Why not just record the odometer reading during the annual inspection, compare it to last year's reading, and charge accordingly? No violations of privacy and it's a HELL of a lot cheaper than installing GPS in hundreds of thousands of automobiles or retrofitting yet another odometer.
You know, now that I think of it, it does sound familiar. Whenever people first start playing SimCity, they build up a small city and start unleashing disasters on it just to see what they do and to have a little fun. Then they get bored and just kinda leave it running for a while, intervening now and then, until they eventually just leave it the hell alone (or close the program). Seeing as how God was supposedly vengeful in the Old Testament, and hasn't rained down sulfur much lately, I'd say it's possible we all exist in a very advanced version of SimCity.
A few of my favorite bugs...
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 1
At least in the 1.4 beta, if you clicked on the "user has 1 new message" popup in the bottom right of the screen, the mail window would come up with no way to be maximized or minimized (the buttons weren't there). Anybody know if that's fixed?
The bug that annoys me the most, that's been there since at least 1.2 and still hasn't been fixed (it's fine in Phoenix) is that clicking on something to download it takes a second or two to open up the Save As dialog, and then easily four or five seconds to pop up the file transfer dialog, and then when it's done, takes another few seconds to return control to me. There's no reason why downloading files should take so long and virtually lock up the system. Anybody else experiencing this problem? (It's almost enough to make me relearn C++ and try to understand the mozilla codebase and hunt it down myself!)
Re:First movers advantage and contentions?
on
Contactless Credit Cards
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wow. Imagine starting your car just by sitting down...
You already can. Mercedes Benz, Porsche, and even certain Volkswagen models (just to name a few, I'm sure there's others) have this feature. You leave the keys in your pocket. To unlock the car, touch the door handle. To start the car, touch a button on the dashboard. To lock the car back up, just touch the outside door handle on your way out. The keys stay in your pocket the whole time. It works by actively seeking out your remote commander ("the clicker"), and if it finds it, it lets you in and lets you start it up. If it doesn't find it, or if it just plain fails to work, you can always take the remote out of your pocket and click. Or even... dare I say it, use the physical key itself. Anyway, it's pretty nifty stuff.
Want to see a REAL-LIFE example of that? Universal Display is doing some amazing things with OLEDs... the page I'm linking to has a flexible video screen. Sure, it's green only (right now), but it's amazing. And they also have displays that are top-only, bottom-only, transparent, ones that show different things on the back and front... their stuff shows great promise. Flexible OLED
I agree. I don't know if it's Pudge getting in a kneejerk reaction or if he simply didn't read the article. There's an audio file on there with an example of the 'pop' that you can download and listen to. If he doesn't like the pop, he doesn't have to order. If it bothers him a little but he decides it's worth the risk, he can order it. If it doesn't bother him at all, why is he even asking the question? It's called "making a decision."
For starters,/usr stands for Unix System Resources, not user. Plus, wouldn't having a/user confuse users looking for their stuff when it's actually in/home? Why not just change/usr to/sys or/apps or something?
And when the closeup happens and you see the stitches where they put the implants in as being three feet long, you suddenly realize what an awful idea it is. It might be cool for gigantic orgy movies or something, or a cooler version of the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene, but it just wouldn't work with current porn.
So they need to reduce the number of applications filed each year? Easy. Reduce the incentive to patent. If they reduced the number of years that a patent could be held to 15 instead of 20, fewer patents would be filed, right? If not, it would at least prove that reducing the duration of exclusive rights to intellectual property does not reduce the incentive to create, and could potentially be used in the battle against copyrights (to prove that longer copyrights are unnecessary).
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
I realize this isn't from you, it's from the article, but the rest of slashdot needs to realize this.
Suppose for a moment that you could replace the sun with a black hole of identical mass. Guess what would happen? Nope, we wouldn't get sucked in. It'd get dark, we'd probably be bathed in some pretty nasty radiation, but we'd still have exactly the same orbit.
Now suppose for a moment that we can warp the laws of physics enough to create an extremely small black hole, on the order of a few grams maybe (more like nano or picograms or smaller if it's in a particle accelerator). It would be a nasty little thing that wouldn't exist very long because there's no way to pump enough energy or matter into it fast enough to sustain it.
Basically, it only has "such immense gravitational pull" within its event horizon, and you need at least a couple solar masses to make a black hole. Last time I checked we didn't have that kind of mass just laying around. As for the strangelet, perhaps I don't have the understanding necessary to see how it could "infect" surrounding matter and compress the whole planet into something smaller than a football stadium. I mean it's not like it's SARS or anything. It's like he's saying "let's take the craziest, kookiest possibilities quantum physics has come up with, and assume they all happen in the worst possible way, etc."
Sixty years ago they were afraid that testing an atomic bomb might rip the entire planet apart, but went ahead with it anyway. They were some pretty smart people. Let's follow their lead.
Actually, our galaxy is a tens of thousands of light years across, and the moon is a little over 1 light-second away. Which makes it even more embarrassing.
It's much easier for our government to protect our freedoms if you're willing to give up all but a few, so that they need only concentrate on protecting those few.
I'm giving up mod points in here for this. They're probably naming it (oddly enough) after Prescott, Wisconsin. That's where the St. Croix River meets the Mississippi River, on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota and is home to a National Scenic Waterway. Intel likes to name future processors after rivers and national parks.
Past examples: Tualatin River Basin, Katmai National Park & Preserve, Deschutes River, Coppermine River, Lake Tahoe, Klamath River, Covington River, Mendocino National Forest, Willamette River, Flagstaff River, Merced River. I'm sure there's others too.
Our enemies are no longer rifle-wielding uniformed soldiers marching in columns towards our borders. Today they are ordinary-looking people getting into the country the easiest way they can. So instead of stationing our National Guardsmen in Germany, perhaps we should be deploying them where we are vulnerable: our borders.
You're right, there are ordinary-looking people trying to invade us and kill us. They're called terrorists, they're a major problem to us all, and they're damned hard to spot. But we don't have any National Guardsmen in Germany. The National Guard is our reserve force. Our presence in Germany is comprised of active duty personnel. Our borders are no longer strictly geographic either. We have endless miles of coastline, land borders, and airports. Trying to keep the terrorists out while letting the decent human beings in is like trying to tell the Viet Cong from the helpful Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. And no, we can't become isolationist.
So far, our taxpayer-funded schools have failed miserably, and throwing more money at them has done absolutely nothing to fix them. Time to let (regulated) private schools create a competetive environment in our education system.
Taking money away from underfunded public schools is bad. The reason throwing more money at them has done nothing is because it's just being thrown at them. Many school superintendents make well over $100,000/year. In my county, the superintendent gets a huge raise each year, whereas the teachers get next to nothing. Much of the money is also tied up in building new schools to deal with the population surge, and in buying computers and other equipment for schools to use. This costs a lot of money. Teachers often have their hands tied and can't control their classes, and administrators aren't much more capable of controlling their students either because of the sue-happy society we're in. Private schools wouldn't be able to handle many of these issues much better, and those that can will charge more for it, putting it out of reach for many underprivelaged children. Early regulation with regards to pricing will just take away the incentive to create a good school or will encourage cost cutting to the point where education is harmed. Simply put, there is no easy fix to the current educational system. If there was, it would have been implemented by now.
Although not nearly as important, I didn't quite mean that the government should actually provide transportation in the forms of busses and trains and such, but more in the form of roads and upkeep of roads. You do not want roads falling into the hands of the private sector. There's one road in my area that's private sector, and it costs $2 each way (about a 12 mile stretch).
I agree with you on Social Security, but how do you propose getting rid of it without pissing off the millions of Americans who have paid it their entire lives, and suddenly wouldn't get what they deserve?
You get additional contracts because who else are you going to hire? The number of large, experienced aerospace companies is tiny and for a while was shrinking every year with all the mergers. Imagine you bought a car from Ford, and you were unhappy with it. Now imagine your only other choices were GM/Chevy (the same company) or Chrysler/Dodge, and you had problems with both of those companies in the past. Who are you going to buy your next car from? You surely won't buy it from some shady guy who made it in his garage down the street. This is why the big aerospace companies keep getting contracts. On the whole, they've done a pretty good job with their contracts (or else they wouldn't be getting them), and if they haven't, they offer such a compelling product that the government is willing to take that risk.
Re:Role of Federal Gov't. - Going a bit OT here
on
Jupiter's Great Dark Spot
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Spending money on the military is fine, up to a point. When you're spending money on R&D and creating jobs, that's just fine. When you're about to spend half a billion dollars on cruise missiles alone that you'll never get back, that's not as good. Sure, people had to be employed to make those bombs, but what happens when the war is over and they aren't needed anymore? And when all the soldiers come back and look for jobs in the private sector, having fulfilled their military duties? Another flood of unemployment, bad for the economy.
The government has more jobs than just protecting us. Even so, "protection" is a very vague concept that entails more than just having a strong military. We the people are one in the same as the country, and so to protect us, the country must be protected as well. We don't need to just be protected from invading armies. We need to be protected from falling behind in the world as well, and that means more than just the military. In order to ensure a future for our nation (which is really why you're protecting it in the first place), you must have a basic framework within which people can live. Our people need to be educated in order to remain competitive in this global economy, therefore the government's job is also to provide basic education to its citizens. We need businesses to make and sell products that let us live our daily lives, and we need to be protected in case they grow too big. Therefore the government's job is also to create an economic infrastructure (the treasury and the mint), transportation (so that people have the freedom to travel and goods can get to where they need to be), telecommunications (or at least regulation thereof, so that people have the freedom to communicate with other people, and businesses can get their jobs done), welfare (because a temporarily unemployed person with no income cannot afford to pay bills, and therefore puts no money back into the economy, which does nothing for our nation. after a certain point, they become a drain on the economy, but welfare can be good when done properly), and taxation (because providing all of these services costs money).
Sun has a lot to offer, but I think its time for them to either get their Sparc archetecture up to speed, or ditch it and just become and integrator with comodity parts.
Solaris offers *complete* binary compatibility on *every* sparc-based Sun box ever made. Show me something made today on a P4 with all the latest bells and whistles running on a bare-bones 286 (no matter how slowly), and I'll agree with you on whether they need to get their architecture "up to speed."
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to Transparent Aluminum, this could very well be possible. Paranoiacs rejoice!
Why not just record the odometer reading during the annual inspection, compare it to last year's reading, and charge accordingly? No violations of privacy and it's a HELL of a lot cheaper than installing GPS in hundreds of thousands of automobiles or retrofitting yet another odometer.
VB too, huh? I guess the fact that you're easy still doesn't make you all that appealing to potential, uh, users. ;)
;)
Note to mods: it's a joke, laugh. And then mod it up.
You know, now that I think of it, it does sound familiar. Whenever people first start playing SimCity, they build up a small city and start unleashing disasters on it just to see what they do and to have a little fun. Then they get bored and just kinda leave it running for a while, intervening now and then, until they eventually just leave it the hell alone (or close the program). Seeing as how God was supposedly vengeful in the Old Testament, and hasn't rained down sulfur much lately, I'd say it's possible we all exist in a very advanced version of SimCity.
At least in the 1.4 beta, if you clicked on the "user has 1 new message" popup in the bottom right of the screen, the mail window would come up with no way to be maximized or minimized (the buttons weren't there). Anybody know if that's fixed?
The bug that annoys me the most, that's been there since at least 1.2 and still hasn't been fixed (it's fine in Phoenix) is that clicking on something to download it takes a second or two to open up the Save As dialog, and then easily four or five seconds to pop up the file transfer dialog, and then when it's done, takes another few seconds to return control to me. There's no reason why downloading files should take so long and virtually lock up the system. Anybody else experiencing this problem? (It's almost enough to make me relearn C++ and try to understand the mozilla codebase and hunt it down myself!)
Wow. Imagine starting your car just by sitting down...
You already can. Mercedes Benz, Porsche, and even certain Volkswagen models (just to name a few, I'm sure there's others) have this feature. You leave the keys in your pocket. To unlock the car, touch the door handle. To start the car, touch a button on the dashboard. To lock the car back up, just touch the outside door handle on your way out. The keys stay in your pocket the whole time. It works by actively seeking out your remote commander ("the clicker"), and if it finds it, it lets you in and lets you start it up. If it doesn't find it, or if it just plain fails to work, you can always take the remote out of your pocket and click. Or even... dare I say it, use the physical key itself. Anyway, it's pretty nifty stuff.
Want to see a REAL-LIFE example of that? Universal Display is doing some amazing things with OLEDs... the page I'm linking to has a flexible video screen. Sure, it's green only (right now), but it's amazing. And they also have displays that are top-only, bottom-only, transparent, ones that show different things on the back and front... their stuff shows great promise. Flexible OLED
I agree. I don't know if it's Pudge getting in a kneejerk reaction or if he simply didn't read the article. There's an audio file on there with an example of the 'pop' that you can download and listen to. If he doesn't like the pop, he doesn't have to order. If it bothers him a little but he decides it's worth the risk, he can order it. If it doesn't bother him at all, why is he even asking the question? It's called "making a decision."
For starters, /usr stands for Unix System Resources, not user. Plus, wouldn't having a /user confuse users looking for their stuff when it's actually in /home? Why not just change /usr to /sys or /apps or something?
And when the closeup happens and you see the stitches where they put the implants in as being three feet long, you suddenly realize what an awful idea it is. It might be cool for gigantic orgy movies or something, or a cooler version of the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene, but it just wouldn't work with current porn.
So they need to reduce the number of applications filed each year? Easy. Reduce the incentive to patent. If they reduced the number of years that a patent could be held to 15 instead of 20, fewer patents would be filed, right? If not, it would at least prove that reducing the duration of exclusive rights to intellectual property does not reduce the incentive to create, and could potentially be used in the battle against copyrights (to prove that longer copyrights are unnecessary).
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
I realize this isn't from you, it's from the article, but the rest of slashdot needs to realize this.
Suppose for a moment that you could replace the sun with a black hole of identical mass. Guess what would happen? Nope, we wouldn't get sucked in. It'd get dark, we'd probably be bathed in some pretty nasty radiation, but we'd still have exactly the same orbit.
Now suppose for a moment that we can warp the laws of physics enough to create an extremely small black hole, on the order of a few grams maybe (more like nano or picograms or smaller if it's in a particle accelerator). It would be a nasty little thing that wouldn't exist very long because there's no way to pump enough energy or matter into it fast enough to sustain it.
Basically, it only has "such immense gravitational pull" within its event horizon, and you need at least a couple solar masses to make a black hole. Last time I checked we didn't have that kind of mass just laying around. As for the strangelet, perhaps I don't have the understanding necessary to see how it could "infect" surrounding matter and compress the whole planet into something smaller than a football stadium. I mean it's not like it's SARS or anything. It's like he's saying "let's take the craziest, kookiest possibilities quantum physics has come up with, and assume they all happen in the worst possible way, etc."
Sixty years ago they were afraid that testing an atomic bomb might rip the entire planet apart, but went ahead with it anyway. They were some pretty smart people. Let's follow their lead.
Actually, our galaxy is a tens of thousands of light years across, and the moon is a little over 1 light-second away. Which makes it even more embarrassing.
Should have used preview. there was supposed to be a at the end of that.
It's much easier for our government to protect our freedoms if you're willing to give up all but a few, so that they need only concentrate on protecting those few.
Past examples: Tualatin River Basin, Katmai National Park & Preserve, Deschutes River, Coppermine River, Lake Tahoe, Klamath River, Covington River, Mendocino National Forest, Willamette River, Flagstaff River, Merced River. I'm sure there's others too.
You stole this comment from topologist (644470). Here's the link to his post in the original story: Hydrogen bonds..
He said x-x+7 is prime. Not x+x+7. X-X+7 always equals 7, and is therefore always prime.
It's "'agonized over' three", not "agonized 'over three'".
You're right, there are ordinary-looking people trying to invade us and kill us. They're called terrorists, they're a major problem to us all, and they're damned hard to spot. But we don't have any National Guardsmen in Germany. The National Guard is our reserve force. Our presence in Germany is comprised of active duty personnel. Our borders are no longer strictly geographic either. We have endless miles of coastline, land borders, and airports. Trying to keep the terrorists out while letting the decent human beings in is like trying to tell the Viet Cong from the helpful Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. And no, we can't become isolationist.
So far, our taxpayer-funded schools have failed miserably, and throwing more money at them has done absolutely nothing to fix them. Time to let (regulated) private schools create a competetive environment in our education system.
Taking money away from underfunded public schools is bad. The reason throwing more money at them has done nothing is because it's just being thrown at them. Many school superintendents make well over $100,000/year. In my county, the superintendent gets a huge raise each year, whereas the teachers get next to nothing. Much of the money is also tied up in building new schools to deal with the population surge, and in buying computers and other equipment for schools to use. This costs a lot of money. Teachers often have their hands tied and can't control their classes, and administrators aren't much more capable of controlling their students either because of the sue-happy society we're in. Private schools wouldn't be able to handle many of these issues much better, and those that can will charge more for it, putting it out of reach for many underprivelaged children. Early regulation with regards to pricing will just take away the incentive to create a good school or will encourage cost cutting to the point where education is harmed. Simply put, there is no easy fix to the current educational system. If there was, it would have been implemented by now.
Although not nearly as important, I didn't quite mean that the government should actually provide transportation in the forms of busses and trains and such, but more in the form of roads and upkeep of roads. You do not want roads falling into the hands of the private sector. There's one road in my area that's private sector, and it costs $2 each way (about a 12 mile stretch).
I agree with you on Social Security, but how do you propose getting rid of it without pissing off the millions of Americans who have paid it their entire lives, and suddenly wouldn't get what they deserve?
You get additional contracts because who else are you going to hire? The number of large, experienced aerospace companies is tiny and for a while was shrinking every year with all the mergers. Imagine you bought a car from Ford, and you were unhappy with it. Now imagine your only other choices were GM/Chevy (the same company) or Chrysler/Dodge, and you had problems with both of those companies in the past. Who are you going to buy your next car from? You surely won't buy it from some shady guy who made it in his garage down the street. This is why the big aerospace companies keep getting contracts. On the whole, they've done a pretty good job with their contracts (or else they wouldn't be getting them), and if they haven't, they offer such a compelling product that the government is willing to take that risk.
The government has more jobs than just protecting us. Even so, "protection" is a very vague concept that entails more than just having a strong military. We the people are one in the same as the country, and so to protect us, the country must be protected as well. We don't need to just be protected from invading armies. We need to be protected from falling behind in the world as well, and that means more than just the military. In order to ensure a future for our nation (which is really why you're protecting it in the first place), you must have a basic framework within which people can live. Our people need to be educated in order to remain competitive in this global economy, therefore the government's job is also to provide basic education to its citizens. We need businesses to make and sell products that let us live our daily lives, and we need to be protected in case they grow too big. Therefore the government's job is also to create an economic infrastructure (the treasury and the mint), transportation (so that people have the freedom to travel and goods can get to where they need to be), telecommunications (or at least regulation thereof, so that people have the freedom to communicate with other people, and businesses can get their jobs done), welfare (because a temporarily unemployed person with no income cannot afford to pay bills, and therefore puts no money back into the economy, which does nothing for our nation. after a certain point, they become a drain on the economy, but welfare can be good when done properly), and taxation (because providing all of these services costs money).
Something tells me you'll stick with cable until you figure out how to move to Mason County.
48 moons? I never would have pictured Jupiter being catholic. ;)
Solaris offers *complete* binary compatibility on *every* sparc-based Sun box ever made. Show me something made today on a P4 with all the latest bells and whistles running on a bare-bones 286 (no matter how slowly), and I'll agree with you on whether they need to get their architecture "up to speed."