With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing.
A computer as slow as yours would make me less productive. Every time I have to stare at a screen waiting for the javascript processor in my web browser to FINALLY produce a renderable web page, my concentration is interrupted and my train-of-though is derailed.
Maximum productivity can only be achieved if computers respond to your input at the speed of thought. Slow computers just don't do that with AJAX apps.
When management wants a project that IT knows is bound to fail, our company will sometimes hire an outside consultant to run the project. That way, half way through the project, as we miss milestones, we can fire the consultant and blame it all on him. He gets paid, and we get out of the blame. Win-win.
There are three pre-pay phones available at any Wal-Mart store in the country: TrakFone, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile To Go.
Having looked at all three options for my parents, I went with Virgin Mobile. It is superior to the other two in almost every way. The phones are cheaper (some models free to new customers!), the plans are cheaper, and every conceivable payment option is available.
Getting started using them requires going to a website and typing a bunch of numbers and stuff, but if you do that for them, they should have no problems with the day to day use of the phone.
either will probably result in a bullet ridden body from an angry crew.
It doesn't take a crew to shoot at someone who is attacking your optics. The crew back home in Kentucky could use the tank's guns to shoot at a spray-paint-wielding AT attacker just as a tank crew on the ground could...
Robots don't have spirituality, morality, etc. Humans do. Human military personnel can look at illegal orders, recognize them, and either refuse to act or directly contravene them. Robots rely on their programming, which I seriously doubt would go anywhere near that far in terms of safeguarding standards of civilization and military conduct.
1) They are remote controlled. Humans still make the decisions. 2) Despite what you want to believe, everything from the Milgram experiment to the Holocaust demonstrates that humans can easily be programmed to kill with complete disregard for "morality," just like robots. All it takes is a little nationalism, religion, racism, or just plain sternly-stated orders, and men will commit atrocities with the efficiency of any killbot.
How hard can it be to build miniature (footprint of wheelchair), remote-controlled tanks with a bunch of cameras all around it, lethal and nonlethal armaments, and a big booming microphone so it can bark orders?
We have been building wheeled robots for longer than we have been building flying robots. Put some on the ground and start saving lives!
isn[']t fear supposed to be an in-built mechanism to prevent us from putting ourselves in dangerous situations[?]
Emotion is the basis of animal decisions. If you decide to avoid something out of fear, you are thinking like an animal.
Reason is the basis of intelligent decisions. If you decide to avoid something because the consequences of a bad outcome * the probability of the bad outcome is greater than the consequences of a good outcome * the probability of a good outcome (aka the benefits outweigh the risks), then you are thinking intelligently.
For the majority of our race, it seems, the animal, emotional fear is so strong that it prevents people from using reason as the basis of their decisions. Taking emotion out of the equation would, therefore, make these people smarter.
Of course, as long as most people make decisions based on emotion, those that base their decisions on reason will have a strong advantage (in, for example, capital markets).
/me checks his money market account and prepares to buy leveraged ETFs during the next panic market selloff
Phishers can still MITM two-factor authentication. OTP methods, like SecurID, and smartcard authentication (hardware-based client X.509 certs), can be forwarded on to a bank if you get the user to go to a bogus site.
The difference is that Slashdot does not pretend to be "fair and balanced." Slashdot is transparent in its bias. It's only that Republican news station that pretends to be fair and balanced while remaining completely biased.:-)
I can imagine how a wounded eardrum would hurt if it was shaken too much (loud noise). I can't imagine a sort of damage which would make background noise indistinguishable from loud noise. The ear is just a sensor which sends the sum of all noise to the brain for processing.
A company is doing what amounts to stock spam, but to drive the price down and not up.
The CEO of Whole Foods is a message board troll. I'm interested to see how many times he posted "fr1st p0s7".
I've always wondered what sort of loser has nothing better to do with his time that troll the internet. Now I know--it's CEOs. Perhaps this is what the ones who don't play golf do while the rest of the company is working:-)
That sounds more like brain damage (differentiating signal from noise) than ear damage (she can hear both signal and noise or she wouldn't be bothered!).
The "new" thin client should be thought of more in terms of AJAX apps than raw X11R6. We don't need to draw every pixel across the network, but we can send instructions for the "thin" client to draw UI controls with sufficient speed and responsiveness.
I agree that there are a few fundamental philosophical questions which can not yet be answered empirically. Defining the terms "human" and "ethical" are the most prominent among those questions.
[If I may interject: My opinion is that humanity is defined intelligence, and ethical behavior is that which has a net benefit for society.]
You are also right that the scientifically-minded tend to fall on the opposite side of the philosophical debate from the religious with respect to those two questions. Still, I consider those topics to be minor in comparison to the more important job of government: setting economic, environmental, defense, and health policy.
I suppose the best fit for a scientifically-minded religious person (of which there are many!) would be a group that advocates the using religious definitions of "human" and "ethical", while supporting scientific foundations for economic, environmental, defense, and health decisions. I'm not aware of such a group, so I suppose such people are forced to choose between supporting the all-religious perspective, or the all-scientific perspective.
Perhaps those who are both religious and empirical will always have to choose the best fit group, rather than the perfect fit group. Trying to blend the two philosophies seems to require a cognitive dissonance which would precipitate perpetual political infighting in such an organization.
Hopefully, I'm wrong, and some Alliance of Christian Empiricists will someday gain power and unseat the theocratic fascists who control the Republican party, ushering in an era of sound economic policy and coathanger abortions. Today, though, everyone must decide whether they side with scientific or with theological reasoning for the majority of political decisions.
Now that everyone has a digital camera? I can tell you that backups are important to EVERYONE, though some don't realize it until the inevitable HD crash.
I don't think these sorts of services are really well-fit for large corps with their own IT departments. But home and small business users don't have IT departments, nullifying your complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing.
A computer as slow as yours would make me less productive. Every time I have to stare at a screen waiting for the javascript processor in my web browser to FINALLY produce a renderable web page, my concentration is interrupted and my train-of-though is derailed.
Maximum productivity can only be achieved if computers respond to your input at the speed of thought. Slow computers just don't do that with AJAX apps.
Actually, a random number generator isn't really random unless it is possible for it to generate the number 42 a thousand times in a row...
When management wants a project that IT knows is bound to fail, our company will sometimes hire an outside consultant to run the project. That way, half way through the project, as we miss milestones, we can fire the consultant and blame it all on him. He gets paid, and we get out of the blame. Win-win.
There are three pre-pay phones available at any Wal-Mart store in the country: TrakFone, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile To Go.
Having looked at all three options for my parents, I went with Virgin Mobile. It is superior to the other two in almost every way. The phones are cheaper (some models free to new customers!), the plans are cheaper, and every conceivable payment option is available.
Getting started using them requires going to a website and typing a bunch of numbers and stuff, but if you do that for them, they should have no problems with the day to day use of the phone.
I doubt my Grandma would use such a cell phone unless it is rotary dial.
Guilt after the fact does not un-commit atrocities. Sorry, that's just not applicable.
If disabling a tank is as easy as you suggest, why isn't spraypaint used to blind regular tanks?
1) They are remote controlled. Humans still make the decisions.
2) Despite what you want to believe, everything from the Milgram experiment to the Holocaust demonstrates that humans can easily be programmed to kill with complete disregard for "morality," just like robots. All it takes is a little nationalism, religion, racism, or just plain sternly-stated orders, and men will commit atrocities with the efficiency of any killbot.
How hard can it be to build miniature (footprint of wheelchair), remote-controlled tanks with a bunch of cameras all around it, lethal and nonlethal armaments, and a big booming microphone so it can bark orders?
We have been building wheeled robots for longer than we have been building flying robots. Put some on the ground and start saving lives!
Obviously, you aren't running a 64-bit-native version of Linux. This is either because:
Emotion is the basis of animal decisions. If you decide to avoid something out of fear, you are thinking like an animal.
Reason is the basis of intelligent decisions. If you decide to avoid something because the consequences of a bad outcome * the probability of the bad outcome is greater than the consequences of a good outcome * the probability of a good outcome (aka the benefits outweigh the risks), then you are thinking intelligently.
For the majority of our race, it seems, the animal, emotional fear is so strong that it prevents people from using reason as the basis of their decisions. Taking emotion out of the equation would, therefore, make these people smarter.
Of course, as long as most people make decisions based on emotion, those that base their decisions on reason will have a strong advantage (in, for example, capital markets).
Phishers can still MITM two-factor authentication. OTP methods, like SecurID, and smartcard authentication (hardware-based client X.509 certs), can be forwarded on to a bank if you get the user to go to a bogus site.
The difference is that Slashdot does not pretend to be "fair and balanced." Slashdot is transparent in its bias. It's only that Republican news station that pretends to be fair and balanced while remaining completely biased. :-)
I can imagine how a wounded eardrum would hurt if it was shaken too much (loud noise). I can't imagine a sort of damage which would make background noise indistinguishable from loud noise. The ear is just a sensor which sends the sum of all noise to the brain for processing.
I may be totally wrong, though.
I've always wondered what sort of loser has nothing better to do with his time that troll the internet. Now I know--it's CEOs. Perhaps this is what the ones who don't play golf do while the rest of the company is working
That sounds more like brain damage (differentiating signal from noise) than ear damage (she can hear both signal and noise or she wouldn't be bothered!).
Don't leave audio out of the mix. A little bit of TOSLINK should be stirred in to that fiber optic signal, also.
You might change your mind if some janitor walks off with 50 laptops left on desks overnight.
The "new" thin client should be thought of more in terms of AJAX apps than raw X11R6. We don't need to draw every pixel across the network, but we can send instructions for the "thin" client to draw UI controls with sufficient speed and responsiveness.
I agree that there are a few fundamental philosophical questions which can not yet be answered empirically. Defining the terms "human" and "ethical" are the most prominent among those questions.
[If I may interject: My opinion is that humanity is defined intelligence, and ethical behavior is that which has a net benefit for society.]
You are also right that the scientifically-minded tend to fall on the opposite side of the philosophical debate from the religious with respect to those two questions. Still, I consider those topics to be minor in comparison to the more important job of government: setting economic, environmental, defense, and health policy.
I suppose the best fit for a scientifically-minded religious person (of which there are many!) would be a group that advocates the using religious definitions of "human" and "ethical", while supporting scientific foundations for economic, environmental, defense, and health decisions. I'm not aware of such a group, so I suppose such people are forced to choose between supporting the all-religious perspective, or the all-scientific perspective.
Perhaps those who are both religious and empirical will always have to choose the best fit group, rather than the perfect fit group. Trying to blend the two philosophies seems to require a cognitive dissonance which would precipitate perpetual political infighting in such an organization.
Hopefully, I'm wrong, and some Alliance of Christian Empiricists will someday gain power and unseat the theocratic fascists who control the Republican party, ushering in an era of sound economic policy and coathanger abortions. Today, though, everyone must decide whether they side with scientific or with theological reasoning for the majority of political decisions.
Now that everyone has a digital camera? I can tell you that backups are important to EVERYONE, though some don't realize it until the inevitable HD crash.
I don't think these sorts of services are really well-fit for large corps with their own IT departments. But home and small business users don't have IT departments, nullifying your complaint.