Although percentages vary across populations, about 7% of males are red-green colorblind. This is almost never address in human machine interaction. In fact, colors that cause problems for red-green perception are used extremely commonly, like the red-yellow-green triad.
Now that pot is becoming legal in the US, maybe the final frontier will be growing pot on the moon.
Think about it. What's needed is a really high (pun intended) profit margin product to drive space exploration. Think how much stoners would pay for pot grown on the moon. Astronomical profit!
Unlike mineral extraction, there is minimal extra-terrestrial processing involved. It's like a sample and return mission, except you don't have to find anything.
Part of the fundamental right wing world view is that they are out to get us.
To put this in the vernacular of George W Bush: "They hate us for our freedom."
If you are trying to achieve political goals via manipulation, fear is the easiest tool to use. Cue references to 1984 and Nazi. In Iran, they chant "Death to America".
Of course, in the case of Republicans, they do have something objective to fear: it's the shrinking percentage of the population with European roots. That's why the Tea Party types say "I want my country back". What they really want is a nation controlled by immigrants from Western Europe (i.e. White People). Immigrants from Africa or Latin America are those people who are lazy and shiftless and just want to live off the hard work of Real Americans.
Of course political reality is not quite this simple. Take Cubans. Ever though they are Latin American, their ant-commie/anti-Castro stance has made them be easily accepted as right wingers. On the other hand, Mexicans (anyone from Mexico or points further south) are, to quote Rep. Steve King from Iowa:
for everyone who is a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there, they weigh 130 pounds and with calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.
So Republicans peddle fear, and it's been a successful message to a great extent. Democrats don't have much in the way of backbone, so they tend to go along.
Is this some evil plan by Ballmer as he is leaving?
Maybe it is an act of aggression against Bill Gates, who has redefined himself as a philanthropist. Ballmer knows that he will never have any of the respect that Gates has achieved since he left Microsoft. He may think that poisoning the non-profit sector will partly blunt Gate's legacy. This would certainly fit with Ballmer's previous demeanor.
Any proprietary software is potentially a trap. You get to use it as long as the owners let you, and they can change their mind at any time.
I know it's fashionable to knock Stallman here on Slashdot (including personal attacks about how he dresses), but he has been consistently right over a long period of time about the pitfalls of closed source.
In this case MS is clearly locking out 3rd party apps, and no one really knows why.
It's not just MS. Google does the same thing. Someone pointed out that the typically lifetime of most free Google apps is 4 years. Even when there the apps are not discontinued, the terms of service are often changed. Look at original Gmail vs. Gmail+. Many people, including myself, would not have become dependent on Gmail if they had known what would happen to it.
So when Stallman is being critical, pay attention. He's likely to be right.
Right. I don't know about Ellison specifically, but the shares are usually granted at a discount, so there is a significant boost in real value. Plus there are tax advantages that he accrues, so he is effectively getting an even larger compensation package.
Plus it's not Ellison's company, it's the shareholders company. If shareholders think he is overpaid that should have some impact. If he disagrees, he can just quit, right? (That's the bullshit line that used to justify treating workers like shit, so it feels really good to use on a prick like Ellison.)
What this really shows is that corporate governance is broken. The board doesn't work for the shareholders, they are at the beck and call of the CEO. He puts them on the board, they make huge amounts for the little work they do, and so they do whatever the CEO wants. They are a rubber stamp. This is a lot closer to feudalism then real capitalism. The workers are serfs, the shareholders are not much better off, and the lords who run the show take everything they can lay their hands on. Welcome to non-capitalist, not a democracy 21st America.
Remember, the original plan was to have every state do their own exchange. It was never intended that the federal exchange would be doing a large percentage of the work. One big exchange is riskier and much more difficult then 50 state sized exchanges.
In effect the deliberately obstructionist Republican governors put the entire project at risk, and now the Republicans are screaming that it doesn't work. They are sick manipulative bastards who will do anything to get their way.
By the way, a friend of mine just signed up through the California exchange, and it was not a big deal. If the people in charge want it to work, they can make it work. If they want it to fail, they can make it fail. The Republicans want government to fail, so it does. By analogy, it's like going to a doctor who thinks medicine is bunk, and he proves it by having his patients die. In both a literal and figurative sense, Republicans are happy to see Americans die.
If this is true, it it might explain the evolution of lawyers. Under this hypothesis, lawyers would have evolved from snakes that preyed on monkeys. As the monkeys got smarter, the snakes evolved into monkey mimics that still had primates as their primary food source. Finally, it all makes sense.
It makes sense once you realize who the real enemy is. It's not the terrorists/Islamists/Chinese/Russians, it's the citizens of the US/UK/NZ/Australia and other countries that are the target of the spying. The general population is the enemy.
In the delusional hyper-paranoid NSA world you gain power and control when you know things that other people don't know. It's all about insiders and outsiders. If the outsiders find out what's going on, they might become less pliable and start wondering about what's going on and ask questions. They might even start objecting to the current setup.
Some of it is about money. The US is spending something over $50 Billion per year. That a long way from chump change, and a lot of companies are getting very very rich from that. I don't think that the direct government employees are the big winners at this, I think the outside contracting companies really rake it in. First you pay your dues working for the Feds, then you make a vastly higher amount doing the same thing in the private sector. That's what Snowden did.
The second thing is fear of failure. Everyone is terrified of taking the blame for the next successful big attack. They want all the data in the vain hope that it means that failure can be avoided forever. It's not possible, but given effectively unlimited resources they can engage in the insane project of trying to spy on every human on earth.
So not only is the goal impossible, it is a huge waste of resources. For the kind of money they are spending they could literally buy off many of the "bad guys" they are fighting. (This assumes that the money was spent wisely, as opposed to the complete cluster fuck of wasted money poured into Afghanistan and Iraq.)
For example, offer the Palestinians and the Israelis billions of dollars each for domestic non-military spending, with the condition that any violence on either side means a complete immediate shutoff. (And no more Israeli building on the west bank.) Assume they are corrupt and can be bought, and it just might work. Even if it doesn't work, at least the money will be poured down some new rat holes for a change.
So where did the internet come from? Was it a untapped natural resource that was just lying around, unused until somebody figured out how to make it work?
In case you forgot, the internet started as ARPANET, which was funded by the federal government. It was a research project, which is the R in ARPA. Research means experimentation, which is what scientists do. That this funding came out of the DOD is irrelevant. Quibbling about it not being "science" is also nonsense. The academic field that includes computer networking is called computer science. I don't think anyone has plans to change the name anytime soon.
You are dumber then a box of rocks. You live in an environment created by a huge effort on the part of countless people, many of whom worked for various governments. Jet engines, nuclear energy, computers, all resulted from government initialed efforts.
You're ignorant and ungrateful. I wish there was some way you could be stripped of all the benefits that have accrued from government research. You'd be sitting miserable in some decrepit hovel, which is all you deserve.
The proposition that the use of twin inverted pulses could enhance radar is tested. This twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) is applied to five targets. A representative target of interest (a dipole with a diode across its feedpoint) is typical of covert circuitry one might wish to detect (e.g. in devices associated with covert communications, espionage or explosives), and then distinguish from other metal (‘garbage’ or ‘clutter’), here represented by an aluminium plate and a rusty bench clamp. In addition, two models of mobile phones are tested to see whether TWIPR can distinguish whether each is off, on or whether it contains a valid SIM card. Given that a small, inexpensive, lightweight device requiring no batteries can produce a signal that is 50dB above clutter in this test, the options are discussed for using such technology for animal tagging or to allow the location and identification of buried personnel who opt to carry them (rescue workers, skiers in avalanche areas, miners, etc.). The results offer the possibility that buried catastrophe victims not carrying such tags might still be located by TWIPR scattering from their mobile phones, even when the phones are turned off or the batteries have no charge remaining.
Consider the hypothesis that the DWave machine is a superposition of classical and quantum computing. By some observations it is classical, by others quantum. As some point a measurement will be preformed on the machine, and it's state will resolve into either a classical physics computing device or a quantum physics computing device.
This situation is completely reasonable give the current state of the art in quantum computing.
Making accusations of "marketing hype" and unethical behavior are irrelevant. Whatever it's doing, it's not digital computing. Even if it turns out to be classical physics, it is still advancing the state of the art in non-digital computing.
No matter how DWave does in the future, quantum computing is still going to happen in the near term. Dwave is not going to change that under any circumstances.
Getting bent out of shape over this is a waste of effort. Even the experts are not in agreement. This is how progress occurs at the cutting edge.
The LSST, which is scheduled to start operation in 2020 will do a complete (Synoptic) sky survey twice each week. It will be used for looking at transient events including supernovas and asteroids. It has features specifically intended for
Near Earth Object Detection
The 100 meter limiting size for significant near-Earth asteroids corresponds to a limiting magnitude of 26. In addition, short exposures are needed since the asteroids trail very quickly at more than 20 second exposures. So large aperture is important. This instrument would be unique. Its utility is diminished if it cannot cover the entire visible sky several times per month as there would be no competing telescopes to cover its holes or even follow its discoveries. At the present time, systematic surveys like Spacewatch have difficulty finding all 21st magnitude near-Earth Asteroids.
With its capability to detect objects as faint as 25th magnitude in 15 seconds, only the LSST will be able to find virtually all significant PHAs 100 meters in size and over 50% of all NEOs 100 meters in size. During its survey of the sky LSST can find 90% of the PHAs over 140 meters in diameter.
A PHA is a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid.
The Chelyabinsk meteor had an 85 meter size, so it would most likely not be found by LSST. There are some other studies to use satellites in the IR band to look for smaller size objects.
When I have mod points and I see a post with lots of fully capitalized sentences, I know to the 99% level that it's from a raving lunatic. Thanks for making the job easier.
At San Onofre spent years with defective equipment and ignoring safety procedures. Both Edison and the NRC fundamentally failed to detect serious problems, even when there was evidence that operations were in bad shape.
San Onofre’s safety problems began drawing attention in 2007. A fire prevention specialist responsible for hourly patrols around the plant had deliberately falsified inspection records for years. In 2008, a safety battery was discovered to have been disconnected for four years.
Concerns began mounting. Whistleblowers alleged they’d been fired for raising safety questions. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission added an extra on-site inspector. The NRC flagged the plant for its problems. San Onofre stayed under the ominous federal warning for four years. It was a serious threat to the plant: Improve or else. Federal regulators have shut down at least one nuclear plant that didn’t heed their order.
The San Onofre mess was brewing for years. It's not like there were no warning signs. Nothing substantial happened.
When Edison replaced the heat exchange system, they self certified that it was a replacement, not a substantial change. It was in fact an upgrade, so they could extract more power. They deliberately lied and no one at the NRC either knew or cared.
Around 50 reactors are not in compliance with fire safety standards that were set in the 1980's as the result of a fire at the Brown's Ferry facility.
The owners of 51 reactors formally notified the NRC of their plans to comply with the NFPA 805 fire protection regulations. In doing so, they implicitly conceded that these reactors failed to comply with the 1980 fire protection regulations. After all, no owner could justify spending the millions of dollars needed to comply with the 2004 regulations if it already satisfied the 1980 regulations.
In the eight years since that time only four reactors have taken the steps to comply. Today, 47 of those 51 reactors still do not comply with either the 1980 or 2004 fire regulations.
Ironically and sadly, the three reactors at Browns Ferry are among those that fail to comply with either the 1980 or the 2004 fire protection regulations. That’s right—more than 37 years after a fire nearly melted down the Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors, these reactors operate in violation of fire protection regulations expressly developed to prevent another Browns Ferry fire.
In the real world, the safety culture of the nuclear industry is pathetic. The lack of major failures is due to luck as much as anything else. As aging plants have their operational lives extended far beyond their original design, it is inevitable that a very serious accident with major radiation release will occur. Everyone involved goes through the motions, but no one is taking real responsibility.
Instead of swimming in his huge money vault like the cartoon character, Bezos builds monuments to himself that are pretend "museums".
Since it is no longer in fashion to pay artists to paint him as a heroic figure on a horse like Napoleon, or sculptors for larger then life marble busts so he can be a pretend emperor, he has a "patent tree". It's a substitute for a huge model of his penis.
So McDuck is funny, and even though he inevitably screws up because of this greed, he always realizes his folly and things turn out well in the end. Bezos wants to own the world, and it would fit in with his ego if the Blue Origin launch vehicle was designed to go to the moon and carve an image of his face that could be seen by everyone on Earth.
Like almost all large US business interests, they are anti-competition. They want their walled garden with guaranteed profits. The only competition they accept is with their equally protected co-monopolists over who gets to squeeze the most money out of powerless consumers who have no meaningful choice.
When actual capitalism with real competitors breaks out, they run screaming to the courts and the law makers to make it go away. This is usually all it takes. If they loose in the courts they just buy some legislation to get what they want.
IT SHALL HENCEFORCE BE ORDERED THAT AMERICANS SHALL NOT UNLOCK THEIR OWN SMARTPHONES.
PENALTY: In some situations, first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both.
Yes, just like murder, bank robbery, smuggling drugs, child molestation, kidnapping, etc. The White House is trying to reverse this, but it's not clear if this is enforced at the current time.
Despite all the heated rhetoric, the US is the home of Not Capitalism. No one seems to notice or care. Shut up an pay whatever your owners demand. Or go to jail.
Slashdot Mirror
There are guidelines for color usage for colorblindness, but very few know they exist, much less put them into use. For examples of the design issues involved, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Design_implications_of_color_blindness
Think about it. What's needed is a really high (pun intended) profit margin product to drive space exploration. Think how much stoners would pay for pot grown on the moon. Astronomical profit!
Unlike mineral extraction, there is minimal extra-terrestrial processing involved. It's like a sample and return mission, except you don't have to find anything.
Now we can finally fill in item number two:
1) Grow pot on Moon
2) Return it to Earth.
3) Profit!
I have a suggestion...
To put this in the vernacular of George W Bush: "They hate us for our freedom."
If you are trying to achieve political goals via manipulation, fear is the easiest tool to use. Cue references to 1984 and Nazi. In Iran, they chant "Death to America".
Of course, in the case of Republicans, they do have something objective to fear: it's the shrinking percentage of the population with European roots. That's why the Tea Party types say "I want my country back". What they really want is a nation controlled by immigrants from Western Europe (i.e. White People). Immigrants from Africa or Latin America are those people who are lazy and shiftless and just want to live off the hard work of Real Americans.
Of course political reality is not quite this simple. Take Cubans. Ever though they are Latin American, their ant-commie/anti-Castro stance has made them be easily accepted as right wingers. On the other hand, Mexicans (anyone from Mexico or points further south) are, to quote Rep. Steve King from Iowa:
So Republicans peddle fear, and it's been a successful message to a great extent. Democrats don't have much in the way of backbone, so they tend to go along.
Does that answer the question?
Your lost me at math. I'm an American.
Maybe it is an act of aggression against Bill Gates, who has redefined himself as a philanthropist. Ballmer knows that he will never have any of the respect that Gates has achieved since he left Microsoft. He may think that poisoning the non-profit sector will partly blunt Gate's legacy. This would certainly fit with Ballmer's previous demeanor.
I know it's fashionable to knock Stallman here on Slashdot (including personal attacks about how he dresses), but he has been consistently right over a long period of time about the pitfalls of closed source.
In this case MS is clearly locking out 3rd party apps, and no one really knows why.
It's not just MS. Google does the same thing. Someone pointed out that the typically lifetime of most free Google apps is 4 years. Even when there the apps are not discontinued, the terms of service are often changed. Look at original Gmail vs. Gmail+. Many people, including myself, would not have become dependent on Gmail if they had known what would happen to it.
So when Stallman is being critical, pay attention. He's likely to be right.
Plus it's not Ellison's company, it's the shareholders company. If shareholders think he is overpaid that should have some impact. If he disagrees, he can just quit, right? (That's the bullshit line that used to justify treating workers like shit, so it feels really good to use on a prick like Ellison.)
What this really shows is that corporate governance is broken. The board doesn't work for the shareholders, they are at the beck and call of the CEO. He puts them on the board, they make huge amounts for the little work they do, and so they do whatever the CEO wants. They are a rubber stamp. This is a lot closer to feudalism then real capitalism. The workers are serfs, the shareholders are not much better off, and the lords who run the show take everything they can lay their hands on. Welcome to non-capitalist, not a democracy 21st America.
In effect the deliberately obstructionist Republican governors put the entire project at risk, and now the Republicans are screaming that it doesn't work. They are sick manipulative bastards who will do anything to get their way.
By the way, a friend of mine just signed up through the California exchange, and it was not a big deal. If the people in charge want it to work, they can make it work. If they want it to fail, they can make it fail. The Republicans want government to fail, so it does. By analogy, it's like going to a doctor who thinks medicine is bunk, and he proves it by having his patients die. In both a literal and figurative sense, Republicans are happy to see Americans die.
If this is true, it it might explain the evolution of lawyers. Under this hypothesis, lawyers would have evolved from snakes that preyed on monkeys. As the monkeys got smarter, the snakes evolved into monkey mimics that still had primates as their primary food source. Finally, it all makes sense.
In the delusional hyper-paranoid NSA world you gain power and control when you know things that other people don't know. It's all about insiders and outsiders. If the outsiders find out what's going on, they might become less pliable and start wondering about what's going on and ask questions. They might even start objecting to the current setup.
Some of it is about money. The US is spending something over $50 Billion per year. That a long way from chump change, and a lot of companies are getting very very rich from that. I don't think that the direct government employees are the big winners at this, I think the outside contracting companies really rake it in. First you pay your dues working for the Feds, then you make a vastly higher amount doing the same thing in the private sector. That's what Snowden did.
The second thing is fear of failure. Everyone is terrified of taking the blame for the next successful big attack. They want all the data in the vain hope that it means that failure can be avoided forever. It's not possible, but given effectively unlimited resources they can engage in the insane project of trying to spy on every human on earth.
So not only is the goal impossible, it is a huge waste of resources. For the kind of money they are spending they could literally buy off many of the "bad guys" they are fighting. (This assumes that the money was spent wisely, as opposed to the complete cluster fuck of wasted money poured into Afghanistan and Iraq.)
For example, offer the Palestinians and the Israelis billions of dollars each for domestic non-military spending, with the condition that any violence on either side means a complete immediate shutoff. (And no more Israeli building on the west bank.) Assume they are corrupt and can be bought, and it just might work. Even if it doesn't work, at least the money will be poured down some new rat holes for a change.
We'll never know. It's another unfathomable aspect of being.
In case you forgot, the internet started as ARPANET, which was funded by the federal government. It was a research project, which is the R in ARPA. Research means experimentation, which is what scientists do. That this funding came out of the DOD is irrelevant. Quibbling about it not being "science" is also nonsense. The academic field that includes computer networking is called computer science. I don't think anyone has plans to change the name anytime soon.
You are dumber then a box of rocks. You live in an environment created by a huge effort on the part of countless people, many of whom worked for various governments. Jet engines, nuclear energy, computers, all resulted from government initialed efforts.
You're ignorant and ungrateful. I wish there was some way you could be stripped of all the benefits that have accrued from government research. You'd be sitting miserable in some decrepit hovel, which is all you deserve.
You are sitting in front of your computer reading this by using electricity, and you are effectively paralyzed from the hips down.
Radar clutter suppression and target discrimination using twin inverted pulses
This situation is completely reasonable give the current state of the art in quantum computing.
Making accusations of "marketing hype" and unethical behavior are irrelevant. Whatever it's doing, it's not digital computing. Even if it turns out to be classical physics, it is still advancing the state of the art in non-digital computing.
No matter how DWave does in the future, quantum computing is still going to happen in the near term. Dwave is not going to change that under any circumstances.
Getting bent out of shape over this is a waste of effort. Even the experts are not in agreement. This is how progress occurs at the cutting edge.
So a quick edit.
See, isn't that much more hysterical? Now you need to learn HOW TO USE THE CAP LOCK KEY.
And a few thousand more religions to go.
A PHA is a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid.
The Chelyabinsk meteor had an 85 meter size, so it would most likely not be found by LSST. There are some other studies to use satellites in the IR band to look for smaller size objects.
When I have mod points and I see a post with lots of fully capitalized sentences, I know to the 99% level that it's from a raving lunatic. Thanks for making the job easier.
So he can devote all his energies to spying on his family and friends.
http://voiceofsandiego.org/2012/07/18/the-trouble-with-the-san-onofre-nuclear-plant/
The San Onofre mess was brewing for years. It's not like there were no warning signs. Nothing substantial happened.
When Edison replaced the heat exchange system, they self certified that it was a replacement, not a substantial change. It was in fact an upgrade, so they could extract more power. They deliberately lied and no one at the NRC either knew or cared.
Around 50 reactors are not in compliance with fire safety standards that were set in the 1980's as the result of a fire at the Brown's Ferry facility.
http://allthingsnuclear.org/fission-stories-98-fires-at-browns-ferry-get-your/
In the real world, the safety culture of the nuclear industry is pathetic. The lack of major failures is due to luck as much as anything else. As aging plants have their operational lives extended far beyond their original design, it is inevitable that a very serious accident with major radiation release will occur. Everyone involved goes through the motions, but no one is taking real responsibility.
Since it is no longer in fashion to pay artists to paint him as a heroic figure on a horse like Napoleon, or sculptors for larger then life marble busts so he can be a pretend emperor, he has a "patent tree". It's a substitute for a huge model of his penis.
So McDuck is funny, and even though he inevitably screws up because of this greed, he always realizes his folly and things turn out well in the end. Bezos wants to own the world, and it would fit in with his ego if the Blue Origin launch vehicle was designed to go to the moon and carve an image of his face that could be seen by everyone on Earth.
I prefer the fictional duck.
Similarly, even if you did the experiment with Twitter users attending NY Comic Con, it would not provide data about normal humans.
When actual capitalism with real competitors breaks out, they run screaming to the courts and the law makers to make it go away. This is usually all it takes. If they loose in the courts they just buy some legislation to get what they want.
Want an example? It's a felony to unlock your smart phone without approval from you carrier.
Yes, just like murder, bank robbery, smuggling drugs, child molestation, kidnapping, etc. The White House is trying to reverse this, but it's not clear if this is enforced at the current time.
Despite all the heated rhetoric, the US is the home of Not Capitalism. No one seems to notice or care. Shut up an pay whatever your owners demand. Or go to jail.