Well, as it existed in the Galactic Republic/Empire, being a Jedi carried with it the prerequisite that you had to be able to use the Force to manipulate objects and people. If we're going to go by the canon-standard, this guy isn't a Jedi anyway. At that point he becomes just another moron who won't take his hood off inside.
But I believe the Jedi "religion" (which I must believe Lucas finds to be a whole new level of stupid) is quite different from the movie's Jedi Order, and has made up its own rituals and requirements in order to help them forget the fact that they aren't actual Jedi.
Look, every car that's computerized to that level has software bugs. The 4 Ford Escapes we have at work have a TCS bug that activates when you go around a corner and there's dust on the outside of the corner, and no dust on the inside of the corner. It detects the difference in traction and freaks out, slamming on the brakes. Ford engineers recommended, when I had the vehicle in for diagnosis "Just turn the traction control off."
3rd gen Acura TLs have a 2nd gear bug, where if you get wheelspin at full throttle in 2nd gear under very specific (and thus far unknown) speeds and conditions, it'll lock the transmission in 2nd gear until you pull over and slow to below 10mph.
You could go through any of the drive-by-wire cars and find bugs in the code. Guaranteed. Some are relatively benign, like the TL's, and some are dangerous as hell, like the Fords.
And there are bugs in the code because the development cycle for cars is too fast for bugfree code to be even a remote possibility. They do a total redesign on cars what, once every 5 years or so? Talk to software engineers and they'll tell you it takes a good 10 or so years to develop software to the point of really good utility and non-bugginess. And that's just talking about relatively easy stuff like MS Word. Unlike critical safety systems like the programming in cars, no one's going to die if they BSOD while typing in their word processor.
A recent study said that the average new car has more lines of code than the F22 fighter (and the cars don't even come with missiles, dammit!) - and the F22 had a much longer development cycle - they started designing that airplane in 1981. Lots more time to get everything right, with less code.
Well that's why you don't go to the lobbyists. Don't let your information sources come to you. Go out and find them. Hell, a 5 minute google search would suffice in this case. He wouldn't even have to leave his office.
It's actually a good thing they put the obviously fake fan in there. If they'd sold it as an OEM no-fan box, you know some people wouldn't have looked close enough and tossed the fake chip into the socket. That would've set off some interesting fireworks on initial power-on;)
The author didn't even tell us which keyboard he used on the Android devices. There's a very big difference between the vertical-orientation kb and the horizontal-orientation one. I can't type worth anything on the vertical, but can blaze along fairly quickly on the horizontal.
Why don't we flip what you just said. "How is this any different from the I-9 verification forms that you're required to complete when starting a new job?"
Exactly. We already have verifications in place to ensure that an employer's workforce is legit. They're already being ignored by employers who want cheap labor. Why do we think a *different* verification process which still relies on the employer's honesty is going to work any better than the one we already have? It won't, because the meatpacker who's knowingly hiring illegals today is going to knowingly hire them tomorrow too.
So either the sponsors of this legislation are stupid (a possibility which I cannot at all discount) or there is an ulterior motive to this legislation (again, something I can't discount).
At best this is going to be a colossal waste of money and a bureaucratic nightmare of tangles, as the government will have to pay to distribute these cards, and will then have to spend inordinate amounts of time fixing the database errors that prevent people from getting work.
At worst this is going to be used to punish people the government is angry with. And I don't mean (necessarily) some Orwellian conspiracy where you either vocally support the government or you don't get to work anymore. I just mean "Oh. You cheated on your taxes back in 1995. Your work papers are revoked."
Whether or not you believe that the government would ever intentionally oppress its citizens, why should we allow the government to install the machinery that would facilitate it?
And those of us who are experienced in buying cars/dataplans know the industry tricks and how to get around them.
But a first time car buyer isn't going to know that the salesman is trying to get you to commit to a monthly payment rather than the price of the car. He'll gladly put you in that car today for only $200 a month! Of course, he doesn't tell you that this is over 15 years and you've just bought a Kia for 36 grand plus down payment plus gap insurance plus extended warranty plus "dealer prep fee" (aka: they'll wash it before you drive it home) and so on.
My technique isn't exactly perfect, and I used to type at about 100-110 wpm when I was working at a publishing house. I haven't bothered to test it in years, but I'm sure I'm much slower now. My wrists thank me for it.
If you're typing at 110wpm and you're not having RSS issues from it, I wouldn't worry terribly much about your technique.
Hey, Beanie Babies took off like they were shot out of cannons (oh don't we wish) too, but that doesn't mean they weren't lame as hell. "Bags of stuffed nothing going for hundreds of dollars!"
Actually sounds rather like an early iPod, doesn't it.
And comparing it to the Sony Walkman is disingenuous. The Walkman had to break into not only a whole new market, but had to convince people that there was a need for that market. And that wasn't overly easy because people in the 80's LIKED carrying their boom boxes around on their shoulder blasting their music for everyone else to hear. All the iPod had to do was convince people who were already sold on the concept of walking around with a personal music player that one with non-moving parts that can store everything without ever having to swap tapes or CD's is a pretty good innovation in a field that already has million of interested customers. And it was helped along by the fact that it was an apple product, and some people will buy anything with an apple logo on it. See: iPad.
If they claim that their certification process "ensures a good user experience" and "gives customers confidence that your product is thoroughly tested" then. . yeah.
The LCD/CRT thing had me pretty mad last year when one of my twin 19" NEC CRTs finally bit the dust. Finding a CRT proved impossible, so I finally ended up replacing them with twin Samsung Touch of Colors screens. I was very surprised at the image quality. It's a lot better now than it was when LCD started to take over. My monitors' refresh rates are actually better than the NECs' were. I don't see any ghosting even on very fast-moving games and videos. And with dynamic contrast, the washed out black issues don't exist for me either.
What I'm getting at is that, compared to HDD technology right now, SSD still pretty much sucks. But it will get better and eventually will outstrip HDD tech. And until then, we need the "ignorant public" who will "buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell" in order to provide the funding for the research that will make SSD something you and I want to buy as well. Consider it a moron tax on the early adopters;)
HDDs have been around for 30 years. They've had a hell of a run, and it's not quite over yet, but the next generation is gearing up to replace them.
That's true, but eventually magnetic will get priced out of the market, because they won't be able to manufacture them for less than they have to sell them for. VHS is cheaper than DVD, too, but that didn't keep VHS from dying.
Indeed. Look at windows software developers. Write a game for windows. Now you have to test it with nVidia and ATI cards, with AMD and Intel processors, with all sorts of different ram configurations, with multiple core-counts (if you bother to write a program that can use more than 1 core at all), Windows XP, Vista, 7, and in some cases 2000. If it's a racing game you have to test it with all the joysticks, and all the steering wheels, because even though all controllers are supposed to behave the same way in their interaction with Windows, we all know they don't.
By the time you buy all the hardware you need to seriously test a mass-distro Windows program, you'll probably be wishing that you only had to buy 3 or 4 Android phones;)
It would be troubling only if there were a serious flaw in whatever android phone you have now, that could be fixed in software, and won't be because no one's developing for your phone anymore.
We're talking about a cell phone here. No one complained when Palm, Windows, Apple, and Blackberry all came out with phones that were incompatible with each other. I don't really view the varying Android phones to be all that much different conceptually. Sure, someone might have to change a few things in the code to make the program they wrote for the Hero usable on the Droid, but then you just float 2 versions of the software on the android marketplace and call it a day. To do the same thing, crossing platforms from Palm to Blackberry, would take a lot more work.
For myself, my Droid works just fine right now. And I've downloaded all the apps I could possibly want (and then some - who REALLY needs a light saber on their phone). Should an app come out in a year or two that I really want, but doesn't work on the droid. ..Well. ..If 6 years from now, something's written for Windows 9 Penultimate that my Windows 7 won't run, I'm in the same boat. Progress is progress.
If you buy any technology on the promise that "the stuff you want to do with it will be available some time in the future," then you're taking a risk that it'll never happen. I wouldn't have gotten the Droid if the phone didn't do exactly what I wanted it to do the day I bought it.
Warp drive doesn't posit a traditional "go-very-fast-through-normal-space" type of spacecraft engine - it warps[*] space-time (hence the name!) in front of and behind the spacecraft - see here for an explanation. The spacecraft itself is sitting in a bubble of normal space, possibly even at rest.
Yes, but the current school of thought is that it would not be a violation of the laws of physics to do this, but even assuming we invented the technology that was capable of it, it would require so much energy as to make it completely unworkable. That alliance with the Klingons isn't going to last very long if we have to extract all the energy on their planet to get back home after a diplomatic mission;)
That said, I'm sure that eventually (barring our extinction) we will figure out how to travel faster than light speed.
Remember, before Bell Aircraft came along and just did it, scientists opined that breaking the sound barrier was impossible too.
If we went back to the dark ages and told them about cars, and GPS navigation, and fighter planes, they'd say it was impossible, just as we are now saying that FTL travel is impossible.
And that's never going to happen, because of the two main problems in our society:
For decades we have taken the attitude that intelligence and intellectualism are bad traits to have. The smart kid is a nerd who gets stuffed in their locker in school. The high school quarterback is the town hero. If a school runs out of money, they cut debate, speech, science club, math club, band - -all of the academics, long before they would even think about cutting football. And in the adult world, brain dead, willfully stupid, incurious buffoons like W and Palin get attention and win elections because people approve of their anti-intellectualism. And so we end up with, essentially, a retarded (in the literal definition of the word, not the psychological) society that only likes "stuff we understand." It's a lot easier to run around in protest marches claiming that socialism is universally bad even though you're marching on a street that was built as part of a socialist transportation infrastructure. And it's a lot easer to look outside and see lots of snow and assume that this means the world is colder, than it is to put down the bible and pick up a science book and actually learn something about how the world works.
And because of that first problem, the second becomes possible - that being a group of politicians and societal elites able to lead the country around by the nose. Senator Inhofe didn't build that Al Gore Igloo on the capitol lawn because he actually believes in or cares about global warming. He did it because he believes in and cares about the kickbacks he's getting from the oil companies, who are very interested in not having environmental regulations levied on them. And because he knows that society had decided to be willfully ignorant about. . damn near everything, he knows he can trick them by using charlatan tricks, and telling them "if you feel cold, global warming doesn't exist."
And so, because of our willfull stupidity and their cynical exploitation of it, politics will ALWAYS be dragged into science issues. Global warming, stem cells, abortion, right-to-die, and countless others are all examples of conniving politicians dragging opinion and sorcery into matters that should be purely science.
"That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse"
You're right. They didn't. So why did you give it to them? You aren't required to give out your SSN to anyone but certain government agencies and your employer for tax purposes. Credit checks can be run without a social. Television can certainly be delivered without it. It's really crazy that people run around scared of identity theft, and then give out their SSN to the cable guy.
A good counter point. I would argue, however, that it may not be desirable to kill all the mosquitos by destroying their reproduction cycle. Annoying as they are, mosquitos are a pretty important part of the food chain for a lot of larger insects, birds, and bats. Driving a species to extinction doesn't seem to be the wisest course of action. And if someone argues that it won't drive them anywhere close to extinction then I would argue that it won't do much good anyway unless it has immediate-kill capabilities.
However, staking out an area where humans are (a patio, or a campsite, for instance) and staking 4 devices set to kill at each of the corners, set so that the arc that encounters the staked out area is a deadzone for laser activation, would ensure that mosquitos getting too close to the area would be killed, without wide-ranging effects on the species in general. You'd need to be able to have the devices talk to each other, so that they could triangulate each other's position and auto-calculate "inside the box" vs "outside the box," but that shouldn't be too difficult.
I do agree with you about the firmware upgrade being a necessity. Might also be fun to give it bluetooth so that you can log in to the device via a laptop/smart phone and set it to take out various types of bugs. If, for instance, you live in an area where mosquitos aren't a big problem, but biting flies are, it'd be cool to be able to instruct the device to target those.
The trouble with rendering them infertile is that the already-fertile females who are out looking for their meal of blood aren't going to realize they've been stealth-spayed, and are going to bite anyway. Seems wiser to keep the thing set to kill.
Doc Serls is a Linux guy. And, what was it, 2 weeks ago or so, that Linuxheads got bent out of shape because Google was writing some stuff in the Android code that couldn't be folded into the regular linux distro?
And acting like basing your income on advertising is a bad strategy shows a distinct lack of understanding of human economic history. Advertising has worked, and worked well, since ancient Greek prostitutes wrote "Follow Me" in reverse on the soles of their sandals, leading customers to their whorehouse.
Some are all a-twitter that advertising is gonna collapse because television stations are cutting budgets due to ad revenues. First off, television stations are cutting budgets because they're only making 15% profit instead of 22%. They're doing just fine. In fact many of them are cutting budgets because they recently spent a boatload of money buying automated production equipment so that they could fire controlroom workers, and then furloughed more staff to make up for the money that they spent. Second, if ads are going away from television (and the $100,000 per second advertising rate during the Super Bowl would seem to belie that idea) that doesn't mean ads are going away. It just means they're going to the internet - - you know, the market that Google seems to have cornered?
IF Google's business plan collapses, it's not going to be until something replaces the internet. And realistically, whatever replaces the internet is probably going to be. . Another internet - only with 3d virtual reality instead of flat webpages. And Google will most likely adapt right along with that - if they don't invent the thing themselves.
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Well, as it existed in the Galactic Republic/Empire, being a Jedi carried with it the prerequisite that you had to be able to use the Force to manipulate objects and people. If we're going to go by the canon-standard, this guy isn't a Jedi anyway. At that point he becomes just another moron who won't take his hood off inside.
But I believe the Jedi "religion" (which I must believe Lucas finds to be a whole new level of stupid) is quite different from the movie's Jedi Order, and has made up its own rituals and requirements in order to help them forget the fact that they aren't actual Jedi.
Look, every car that's computerized to that level has software bugs. The 4 Ford Escapes we have at work have a TCS bug that activates when you go around a corner and there's dust on the outside of the corner, and no dust on the inside of the corner. It detects the difference in traction and freaks out, slamming on the brakes. Ford engineers recommended, when I had the vehicle in for diagnosis "Just turn the traction control off."
3rd gen Acura TLs have a 2nd gear bug, where if you get wheelspin at full throttle in 2nd gear under very specific (and thus far unknown) speeds and conditions, it'll lock the transmission in 2nd gear until you pull over and slow to below 10mph.
You could go through any of the drive-by-wire cars and find bugs in the code. Guaranteed. Some are relatively benign, like the TL's, and some are dangerous as hell, like the Fords.
And there are bugs in the code because the development cycle for cars is too fast for bugfree code to be even a remote possibility. They do a total redesign on cars what, once every 5 years or so? Talk to software engineers and they'll tell you it takes a good 10 or so years to develop software to the point of really good utility and non-bugginess. And that's just talking about relatively easy stuff like MS Word. Unlike critical safety systems like the programming in cars, no one's going to die if they BSOD while typing in their word processor.
A recent study said that the average new car has more lines of code than the F22 fighter (and the cars don't even come with missiles, dammit!) - and the F22 had a much longer development cycle - they started designing that airplane in 1981. Lots more time to get everything right, with less code.
Well that's why you don't go to the lobbyists. Don't let your information sources come to you. Go out and find them. Hell, a 5 minute google search would suffice in this case. He wouldn't even have to leave his office.
It's actually a good thing they put the obviously fake fan in there. If they'd sold it as an OEM no-fan box, you know some people wouldn't have looked close enough and tossed the fake chip into the socket. That would've set off some interesting fireworks on initial power-on ;)
Agreed.
The author didn't even tell us which keyboard he used on the Android devices. There's a very big difference between the vertical-orientation kb and the horizontal-orientation one. I can't type worth anything on the vertical, but can blaze along fairly quickly on the horizontal.
Why don't we flip what you just said. "How is this any different from the I-9 verification forms that you're required to complete when starting a new job?"
Exactly. We already have verifications in place to ensure that an employer's workforce is legit. They're already being ignored by employers who want cheap labor. Why do we think a *different* verification process which still relies on the employer's honesty is going to work any better than the one we already have? It won't, because the meatpacker who's knowingly hiring illegals today is going to knowingly hire them tomorrow too.
So either the sponsors of this legislation are stupid (a possibility which I cannot at all discount) or there is an ulterior motive to this legislation (again, something I can't discount).
At best this is going to be a colossal waste of money and a bureaucratic nightmare of tangles, as the government will have to pay to distribute these cards, and will then have to spend inordinate amounts of time fixing the database errors that prevent people from getting work.
At worst this is going to be used to punish people the government is angry with. And I don't mean (necessarily) some Orwellian conspiracy where you either vocally support the government or you don't get to work anymore. I just mean "Oh. You cheated on your taxes back in 1995. Your work papers are revoked."
Whether or not you believe that the government would ever intentionally oppress its citizens, why should we allow the government to install the machinery that would facilitate it?
I'm not sure, but Jobs was shouting something about "Motorola..."
Plus, "Language" should not be capitalized.
Btw, there should be a semicolon or a period after "S'alright," and Nazis should be capitalized. ;)
And those of us who are experienced in buying cars/dataplans know the industry tricks and how to get around them.
But a first time car buyer isn't going to know that the salesman is trying to get you to commit to a monthly payment rather than the price of the car. He'll gladly put you in that car today for only $200 a month! Of course, he doesn't tell you that this is over 15 years and you've just bought a Kia for 36 grand plus down payment plus gap insurance plus extended warranty plus "dealer prep fee" (aka: they'll wash it before you drive it home) and so on.
My technique isn't exactly perfect, and I used to type at about 100-110 wpm when I was working at a publishing house. I haven't bothered to test it in years, but I'm sure I'm much slower now. My wrists thank me for it.
If you're typing at 110wpm and you're not having RSS issues from it, I wouldn't worry terribly much about your technique.
Hey, Beanie Babies took off like they were shot out of cannons (oh don't we wish) too, but that doesn't mean they weren't lame as hell. "Bags of stuffed nothing going for hundreds of dollars!"
Actually sounds rather like an early iPod, doesn't it.
And comparing it to the Sony Walkman is disingenuous. The Walkman had to break into not only a whole new market, but had to convince people that there was a need for that market. And that wasn't overly easy because people in the 80's LIKED carrying their boom boxes around on their shoulder blasting their music for everyone else to hear. All the iPod had to do was convince people who were already sold on the concept of walking around with a personal music player that one with non-moving parts that can store everything without ever having to swap tapes or CD's is a pretty good innovation in a field that already has million of interested customers. And it was helped along by the fact that it was an apple product, and some people will buy anything with an apple logo on it. See: iPad.
If they claim that their certification process "ensures a good user experience" and "gives customers confidence that your product is thoroughly tested" then. . yeah.
Yes, and we'll get off your lawn too ;)
The LCD/CRT thing had me pretty mad last year when one of my twin 19" NEC CRTs finally bit the dust. Finding a CRT proved impossible, so I finally ended up replacing them with twin Samsung Touch of Colors screens. I was very surprised at the image quality. It's a lot better now than it was when LCD started to take over. My monitors' refresh rates are actually better than the NECs' were. I don't see any ghosting even on very fast-moving games and videos. And with dynamic contrast, the washed out black issues don't exist for me either.
What I'm getting at is that, compared to HDD technology right now, SSD still pretty much sucks. But it will get better and eventually will outstrip HDD tech. And until then, we need the "ignorant public" who will "buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell" in order to provide the funding for the research that will make SSD something you and I want to buy as well. Consider it a moron tax on the early adopters ;)
HDDs have been around for 30 years. They've had a hell of a run, and it's not quite over yet, but the next generation is gearing up to replace them.
That's true, but eventually magnetic will get priced out of the market, because they won't be able to manufacture them for less than they have to sell them for. VHS is cheaper than DVD, too, but that didn't keep VHS from dying.
Indeed. Look at windows software developers. Write a game for windows. Now you have to test it with nVidia and ATI cards, with AMD and Intel processors, with all sorts of different ram configurations, with multiple core-counts (if you bother to write a program that can use more than 1 core at all), Windows XP, Vista, 7, and in some cases 2000. If it's a racing game you have to test it with all the joysticks, and all the steering wheels, because even though all controllers are supposed to behave the same way in their interaction with Windows, we all know they don't.
By the time you buy all the hardware you need to seriously test a mass-distro Windows program, you'll probably be wishing that you only had to buy 3 or 4 Android phones ;)
It would be troubling only if there were a serious flaw in whatever android phone you have now, that could be fixed in software, and won't be because no one's developing for your phone anymore.
We're talking about a cell phone here. No one complained when Palm, Windows, Apple, and Blackberry all came out with phones that were incompatible with each other. I don't really view the varying Android phones to be all that much different conceptually. Sure, someone might have to change a few things in the code to make the program they wrote for the Hero usable on the Droid, but then you just float 2 versions of the software on the android marketplace and call it a day. To do the same thing, crossing platforms from Palm to Blackberry, would take a lot more work.
For myself, my Droid works just fine right now. And I've downloaded all the apps I could possibly want (and then some - who REALLY needs a light saber on their phone). Should an app come out in a year or two that I really want, but doesn't work on the droid. . .Well. . .If 6 years from now, something's written for Windows 9 Penultimate that my Windows 7 won't run, I'm in the same boat. Progress is progress.
If you buy any technology on the promise that "the stuff you want to do with it will be available some time in the future," then you're taking a risk that it'll never happen. I wouldn't have gotten the Droid if the phone didn't do exactly what I wanted it to do the day I bought it.
I'm not entirely sure that a contract stating that your name is someone else's intellectual property would be enforceable.
Warp drive doesn't posit a traditional "go-very-fast-through-normal-space" type of spacecraft engine - it warps[*] space-time (hence the name!) in front of and behind the spacecraft - see here for an explanation. The spacecraft itself is sitting in a bubble of normal space, possibly even at rest.
Yes, but the current school of thought is that it would not be a violation of the laws of physics to do this, but even assuming we invented the technology that was capable of it, it would require so much energy as to make it completely unworkable. That alliance with the Klingons isn't going to last very long if we have to extract all the energy on their planet to get back home after a diplomatic mission ;)
That said, I'm sure that eventually (barring our extinction) we will figure out how to travel faster than light speed.
Remember, before Bell Aircraft came along and just did it, scientists opined that breaking the sound barrier was impossible too.
If we went back to the dark ages and told them about cars, and GPS navigation, and fighter planes, they'd say it was impossible, just as we are now saying that FTL travel is impossible.
And that's never going to happen, because of the two main problems in our society:
For decades we have taken the attitude that intelligence and intellectualism are bad traits to have. The smart kid is a nerd who gets stuffed in their locker in school. The high school quarterback is the town hero. If a school runs out of money, they cut debate, speech, science club, math club, band - -all of the academics, long before they would even think about cutting football. And in the adult world, brain dead, willfully stupid, incurious buffoons like W and Palin get attention and win elections because people approve of their anti-intellectualism. And so we end up with, essentially, a retarded (in the literal definition of the word, not the psychological) society that only likes "stuff we understand." It's a lot easier to run around in protest marches claiming that socialism is universally bad even though you're marching on a street that was built as part of a socialist transportation infrastructure. And it's a lot easer to look outside and see lots of snow and assume that this means the world is colder, than it is to put down the bible and pick up a science book and actually learn something about how the world works.
And because of that first problem, the second becomes possible - that being a group of politicians and societal elites able to lead the country around by the nose. Senator Inhofe didn't build that Al Gore Igloo on the capitol lawn because he actually believes in or cares about global warming. He did it because he believes in and cares about the kickbacks he's getting from the oil companies, who are very interested in not having environmental regulations levied on them. And because he knows that society had decided to be willfully ignorant about. . damn near everything, he knows he can trick them by using charlatan tricks, and telling them "if you feel cold, global warming doesn't exist."
And so, because of our willfull stupidity and their cynical exploitation of it, politics will ALWAYS be dragged into science issues. Global warming, stem cells, abortion, right-to-die, and countless others are all examples of conniving politicians dragging opinion and sorcery into matters that should be purely science.
"That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse"
You're right. They didn't. So why did you give it to them? You aren't required to give out your SSN to anyone but certain government agencies and your employer for tax purposes. Credit checks can be run without a social. Television can certainly be delivered without it. It's really crazy that people run around scared of identity theft, and then give out their SSN to the cable guy.
A good counter point. I would argue, however, that it may not be desirable to kill all the mosquitos by destroying their reproduction cycle. Annoying as they are, mosquitos are a pretty important part of the food chain for a lot of larger insects, birds, and bats. Driving a species to extinction doesn't seem to be the wisest course of action. And if someone argues that it won't drive them anywhere close to extinction then I would argue that it won't do much good anyway unless it has immediate-kill capabilities.
However, staking out an area where humans are (a patio, or a campsite, for instance) and staking 4 devices set to kill at each of the corners, set so that the arc that encounters the staked out area is a deadzone for laser activation, would ensure that mosquitos getting too close to the area would be killed, without wide-ranging effects on the species in general. You'd need to be able to have the devices talk to each other, so that they could triangulate each other's position and auto-calculate "inside the box" vs "outside the box," but that shouldn't be too difficult.
I do agree with you about the firmware upgrade being a necessity. Might also be fun to give it bluetooth so that you can log in to the device via a laptop/smart phone and set it to take out various types of bugs. If, for instance, you live in an area where mosquitos aren't a big problem, but biting flies are, it'd be cool to be able to instruct the device to target those.
The trouble with rendering them infertile is that the already-fertile females who are out looking for their meal of blood aren't going to realize they've been stealth-spayed, and are going to bite anyway. Seems wiser to keep the thing set to kill.
And there were a few sampling lawsuits when it first got popular, because artists were taking the samples without paying royalties for them.
Since she thinks it's OK, perhaps we should "sample" her book to a txt file and distribute it for free online ;)
Doc Serls is a Linux guy. And, what was it, 2 weeks ago or so, that Linuxheads got bent out of shape because Google was writing some stuff in the Android code that couldn't be folded into the regular linux distro?
And acting like basing your income on advertising is a bad strategy shows a distinct lack of understanding of human economic history. Advertising has worked, and worked well, since ancient Greek prostitutes wrote "Follow Me" in reverse on the soles of their sandals, leading customers to their whorehouse.
Some are all a-twitter that advertising is gonna collapse because television stations are cutting budgets due to ad revenues. First off, television stations are cutting budgets because they're only making 15% profit instead of 22%. They're doing just fine. In fact many of them are cutting budgets because they recently spent a boatload of money buying automated production equipment so that they could fire controlroom workers, and then furloughed more staff to make up for the money that they spent. Second, if ads are going away from television (and the $100,000 per second advertising rate during the Super Bowl would seem to belie that idea) that doesn't mean ads are going away. It just means they're going to the internet - - you know, the market that Google seems to have cornered?
IF Google's business plan collapses, it's not going to be until something replaces the internet. And realistically, whatever replaces the internet is probably going to be. . Another internet - only with 3d virtual reality instead of flat webpages. And Google will most likely adapt right along with that - if they don't invent the thing themselves.
Yep. Before the internet, depressed people stayed inside and stared at the wall. Now they're staring at a computer screen.
But you KNOW the media's gonna try to spin it as "the internet depresses people! (see more, on our website)"