Yes, and the article says that they saw this, asked Amazon about it, Amazon confirmed that it was 0, and they decided to do it anyway because they wanted more data points for their Android developing experiment. They didn't misread anything. They knew they were getting screwed, wanted to know how badly, and then wrote about it.
Stories like this have been circulating lately about sites like Groupon/Living Social, etc, where the company (Amazon in this case) promises the world as far as exposure and sales, but then when you sign up for the promotion, you discover that you lose money hand over fist, and the business doesn't really pick up on the back side of the promo. A lot of small businesses have gotten in trouble by signing up for stuff like this.
Seems to me these guys were testing Amazon to see if the same could happen there, and then reported that it can.
The reviews are hilarious. Especially the one that complained he only had half the sample after the halflife was over;)
They (well, not actually they - it's another store selling it via Amazon) sell it because people who have Geiger counters need to calibrate them. There's all sorts of lab equipment and supplies sold on and through Amazon.
His fuel was americium-241. Or at least some of it was. TFA says he bought some fuel (didn't say what) and got the rest by taking apart a smoke detector, which would be the americium. 241 is pretty stable, and is generally only dangerous if you eat it, so depending on what he bought, it probably wasn't too terrible.
Of course, you can buy uranium on Amazon, though I wouldn't doubt if they had some sort of check in place if you try to buy more than a calibration amount.
I wasn't even thinking of that system. But with it, you don't need to change the focus. Everything is in focus.
Note that this would still suck (though from an aesthetic standpoint rather than a "shit my eyes hurt!" standpoint, which I think would be an improvement) because a big cue for distance is that when we're focusing on something 2 feet away, things 15 feet away are blurry. Take that away and things would look weird.
Really, 3d won't be viable as a "totally realistic" medium until we have holographic projectors that actually project the image in 3 dimensional space.
Exactly. Besides, until that eye tracker tracks where the eye is focusing and adjusts the image focus to compensate (this is actually technically possible - they use a similar system to check your vision at some eye doctors now) you're still going to get eyestrain and headaches as you sit there unconsciously trying to bring an out of focus element of the image into focus, which of course you can't do because it was shot out of focus.
The antivirus company does not know that you will never hook your computer up to the net, and that you will only plug in to the computer cameras which you have independently virus scanned (you did know that viruses have been payloads on factory-bought storage media before right?) on some other computer.
The antivirus maker figures you'll be on the net. Or at minimum will be sticking thumb drives and non-scanned DVD's (they've been virus vectors in the past too) and cameras in your computer, and therefore will expose yourself to a potential virus.
Even in the pre-net days the virus scanner would prompt you to call a BBS and download the latest definitions. There's nothing wrong with them encouraging you to go get them now.
That's a pretty simplistic view of healthcare. There is, yet is not, more to healthcare than life or death surgery. Improper decisions, diagnoses, or recommendations made at one point can lead to life or death surgery down the road. You might think you could have a non-licensed doc give you high blood pressure medicine, but as many with hypertension have discovered, improperly-medicated high blood pressure can damage the heart.
As medical laymen, we don't necessarily know whether or not the advice we're getting is good or bad. It's a help to have a governing body at least making the attempt to ensure that some halfwit with a pizza cutter and a spool of thread isn't running around calling himself a doctor.
Your argument sounds neat until you realize that the goober installing your wireless router isn't going to kill you if he configures it wrong. The doctor just might. I'm just fine with doctors having to meet the higher standards, and I'm just fine with paying the guy who is going to be literally holding my heart in his hands more than I (would, if I ever used them) pay the dude from the Geek Squad.
Other than that, I agree in principal with you. A lot of people who have no business going to college go to college because you damn near need a Bachelor's to be a garbage collector these days. I remember when I was in college working at a hardware store, most of my older coworkers had college degrees. There's a real glut of college-educated people these days, brought on by the "everyone needs a degree!" mentality, and that cheapens the value of the individual degree.
I don't think college is a scam, per se, but I do think the way it's marketed to the public is. A guy who's really good at working on cars or welding and not much good at anything else should not go to college. He should go to a trade school and then do the work that he has natural talent for. But to hear college recruitment ads talk, college benefits everyone no matter what.
oh btw, as to expense, it's not unusual for a station to pay $50,000 for one camera (and that's not counting the tripod or batteries or charger or case or rain cover or light or microphones). This laptop could be bought almost with couch-cushion change when your equipment budget is at that scale.
Well, actually, for TV news this laptop would be pretty fantastic. A lot of editing is done on the road or in the live truck at the scene. Having twin monitors is nice, but there usually isn't enough rack room (especially if you shoot in HD) in the truck to accommodate 2 decent-sized edit monitors because they're already stuffed full of other crap you need to run the truck, especially if it's a hybrid sat/microwave truck. Having external monitors that aren't rack-mounted isn't acceptable because the truck moves, and you can't have them bouncing around when you're driving. This one laptop would replace 4 pieces of equipment in a live truck, and you could yank it out of the truck and bring it with you if you needed to.
I definitely see a market for this thing in TV circles (assuming its durability is decent).
I was more referring to a solution that would enable people like Manning to expose malfeasance without being unduly punished, without allowing lazy idiots to disobey orders because they just don't want to do it.
The trouble is that the way the military works, if you choose to disobey an order on moral grounds, you have a steep hill to climb to prove that you were justified in doing so. And by the time you climb it, you've been punished heavily for disobedience.
I don't really know what the solution is there - if the hill wasn't steep then you'd get dipshits disobeying orders because they don't feel like it.
Because they don't want to amend it. They want to rewrite it. There's a difference. None of the original wording of the Constitution has, to date, been removed. Amendments modify it, yes, but that which has been modified is still there to see. To strip the historical clauses that you have amended not only is not part of the amendment process, but it also is a move purely calculated to rewrite not only the constitution, but history itself.
It certainly wasn't for lack of trying on NASA's part. They can't advance anything without approval from the government, and the government keeps jerking them around. "Build a new shuttle! Wait cancel that. OK, start it up again, but you gotta start it from scratch - Build a new new shuttle! Nope, stop, don't do that, go to Mars! Wait, go back to the moon! Wait, no, go to an asteroid. And Mars. Maybe." And I'll bet that the next election will bring new marching orders for NASA that will require to, once again, scrap everything they've worked on so far and start working on something else.
NASA has had several design processes for the next generation shuttle, and Congress/POTUS keep scrapping the programs.
(btw Slashdot, isn't a >4 minute flood control a bit. . excessive?)
The Declaration of Independence was a fine document, but it is not legally binding. All it was was a letter to George III telling him why we didn't want to be part of his country any more. The Constitution is the founding document of our current government. If we want to update it, it's set up for that. They're called "amendments."
To update it in the way that these clowns are suggesting would actually be to rewrite the whole thing. We can do that, too, but whoever does it is overthrowing the government. Technically, the idiots calling for the rewrite are treasonous.
I always found Data to be a study in inconsistency. He's an almost human android who can write himself programs that allow him to have a complicated sexual relationship with a crew member, but he can't write a simple subroutine that says "whenever you're about to say "cannot," say "can't" instead."
Then he can quote on command and without delay the most obscure trivia about anything in the universe, but doesn't know who Pinocchio is without booting up the spare hard drive.
Based on that, I think it's totally consistent with my interface argument that Data would verbalize commands when it's easier to hit a button. Just another of his inexplicable idiosyncrasies.;)
(I always wondered why they bothered staffing the bridge with anything but the Captain, F/O, and Data. Hook data up to the ship with that blinky brain cable of his and let him drive and shoot).
I should clarify that Star Trek got the interface mostly right, but their audience didn't always understand why. They talked to the computer when convenient ( "Lights/Tea, Earl Grey, Hot) but still tapped on PADDs or desktops for other functions. You didn't hear the Captain saying "page down" when reading data on his desktop display.
And I think that in certain situations, touch interfaces were the right solution - such as on the PADDs. But you'll notice that there was a physical button on the desktop display (only 1, but who's counting) that they'd press rather than jabbing at the screen.
Where they messed up (and this was actually addressed in Voyager) was in designing touch interfaces for vital ship controls. Anyone who's tried to use a vibrating touch interface, such as when your cell phone is in a car holder, knows that hitting the right button is pretty damned hard. It's a pretty stupid design to require people to precisely target a nonphysical "fire phasers / get the hell out of here" button when the ship is shaking from incoming fire.
Other than that, a Star Trek style interface would be 90% appropriate for most of our computing needs. But Star Trek never had them sitting at a desk looking at a display, and having to reach way over the desk to touch the screen. I would guess that in such situations, some future version of a mouse would still be in use.
I think the interface is stupid. Touch-oriented? Who the hell wants to sit there jabbing their finger into their monitor? That requires that the monitor be close to you - most of us like it farther away - and it requires that you get greasy fingerprints all over your shiny >21" screen. The reason touch works on smartphones and tablets is because physical buttons are too small, annoying to use, and add needless bulk and weight. None of this is a concern for using a desktop, and at the end of the day you're still gonna hook the damn thing up to a keyboard and mouse because it's more ergonomic to use those than it is to try to type 100wpm on a touchpad.
I call Win8 a gimicky kludge that's meant to appeal to Star Trek fans who haven't thought about the pitfalls of touch-centric interfaces.
I think you're right in your last paragraph. Sadly, there's still a shocking (and inexcusable) ignorance of all things tech in the legal profession. When the judge doesn't know what the hell you're talking about, that increases the likelihood that he'll render a stupid decision.
I do agree with you that it seems overly excessive for the SS to get involved here. After all, they don't get involved with spyware that ends up on our desktops, which I would argue is a more heinous crime than that committed by the artist.
I do maintain, however, that getting authorization from someone who it should be obvious does not have the authority to authorize it does not give you a get out of jail free card.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and the article says that they saw this, asked Amazon about it, Amazon confirmed that it was 0, and they decided to do it anyway because they wanted more data points for their Android developing experiment. They didn't misread anything. They knew they were getting screwed, wanted to know how badly, and then wrote about it.
Stories like this have been circulating lately about sites like Groupon/Living Social, etc, where the company (Amazon in this case) promises the world as far as exposure and sales, but then when you sign up for the promotion, you discover that you lose money hand over fist, and the business doesn't really pick up on the back side of the promo. A lot of small businesses have gotten in trouble by signing up for stuff like this.
Seems to me these guys were testing Amazon to see if the same could happen there, and then reported that it can.
Someone misread something, but it wasn't them. Read the article again.
The reviews are hilarious. Especially the one that complained he only had half the sample after the halflife was over ;)
They (well, not actually they - it's another store selling it via Amazon) sell it because people who have Geiger counters need to calibrate them. There's all sorts of lab equipment and supplies sold on and through Amazon.
His fuel was americium-241. Or at least some of it was. TFA says he bought some fuel (didn't say what) and got the rest by taking apart a smoke detector, which would be the americium. 241 is pretty stable, and is generally only dangerous if you eat it, so depending on what he bought, it probably wasn't too terrible.
Of course, you can buy uranium on Amazon, though I wouldn't doubt if they had some sort of check in place if you try to buy more than a calibration amount.
I wasn't even thinking of that system. But with it, you don't need to change the focus. Everything is in focus.
Note that this would still suck (though from an aesthetic standpoint rather than a "shit my eyes hurt!" standpoint, which I think would be an improvement) because a big cue for distance is that when we're focusing on something 2 feet away, things 15 feet away are blurry. Take that away and things would look weird.
Really, 3d won't be viable as a "totally realistic" medium until we have holographic projectors that actually project the image in 3 dimensional space.
Exactly. Besides, until that eye tracker tracks where the eye is focusing and adjusts the image focus to compensate (this is actually technically possible - they use a similar system to check your vision at some eye doctors now) you're still going to get eyestrain and headaches as you sit there unconsciously trying to bring an out of focus element of the image into focus, which of course you can't do because it was shot out of focus.
The antivirus company does not know that you will never hook your computer up to the net, and that you will only plug in to the computer cameras which you have independently virus scanned (you did know that viruses have been payloads on factory-bought storage media before right?) on some other computer.
The antivirus maker figures you'll be on the net. Or at minimum will be sticking thumb drives and non-scanned DVD's (they've been virus vectors in the past too) and cameras in your computer, and therefore will expose yourself to a potential virus.
Even in the pre-net days the virus scanner would prompt you to call a BBS and download the latest definitions. There's nothing wrong with them encouraging you to go get them now.
That hand is going to change along with the sock puppet. Rove doesn't tell Obama what to do, after all. Someone else gets that job.
That would be closer to the truth if the sock puppet wasn't able to start wars (whether he calls them wars or not) at a whim and with no oversight.
That's a pretty simplistic view of healthcare. There is, yet is not, more to healthcare than life or death surgery. Improper decisions, diagnoses, or recommendations made at one point can lead to life or death surgery down the road. You might think you could have a non-licensed doc give you high blood pressure medicine, but as many with hypertension have discovered, improperly-medicated high blood pressure can damage the heart.
As medical laymen, we don't necessarily know whether or not the advice we're getting is good or bad. It's a help to have a governing body at least making the attempt to ensure that some halfwit with a pizza cutter and a spool of thread isn't running around calling himself a doctor.
Your argument sounds neat until you realize that the goober installing your wireless router isn't going to kill you if he configures it wrong. The doctor just might. I'm just fine with doctors having to meet the higher standards, and I'm just fine with paying the guy who is going to be literally holding my heart in his hands more than I (would, if I ever used them) pay the dude from the Geek Squad.
Other than that, I agree in principal with you. A lot of people who have no business going to college go to college because you damn near need a Bachelor's to be a garbage collector these days. I remember when I was in college working at a hardware store, most of my older coworkers had college degrees. There's a real glut of college-educated people these days, brought on by the "everyone needs a degree!" mentality, and that cheapens the value of the individual degree.
I don't think college is a scam, per se, but I do think the way it's marketed to the public is. A guy who's really good at working on cars or welding and not much good at anything else should not go to college. He should go to a trade school and then do the work that he has natural talent for. But to hear college recruitment ads talk, college benefits everyone no matter what.
Yes, but the reverse is true when you're applying to be an accountant at ESPN.
oh btw, as to expense, it's not unusual for a station to pay $50,000 for one camera (and that's not counting the tripod or batteries or charger or case or rain cover or light or microphones). This laptop could be bought almost with couch-cushion change when your equipment budget is at that scale.
Well, actually, for TV news this laptop would be pretty fantastic. A lot of editing is done on the road or in the live truck at the scene. Having twin monitors is nice, but there usually isn't enough rack room (especially if you shoot in HD) in the truck to accommodate 2 decent-sized edit monitors because they're already stuffed full of other crap you need to run the truck, especially if it's a hybrid sat/microwave truck. Having external monitors that aren't rack-mounted isn't acceptable because the truck moves, and you can't have them bouncing around when you're driving. This one laptop would replace 4 pieces of equipment in a live truck, and you could yank it out of the truck and bring it with you if you needed to.
I definitely see a market for this thing in TV circles (assuming its durability is decent).
I was more referring to a solution that would enable people like Manning to expose malfeasance without being unduly punished, without allowing lazy idiots to disobey orders because they just don't want to do it.
The trouble is that the way the military works, if you choose to disobey an order on moral grounds, you have a steep hill to climb to prove that you were justified in doing so. And by the time you climb it, you've been punished heavily for disobedience.
I don't really know what the solution is there - if the hill wasn't steep then you'd get dipshits disobeying orders because they don't feel like it.
Because they don't want to amend it. They want to rewrite it. There's a difference. None of the original wording of the Constitution has, to date, been removed. Amendments modify it, yes, but that which has been modified is still there to see. To strip the historical clauses that you have amended not only is not part of the amendment process, but it also is a move purely calculated to rewrite not only the constitution, but history itself.
That's true, but it's always good to have someone to bounce ideas off of when you're dealing with a pissed off Nausicaan.
Great. Find them first. They're using the internet. They don't all have to be in the same place. Or even the same continent.
It certainly wasn't for lack of trying on NASA's part. They can't advance anything without approval from the government, and the government keeps jerking them around. "Build a new shuttle! Wait cancel that. OK, start it up again, but you gotta start it from scratch - Build a new new shuttle! Nope, stop, don't do that, go to Mars! Wait, go back to the moon! Wait, no, go to an asteroid. And Mars. Maybe." And I'll bet that the next election will bring new marching orders for NASA that will require to, once again, scrap everything they've worked on so far and start working on something else.
NASA has had several design processes for the next generation shuttle, and Congress/POTUS keep scrapping the programs.
(btw Slashdot, isn't a >4 minute flood control a bit. . excessive?)
The Declaration of Independence was a fine document, but it is not legally binding. All it was was a letter to George III telling him why we didn't want to be part of his country any more. The Constitution is the founding document of our current government. If we want to update it, it's set up for that. They're called "amendments."
To update it in the way that these clowns are suggesting would actually be to rewrite the whole thing. We can do that, too, but whoever does it is overthrowing the government. Technically, the idiots calling for the rewrite are treasonous.
I always found Data to be a study in inconsistency. He's an almost human android who can write himself programs that allow him to have a complicated sexual relationship with a crew member, but he can't write a simple subroutine that says "whenever you're about to say "cannot," say "can't" instead."
Then he can quote on command and without delay the most obscure trivia about anything in the universe, but doesn't know who Pinocchio is without booting up the spare hard drive.
Based on that, I think it's totally consistent with my interface argument that Data would verbalize commands when it's easier to hit a button. Just another of his inexplicable idiosyncrasies. ;)
(I always wondered why they bothered staffing the bridge with anything but the Captain, F/O, and Data. Hook data up to the ship with that blinky brain cable of his and let him drive and shoot).
I should clarify that Star Trek got the interface mostly right, but their audience didn't always understand why. They talked to the computer when convenient ( "Lights/Tea, Earl Grey, Hot) but still tapped on PADDs or desktops for other functions. You didn't hear the Captain saying "page down" when reading data on his desktop display.
And I think that in certain situations, touch interfaces were the right solution - such as on the PADDs. But you'll notice that there was a physical button on the desktop display (only 1, but who's counting) that they'd press rather than jabbing at the screen.
Where they messed up (and this was actually addressed in Voyager) was in designing touch interfaces for vital ship controls. Anyone who's tried to use a vibrating touch interface, such as when your cell phone is in a car holder, knows that hitting the right button is pretty damned hard. It's a pretty stupid design to require people to precisely target a nonphysical "fire phasers / get the hell out of here" button when the ship is shaking from incoming fire.
Other than that, a Star Trek style interface would be 90% appropriate for most of our computing needs. But Star Trek never had them sitting at a desk looking at a display, and having to reach way over the desk to touch the screen. I would guess that in such situations, some future version of a mouse would still be in use.
I think the interface is stupid. Touch-oriented? Who the hell wants to sit there jabbing their finger into their monitor? That requires that the monitor be close to you - most of us like it farther away - and it requires that you get greasy fingerprints all over your shiny >21" screen. The reason touch works on smartphones and tablets is because physical buttons are too small, annoying to use, and add needless bulk and weight. None of this is a concern for using a desktop, and at the end of the day you're still gonna hook the damn thing up to a keyboard and mouse because it's more ergonomic to use those than it is to try to type 100wpm on a touchpad.
I call Win8 a gimicky kludge that's meant to appeal to Star Trek fans who haven't thought about the pitfalls of touch-centric interfaces.
I think you're right in your last paragraph. Sadly, there's still a shocking (and inexcusable) ignorance of all things tech in the legal profession. When the judge doesn't know what the hell you're talking about, that increases the likelihood that he'll render a stupid decision.
I do agree with you that it seems overly excessive for the SS to get involved here. After all, they don't get involved with spyware that ends up on our desktops, which I would argue is a more heinous crime than that committed by the artist.
I do maintain, however, that getting authorization from someone who it should be obvious does not have the authority to authorize it does not give you a get out of jail free card.