I hope one such asshole with an active jammer is sitting right next to you the day when your wife is in an automobile accident and the hospital is trying to contact you about it.
Actually I'd really rather that the hospital were trying to like treat her injuries, not wasting time trying to phone me.
Oh, sorry. This is an American story. I forgot, they'd be phoning you once they'd drained her credit cards to start the blood transfusion, and that's why it's so urgent they get through to some other source of profit. Try having a healthcare system!
Yes, I too remember getting that 3am phone call from my father, immediately after he'd closed his father's eyes. Didn't to anything for dead Grandfather, but made Dad feel slightly better.
and someone would have had to get the train to stop in the next station before calling for help
Shockingly, there is also the possibility of actually doing something about it yourself. Sudden life-threatening illness falls into one of a small number of categories - inability to breathe (in which case, you know the choking drill from your school days and from your safety training for work), loss of circulation (again, you know the drill. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-stayin'-alive!"), or stroke (not a lot you can do about that one).
Unless, of course, you skipped the first aid classes at school, and your work is too cheap to train the requisite number of first aiders. Or you're afraid to take on the responsibility.
How does someone who is about to get an emergency call (about an injured spouse, etc.)
That's not an emergency. If the call does not go through, who dies, and how is the death related to the inability to connect the call? Even if the call did connect, how is being aware of the situation going to change matters? Will the person who receives the information pull out a gun hold it to the train driver's head and force him to drive faster? Or make an emergency stop, jump off the train, and then get stuck in a traffic jam on their way to home (spouse's work place, shopping mall, whatever)?
Try making an effective argument.
People did actually survive things like a spouse dieing before there were cell phones.
Hmmm, "glomalin" is a new one on me - though since it wasn't discovered until 8 years after I finished my undergraduate course in soil science, that's less than surprising.
Most people (including the civil engineer in this thread) don't appreciate how complex soils are, but forming a soil from the regolith ("broken rocks") already present on the surface of the Moon and Mars (and the Atacama, and Antarctica, and fresh volcanoes) isn't that hard. Yes, you'll need your "starter innoculants" of fungi, humus, organic matter etc, amounting to something approaching 10% of your soil mass. But once you've got your first batch of soil made, you can use that to innoculate the next batch. The difficult thing is going to be keeping the soil in good condition, as it will evolve with time and use. That is sometimes called "farming".
Why couldn't they just put it in vacuum-sealed glass jars, and not turned them upside-down?
If oxidation was the concern (which is what the original claim implied), there was never any need to keep them in vacuum. Dry nitrogen or argon would have done the job perfectly well and been a lot less hazardous than rigid vacuum vessels on the returning (atmosphere-filled) spacecraft.
Soil perchlorate will react with any organic matter it gets hold of, but is consumed in the reaction. Just factor in another percent or so (by mass of soil to be treated) of OM to mix in with the mineral fraction in preparing your basic "soil". For a normal soil, you'll need to be getting several percent of OM into the soil already (from your hydroponics/ oxygen greenhouse) so it's not a big constraint on operations.
Probably your first crop would end up being a sacrificial crop as you generate soil and try to clear it of the more undesirable, mobile toxins.
The soils contained heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and mercury, and there were concerns that these could be taken up by the plants.
"concerns" doesn't mean that the toxins were taken up, just that there were "concerns". That's a bit odd, because such analyses are pretty trivial, and absolutely routine. Odd that.
My guess would be that they didn't analyse the "soils" either, and just took the composition, including the toxin content from the wrapper. [Googles] And here's the MSDS : http://www.orbitec.com/store/J... ; I don't see any grounds for concern there. Another source http://www.orbitec.com/store/J... also has no grounds for concern. A study on mouse response to the dusts : http://sci-hub.io/http://www.t... - no concerns. Ah, some composition for the lunar stimulant from http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/... - and that quantifies the arsenic at 19+/-9 ppm, about twice what is typical for soils. Which would b a problem if this were a level in drinking water, but it's not. How much of that mobilises, and how much concentrates into the plants simply needs analysis.
Even so, those levels are probably manageable. You might need to make sure the soil is well oxygenated (not difficult, particularly with the perchlorate in the soils) and at a near neutral pH (again, you need that anyway for your plants to grow). You might need to grow some crops of "scavanger" plants with newly made batches of soil, then discard them along with the mobilised toxins. Or it might simply not be a high enough level to worry about.
Looking from the other end of the telescope, Cornwall is well known for arsenic minerals (well, I'm a geologist ; "well known" amongst geologists), and there's a lot of agriculture there. How much arsenic do they have to deal with?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24213800 " garden soils in the historical mining area of Hayle-Camborne-Godolphin, Cornwall, England are large and range widely (144-892 μg/g [=ppm]). [...] Examination of 6 salad and vegetable crops grown in 32 gardens has shown arsenic concentrations in the edible tissues to be only slightly elevated. [...] Arsenic in all the vegetables sampled was below the statutory limit in the U.K. of 1 mg/kg [1ppm] fresh weight."
On the basis of that, I doubt there would be a real problem. It'd be worth including a portable XRF in the load out, but that's probably in the mining and surveying gear anyway.
Humans make mistakes, so can computers. He should have played the full games instead of resigning. Maybe the computer AI really sucks at making those last winning moves and he could have exploited that.
Not impossible - as you say, people do make mistakes. But the likelihood of achieving significant gains that way is negligible.
In a real game (clearly, you don't play) which people are playing to completion (say, because you've both got 20 minutes on the clock, and the lunch break is coming up before the next round of the McMahon), you'll typically trip through the yose cooperatively, with the only really interesting points being deciding when one player will surrender sente to the other, and when it comes back. And by that point, you both know what - to within a couple of points, the outcome is. If the score is closer than that, then you carry on fighting to the end. But if you're 20 points down, and your final attempt to kill an enemy group fails... you know you've lost. you might make it a 15 point loss, not a 20 point loss, but typically that has no effect on the outcome of the tournament.
FYI, a point on a goban has three possible states : black, white and unoccupied. Depending on your ruleset, you may need to add a 4th state, for "currently unoccupied but has been occupied".
If you lived i nBritain, you'd know that Liverpudlians (inhabitants of Liverpool) answer to being "Scousers," and you'd likely know that "scouse" is a local (to Liverpool) potato stew with anything else to hand being chucked in. So the composition of "lobscouse" doesn't come as a surprise.
Went shopping today. Amongst other things, I brought an oxtail, precisely to make a stew with.
....except that no program ever computes the full game tree. It would be impossible to do in many games, eg. Chess.
True, but not particularly helpful.
The trick is to prune the tree. This requires skill by human programmers.
And a necessary prerequisite before pruning the game tree is an efficient algorithm for comparing the likely score for one board position compared to another well before you get to the end of the game. While the AlphaGo team have made progress in this aspect - as well as in other aspects of the game, this remains one of the more difficult aspects of computer Go.
Errrrr.. I read that.OK, 3rd reading.... i8f they open source the code Null
d if they contribute it willingly to other projects with licenses that are incompatible with stating that you need a license to use the code, then they have triggered estoppal. Sorry, did you just say that I have NO CHOICE but to
Slug more $So,
I do agree with the AC. (Washes mouth out with soap made from Tyler Durden's fat.) Enough people who have enough money for deep lawyering have caved on that, that I take it as true. IANAL (thank fuck IANAL!. But money pays for deep lawyering, and enough etc etc) so I don't know what the original issue was, but from later quietness, it is something that can be easily bypassed. so, no problem.
Mathematics (as opposed to implementations of the maths) are published ideas (how else can the validity be assessed?), and computing is maths (see Turing, about 1935) so, [shrug]. For any patented implementation, there is an unpatentable, equally true implementation [I think that's the essence of Turing's 1937-ish "stopping problem" proof, but I welcome correction.] It might be less efficient, but that's not normally a BFD. (Is BFD an unrecognisable acronym for the linguistically challenged? It means "Big Fucking Deal," and is an expression of derisory contempt.)
Did someone patent 3x5in cards for exam revision? BFD, I'll use 8x5cm cards. If MS have a patent on an implementation of $IDEA$, then whoopie-doo. If it is likely (judgement) to be quicker (judgement) and / or (judgement) easier (judgement) to re-implement it from scratch, then fight the case. Otherwise, buy the license (for which I assume M$ have adequately demonstrated ownership). There are a lot of judgement calls there. It's not a clear result.
I forgot to include the costs of fighting the case. That substantially shifts the argument towards "settle". Even if, ultimately, you think you could win. Theories don't run on 3- or 5- year budgets. Unlike bean-counters.
One of these days, I'll persuade a SlachCoder to implement "this member spent x minutes composing this response" function.
Actually, as a way of encouraging "considered response"... [American Dad Roger]you don't want to know how many time I had to correct that [/American Dad Roger]. Are the New Owners watching?
I don't want to take away from the generally positive tone of your comment, or disagree with it hugely (I would piss on Bill Gates - if he were on fire. And if I met him in the street having a heart attack I'd do CPR [as appropriate] because his post-work work on malaria re-qualifies him to join the human race. But...)
They have enabled/driven so much and inspired so many - even if they inspired hate and gave someone reason to create an open source alternative.
Sorry, but I was using a touch screen on a Xenix (Xenix!! Wiki link for those who don't need that stupid hair-browning shit the TV advertises incessantly) in 1988 (-89? Ohh, my grey hairs.)... but that's when MS made a hardware mouse... and touch-screen drivers were not in Win3.11, despite hardware being available and functioning. I saw that, and brought Win3.11 after considering buying Xenix, and a SVR5-alike from some legitimate Unix-a-like vendor called SCO (yes, them!). And as is almost traditional for me, once I'd jumped in one direction at a technological crux, the world went a different way, and some mad Finn hacked his 386.
Trust me on this - if I jump one way on a technology at the cutting edge... jump another way. It'll improve your odds.
(Bill Gates and Richard Stallman are each other's best sales men/ women/ people. I deliberately leave out the option of "sales robots" as one would hope that robots would be more competent.)
Slashdot Mirror
I made the count of large countries in the Cold War to be three, not two, with the fourth large country leading the "non-aligned movement".
Are you one of those fools who believes that radio waves can give you cancer? Then obviously you don't have a mobile phone, do you?
It took him 24 to 48 hours to find somewhere with a landline? Even his hotel didn't have one? In central Boston?
It may be true that your friend didn't call his family, but lack of working communications equipment wasn't the reason.
You might expect that. I don't. A good 30% of my life is spent hundreds of kilometres from the nearest cellphone signal.
Actually I'd really rather that the hospital were trying to like treat her injuries, not wasting time trying to phone me.
Oh, sorry. This is an American story. I forgot, they'd be phoning you once they'd drained her credit cards to start the blood transfusion, and that's why it's so urgent they get through to some other source of profit. Try having a healthcare system!
Yes, I too remember getting that 3am phone call from my father, immediately after he'd closed his father's eyes. Didn't to anything for dead Grandfather, but made Dad feel slightly better.
What if he hates music (as I do)?
Also, every one of them will at some point justify their inaction by saying "I was sure someone would have been calling the emergency services."
The only way that anyone can be sure someone is calling the emergency services is if they are the person calling the emergency services.
Your ridiculous hyperbole is so insane that you've moved me from sitting on the fence to being convinced that the man with the jammer is in the right.
But you're an American. you can afford body armour, and isn't it compulsory now to carry machine guns at all times? Because terrororism.
Shockingly, there is also the possibility of actually doing something about it yourself. Sudden life-threatening illness falls into one of a small number of categories - inability to breathe (in which case, you know the choking drill from your school days and from your safety training for work), loss of circulation (again, you know the drill. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-stayin'-alive!"), or stroke (not a lot you can do about that one).
Unless, of course, you skipped the first aid classes at school, and your work is too cheap to train the requisite number of first aiders. Or you're afraid to take on the responsibility.
That's not an emergency. If the call does not go through, who dies, and how is the death related to the inability to connect the call? Even if the call did connect, how is being aware of the situation going to change matters? Will the person who receives the information pull out a gun hold it to the train driver's head and force him to drive faster? Or make an emergency stop, jump off the train, and then get stuck in a traffic jam on their way to home (spouse's work place, shopping mall, whatever)?
Try making an effective argument.
People did actually survive things like a spouse dieing before there were cell phones.
Most people (including the civil engineer in this thread) don't appreciate how complex soils are, but forming a soil from the regolith ("broken rocks") already present on the surface of the Moon and Mars (and the Atacama, and Antarctica, and fresh volcanoes) isn't that hard. Yes, you'll need your "starter innoculants" of fungi, humus, organic matter etc, amounting to something approaching 10% of your soil mass. But once you've got your first batch of soil made, you can use that to innoculate the next batch. The difficult thing is going to be keeping the soil in good condition, as it will evolve with time and use. That is sometimes called "farming".
Do you know of a source of non-volcanic pumice?
If oxidation was the concern (which is what the original claim implied), there was never any need to keep them in vacuum. Dry nitrogen or argon would have done the job perfectly well and been a lot less hazardous than rigid vacuum vessels on the returning (atmosphere-filled) spacecraft.
Probably your first crop would end up being a sacrificial crop as you generate soil and try to clear it of the more undesirable, mobile toxins.
"concerns" doesn't mean that the toxins were taken up, just that there were "concerns". That's a bit odd, because such analyses are pretty trivial, and absolutely routine. Odd that.
My guess would be that they didn't analyse the "soils" either, and just took the composition, including the toxin content from the wrapper. [Googles] And here's the MSDS : http://www.orbitec.com/store/J... ; I don't see any grounds for concern there. Another source http://www.orbitec.com/store/J... also has no grounds for concern. A study on mouse response to the dusts : http://sci-hub.io/http://www.t... - no concerns. Ah, some composition for the lunar stimulant from http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/... - and that quantifies the arsenic at 19+/-9 ppm, about twice what is typical for soils. Which would b a problem if this were a level in drinking water, but it's not. How much of that mobilises, and how much concentrates into the plants simply needs analysis.
Even so, those levels are probably manageable. You might need to make sure the soil is well oxygenated (not difficult, particularly with the perchlorate in the soils) and at a near neutral pH (again, you need that anyway for your plants to grow). You might need to grow some crops of "scavanger" plants with newly made batches of soil, then discard them along with the mobilised toxins. Or it might simply not be a high enough level to worry about.
Looking from the other end of the telescope, Cornwall is well known for arsenic minerals (well, I'm a geologist ; "well known" amongst geologists), and there's a lot of agriculture there. How much arsenic do they have to deal with?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24213800 " garden soils in the historical mining area of Hayle-Camborne-Godolphin, Cornwall, England are large and range widely (144-892 μg/g [=ppm]). [...] Examination of 6 salad and vegetable crops grown in 32 gardens has shown arsenic concentrations in the edible tissues to be only slightly elevated. [...] Arsenic in all the vegetables sampled was below the statutory limit in the U.K. of 1 mg/kg [1ppm] fresh weight."
On the basis of that, I doubt there would be a real problem. It'd be worth including a portable XRF in the load out, but that's probably in the mining and surveying gear anyway.
Not impossible - as you say, people do make mistakes. But the likelihood of achieving significant gains that way is negligible.
In a real game (clearly, you don't play) which people are playing to completion (say, because you've both got 20 minutes on the clock, and the lunch break is coming up before the next round of the McMahon), you'll typically trip through the yose cooperatively, with the only really interesting points being deciding when one player will surrender sente to the other, and when it comes back. And by that point, you both know what - to within a couple of points, the outcome is. If the score is closer than that, then you carry on fighting to the end. But if you're 20 points down, and your final attempt to kill an enemy group fails ... you know you've lost. you might make it a 15 point loss, not a 20 point loss, but typically that has no effect on the outcome of the tournament.
FYI, a point on a goban has three possible states : black, white and unoccupied. Depending on your ruleset, you may need to add a 4th state, for "currently unoccupied but has been occupied".
Went shopping today. Amongst other things, I brought an oxtail, precisely to make a stew with.
True, but not particularly helpful.
And a necessary prerequisite before pruning the game tree is an efficient algorithm for comparing the likely score for one board position compared to another well before you get to the end of the game. While the AlphaGo team have made progress in this aspect - as well as in other aspects of the game, this remains one of the more difficult aspects of computer Go.
Errrrr.. I read that.OK, 3rd reading ....
i8f they open source the code
Null
d if they contribute it willingly to other projects with licenses that are incompatible with stating that you need a license to use the code, then they have triggered estoppal.
Sorry, did you just say that I have NO CHOICE but to
Slug more $So,
From your description, your work in $JURISDICTION$?
But , does this ruling apply to $OTHER_JURISDICTION$?
I don;t live in America, and have no desire to visit America, or to conduct business with anyone whose contract law is based in America.
Do I need to concern myself with someone called "FTC"?
Mathematics (as opposed to implementations of the maths) are published ideas (how else can the validity be assessed?), and computing is maths (see Turing, about 1935) so, [shrug]. For any patented implementation, there is an unpatentable, equally true implementation [I think that's the essence of Turing's 1937-ish "stopping problem" proof, but I welcome correction.] It might be less efficient, but that's not normally a BFD. (Is BFD an unrecognisable acronym for the linguistically challenged? It means "Big Fucking Deal," and is an expression of derisory contempt.)
Did someone patent 3x5in cards for exam revision? BFD, I'll use 8x5cm cards. If MS have a patent on an implementation of $IDEA$, then whoopie-doo. If it is likely (judgement) to be quicker (judgement) and / or (judgement) easier (judgement) to re-implement it from scratch, then fight the case. Otherwise, buy the license (for which I assume M$ have adequately demonstrated ownership). There are a lot of judgement calls there. It's not a clear result.
I forgot to include the costs of fighting the case. That substantially shifts the argument towards "settle". Even if, ultimately, you think you could win. Theories don't run on 3- or 5- year budgets. Unlike bean-counters.
One of these days, I'll persuade a SlachCoder to implement "this member spent x minutes composing this response" function.
Actually, as a way of encouraging "considered response" ... [American Dad Roger]you don't want to know how many time I had to correct that [/American Dad Roger]. Are the New Owners watching?
Sorry, but I was using a touch screen on a Xenix (Xenix!! Wiki link for those who don't need that stupid hair-browning shit the TV advertises incessantly) in 1988 (-89? Ohh, my grey hairs.) ... but that's when MS made a hardware mouse ... and touch-screen drivers were not in Win3.11, despite hardware being available and functioning. I saw that, and brought Win3.11 after considering buying Xenix, and a SVR5-alike from some legitimate Unix-a-like vendor called SCO (yes, them!). And as is almost traditional for me, once I'd jumped in one direction at a technological crux, the world went a different way, and some mad Finn hacked his 386.
Trust me on this - if I jump one way on a technology at the cutting edge ... jump another way. It'll improve your odds.
(Bill Gates and Richard Stallman are each other's best sales men/ women/ people.
I deliberately leave out the option of "sales robots" as one would hope that robots would be more competent.)