought up as a potential energy source. It's a bomb: it destroys most of itself every time it's fired, which is done with dozens upon dozens of lasers all firing at exactly the same instant. All credit to them - it's amazing it works at all - but the bigger you make those little fuel pellets the harder it is to replace the aforementioned blown up bits. If fusion is going to be practical I'd wager lasers will be used to start a reaction at most, not contain it.
Where are these convenient, pre-formed, barren valleys? In all of Europe? I doubt it, not everyone here has the space for solar, or enough sunshine to make it worthwhile.
It's also 8 light-minutes away and has an average power density on the order of 1 kW/m2. Who wants to cover the land in PV cells as far as the eye can see when you can build a few miniature stars with a few tonnes of superconducter and a vacuum chamber and have done with it?*
*Go Polywell! It'd be nice if Dr. B. turned out to be right.
Does not apply to a black hole, IMO.
Not until stellar engineering encompasses more than theory.
Oblig., but not XKCD for a change.
That and the fact that making boxes out of sheet metal is cheaper than making spheres out of sheet metal...
Depends how big they are; I'm sure you could spin a mini-itx one fairly easily if you wanted to.
While a sphere may enclose the most volume with a given surface area a square object wastes none from a stacking perspective.
How do we know the image for the card wasn't put together in Japan? The camera says Made in China, the software perhaps not.
Don't feel too bad, only 1-2 generations ago here everyone used imperial measures. Nowadays hardly anyone remembers how many thimbles there are in a hogshead. It's a good thing.
Tell you what, if those guys will switch to metric the rest of the world will forgive the wrong spellings, all of them.
How do these rocks hoist themselves upwards from the surface and into space without the life on them being slagged by the meteorite that just smashed into them?
Well he was crassly stupid and completely fucked when he admitted he broke into the computers and found UFOs. If he would have kept his fuckin mouth shut as I am sure his lawyer was begging him to do he might not have had any problems. But he admitted his offense and is now sounding like a whiny little bitch for failing to man up and face the music.
He admitted his crime, apparently freely. That takes bollocks.
You may think that breaking into US DOD computers is minor, but Gary's just lucky he's not an Afghani who did it, or else he'd be dead now. Uncle Sam is serious about stuff like this, even if you and Gary aren't, and guess what?
How charming, Afghanis don't even get a show trial! If McKinnon is extradited you'll see him put in front of jury not of his peers that will find him guilty
Uncle Sam has a lot more clout with the Crown than you or Gary.
Oh, spare us. The Crown will not decide this man's fate: no appeal would reach this far up. The new government is halting these procedings (perhaps only temporarily) because we, the people are demanding it not because Her Majesty is having second thoughts.
Please, before you think about making another snarky comment about the political system that spawned yours bear in mind one thing: For some time, the monarch has held much of their power only on the condition that it isn't exercised.
A burglar enters through a hole in a fence, breaks a window and damages property. If we ignore the criminal side, e.g. trespassing and concentrate on the civl matter of the damaged property should a court order the defendant to pay for the fence?
Now that these vulnerabilities are known publicly the gov't has to deal with them because they're responsible for sealing them. McKinnon will no doubt end up doing hard time but paying to patch the hole he got in through? Don't take the piss.
Face it: it this was really true they would have sent a wet-worker after him rather than prosecuting.