While I'm inclined to agree with you to a point, the idea that merely being aware of what's going on will make things significantly safer is likely demonstrably false. The NHTSA reported the 2008 Traffic Safety Assessment a few months ago, and they found that both injuries and fatalities dropped on both absolute and comparative bases. The total number of fatalities dropped by 9.7%, the number of injuries dropped by 5.8%, and the rates per 100 million miles driven decreased by 6.6% and 2.4% respectively. The number of vehicle miles traveled decreased by 3.4%. I expect that these numbers will improve still more as distance-measuring and automatic-braking systems become more common in lower-priced cars. It may lead some to tailgate more, but I don't think that's going to outweigh the benefits of the systems overall.
Funny that you mention grocery stores, which are intentionally designed in a non-intuitive fashion. The more product you go by, the more likely you are to grab something else.
Consider the example of my primary shopping store. Facing the back of the store, the freezer section is in the middle, the lunch meats are along the far left wall, the bread is two aisles to the right of the freezer section, and the produce is all the way over on the right side. Mayonnaise is facing the produce, and mustard is one aisle to the left of that. Canned vegetables are three aisles to the right of the bread and two to the left of the produce, while the dinner meats are in the frozen section or against the back wall to the right of the dairy section, which is against the back wall on the left side. For any given meal not prepared from a single box (like TV dinners or Lunchables), you have to cross a significant portion of the store at least once.
And every store is different. Even stores of about the same size and within the same brand only a few miles apart can differ significantly. As such, using a grocery store as a model of intuitiveness is really a broken idea.
My dad was injured in a fall at work a few years ago. Since then, he has had significant problems with memory and some cognitive function.
When I first installed Office 2007 on his system, he despised it because he couldn't find anything, and demanded that I put Office 2003 back on. I did that, but then a few months later, he asked that Office 2007 be put back in. At school, they had upgraded to it and after using it for a few weeks, he found it more intuitive. He didn't have to remember where esoteric things were, and the odd logic of where things went in menus didn't have to be refigured.
I've loved it from the start. It's less keyboard-oriented, but I find that it's more productive. It's gotten even better with Office 2010 and the ability to customize the ribbons. I'm interested to see where Mozilla takes this.
Britain just offered to reduce its nuclear deterrent by reducing its Trident sub force from four to three. Russia has reduced its active nuclear arsenal from a peak of around 40,000 warheads (under the Soviet Union) to under 5000. The US has reduced its active arsenal from a peak of 32,000 warheads to under 4000.
The largest-scale nuclear risk for both Russia and the US still stems from the other party. It's a slow mechanism for draw-down, but it is happening. Whether either country will ever see its last warhead decommissioned and dismantled, I don't know, but it will largely depend on whether anyone else has them.
Only those approved by the Iranian government as sufficiently Islamic can run for any office. Media outlets deemed too liberal are routinely shut down in the lead-up to the elections.
The president of Iran answers to the Supreme Leader of Iran, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. The Supreme Leader's word is final in almost all matters, though he technically is subject to the approval of the Assembly of Experts. But since the Assembly of Experts is elected from candidates approved by the government -- and the Supreme Leader -- the position is incredibly safe. Even in the recent tumult, with Assembly leader Hashemi Rafsanjani criticizing the election and following activities, Khamenei has never been in any real danger of losing his position.
Presumably it would take more than one to trigger a counterstrike. It would probably require several, plus loss of connection to multiple communications facilities. The Soviets may have been paranoid, but they generally weren't stupid. A fault along those lines could trigger an initial strike, guaranteeing an American counterstrike.
Most of the nations that want them (Iran, Syria, North Korea, and maybe Burma) seem to be those with dictatorial control of their populace. Most of those that wanted and occasionally had them in the past were dictatorial states (Libya, Iraq, South Africa, and Brazil and Argentina during their military governments).
The primary arguments that are put forth now are due to non-compliance issues. Iran, Syria, and Burma are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which means that they are not allowed to develop, import, or export technology intended to build a nuclear weapon. There is some overlap between paths to nuclear weapons and paths to heavy water reactors, but light water reactors are considered to be superior in terms of safety, efficiency, and risk of proliferation, which is why the established nuclear powers are much more eager to provide information and assistance building those than letting heavy water reactors get built, byproducts of which could be used to build nuclear weapons.
I can declare anything I want, just as you can declare that I can't declare something. However, to satisfy your pedantry, it is not a word that is recognized as valid by any published dictionary. A few mention it, but always as an incorrect pluralization of the word 'virus.'
CS 1.6 is still heavily played, many years after CS:Source was released. The graphics certainly haven't kept up, but the tactical and social aspects made it worth playing for a long time. It probably is still worth playing, only I don't have the time to keep the skills up (not that they were fantastic to begin with).
In the county government (not in Massachusetts) where I work, there is no standard policy. A draft policy was circulated not long ago that would mandate a standard retention policy of 90 days. Some agencies have different policies by law (child support must hold onto e-mail for I think five years, and the district attorney and public defender's offices must keep case-related e-mail in perpetuity), but the 90-day cap was allegedly intended to balance discovery and e-mail storage requirements. Part of the policy suggested that PSTs, forwarding to other e-mail accounts, and saving messages locally should be disabled; the response from one agency was that they should prepare to start spending more on printers, because a lot of material was going to end up in hard copy, especially for those of us working on projects that can take as much as three years to complete. AFAICT, no IT staff were consulted before the draft was written.
If it's no longer a question, then why is there an ethics debate over whether to destroy the last known samples of the smallpox virus? The core of that debate is whether it is ethical to undertake an action that would knowingly render extinct something that may be considered to be life.
Sounds more like an impromptu speech by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He's OK with prepared words, but if he has to speak spontaneously, it's painful to hear.
Whether viruses are life is still a matter of some debate. They have genes, reproduce, and evolve, but have no metabolism of their own and do not reproduce by division. They require a host cell in order to reproduce, but so do some bacteria. It's a fuzzy line.
While I welcome that possibility, it's a far cry from the rate of addition of modules originally planned. If Bigelow can add capacity and capability at a reasonable cost, then I'm all for it. However, before something like this gets added to the station, it needs to be determined whether it will work as planned. I looked up the Sundancer and BA-330 modules, and both of them appear to have expanded considerably on the technology in the Genesis modules. This will make NASA wary about attaching one of them to the ISS, and probably require testing of an independent module (which appears will happen anyway from the desire of Bigelow Aerospace to build a commercial space station).
There seems to be a great deal of attention being paid to the ISS by various countries around the world. As another posted points out, the Dragon may be ready soon, and after the shuttle's retirement, this would make at least four systems that can provide resupply. Construction may come to a halt (at least temporarily), but it doesn't seem that the crews will be short of things to do while there. If construction continues at some point, the ability of multiple agencies to launch could provide for a fairly rapid rotation of equipment and experiments, and eventually crew.
I wonder if India, China, Ukraine, and perhaps even lesser-known space-capable nations like Brazil will begin working on craft capable of docking with the ISS. Much of the groundwork has been laid; it makes sense to take advantage of it.
If you're working with a large-scale legacy application, it can be very hard to change it without a very large and expensive project. California has several applications used by the various social welfare agencies that are locked into IE6, and there is no money to do the work required to implement the changes to allow newer or alternate browsers.
(I work for a county government, and this is my biggest issue with the state's tech base right now.)
I don't see how that's different from the old movies. You mostly see the color classics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, filtered through the decades of viewing. The 80s are in the process of being filtered in that way, and the 90s soon will as well. It takes time for any work to get the general social acceptance or refusal. Some people will see a movie and love it then, like it later, and then eventually wonder what they saw in it in the first place.
There were plenty of films that were just shot and thrown out there in black and white. Like many of the color films that followed, the signal-to-noise ratio could be quite low.
Most television will probably remain 2D, but the 3D tech integrated for those shows that are in 3D will probably require something like polarized glasses for at least the first generation.
It will take some time to transition to 3D. At first, it will be for special use. I can see HBO shelling out for a new series, and some movies made for 3D presentation (mostly animated films right now) will benefit. Provided viewers can accept it, as it becomes more common, it will become less expensive, and eventually fairly ubiquitous, such that the next generation may regard 2D as we often regard black & white.
There's an enormous difference between failing and suddenly ceasing to exist. When there's failure, it's generally due to a lack of business sense and a visible decrease in revenues, the end results of which can be seen some distance out. Jobs are generally shed more or less gradually, not all in one shot.
This doesn't always work in practice. There are occasional situations where things simply halt. I've seen a situation like that before, where a large contracting company that worked for Disney simply ceased operations over a weekend. Disney did not hire the workers on, nor did they ask any of the other contracting companies (my employer included) to do so. They simply did without, spreading the existing staff to cover the gap for a time until a new contractor could be brought in with almost completely new staff.
It's ugly no matter what happens, but you're calling for the imposition of penalties on dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who had nothing to do with the illegal activities, and that's the wrong thing to be doing.
Smaller corporations can be (and are) shut down if the majority of their business deals with breaking the law. However, larger corporations bring in other concerns.
Let's say that IBM overstepped their bounds, sufficient enough for your corporate death penalty. Then what? Wipe them out of existence? Fire all of their employees? That's tens of thousands of people, not to mention their subcontractors which suddenly have no income from their contracts with IBM.
How about Exxon-Mobil? Their crimes are surely more significant. But then what? Shut down their operations and fire everyone? Again, tens of thousands of employees would be out of a job. Subcontractors would have sudden problems. And oil prices would spike as never before because Exxon's operations produce some four million barrels of oil per day -- about 5% of the world's output.
If something went horribly awry with either of these two -- or even with an operation that has only a few hundred employees -- the better action is to prosecute the executives and those employees who knew or reasonably should have known that what they were doing was wrong. The corporate shield does not exist for those actions. Maybe it should be enforced more often, but the idea of a corporate death penalty will do more to stagnate development than to promote good corporate citizenship.
I've got a friend who owns a Romanian variant, and can consistently hit a man-sized target from a standing position using iron sights out to 300m.
He also owns two AR-15s, and the basic ammo capacity is the same for both: 30-round detachable magazines. He has higher-capacity magazines, including a 74-round drum for the AK and a 100-round double-spiral for the AR. The AK's is a little temperamental but faster to load, while the AR's works smoothly but takes forever to stuff the rounds in, even with the loader. Both make the weapons more awkward due to the extra weight.
The AK-47 is the parent of the most prevalent rifle used in war, but it is not the mother of all assault rifles. For widespread use, that would be the Browning Automatic Rifle, or for original concept, the Mexican Mondragon.
The cop got pissed because Gates didn't supply an ID when the cop demanded one, which you actually don't have to do when you're inside a house.
and this:
The cop additionally did not attempt to verify his identity
seem contradictory.
BTW, unless I missed something in the 911 call, the caller did not say anything about anyone being black. She said that one might have looked Hispanic, but she didn't get a look at the other. The police report says that she described two black men breaking in, but there's no reason for her to change her story in the short time between the 911 call and talking to the officer.
The AC's point is that the beam will lose its coherence on the way back, limiting its destructive capabilities to perhaps darkening some paint on the source aircraft, if even that. The adaptive laser is what tells the main laser how to focus the beam on the way out. To maintain its status as a destructive beam, it would have to be corrected on the way back, not only for atmospheric distortions, but for whatever distortions the reflector induces.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm inclined to agree with you to a point, the idea that merely being aware of what's going on will make things significantly safer is likely demonstrably false. The NHTSA reported the 2008 Traffic Safety Assessment a few months ago, and they found that both injuries and fatalities dropped on both absolute and comparative bases. The total number of fatalities dropped by 9.7%, the number of injuries dropped by 5.8%, and the rates per 100 million miles driven decreased by 6.6% and 2.4% respectively. The number of vehicle miles traveled decreased by 3.4%. I expect that these numbers will improve still more as distance-measuring and automatic-braking systems become more common in lower-priced cars. It may lead some to tailgate more, but I don't think that's going to outweigh the benefits of the systems overall.
Funny that you mention grocery stores, which are intentionally designed in a non-intuitive fashion. The more product you go by, the more likely you are to grab something else.
Consider the example of my primary shopping store. Facing the back of the store, the freezer section is in the middle, the lunch meats are along the far left wall, the bread is two aisles to the right of the freezer section, and the produce is all the way over on the right side. Mayonnaise is facing the produce, and mustard is one aisle to the left of that. Canned vegetables are three aisles to the right of the bread and two to the left of the produce, while the dinner meats are in the frozen section or against the back wall to the right of the dairy section, which is against the back wall on the left side. For any given meal not prepared from a single box (like TV dinners or Lunchables), you have to cross a significant portion of the store at least once.
And every store is different. Even stores of about the same size and within the same brand only a few miles apart can differ significantly. As such, using a grocery store as a model of intuitiveness is really a broken idea.
My dad was injured in a fall at work a few years ago. Since then, he has had significant problems with memory and some cognitive function.
When I first installed Office 2007 on his system, he despised it because he couldn't find anything, and demanded that I put Office 2003 back on. I did that, but then a few months later, he asked that Office 2007 be put back in. At school, they had upgraded to it and after using it for a few weeks, he found it more intuitive. He didn't have to remember where esoteric things were, and the odd logic of where things went in menus didn't have to be refigured.
I've loved it from the start. It's less keyboard-oriented, but I find that it's more productive. It's gotten even better with Office 2010 and the ability to customize the ribbons. I'm interested to see where Mozilla takes this.
Britain just offered to reduce its nuclear deterrent by reducing its Trident sub force from four to three. Russia has reduced its active nuclear arsenal from a peak of around 40,000 warheads (under the Soviet Union) to under 5000. The US has reduced its active arsenal from a peak of 32,000 warheads to under 4000.
The largest-scale nuclear risk for both Russia and the US still stems from the other party. It's a slow mechanism for draw-down, but it is happening. Whether either country will ever see its last warhead decommissioned and dismantled, I don't know, but it will largely depend on whether anyone else has them.
Only those approved by the Iranian government as sufficiently Islamic can run for any office. Media outlets deemed too liberal are routinely shut down in the lead-up to the elections.
The president of Iran answers to the Supreme Leader of Iran, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. The Supreme Leader's word is final in almost all matters, though he technically is subject to the approval of the Assembly of Experts. But since the Assembly of Experts is elected from candidates approved by the government -- and the Supreme Leader -- the position is incredibly safe. Even in the recent tumult, with Assembly leader Hashemi Rafsanjani criticizing the election and following activities, Khamenei has never been in any real danger of losing his position.
Presumably it would take more than one to trigger a counterstrike. It would probably require several, plus loss of connection to multiple communications facilities. The Soviets may have been paranoid, but they generally weren't stupid. A fault along those lines could trigger an initial strike, guaranteeing an American counterstrike.
Most of the nations that want them (Iran, Syria, North Korea, and maybe Burma) seem to be those with dictatorial control of their populace. Most of those that wanted and occasionally had them in the past were dictatorial states (Libya, Iraq, South Africa, and Brazil and Argentina during their military governments).
The primary arguments that are put forth now are due to non-compliance issues. Iran, Syria, and Burma are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which means that they are not allowed to develop, import, or export technology intended to build a nuclear weapon. There is some overlap between paths to nuclear weapons and paths to heavy water reactors, but light water reactors are considered to be superior in terms of safety, efficiency, and risk of proliferation, which is why the established nuclear powers are much more eager to provide information and assistance building those than letting heavy water reactors get built, byproducts of which could be used to build nuclear weapons.
I can declare anything I want, just as you can declare that I can't declare something. However, to satisfy your pedantry, it is not a word that is recognized as valid by any published dictionary. A few mention it, but always as an incorrect pluralization of the word 'virus.'
CS 1.6 is still heavily played, many years after CS:Source was released. The graphics certainly haven't kept up, but the tactical and social aspects made it worth playing for a long time. It probably is still worth playing, only I don't have the time to keep the skills up (not that they were fantastic to begin with).
In the county government (not in Massachusetts) where I work, there is no standard policy. A draft policy was circulated not long ago that would mandate a standard retention policy of 90 days. Some agencies have different policies by law (child support must hold onto e-mail for I think five years, and the district attorney and public defender's offices must keep case-related e-mail in perpetuity), but the 90-day cap was allegedly intended to balance discovery and e-mail storage requirements. Part of the policy suggested that PSTs, forwarding to other e-mail accounts, and saving messages locally should be disabled; the response from one agency was that they should prepare to start spending more on printers, because a lot of material was going to end up in hard copy, especially for those of us working on projects that can take as much as three years to complete. AFAICT, no IT staff were consulted before the draft was written.
If it's no longer a question, then why is there an ethics debate over whether to destroy the last known samples of the smallpox virus? The core of that debate is whether it is ethical to undertake an action that would knowingly render extinct something that may be considered to be life.
Sounds more like an impromptu speech by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He's OK with prepared words, but if he has to speak spontaneously, it's painful to hear.
Virii is not a word. The plural is 'viruses.'
Whether viruses are life is still a matter of some debate. They have genes, reproduce, and evolve, but have no metabolism of their own and do not reproduce by division. They require a host cell in order to reproduce, but so do some bacteria. It's a fuzzy line.
While I welcome that possibility, it's a far cry from the rate of addition of modules originally planned. If Bigelow can add capacity and capability at a reasonable cost, then I'm all for it. However, before something like this gets added to the station, it needs to be determined whether it will work as planned. I looked up the Sundancer and BA-330 modules, and both of them appear to have expanded considerably on the technology in the Genesis modules. This will make NASA wary about attaching one of them to the ISS, and probably require testing of an independent module (which appears will happen anyway from the desire of Bigelow Aerospace to build a commercial space station).
There seems to be a great deal of attention being paid to the ISS by various countries around the world. As another posted points out, the Dragon may be ready soon, and after the shuttle's retirement, this would make at least four systems that can provide resupply. Construction may come to a halt (at least temporarily), but it doesn't seem that the crews will be short of things to do while there. If construction continues at some point, the ability of multiple agencies to launch could provide for a fairly rapid rotation of equipment and experiments, and eventually crew.
I wonder if India, China, Ukraine, and perhaps even lesser-known space-capable nations like Brazil will begin working on craft capable of docking with the ISS. Much of the groundwork has been laid; it makes sense to take advantage of it.
If you're working with a large-scale legacy application, it can be very hard to change it without a very large and expensive project. California has several applications used by the various social welfare agencies that are locked into IE6, and there is no money to do the work required to implement the changes to allow newer or alternate browsers.
(I work for a county government, and this is my biggest issue with the state's tech base right now.)
I don't see how that's different from the old movies. You mostly see the color classics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, filtered through the decades of viewing. The 80s are in the process of being filtered in that way, and the 90s soon will as well. It takes time for any work to get the general social acceptance or refusal. Some people will see a movie and love it then, like it later, and then eventually wonder what they saw in it in the first place.
There were plenty of films that were just shot and thrown out there in black and white. Like many of the color films that followed, the signal-to-noise ratio could be quite low.
Most television will probably remain 2D, but the 3D tech integrated for those shows that are in 3D will probably require something like polarized glasses for at least the first generation.
It will take some time to transition to 3D. At first, it will be for special use. I can see HBO shelling out for a new series, and some movies made for 3D presentation (mostly animated films right now) will benefit. Provided viewers can accept it, as it becomes more common, it will become less expensive, and eventually fairly ubiquitous, such that the next generation may regard 2D as we often regard black & white.
There's an enormous difference between failing and suddenly ceasing to exist. When there's failure, it's generally due to a lack of business sense and a visible decrease in revenues, the end results of which can be seen some distance out. Jobs are generally shed more or less gradually, not all in one shot.
This doesn't always work in practice. There are occasional situations where things simply halt. I've seen a situation like that before, where a large contracting company that worked for Disney simply ceased operations over a weekend. Disney did not hire the workers on, nor did they ask any of the other contracting companies (my employer included) to do so. They simply did without, spreading the existing staff to cover the gap for a time until a new contractor could be brought in with almost completely new staff.
It's ugly no matter what happens, but you're calling for the imposition of penalties on dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who had nothing to do with the illegal activities, and that's the wrong thing to be doing.
Smaller corporations can be (and are) shut down if the majority of their business deals with breaking the law. However, larger corporations bring in other concerns.
Let's say that IBM overstepped their bounds, sufficient enough for your corporate death penalty. Then what? Wipe them out of existence? Fire all of their employees? That's tens of thousands of people, not to mention their subcontractors which suddenly have no income from their contracts with IBM.
How about Exxon-Mobil? Their crimes are surely more significant. But then what? Shut down their operations and fire everyone? Again, tens of thousands of employees would be out of a job. Subcontractors would have sudden problems. And oil prices would spike as never before because Exxon's operations produce some four million barrels of oil per day -- about 5% of the world's output.
If something went horribly awry with either of these two -- or even with an operation that has only a few hundred employees -- the better action is to prosecute the executives and those employees who knew or reasonably should have known that what they were doing was wrong. The corporate shield does not exist for those actions. Maybe it should be enforced more often, but the idea of a corporate death penalty will do more to stagnate development than to promote good corporate citizenship.
I've got a friend who owns a Romanian variant, and can consistently hit a man-sized target from a standing position using iron sights out to 300m.
He also owns two AR-15s, and the basic ammo capacity is the same for both: 30-round detachable magazines. He has higher-capacity magazines, including a 74-round drum for the AK and a 100-round double-spiral for the AR. The AK's is a little temperamental but faster to load, while the AR's works smoothly but takes forever to stuff the rounds in, even with the loader. Both make the weapons more awkward due to the extra weight.
The AK-47 is the parent of the most prevalent rifle used in war, but it is not the mother of all assault rifles. For widespread use, that would be the Browning Automatic Rifle, or for original concept, the Mexican Mondragon.
This:
and this:
seem contradictory.
BTW, unless I missed something in the 911 call, the caller did not say anything about anyone being black. She said that one might have looked Hispanic, but she didn't get a look at the other. The police report says that she described two black men breaking in, but there's no reason for her to change her story in the short time between the 911 call and talking to the officer.
The AC's point is that the beam will lose its coherence on the way back, limiting its destructive capabilities to perhaps darkening some paint on the source aircraft, if even that. The adaptive laser is what tells the main laser how to focus the beam on the way out. To maintain its status as a destructive beam, it would have to be corrected on the way back, not only for atmospheric distortions, but for whatever distortions the reflector induces.